The secret to self-esteem

What is the secret to improved self-esteem? In a nutshell: self-love. Learning to love yourself is not as easy as we can, at first, imagine. Yet, it is one of the elements that provide the groundwork towards improved calm emotions and good mental health. 

Learning to love yourself is difficult, as it needs to be practised. Begin by acknowledging and appreciating your worth, skills, and abilities so you can see your potential - rather than rely on someone else’s opinion.

Self-love has two main keys: 

• understanding 
• acceptance   

Most people say that the art of self-love is to practice positive self-talk. In essence, this may be considered a good thing. However, you need to understand what you are going through before you attempt to create a positive frame of mind. For instance, if you are experiencing the depths of depression, or feeling even slightly anxious about life, or maybe experiencing a reaction to a particularly traumatic episode, being positive can be so very difficult.  

For this reason (and others), I don’t advocate that you struggle to find the positivity inside you.  The first step to giving yourself some loving-kindness is to accept the situation as it is, or the person the way they are, to bring yourself up from a negative position to be in a neutral frame of mind.  

Resilience is a character trait that is needed for you to be able to love yourself. Resilience is a trait that builds up after having experienced some tough knocks in life.  It comes from seeing setbacks as challenges and dealing with them, so you eventually overcome them.  

Self-talk

Self-love begins with noticing the words that are rattling around in your mind.  Generally, this is called ‘self-talk’.  It’s an internal voice (thoughts, words, and reflections) that puts you down or makes you feel you are not worth it.  

Think of yourself as an actor in a film and you’re hearing the ‘voice in the sky’ narrating your story as you go through life.  

That narrator can be quite mean at times.  It often tells you that you’re unable to do certain things, warns you of the dangers ahead and tells you that a certain person doesn’t like you.  This voice comes from your past.  All those experiences you’ve gone through:

• The people you’ve met and learned from
• Situations you’ve been influenced by
• Those values and beliefs that have set you up from day one

This narrator may seem like ‘background music’, but it’s very much in the foreground when forming the reality you see around you. It tends to:

• Interpret situations 
• Judge people
• Colour emotions
• Guide reactions and responses

This self-talk can be a severe critic that makes you doubt what you are doing. Or, it can be the best friend you wish you had, encouraging and uplifting you throughout the day.

Self-acceptance

Whichever way this voice speaks to you, is the way you will naturally approach life. The key is to be able to acknowledge it and control it. Learning to do that, means you will need to do the work. Work? Yes, work.  

You can do the work by reading books or listening to YouTube videos.  Or, you can enlist the help of a professional counsellor.

While books and videos are great, they can’t be personal to your situation. Books and videos are brilliant at giving you an overall view, or some parameters to work within.  However, a counselling session is focused on the emotions and behaviours you are personally experiencing.

To do the work on self-love via videos and books, you’ll need to learn how to:

• cultivate resilience
• elevate your mood
• decide which approach to take
• improve your approach to relationships
• acknowledge your self-worth
• set boundaries
• have self-compassion when you fail (and you will, at first)
• reflect on the situation you have either reacted or responded to
• adapt to change
• celebrate your victories

A counselling session aims to help you with all this, and more. A professional counsellor is trained to understand the personal thoughts that come from your experiences. They are also trained to help you reframe, rewind and redefine the words in your mind so that you can create an approach that will empower you to persist with the changes you want. For what purpose?  So you can get on with the life you want with more self-confidence and self-love.