9 Tips to Raise Your Self-Esteem

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Have you ever wondered how to get more self-esteem?  Do you have low self-esteem?  Do you know how to know and what you should do about it?  “Who are you and how do you feel about it?”  This is the question that self-esteem answers.  You do not inherit self-esteem, but you learn it from your family of origin. 

A normal and constant self-esteem about “who we are” is considered to be global self-esteem.  “What we do” during specific events is considered situational self-esteem and it often fluctuates based on certain roles, events and circumstances.  At one moment, situational self-esteem can be high (e.g., at work) and then low shortly after (e.g., at home).  A negative evaluation on yourself is low self-esteem, and this usually happens when you encounter a circumstance in your life that touches your sensitivities.  When this happens you personalize the incident and in return experience emotional, physical and cognitive arousal.  When you feel emotionally blocked or upset, your alarming and confused actions respond in a self-destructive and self-defeating manner.  When your actions are impulse-driven and automatic, your thinking narrows, you lose all self-sense, your self-care deteriorates and you become completely self-absorbed while trying to be in complete control.  Raising global self-esteem, which is never set in stone is not easy, but possible.  As you learn from certain experiences and face your fears, global self-esteem grows. 

Boost Your Self-Esteem

1.  Get Sober.  Stop self-destructive behavior through a 12-step group.  Did you know that your mood can be dragged down and learning can be blocked by addictions?  Identify and replace your addictions with self-care.

2.  Practice Self Health-care.  Practice positive health care and joining self-help groups can be helpful when you are making new lifestyle choices. 

3.  Identify what triggers your low self-esteem.  You may infer negative meanings about yourself when you personalize events that are stressful, such as criticism.  Often, this is often followed by a self-defeating action.  Instead, face your fear and the negative beliefs and meanings by letting each event be a chance to learn more about yourself. 

4.  Stop "Automatic" Reactions. Slow down your impulsive responses to people.  To interfere with automatic overreactions, use stress and relaxation techniques to direct towards self-soothing arousals.  This will allow you to find a way to face the fears that are unacknowledged by interrupting the automatic inevitable reaction. 

5.  Stop and pay attention.  Take notice to the impulse familiarity.  You tend to overreact to the same incident in the same ways.  If you notice the similarity, it can slow your reactivity. 

6.  Acknowledge reaction.  Instead of passively noting it, do something about it!  Describe your feelings, thoughts and action by verbalizing.

7.  Choose Your Response.  Act in an effective and self-caring way rather than with impulses of self-defeat.  You are taking a step towards facing your fears by acting in more functional manner.

8.  Acknowledge Your Impulses. By being able to acknowledge the benefits that you get from your overreactions (e.g., protection), you can better understand the hidden motivations that you have for taking certain impulsive actions that defeat your own interests.  It will not be easy to do this at first, but once you do become more effective, you will appreciate how your impulse of self-defeat was actually designed to meet one of your needs.  With this knowledge, you can meet your needs in a more positive way in the future.

9.  Develop skills. Developing these emotional self-management skills will set you apart from others and help to raise your self-esteem, assist you with tolerating confusion, and provide for your own safety by learning and using these very essential skills of life:

     1.       Experience feelings.  You can identify your hidden needs by “feeling” your feelings.  When you do not respect your feelings, you only can rely on what others believe and want, which will cause you to lose your sense of independent existence and therefore demolish any self-esteem that you thought you had.  Know Thy Self.

     2.       Optional thinking.  Either/or thinking must end.  Learn how to reframe meanings by giving yourself a variety of optoins, which will open you to new possibilities about how you think about your dilemmas.

     3.      Boundaries.  Do not give in to everything that other people want; Say NO!  By discouraging abuse from others and asserting your separateness, you are maintaining personal boundaries. 

     4.       Assertion.  Make “I” statements by voicing what you want, feel and see.  You are showing that you are in charge of your life when you directly and honestly express your desires, feelings and thoughts.

     5.       Receptivity.  Listen to others words to restate them and END YOUR SELF-ABSORPTION.  By doing so, you will empathize with others needs and with awareness of your events contribution. 

People can sometimes be left feeling depressed and defeated with little self-esteem when they do not follow these best practices, and low self-esteem can cause people to make terrible decisions that further compound their self-esteem problems.  However, YOU can make changes to your life by raising self-esteem if you follow these essential tips.  Live a better life and feel better about yourself!


- Erin