“Vijay, you’re doing great work. I see a lot of improvement from last quarter; however, I have the same constructive comments from last time. I need you to be more confident in your managerial skills. Asking for advice as often as you do and doubting your abilities will hinder your performance as a successful manager and can prevent you from moving up in this company,” said his boss.
“Tanvi, you have to stop being so hard on yourself! You will do great on your math test tomorrow. You have to keep repeating that to yourself so you will do well,” her sister said for the tenth time.
“I hate how much Miram doubts himself. We’ve been together for 3 years and she still has to ask me what my favorite thing to eat for lunch is. She just doesn’t trust herself to know me and to make decisions on her own. That is extremely frustrating,” Ali told his friend.
“Anu takes too many things too personally. I can’t have an honest conversation with her because anytime I try to speak the truth, she just feels terrible thinking I’m criticizing her when I’m just offering advice. I just can’t be friends with her because I have to watch what I say so much. I spend more energy trying not to offend her than actually enjoying spending time with her,” Neha lamented to her husband.
Low self-esteem can take many forms and affects both men and women. Sometimes it presents itself as self-doubt or a negative self-image. Other times, people create a falsely positive sense of often coming across as narcissistic, pompous and arrogant to mask their true feelings of self-loathing. No matter how low self-esteem presents itself, it negatively affects your relationships (including intimate partnerships and friendships), your job as well as your health, as low self-esteem can be connected with symptoms of depression.
One way to improve self-esteem is to change the thoughts, emotions and behaviors associated with low self-confidence. Here are seven steps to building healthier self-esteem. It is recommended to write the answers down to best see results.
1. Identify a situation that made you feel upset.
In the first column on your paper, write down what happened in the situation that caused you to feel upset and hurt your self-confidence. E.g. No one asked questions during my presentation.
2. What thoughts entered your mind during that situation?
When our self-esteem is threatened, we tend to automatically engage in negative self-talk and have thoughts that exacerbate our low self-esteem. These thoughts are your interpretation of the event and sometimes can be irrational, unreasonable or based on false beliefs about what happened. Regardless of what they mean, it is important to identify the pattern of how you think when you are in a troubling situation. E.g. No one likes my presentation. I have not prepared enough. I am not an engaging speaker. I knew I should have asked someone else to give the presentation instead.
3. Rate your mood.
Negative self-talk and situations that lower your self-esteem tend to lower mood and create a self-perpetuating cycle. On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being mood that is so low you can’t get out of bed to 10 being euphoric, rate your mood was during the situation. Then identify the emotions affiliated with that rating. E.g. 3 – depressed, guilty and worried.
4. Identify your physical symptoms.
Reactions to low self-esteem also present themselves through physical symptoms. E.g. My heart is racing and I feel nauseous.
5. Identify your behavioral responses.
When we notice our self-esteem dropping, we tend to behave in certain ways to console ourselves. Sometimes that is through eating, sleeping, working, blaming others, etc. Identify what you did as a result of feeling negatively about the situation. E.g. I felt like being alone so I cancelled my plans and sat in my room obsessing about what I did wrong.
6. Challenge your thoughts.
Researchers believe that low self-esteem is primarily created and maintained by our negative thoughts and inaccurate interpretations of a situation. Challenge yourself to come up with different explanations for the situation. This is often very difficult to do but push yourself to find at least 3 different explanations than the one you immediately relied on as “the truth”. The goal is to help you identify that your interpretation is just one of a few possible explanations for why the situation occurred in the first place. E.g. 1) They couldn’t hear me so they didn’t know what to react to. 2) They were paying attention and interested in the content so they did not want to interrupt my presentation. 3) People may not have wanted to extend the presentation and make everyone even more late than we already were.
7. Rate your mood.
Often, identifying alternate possible explanations for the same situation relieves stress and anxiety of lifts mood. On the same scale of 1-10 from step 3 rate your mood now and identify the emotions affiliated with that rating. E.g. 6 – relieved, less lonely
As you keep this record of self-esteem lowering situations and your reactions to them, you will quickly start to see a pattern of the types of situations that cause you to feel a certain way. You will notice that specific thoughts and behaviors are associated with your feelings of low self-confidence. Primarily you will notice at least one of the following automatic thought patterns when you feel bad:
- All or nothing thinking – You think in black and white with no shades of gray. E.g. If I don’t pass this test, I’m a failure in this subject.
- Self put-downs – You undervalue yourself and often use self-deprecating language or humor. E.g. My marriage is not great but that’s what I deserve.
- Mental filtering – You pick out only the negatives of a situation and focus on them creating a distorted memory of the actual situation. E.g. I made a mistake on my project and my professor will know that I am not qualified for this class or profession.
- Transforming positive into negative – You attribute positive qualities and successes to reasons outside of your control but feel responsible for the negative situations. E.g. I only did well on that interview because the interviewer was really friendly.
- Jumping to negative conclusions – Without enough evidence, you automatically assume the negative. E.g. My husband hasn’t called me back after the message I left. He must be mad at me.
- Assuming feelings are facts – You assume how you feel about yourself is the truth about yourself. Feelings are entirely different and separate from facts and cannot be mistaken as equivalent. E.g. I feel like a terrible friend so I must be a terrible friend.
As you engage in this exercise long enough to identify your patterns, you will become better at overriding your automatic thought patterns with alternate explanations for a situation that makes you feel upset. Learning this skill helps significantly improve self-esteem and eventually will help improve the quality of your relationships, your success at work as well as overall health and wellbeing.
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