Learn more about personaldevelopment with this collection
Cultivating self-awareness and self-reflection
Prioritizing and setting boundaries for self-care
Practicing mindfulness and presence
4. Eliminate self-criticism and introduce self-compassion
Since our goal is to enhance our self-esteem, we need to substitute self-criticism with self-compassion. Specifically, whenever your self-critical inner monologue kicks in, ask yourself what you would say to a dear friend if they were in your situation (we tend to be much more compassionate to friends than we are to ourselves) and direct those comments to yourself. Doing so will avoid damaging your self-esteem further with critical thoughts, and help build it up instead.
156
517 reads
MORE IDEAS ON THIS
Build Yourself Up
Many of us recognize the value of improving our feelings of self-worth. When our self-esteem is higher, we not only feel better about ourselves, we are more resilient as well.
That said, it is certainly possible to improve our self-esteem if we go about it the right way. Here...
145
647 reads
3. Learn to accept compliments
Set yourself the goal to tolerate compliments when you receive them, even if they make you uncomfortable (and they will). The best way to avoid the reflexive reactions of batting away compliments is to prepare simple set responses and train yourself to use them automatically whenever you get good...
150
510 reads
5. Affirm your real worth
The following exercise has been demonstrated to help revive your self-esteem after it sustained a blow: Make a list of qualities you have that are meaningful in the specific context. For example, if you got rejected by your date, list qualities that make you a good relationship prospect. Then cho...
158
468 reads
1. Use positive affirmations correctly
Positive affirmations such as “I am going to be a great success!” are extremely popular, but they have one critical problem they tend to make people with low self-worth feel worse about themselves because such declarations are simply too contrary to our existing beliefs. For affirmations to work ...
155
624 reads
2. Identify our competencies and develop them
Self-esteem is built by demonstrating real ability and achievement in areas of our lives that matter to us. If you pride yourself on being a good cook, throw more dinner parties. If you’re a good runner, sign up for races and train for them. In short, figure out your core competencies and find op...
157
595 reads
Bottom Line
Improving self-esteem requires a bit of work, as it involves developing and maintaining healthier emotional habits but doing so, and especially doing so correctly, will provide a great emotional and psychological return on your investment.
134
610 reads
Related collections
Other curated ideas on this topic:
Practice self-compassion
People with low self-esteem tend to be hard on themselves and take everything very personally.
When you catch yourself being very critical of yourself, stop. Take a step back and see the situation from the viewpoint of a good friend. Ask yourself if it is really that bad. Remember that ther...
Correcting our assumptions about self-compassion
- Notice what you believe about self-compassion. What do you think would happen if you were self-compassionate? What would happen if you let go of harsh self-criticism?
- Notice how you talk to yourself. Is your self-talk negative? Do you hold yourself...
Practice self-compassion
Particularly in the West, people have adopted a propensity for self-criticism as a cultural value, and tend to self-punish when dealing with setbacks and failures, she says. But excessive self-criticism gets in the way of achieving your goals.
There are three parts to practicing se...
Read & Learn
20x Faster
without
deepstash
with
deepstash
with
deepstash
Personalized microlearning
—
100+ Learning Journeys
—
Access to 200,000+ ideas
—
Access to the mobile app
—
Unlimited idea saving
—
—
Unlimited history
—
—
Unlimited listening to ideas
—
—
Downloading & offline access
—
—
Supercharge your mind with one idea per day
Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.
I agree to receive email updates