Self Improvement | Improve your self esteem | The Self Improvement ...

By Jacky Tustain -

Even if you want to improve your self esteem it is difficult to be objective and see where improvement is required as it is your perception of yourself. It is your reality and no matter what people say it is very hard to shift your view of yourself.

Assess your Overall Self Esteem

Before you can start improving your self esteem you need to get an objective idea of your self worth. One place to start is to take the famous Rosenberg self esteem test to give yourself an idea as to how low or high your esteem is. This awareness will be a good start to getting a more balanced understanding of your self worth. This will give you a good overall indicator but it will not pick up the finer details of where your perception is out of balance.

Look for the Specifics

If it seems that your overall self esteem is OK then you may want to focus on specific areas that you want to improve. There are a couple of ways to spot the specifics that need improving. Firstly, listen to family and friends. Do they persistently disagree with something you insist on about yourself, for instance, you insist that you are ugly ? yet they all keep telling you otherwise.

The other way is to consider where you are expecting yourself to be perfect. Do you think you are fat because you don?t look like a skinny supermodel? Are you too short because you have taller friends? Perhaps you think you are boring because people seem to ignore you a lot and would rather talk about themselves.

Accept Yourself

The first point can be helped by considering that you are wrong about yourself. Using affirmations where you speak positively to yourself to counteract your negative self talk will help towards shifting your self perception.

This second issue can be addressed by re-educating yourself about being human. No, you are not perfect and that is actually OK. We are all a hotch potch of shapes and sizes, of different abilities and talents. Some people are very gifted in some areas but lack in others, some are mediocre generally and some have disabilities. We all make mistakes in everything we do; that is how human beings learn. It is how you learned to walk and talk. Learning to accept ?what is? will go a long way to helping you redress the balance about your view of yourself.

Really Low Esteem

If your self esteem turns out to be really low then the above is not likely to work very well. You are likely to have spent a very long time creating this reality that you live in, possibly enforced by some kind of abuse in your life. It may not even be abuse but possibly a lack of attention when you needed it most, and it may not have even been intentional.

As the pain in this situation goes deep, the healing needs to do so too. You can still use affirmations but learning to love and forgive where it is required will help you let go of this low opinion of yourself.

This love and forgiveness may be directed inwards towards yourself or towards someone else. If forgiveness is required but you struggle to forgive bear in mind that we forgive a person not the behaviour that caused the hurt.

There are no tests to work out if this is the problem, however meditation, prayer, hypnotherapy or self hypnosis are all good tools to use to uncover the truth. If you choose to work with a therapist be careful that you choose wisely as the brain is very susceptible to improper suggestions.

Learn to Let Go

If you still struggle to overcome these negative thoughts and beliefs about yourself and cannot work through them with or without help then consider just letting them go. There is a popular visualisation where you imagine putting whatever it is that is bothering you into a box for ?God? or a ?Higher Power? and allowing them or it to deal with it for you.

Whatever your spiritual belief system this is very powerful because it allows your mind to drop the responsibility for resolving the problem and thereby dismisses it, making you feel empowered and free. It is as if you have ?thrown away? the issue and it is no longer there, allowing you to move forward and make yourself the person you want to be, even if that is just learning to accept yourself as you are.

Jacky Tustain is a Life Coach based in Basingstoke, Hampshire in the UK, specialising in helping people turn their life around through first raising confidence and self esteem and then focussing on achievement of their goals.

For related Life Coaching information check out her BeCanDo website.

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Source: http://theselfimprovementblog.com/self-improvement/self-esteem/16309/

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