Self-esteem is the foundation upon which a fulfilling and meaningful life is built.
It’s the deep-seated belief in your own value, abilities, and deservingness of happiness and success.
However, building self-esteem is not always easy, especially in a world that often seems to undermine our confidence.
Yet, with dedication and practice, it’s entirely possible to cultivate a strong sense of self-worth. Here are seven powerful ways to do just that:
Build Self-Esteem and Be Confident
Healthy self-worth is a deep-down, inside-the-soul belief in your worth, regardless of age, looks, ethnicity, gender, religion, background, or status.
It encompasses the idea that you have potential success and fulfillment and are worth investing in, learning, gaining skills, and performing a valuable service to society in your unique way.
It allows you to feel deserving of a new, healthier environment or lifestyle instead of being a mirror or victim of your early or current circumstances. It is one of the most important roots in the healthy growth of every human being.
How do you build self-confidence and self-esteem? Are you looking for ways to feel better about yourself and physically, too? Are you looking for ways to make yourself feel better that work?
Low self-esteem can negatively affect every aspect of your life, including your relationships, work, and wellness.
To build your self-esteem, you must overcome fears, break habits, and be successful and happy with yourself.
- What is self-esteem? Self-esteem is the way you feel about yourself.
- What is confidence? The feeling of certainty in one’s self and abilities.
Knowing your self-worth is the first step to progress and happiness and is essential to your emotional well-being. If your inner voice (or thoughts about yourself) are the most critical, you most likely have low self-esteem.
That means boosting your self-esteem starts with deciding that you are valuable and treating yourself as such. Self-esteem is whether you believe you’re worthy of respect from others, while self-confidence is whether you believe in yourself.
Self-esteem and self-confidence always go hand-in-hand, and they are directly related. The more self-esteem you have, the more self-confident you are! The less developed your self-esteem is, the less confident you are!
7 Powerful Ways to Build Your Self-Esteem and Boost Confidence
- Practice Self-Compassion: Treat yourself with the same kindness and understanding you would offer to a dear friend. Acknowledge your flaws and mistakes without harsh self-criticism. Embrace the reality that imperfection is a part of the human experience and that you are worthy of love and acceptance regardless of your perceived shortcomings.
- Set Healthy Boundaries: Boundaries are essential for preserving your self-worth and protecting your mental and emotional well-being. Learn to say no to things that drain your energy or compromise your values. Surround yourself with people who respect your boundaries and uplift you rather than bringing you down.
- Celebrate Your Achievements: Take pride in your accomplishments, no matter how small they may seem. Keep a journal of your successes, whether it’s completing a project at work, overcoming a personal challenge, or simply taking care of yourself. Reflecting on your achievements can boost your confidence and reinforce your sense of self-worth.
- Practice Gratitude: Cultivate an attitude of gratitude by focusing on the positive aspects of your life. Each day, take a few moments to reflect on the things you’re thankful for, whether it’s your relationships, opportunities, or personal qualities. Gratitude helps shift your perspective from what you lack to what you have, fostering a sense of abundance and worthiness.
- Challenge Negative Self-Talk: Pay attention to your inner dialogue and challenge negative self-talk when it arises. Replace self-limiting beliefs with empowering affirmations and reframes. Instead of saying, “I’m not good enough,” remind yourself, “I am capable and deserving of success.” Over time, reshaping your self-talk can transform your self-perception and boost your self-worth.
- Invest in Self-Care: Prioritize self-care activities that nurture your mind, body, and spirit. Whether it’s exercise, meditation, hobbies, or spending time with loved ones, make time for activities that replenish your energy and bring you joy. Taking care of yourself sends a powerful message that you value your well-being and deserve to prioritize your needs.
- Seek Support: Don’t be afraid to reach out for support when you need it. Whether it’s from friends, family, or a therapist, having a support system can provide validation, perspective, and encouragement during challenging times. Surround yourself with people who believe in you and cheer you on as you build your self-worth.
How to Create Integrated Self-Belief
- One of the mind’s primary functions is to prove itself right.
- To stay consistent with whatever was previously said or believed, we can unconsciously sabotage or have contradictory feelings about ourselves or a situation.
- The Integrated Self-Belief Exercise can resolve any conflicting tension and increase your self-belief:
- Try to remember the two conflicting beliefs within your mind.
- Open your eyes and palm your hands in front of you. Imagine the confident part in one hand and the fearful part in the other.
- Ask each part, in turn, what its positive intention for you is.
- Close your eyes and get in touch with the confident part of you.
- Get in touch with the fearful part.
- Bring your hands together.
- Pull your hands into your chest and integrate a new super-part of you.
Self-Worth and Confidence
The Definition of Self-Esteem: Confidence in one’s worth or abilities; self-respect.
I chose not to speak in most social settings when I was younger because of social anxiety. I spoke fine at home, where I felt comfortable and relaxed.
My family couldn’t get me to shut up. But, once you dropped me off at school or put me in front of strangers, I didn’t open my mouth and looked at the ground instead.
I overcame my social anxiety by building my self-esteem and self-confidence. I also learned to feel better about myself, even my shortcomings. Can you allow yourself to feel better about yourself?
You can feel better by letting go and surrendering to the present moment. The Present moment or “The Now,” as it is often referred to, is all there is.
Granted, your mind will naturally think of the past and the future because it always looks for danger. This is why daily quiet time is so crucial.
Whenever you resist the present moment, you will create an inner resistance that will eventually lead to negative emotions.
Negative emotion is the experience of feeling uncomfortable energy which may stagnate and become “stuck energy” within the body system.
When you have a small amount of stuck energy or negative emotion in your body, you can generally function with it. But once the energy becomes so blocked that you can no longer ignore it, you will experience negative emotions like anger, rage, jealousy, etc.
Negative Emotions & Self-Worth
Self-worth is at the root of all behavior, both positive and negative. Self-esteem is a combination of self-worth and self-trust.
- Self-worth is being glad you are with your genes, body, background, and potential.
- Self-trust is the functional belief in your ability to positively and effectively control what happens to you in a world of uncertainty.
The first gives you a sense of optimism, and the second gives you empowerment.
All negative emotion results from the ego getting in the way of what you are experiencing. Instead of just experiencing the event, the ego will get in the way and try to push against the experience.
Negative emotions signal to yourself, telling you that your thoughts and feelings are entirely out of alignment with your authentic, core self.
What you know to be accurate and what you believe to be confirmed are not a match. Hence you feel negative emotions.
Initially, the ego will give a slight resistance to an unwanted event. Later, the ego will eventually push so hard against what is happening that your body will experience negative emotions.
It would help if you saw the ego for what it is. It is not you, and it is the false you that was told a thousand “no’s” in your childhood.
The ‘You’ feeling victimized, you felt bullied, and they mistreated you. The ego is trying to prevent you from experiencing events or encounters that would deem harmful to you.
But harmful is a matter of perspective.
The ego could view giving a speech in front of a group of people as harmful, but it is not. The only way to get through the negative inner resistance is by doing what you are afraid to do. Just go ahead and do it, and don’t let the egoic mind stop you.
Have fun, and play with it, but don’t resist it. Allow instead and show that you are in charge, not your ego.
You Are The Author Of Your Story
I am going to let you in on a bit of a secret. You are the creator of your reality. You probably unconsciously create your reality, but you are making it nonetheless.
Your job from here on out is to create your life consciously. Wake up to what no longer serves you and let it go. Begin now creating what it is you want to experience.
Would you like more money, better health, and improved relationships? Then decide how to write that into your life story. If unsure what to experience, think of experiences you do not prefer and write the opposite.
Maybe up until this point, you were overweight. Write into your new script that you will have the body you always wanted. You can do it. Maybe up until this point, money came into your life sporadically.
Now write into your new life script that money flows into your life abundantly and continuously.
Maybe your relationships were too one-sided. Perhaps you always gave more than you received. Write into your new life script that you now experience balanced and harmonious relationships.
It’s your life, and it’s your script. Take control now and write an experience for yourself that you have always dreamt of but were unsure how you would get it. Please write it down, trust that you will have it, and then step back and allow it into your life.
After reading this post, please stop what you are doing and play around with this idea for a while. Just close your eyes and let your imagination run wild with it. After you have imagined for a time what your new life script would be like, write down some of the ideas you came up with.
This is your script, so feel free to run wild with it as much as you want to. You can permanently remove some things from your new life script if they do not go as well as you hoped.
Remember, life is about tweaking wants, needs, and desires. People wanted, needed, or desired something; once they did, they no longer wanted, needed, or desired it.
The critical point to remember is having fun and playing with life but being kind and respectful to others during your scriptwriting because we do what we do to ourselves. That is life, and that is what it is like being human. We change, and because of this, our wants, needs, and desires also change.
There is no absolute separation between any of us. It is only a five-sensory illusion that makes it appear that you and I are separate from any other person, animal, tree, and so on.
We are all part of the same energy field, and having different experiences. Still, our knowledge of it and who we are is connected to this energetic field.
Once we fully remember who we are, we will no longer choose to intentionally harm another living being on this planet because this would seem unwise.
⇒Related article: 5 Powerful Actions To Become More Assured
Letting Go To Improve Self-Worth & Confidence
Your essential nature is freedom, yet it often feels like we are limited. This comes from allowing ourselves to get lost in our beliefs, especially the core belief that “I am a limited person.”
Hale Dwoskin, the creator of the Sedona Method, has a system created for letting go of painful or harmful emotions.
There are five ways to approach the process of releasing. They all lead to the same result: liberating your natural ability to let go of any unwanted emotion on the spot and allowing some suppressed energy in your subconscious to dissipate, revealing your unlimited potential.
- The first way is by choosing to let go of the unwanted feeling.
- The second way is to welcome the feeling, to allow the emotion to be.
- The third way is to dive into the very core of the emotion.
- The fourth way is by dissolving the opposing polarities we all carry
- The fifth way is by seeing through the feeling to the effortless awareness behind it.
Letting go to heal self-esteem is to release emotions you think are you. You are not your painful or positive emotions; you experience them, yet you are not your emotions.
17 Ways To Build Your Self-Worth
I have a list of 17 ways to build your self-esteem. But I am going to add one more here first. I made a home gym in my basement two years ago. Initially, I worked out with light weights several times a week.
After a while, I worked out seven days a week with heavier weights.
This past summer, I got caught up with life and stopped lifting weights regularly. Eventually, my energy and strength decreased, and my thoughts weren’t as positive as usual.
I kept rationalizing why I wasn’t working out. I don’t have the time or energy, my body is sore, and I need to do other things.
This month, I began working out regularly again, lifting weights and walking on my treadmill or outside. I noticed my energy perked up – even the next day after I worked out.
Working out will increase my energy, and my energy and self-esteem will improve. What’s the moral of the story? Do things for yourself that are good for you, your image, and your self-worth. Do these things first thing in the morning if you can. You can also include eating well too.
Ways to improve your self-esteem:
- Stop everything you are doing and sit or lie down. Breathe in and out for ten seconds.
- Relax your body and release tension. Every thought you think either causes your body to expand or contract.
- Write down a list of all your favorite accomplishments.
- Stop OVERREACTING when things don’t go your way.
- Go for a walk outside in the park.
- Change your diet to clean, healthy foods.
- Be good to yourself daily. It’s no one else’s job to care for you.
- Let go of false beliefs about yourself.
- Write down ten things you are grateful for.
- Hug yourself; you’re doing the best you can.
- Surround yourself with people who love, care, and respect you as you are.
- Learn to set boundaries with people and get comfortable saying No!
- Handle setbacks and challenges calmly and rationally.
- Stop doing things that drain your energy.
- Get Stuff Done!
- Don’t believe the thoughts your mind tells you.
- Meditate to rise out of the thinking kind that keeps you trapped in negativity.
Conclusion
Building self-worth is an ongoing journey that requires patience, self-reflection, and dedication.
By practicing self-compassion, setting boundaries, celebrating achievements, cultivating gratitude, challenging negative self-talk, investing in self-care, and seeking support, you can strengthen your sense of worthiness and lead a more fulfilling life.
Remember, you are inherently valuable and deserving of love, respect, and happiness.