Tips to Raise Your Self Esteem So You Can Reach Your Full Potential

“If I could give you one gift I would give you the ability to see yourself as I see you so you could see how special you are." ~ Anonymous

Your level of self esteem is critical to your success and overall ability to live out your purpose, yet, so many people are trapped in a revolving door of quiet insults and self criticisms that hold them back in life. We can't possibly reach our fullest potential when we are putting ourselves down all the time or believe that we are not worthy. The good news is, if you or someone you love is suffering from low self esteem, there is a way out and this blog gives you some tips on how to to get to work on this right away.

Self esteem - really?

Maybe when you hear the words, “self esteem”, there is a part of you that winces? Does it bring to mind this weak idea that has been pushed on us humans that if we just believe in ourselves then we can do anything? It’s impossible not to find fault with this oversimplification, even if it’s chock full of truth, because it's missing A WHOLE LOT to make it seem tangible, let alone believable. The words “self esteem” carry in them for me images from my youth when perhaps we watched certain cheesy animated videos about self esteem, or teachers gave us lectures on how our self esteem is important and why we shouldn’t be bullies....or, with low self esteem we can be peer pressured… simple things like this….simple thinking like this. I’m sure you can relate. Yet, who knew that 30 odd years later, 15 odd years of serious academia in healthcare leadership, quality excellence and personal success later, I would come to find self esteem to be one of the biggest and most crucial aspects of human potential above most else. Yeah, seriously!

What is self esteem?

Let’s take a moment here to really define what self esteem is so we’re moving forward together with the same basic understanding. Self esteem is your overall sense of worthiness and value. Self confidence is really more about what you think you're capable of and these two concepts most certainly do interconnect, but they are different. Self confidence and self esteem are often used interchangeably, but I am of the school-of-thought that self esteem stands alone, it’s a matter of the whole Self, permeating all areas of our lives, whereas our self confidence changes depending on the situation. I think it’s more accurate to consider terms like, self regard and self worth as synonymous with self esteem. Your self concept is all of the above.

everything in our lives is affected by our levels of self esteem

If I were to draw a mind-map of effective living and human actualization, you know those diagrams you make to outline all the elements related to say a project you're working on? It’s a brainstorming tool where you take the main project idea, put it in the center, then draw a bunch of lines away from it to outline all the mini-projects within that project, then from those mini-projects, all the steps to complete the mini-projects? The center and main point of that mind-map would be your self concept - how you see yourself, your perceived value in the world, and how you think other people perceive you. Everything else you ever do would branch off from there. Everything in our lives is affected by our self esteem - our choices, how we speak, what we think about, our ability to take action, our relationships with others, our relationship with ourselves, our ability to contribute in our jobs, our ability to problem solve in any situation, our ability to stand up for ourselves, our awareness of our potential, our finances - I mean, the list is huge. When we know this it becomes undeniable that self esteem and personal success are proportionally related. When one is high, the other is high. Agreed?

The shitty low self esteem cycle

At this point, you're likely doing a little soul searching right now… a little self assessment of your own and connecting with some ideas you might have about yourself in certain areas of your life. It is natural for us to do this because it is natural for all humans to try and improve. It’s related to our survival - if we improve, we survive; if we conform, we belong. We’re problem solvers by nature too, so of course, we’re going to be acutely aware of our problems - maybe too aware. This natural tendency can cause us to spend a little too much time comparing ourselves to others or to the ideas we have learned about life, and too little time finding and setting honest and authentic standards for ourselves based on a quality of living that is largely driven by our intrinsic (internal) desires.

We all need love and belonging. On Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I think this is actually the very first need above basic survival like shelter, food and safety! So, naturally and quite inherently, we look outside of ourselves to constantly measure whether or not this fundamental need of belonging is being met. We can get into some sticky situations with this. If we have a low self-esteem, it can become difficult for us to form lasting and healthy friendships or romantic relationships and thus, our self esteem continues to suffer. If we have a healthy self esteem but don’t have successes we feel proud of, we start to feel faulty and like we don’t belong, then we start to feel, you guessed it, a low self-esteem. It’s a shitty, shitty cycle to be in and, let me tell you, more people than we would ever like to believe are stuck in this cycle. People of all ages, of all ethnicities, all genders, across the world are experiencing this right now. This phenomenon is quite literally holding the world back. If you’re in this cycle, you’re not alone. If this is you, you need to know and internalize for me right now, that this is something you have the power to change and take heart, take solace in knowing, that it is really you that decides whether you’re worthy - you can accept it or reject it. Reject it and you can break out of this cycle.

Our perceptions are flawed

The meaning we make out of our lives comes from our beliefs. If we believe certain people who look a certain way can’t be trusted then we will perceive this, because we will find evidence of this in the world. If, on the other hand, at a very basic level at least, we learn that our perceptions can be flawed because our beliefs can be flawed, we open ourselves up to powerful transformation. When we challenge our beliefs we create the necessary space between our quick judgements and convictions to allow more consideration. I love the exercise Stephen Covey uses in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to demonstrate this. I hope I’m remembering this right: In a large university classroom filled with students, he gave half of them a sketch that looked like an old, haggard and gnarly looking woman and the other half a sketch of a young fashionably dressed fair maiden. With each sketch was a description describing the features and maybe even the nature of each woman. Then he placed a sketch on overhead that had combined the features of both women into one drawing. Half the class insisted they saw an old woman without the ability to see the young woman. The other half of the class felt equally convinced that they were looking at a sketch of a young woman. I, myself, had a very hard time seeing the fair maiden at first - because I was introduced to the old woman first. I only saw the old woman. Apparently, people even got angry about what they insisted was there. Some students after some time were able to see the other woman. Neither classmate was wrong in what they saw, but they weren’t right either when they insisted that their knowledge was superior to the other. I mean, perception is everything to us, it defines our world. But the lesson we need to learn is that what we think we know about the world and what we think we know about ourselves can (and should) be challenged because it is often false, especially if it is disempowering of ourselves or others. So, when it comes to self esteem, first and foremost, above all else, you need to know that how you feel about yourself is very likely based on some false perceptions and most importantly, just like you can learn to see the other woman in the sketch so-to-speak, you can learn to see your true Self by understanding that your beliefs may be false. Once the false belief is seen for what it is, it can be changed, disposed of or replaced with something closer to the true essence of you and your abilities - to something more empowering. When you do this work, you can make major shifts in your belief systems, thereby altering your perceptions and fundamentally changing your life.

What stories are you telling yourself?

I think it is critical to point out here that challenging your beliefs to is not a form of brainwashing yourself into thinking differently. It’s radical but not obscene. What I am suggesting though is that many of us are living with beliefs that are based on FALSE premises. Here’s a good example of how this can happen, and it demonstrates beautifully the power that our beliefs have over us: Sally grew up in a low income household. Her mother and father had to scrape together all that they had to pay the bills and put food on the table. Sometimes they needed to go to the food bank. Sally’s mother would often sit Sally down to tell her just how hard it is out there in the real world. She would even tell Sally stories of how she comes from a long line of women who didn’t have book smarts and had to learn to get by with street smarts because of it. Sally’s mother continuously reminded Sally that her low grades meant that she didn’t have book smarts either, and that it’s not her fault, it’s just in her blood. So, Sally started to believe that she struggled in school because she wasn’t smart and that her destiny was to be very similar to her parents’ destiny. She resigns herself to this sad outcome and doesn’t apply herself at school, causing her to struggle further. She eventually drops out and doesn’t finish high school because, what’s the point, then goes on to work in factories for the rest of her life, wondering at times, what could have been. If this was a choose your own adventure storybook, the other story could be something like this: Sally’s parents didn’t finish high school and neither did anyone else in their families. Sally’s parents struggled to make ends meet. They saw Sally was struggling in school so they sat her down. They asked Sally what was troubling her in school. They explained to Sally that they want to help her find solutions to support her achievement in school because they believe in her and would like to see her go on to complete high school. They inspired her by telling her stories of perseverance and got excited that maybe Sally could be the first in a long lineage to go on to post secondary school even though they had no idea at the time how they would pay for it. They explained to Sally her education is her ticket to a better life than what her parents were living. They tell her that her efforts will pay off, that she can have a future with financial freedom if she puts in the hard work, believes in herself and asks for help when she needs it. Sally sees how hard her parents struggle and wants something different for herself. She gets some after school help, sticks to it and goes on to become an environmental engineer making $100,000 a year.

We carry stories within us that have been very much defined by our past, particularly our youth. Some of them might be empowering us, some of them might be disempowering us. It all acts like computer code….once the software is in place, all systems will respond accordingly and only until the code is changed or broken/defective will we change. Our daily decisions and ideas about ourselves are heavily influenced by this code. In the stories above, Sally is the same person, but she had different beliefs based on her upbringing, which changed her choices and actions and, therefore, her future. In fact, when we continue with the computer code analogy, it can become easy for us to feel so convinced we are this code and feel so strongly that it is impossible to change - we believe the code IS us - like it’s in our DNA. Someone might say, “I am shy. This is how I have always been. I am a shy person and always will be”. But, really, it’s just programming, and we can change the programming. Like we can install a new operating system onto a computer, we can do this for ourselves as well.

If low self esteem is stifling your progress it is likely causing you some mental anguish. Even people who seem really successful may be struggling with low self esteem which is keeping them from moving up to the next level in their career. These feelings of frustration from not moving to the next level, from holding ourselves back, create inner conflict. Our higher Selves know we want more, and can do better, but our lower selves, our Ego selves, say we can’t, or that we’re not good enough. Maybe we are unwilling to fail. Maybe we are unwilling to be judged. Maybe it just feels too unsafe to try and safety is our very basic need for survival. But, humans want to progress. Your Higher Self wants you to tap into your potential and take the reins. When we are not progressing, we start to really struggle mentally, so the internal conflict ensues. It doesn’t go away and we find ourselves unhappy.

What we need to pull from all of this are the following gems:

1. We have a potential to fulfill. It is unique to us and we’ve been given a lifetime to fulfill it. We have innate talents within us that peek out to us as interests, inspirations, fascinations, admirations, curiosities and passions;

2. When we are not taking steps in our lives towards the fulfillment of our highest potential, towards our actualization, we start to feel a lack of progress, we begin to feel confused, lost, hopeless and sad. We have mental anguish;

3. We are more than the sum of our beliefs, but our beliefs create our perceptions that drive our decisions and actions. If we align our beliefs with the part of us that wants to progress, and our decisions and actions follow suit, we start to see some seriously cool stuff happen in our lives; and

4. The kicker - When we align our beliefs, decisions and actions with who we really are, meaning - what we really want - what we yearn for - we start to self actualize. When we fully self actualize, we experience a full realization of our abilities and a profound sense of completeness.

“What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization” ~ Abraham Maslow

So, the real problem sets in when we don’t feel worthy or capable of doing the things that are calling to us. When we feel this way, when we feel powerless or reside in a place of inaction, it begins to manifest itself within us a dis-ease - we struggle. Rumi says, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you”, which means, our struggles are our greatest teachers. Our suffering, our mental and emotional anguish, is telling us to take notice, seek to understand and take corrective action. We are not our suffering - our suffering is our teacher. We are not our anguish. These things are a part of us but they do not define us. This is why the self help industry is so HUGE! I mean, it has to be! It has a seriously massive job to do. Many, in fact, MOST of us are struggling and need help. We don’t realize that we are not our suffering, or that we can move beyond the suffering, until we first learn this, then comprehend it fully. We are not our thoughts, either. We are not our feelings. We are not our past mistakes. These things interfere greatly with our functionality in life though, they appear to be all there is. Moving beyond this can feel very difficult and extremely abstract. We do not learn this stuff in school, regretfully, and most of us it didn't learn this at home either. I'm so grateful for the conscious parenting movement - we so need this.

We are ethereal beings who reside in bodies of flesh and it is our bodies who feel anguish - not our beings - our beings are very much at peace and very capable. It is our minds that have been conditioned to think certain ways and our thought habits are sometimes so deeply ingrained that we can’t possibly imagine thinking any differently. But we can. We 100% can think and act differently, but it takes some understanding first of what is really going on with us. We are just a mix-mash of everything we’ve been taught and all that we believe to be true about life and ourselves. Consider this small example that demonstrates how we we're born with pure drive, intentionality and with a clean mind to keep moving to our next level but unlearned this over the years in our human conditioning: When you were a baby and were old enough sit, everything in you began to prepare and aspire to crawl (most of us crawled first - but not all of us). Then, once you could crawl, everything in you began to prepare and aspire to walk. Now, walking was really hard as a baby. You fell a lot and cried a lot. But no one ever said, “Don’t walk, stop doing that, be careful, you’ll fall, you keep failing which means you’re no good at this.” No, you were encouraged and even celebrated when you walked. But beyond this, you wanted to walk and even though you kept falling you were so determined that it was your next necessary step to take (pun intended!) that you kept trying. You didn’t stop until you succeeded. Now, in case you weren’t sure, you are still the same person that you were when you were a baby learning to walk. You have more life experience and more knowledge but the essence of you is still the same. If you can connect with this, then you my friend are ready to start to grasp something truly magnificent here, you are ready to know that getting to a place of self esteem will be a two-pronged process: one of undoing the garbage you took on since a young child that isn’t serving you, and one of allowing the true essence of you to emerge, because this essence of you is very high functioning, seriously capable, and unafraid.

I get it, this may seem like an amazing place to be but surreal and fantastical sounding. I know, I hear you. I can tell you that I am not a fully evolved person living only as my Higher Self. I have not yet reached enlightenment and I may never in this lifetime. But, through meditation and through the re-engineering of some of my core beliefs, I have evolved considerably and not only know and feel this Higher Self within me, I am connected to this Higher Self and serving her every day. I will continue to evolve until I die, because that is what I have decided I must do. Lord knows I have struggled with this all of my life, I mean really struggled. It wasn’t until I figured this out that I was able to rise above all the turmoil that I was feeling to see what was underneath. I saw within me passion, and talent and yearning butting up against fear and self-doubt (a doozy of a duo), and decided to disengage from the fear and self-doubt and show up for myself. I took 100% responsibility for my life and more actively assumed the role as the co-creator of my life that I am. I’m still very much in uncharted territory. Sometimes, I am really uncomfortable living this way because, the state I am living in at this moment is a state of surrender and, boy, surrender is tough for someone like me who has always wanted to be in supreme control of my life and my emotional state. I am also currently in a state of allowing. But mostly I am in a state of faith, faith that I am right where I need to be. Faith that I am loved and protected and supported by powers within me and beyond me to not only survive this major directional life change but to thrive. Faith that I am really a powerful person who just has a lot of undoing to do to get back to love. I am also in a state where I have to continuously remind myself that I am safe, that my courage will hold me up when I feel weak and afraid, and that taking risks will not kill me. In a nutshell, I believe that the things I am trying to do are the things that I am supposed to be doing. I have experienced a fundamental and transformational shift in my beliefs - I believe that we need to do the things that we are afraid to do. This is a huge experiment for me and my hypothesis is that I will succeed with flying colours. Not necessarily financially, but that would be nice and it is quite likely, but succeed in the sense that I will know with every cell of my body what it feels like to be living on purpose, to be in service of others, and most of all to know how incredible it feels to stop doubting my greatness, to say yes, to feel worthy, to put my chin up and say, “Why not me?”.

“You were not given life just to have a job or a career. You were given life to discover the wildly creative and powerful resources of your soul.” ~ Caroline Myss

Success to me is also the ability to live as an example and to teach it to others; to show the way, to guide, and to support. I identify myself as a teacher, and all good teachers don’t just give you information they give you tools to help you integrate that learning somehow. Nothing that I do I consider done well unless I have you taking action. So, let's now look at a couple of tools that you can put into practice in your own life to get results.

institute an inner coach

One of the simplest things that you can do to start respecting yourself is to start taking more care in how you speak to yourself. The way we speak to ourselves tends to be much harsher and more critical than any of the ways that we would speak to others that we respect. Self respect is a very high form of self care that contributes to our sense of worthiness and, therefore, our overall self esteem. Consider instituting this really effective and truly necessary first tool, The Inner Coach, which you can read more about in my previous blog, Effective Self Leadership is Intuitive Living. The idea is, you need to treat your sloppy attempts in life, your misgivings, your failures to launch, and your poor results the same way you treat those of someone you not only care deeply about but want to see succeed. An example would be, if you had a really angry outburst at a store clerk who kept you waiting. Aside from apologizing in the moment, you could use it as an Inner Coaching moment for yourself. Instead of your usual thoughts of yourself being, “You are seriously out of control and a total monster! It’s no wonder your friends don't call you. You don’t deserve friends.” You could say something instead that neutrally (without insults) acknowledges what you’ve done PLUS add a couple of constructive insights and tips to improve, such as: “You lost control today because you were worried about being late for dinner. You didn’t really leave yourself a lot of time to spare with this after work errand. This person didn’t deserve to be yelled at, but you apologized right away, that was an important move, good for you. Your husband always gets mad at you when you’re late because you don’t tell him where you are. I think he just wants to be informed so he can plan accordingly. Make an effort to be on time for dinner, and if you’re running late just let him know, this will take the pressure off of you and keep him from getting angry. You’re not a bad person, you just made a mistake, you’ll do better next time.” Start small with this tactic by first identifying a few ways where you are really hard on yourself. If you have a tendency to be hard on yourself about your body or lack of exercise, consider crafting a few supportive statements in advance to have ready when the insults start coming in. These are not lies you tell yourself, they are simply supportive statements of self love and gentle encouragement to improve.

implement a pattern interrupt

The next tool is what is referred to as a “pattern interrupt” and I learned this from Psychologist Katherine Chambers in her book Self Esteem For Women. Unfortunately, when we say something really critical or demeaning to ourselves, we end up in what’s called a negative thought spiral. It happens something like this: we experience a trigger, we have a thought, which triggers another thought, which triggers another thought, which triggers an emotion. The idea is that you find a way to abruptly bud in on your thoughts to interrupt the negative thought spiral from completing. You can do this by making a loud clap, making a loud cough, or you can use what my mentor Jack Canfield teaches which is to just say, “cancel” or see a big red "X" in a box in your mind. The challenge with catching these cruel things we think and say about ourselves is that we often don’t even realize when we’re doing this because it is so automatic. The only way this pattern interrupt is effective though is to catch it before the cascade starts. Usually there is something that triggers us. Most of us horribly judge, criticize and berate ourselves for the same certain things on a regular basis so it won’t be long before you start tuning into what these triggers are. Often the tail end of the negative thought spiral comes back to the same old hurts again and again, that usually have nothing to do to the trigger at all, like above when an outburst at the store clerk leaves you feeling shame about friendships. The more you do this work, the closer you get to understanding what these deep rooted disturbances are in you that lead you to these bad feelings about yourself. Therefore, over time your pattern interrupts will become more effective. I promise you, even if this starts out slow for you, you’ll get better and better at it with time. Simply by starting to pay attention to how we speak to ourselves, we create a new habit of witnessing and this has far reaching implications beyond self-esteem into other realms of our lives. Once we develop the habit of awareness we can recognize the trigger, interrupt it, and interject a new coaching thought to stop the spiral from taking place.

Forgive The THOught and choose again

Another great tactic that works really well with these two aforementioned tools is to simply forgive the negative thought and choose again. This is an effective strategy that I learned from Gabby Bernstein in her book, Judgement Detox. I really love this approach and it works well for me. It so perfectly weaves in self-compassion and forgiveness so that we can forgo the feelings of disappointment and shame that come up for us when we are hard on ourselves. This is a great pattern interrupt! Inside, many of us have this internal cycle of letting ourselves down and then berating ourselves for it and then feeling badly after and even feeling badly because we feel bad!!! Holy cow, I know, right? It is such a horrible cycle yet we live it day in and day out and in some cases we start our day with it and we end our day with it too. It’s a horrible existence to live this way but using this specific pattern interrupt of, “I forgive this thought and I choose again”, gives you 100% control to cancel the cascade and choose a more empowering, supportive or loving thought. As I said, this is all very simple but not necessarily easy. It will take some discipline but it is doable. Just like putting on your shoes to go out the door, or putting on your seatbelt in the car before you drive, because of the proven science of neuroplasticity, you can create new thought patterns with repetition - we don’t need to be a victim of the deep rooted thought patterns in our brains forever. Like a well used trail in the woods, your repeated behaviours become automatic and your brain's “go-to” thought processes. Stop using the trails that harm you and the forest floor will devour it, covering the trail completely. Start a new trail, walk it often enough and it will become your brain’s new go to! This is something you can learn to do - work it and it will work for you.

KEEP YOUR COMMITMENTS TO YOURSELF

Finally, carrying forward from above, when we let ourselves down often, the deep disappointment we feel often leads to shame and an even lower self esteem. The logical thing to counteract this is to start keeping the agreements you make with yourself. Again, self respect is a very high form of self care. Letting ourselves down feels really awful. It often leads to criticizing ourselves, berating ourselves and simply resigning ourselves to more self sabotage. Just like you would lose trust in anyone in your life who didn’t do what they said they were going to do, especially when it came to things that were really important to you, you’d remove them from your life, right? I HOPE SO! So, when you feel this level of disappointment with yourself, well, you end up feeling lower than low. This is because you are not just letting down some random Joe Blow, you’re letting down the deepest part of you that wants to progress - Your Higher Self. Your Higher Self wants to fulfill its destiny but your lower Self is getting in the way. You can turn this around by setting really achievable goals for yourself every day and meeting them. Once you start keeping your agreements with yourself, something wakes up. You start to feel powerful again. You begin to trust yourself. You begin to KNOW that you are powerful beyond measure when you deploy these certain skills. Keeping your word to yourself means, once you make a decision, it happens, no matter what. It also means that you don’t set goals and make decisions that you know you won’t keep, so you have to learn to say no as well. Start small, and gain a bunch of small wins and watch your spine straighten out. When you start gaining momentum my hope is that you’ll realize that your actions are building the sense within you that you are capable of so much more. Becoming the master of your life doesn't happen while on the couch, smoking a bong, and binging on Netflix. It happens with action on the very things that get you the results that you want. Action = Reaction. Cause = Effect. Act as if - Do what it is that the future successful you would need to do to be successful! Start doing it now. Success doesn’t come first, it comes last. Action comes first.

There you have it my friend - my thoughts on self esteem, why we experience low self esteem, why building on it and cultivating it matters so much and some tools I hope you’ll use to start building up your self esteem so that you can begin to move to your next level. Once you learn how to level up this way, you’ll be able to apply it again and again in your life - it can’t be unlearned. If you were doing all that you were capable of doing, you would be astonished. Really! So, I hope you are ready to start to get to know the true you and start living from a place of true self love and empowerment. You'll be so happy that you did.

I’m always wishing the best for you my friend.

Jennifer