Self Esteem – Part 2
Self-esteem Part 1 covered what low self-esteem is, what causes it and the ways that we continue to fuel it in adulthood.
Overcoming low self-esteem
There are lots of techniques and tools that you can do for yourself that will help you to overcome low self-esteem in time. They all require patience, persistence, and dedication to maintain and develop a new mindset. Your world view and belief system took years to be created and solidified, so it will take time and dedication to undo the patterns and defaults that your brain now relies on. It may be useful to read up on the concept of neuroplasticity to better understand what you are ultimately trying to do.
Really, really know yourself
The first step in making any real change is truly understanding who you are, and how you were shaped and formed as you evolved throughout your life. Self-awareness can help to unlock why we might feel a certain way or believe certain things we believe. Think about the key things that happened when you were growing up. What was your relationship with the adults around you like? How did they respond and talk to you? Were there any pivotal incidents growing up or in your adolescence? Most importantly, look hard at the questions: ‘how am I in the world, how do I carry myself, how do I interact with people?’, ‘what are my strengths, what am I good at?’ and ‘what are my (realistic) weaknesses’. Do this last one with no judgement, remain factual and balanced in your assessment.
Being realistic and accepting
This is perhaps the most difficult step for some people. Some find it hard to accept they have strengths and are good at certain things. Some fear change and worry that acceptance may be a barrier to who they would ideally like to be. But this isn’t necessarily true.
Whilst accepting all parts of yourself is hard, and there is no quick answer on how to do this, acceptance is a choice, and one which we must exercise daily in the behaviours and choices we make. It is important to be realistic and accept all parts of ourselves, the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses. Self-acceptance is a process, and one that is probably lifelong for most of us.
Some practical steps
Identifying and challenging your self-criticism
We all talk to ourselves, therefore the voice we have in our minds is important. In those with low self-esteem, their inner voice is being overly and unhelpfully harsh and critical. By identifying it and labelling it we can start to put some distance between it and us. View it as a bully, or a sabotaging voice, one that you want to turn the dial down on. This is a very important step in increasing self-esteem. Some people find it very powerful to give their critical voice a name and start to talk back to it. Viewing this voice as separate from you, not as you, will help to lessen the hold it has on you. In time, once you have started to separate out this voice, start to observe it challenge it. When is it at it loudest? What message does it always repeat? Then when you can do this, start to challenge it.
Retraining your focus
People with low self-esteem can be overly and unduly focused on the negative. So naturally, examples of it can be found everywhere because there are bias, and scanning for it that is now happening.
Those with low esteem can benefit from retraining the mind to be more balanced in its outlook. If your belief is “I am a failure” then you are going to be biased to paying attention to all the struggles you perceive you have, thus reinforcing your position. In doing this, we block the rest of the picture and so remove opportunities to reframe, grow, and learn. As with anything new we are training the brain into doing so, you need to be intentional, focused and deliberate about it. Some people find it useful to log three positives each day. These can be small and seemingly inconsequential. The point is to start to get the brain scanning and seeing positives, to help turn its focus away from the negative bias it may have built up.
Challenging your narrative
Ultimately, you will need to understand what your narrative is (hence the section above on knowing yourself). When you start to monitor your self-critical and harsh thoughts, you will probably start to discover a pattern. What are your recurrent thoughts? What labels do you use for yourself? Rather than assume this is the truth about you - who you are - start to be curious and quizzical about it. Regard these thoughts as just a theory, or an opinion, something that can be scrutinised and challenged. Can you attribute any part of this theory or opinion to anything in your history? Where does it come from? Is it true? Is it just or warranted? Above all, is it helpful, or is it time to start to challenge it and let it go?
Once you have done this critical thinking and challenging, see if you can reframe your narrative and beliefs. You don’t need to believe it at first. It may feel uncomfortable, or even silly. The idea again is that the brain needs to be trained into accepting new and different, and that takes time and can be frustrating and difficult. Be patient and persistent.
Find a new narrative and set of beliefs that are more useful to you, ones that allow you to be more confident and comfortable in yourself. Now keep your focus on that, reminding yourself and being persistent in this is who you are, and how you feel. Like a bad habit, the brain of someone with low self-esteem will naturally want to reach for the long held and deeply entrenched negative narratives and beliefs, so it is important to work to challenge those beliefs, collect new evidence to the contrary and start to imagine yourself differently until the brain can learn to naturally default to this.
References:
[1] Fennell, M. J. (1997). Low self-esteem: A cognitive perspective. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 25(1), 1-26.