Your ability to make decisions plays a significant role in charting a path for your life. Your ability to make decisions that affect yourself is greatly influenced by what you think of yourself. In turn, your self-esteem as a human being describes what you feel about yourself.
Having good self-esteem is often used to refer to someone who does not think they are worthless in any way. However, your self-esteem is something that can be damaged. You can learn how to build your self-esteem back, but the best thing to do is to ensure it is not damaged in the first instance.
One thing that hurts people’s self-esteem is other people’s opinions about them. They internalize these opinions, and it has adverse effects on them. You can also overthink yourself, and this is what usually devolves into pride.
Again, the opinion of people about a person can cause this. However, there are rare cases where people appear to think low about themselves naturally, and no amount of positive praise can fix that.
This article will focus on low self-esteem, how you can build it back, and the various types of self-esteem that exist.
How To Build Your Self-Esteem
What Are The Three Types of Self-Esteem?
In the introductory part of this article, the different types of self-esteem were lightly described. This is a more in-depth look at them. Self-esteem type refers to the other states any person’s self-esteem can be in at various times. The three types of self-esteem are listed below.
1. Low Self Esteem
You will often run into several people with this disorder if you think of self-esteem as a spectrum. Low self-esteem would be on one far-end as a result of a lack of it. People who have low self-esteem deride themselves often.
They think lowly of themselves, and they do not believe they are better than the next person. This inability to place value on themselves negatively affects their lives.
They are usually agreeable people and will let their rights get trampled upon because they do not believe they are deserving of those rights in the first place.
Having low self-esteem can affect a lot of things in your life. It can even affect your love life. Most people with low self-esteem do not even bother establishing romantic relationships because they do not believe they are worth loving.
Those who can establish relationships soon send it crashing with their constant pessimism about their chances at anything, which can quickly tire out their partner.
People with low self-esteem get bothered about it so much that they, sometimes, turn to performance enhancers in a social context to live through the day. These drugs fill them with a sense of belonging and superiority that they often become addicted to them.
2. Inflated Self Esteem
Inflated self-esteem would be another self-esteem-related disorder found on the other end of the spectrum opposite low self-esteem. People with this disorder have an inflated sense of self. They feel they are more than their actual worth. They are full of themselves, proud, and usually mistake that for being self people with an inflated sense of self always think they are better than others, even if there is evidence to the contrary.
They never listen to others because their mantra is always “my way or the highway.” Having a ballooned self-esteem can affect your life just as a deflated one has its impact too.
One effect is that it can render you unemployed because that inflated sense of self is hard to fuse-in with any other personality on a team. You will always feel your opinions are superior and those of your team members are in no way relevant. They are even more terrible if they are the leaders of any team.
3. High Self Esteem
Still going with that spectrum analogy, high self-esteem will fall somewhere in the middle. People with high self-esteem have the correct dosage of self-worth required for their everyday life. They have a strong belief in their abilities and the ability of others. You will never see them try to bring down a teammate at the workplace; instead, they help create an environment where everyone can find joy working.
In life, we often have to reinvent ourselves. People with low self-esteem lack the courage to do it. Those with an inflated sense of self often do not see the errors in their way of living and hence do not bother to reinvent themselves. However, people with high self-esteem can change without the fear of being judged by the general public.
How Do I Build My Self-Esteem and Confidence?
Here are some steps that can help improve our self-esteem:
Identify its cause and Challenge it
The first step to solving any problem is knowing it exists. To combat your self-worth problems, you have to identify what about yourself makes you think you are worth less than the next person.
After listing out the beliefs that cause you to challenge your self-worth, the next thing to do is take the necessary steps to challenge those beliefs.
Tell yourself things to challenge the negative thoughts you have about yourself.
Identify the Positives
You are good at these things, so you should focus on them and amplify their thoughts in your head.
If you are talented in art, look at the images you’ve drawn and praise yourself for it.
Drown any negative thoughts about yourself with positive thoughts.
Protect Yourself
Give yourself a fighting chance by getting rid of anything that reminds you of your deficiencies.
Cut off relationships with anyone who continually deride you in any way.
If you do not want to do that, an excellent first step is confronting them and asking them to stop.
Bottom Line
Low self-esteem usually stems from thinking or accepting negativity about you in any form. You have to come to terms with the fact there is no one alive who does not have features about themselves that they are not proud of.
Nobody is perfect, and accepting this will ease your mind about things you consider your shortcomings. People who suffer from inflated self-esteem find it hard even to accept they have a problem in the first place.
Look out for the way people react to you. If everyone is always talking about how arrogant you are, you need to check yourself.
