But how do you improve your self-esteem in a practical way?
1. Say stop to your inner critic
A good place to start with raising your self-esteem is by learning how to handle and to replace the voice of your own inner critic.
We all have an inner critic.
It can spur you on to get things done or to do things to gain acceptance from the people in your life. But at the same time it will drag your self-esteem down.
This inner voice whispers or shouts destructive thoughts in your mind.
Thoughts like for example:
- You are lazy and sloppy, now get to work.
- You aren’t good at your job at all and someone will figure out and throw you out
- You are worse or uglier than your friend/co-worker/partner.
You don’t have to accept this though. There are ways to minimize that critical voice and to replace it with more helpful thoughts. You can change how you view yourself.
One way to do so is simply to say stop whenever the critic pipes up in your mind.
You can do this by creating a stop-word or stop-phrase.
As the critic says something – in your mind – shout: STOP!
Or use my favorite: No, no, no, we are not going there!
Or come up with a phrase or word that you like that stops the train of the thought driven by the inner critic.
Then refocus your thoughts to something more constructive. Like planning what you want to eat for dinner or your tactic for the next soccer game.
In the long run it also helps a lot to find better ways to motivate yourself than listening to your inner critic. So let’s move on to that…