What To Do When You Feel Like CRAP About Yourself & Have Low Self-Esteem
When you have low self-esteem, it can feel like you are in an abyss that will never end.
While you’re in it, low self-esteem can feel like you’re in an abyss that will never end. Nothing you do or say will ever be good enough and you find yourself feeling unworthy or undeserving and it affects every area of your life.
You need to know it’s possible to get over the feeling of low self-esteem. It’s a process of re-programming yourself and taking inventory of what is true and what isn’t in your life.
When you’re battling low self-esteem you believe you will never get over it and everything negative you say about yourself is true, but it isn’t. A lot of what you tell yourself are just programs you’ve been running for a long time that require you to decompile them and install new upgrades.
Think of your mind like a computer. If you were running an old operating system like DOS today, you wouldn’t be reading this article. You need to upgrade your operating system to Windows to get online and search the internet.
Your mind is like a super computer. You sometimes need to identify the operating system and then the programs that have been installed. Some may work and others need to be updated, decompiled, or deleted.
First, let’s define what self-esteem really is because many people confuse it with how they look to others or what they have accomplished in their lives.
Self-esteem, simply put, boils down to appreciating who you are: perfectly imperfect. Self-Esteem is defined as confidence in one’s own worth or abilities; self-respect.
Low self-esteem is more common than most people realize and very misunderstood. It becomes the culprit and root cause that makes you vulnerable to stress, anxiety, and even depression. Low self-esteem, when not addressed, can lead to many emotional, personal, and relationship challenges.
The process to get over the feeling of low self-esteem is easier than you might have imagined. It requires you do some decompiling of your old programs and start questioning what you are telling yourself. You may be relying on the old tapes when you could be upgrading to DVDs. It requires you to stop beating yourself up and put in some nicer programs that will support you now.
Are you ready to let go of what no longer serves you? To take back the control and live the life you deserve and desire?
Then commit to these simple tasks to learn how to get over the feeling of low self-esteem:
1. Acknowledge how low self-esteem shows up for you.
Your low self-esteem comes from beliefs and the “lies” you tell yourself. You’re good or bad, a success or failure, pretty or ugly.
Low self-esteem can come from a fear of not being liked and wanting others to accept you. Fear of not being good enough, worthy enough, pretty enough, smart enough, skinny enough. Fear of not being loved.
Write a list of the fears or lies that are holding you back and causing your low self-esteem.
2. Take inventory of which life lessons created the low self-esteem.
More than half of your beliefs were formed by the time you were five years old by well-meaning parents, teachers, and guardians.
For example, you believed in the tooth fairy, perhaps for years. Ask yourself, what other lies were you told? Think about some of the life lessons that have defined you. What was the life lesson you learned from it? Were they true or limiting beliefs that no longer serve you?
Gather information and support, confront the perception, and dissipate the fear. You get to choose which to hold onto or release.
Is it possible when you were 9 years old, someone said you weren’t smart? Could that have been true at the young age of 9 that there was more you needed to learn? Does that mean you are not smart today? No, of course not, but if you keep telling yourself that you’re not smart, you eventually will start to believe it.
Instead, make of list of 10 things that prove it to be FALSE. If you are finding a challenge identifying them, ask your family, friends, or co-workers to give you examples of times they found you to be smart in some area. Do this for your personal limiting belief that causes your feeling of low self-esteem.
3. See what cost you believing the lies about yourself.
You may not have ever thought what low self-esteem has cost you. It doesn’t have to be in a monetary sense, but it can be too. Perhaps you missed out on events, gatherings, and opportunities personally and professionally due to your low self-esteem. Allow yourself to “get sick and tired” of “being sick and tired” of it all.
4. Break through toxic emotions and meanings.
Words generate meanings which create the emotions of our lives, which drive all our actions, therefore producing the results we experience! Look at the language are you associating to your circumstances.
There are over 500k words in the English language. Yet, linguists say we only use 2,000 in our vocabulary. Over 4,000 words are available to describe our emotions, yet most people generalize and live in less than a dozen of which 80 percent are negative and we link all the same pain or pleasure to each one.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” persuades the victim of name-calling to ignore the taunt, to refrain from physical retaliation, and to remain calm and good-natured. Names and words can hurt you if you let them.
Stay away from toxic words and emotions and create new empowering ones! Redefine the negative words and emotions you tell yourself over and over again that create your low self-esteem and replace them with new empowering meanings. Instead of generalizing the meaning and emotion make it specific and rewarding.
For example, instead of “I am not smart”, perhaps you came up with “I am smart at work”, “I am smart with how I raise my children”, “I am smart with my organization skills”, or “I am smart with how I manage money.”
5. Learn to take imperfect action.
Give yourself permission to get over the feeling of low self-esteem and eliminate the things that keep you stuck like pain, shame, guilt, and blame. Stop making excuses for your life and start taking responsibility for it from here on in.
Take imperfect action and find what is great in every moment instead of what is wrong.
6. Make peace and practice gratitude.
The gift of a high self-esteem starts with making peace with your pain. Start with gratitude. Be grateful! Count your blessings! Your very life is the results of your thinking processes.
According to Claude M. Bristol: “The secrets of success lies not without, but within, the thoughts of man… what you believe yourself to be, you are.” Your thoughts control every action be careful with them.
When you make these suggestions a daily practice in your life, you will see low self-esteem is a feeling that you can get over quickly and easily.
Your self-esteem will improve and you will start to feel better about yourself. You will find more appreciation and love show up around you. Your self-worth will improve and you will find yourself taking more pride in your successes.
The world around you may seem to have changed, but you will know it was an inside job.
Decide today to eliminate low self-esteem and make it a feeling you can get over. Start now by taking imperfect action, appreciate all the gifts in your life and live in gratitude. See how the challenges you once thought were so big no longer have weight in your life. Watch the way you see and feel about yourself improve day by day.
If you need to get a handle on your fear of being not good enough, please reach out. We can help you can get on with your life.
