Jeez, that all sounds like a lot of work. I just bought mine at Walmart. I think it was in housewares or small appliances somewhere, and you can’t beat their prices.
What sorts of goals? Can you give some examples?
I think David Burns has a book called something like “10 Days to Self Esteem.” I find his work to be very good at countering negative self-talk and encouraging positive action.
When I was young I assumed that everyone else made better decisions than I did, and so I made choices bases upon what others told me to do.
These decisions almost always turned out to be wrong, for me, they might have been good for someone else but not for me. When I finally decided to make choices based upon what I thought was best, well at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that it was my choice, not one I had been advised to make by my perceived superiors.
This is when you realize that all the people you are listening to are not qualified to make important decisions for YOU.
Make your own bad choices and tell Ms Grundy to fuck off. Your decisions may be wrong, but at least you made them.
You own your success and you own your failure.
Moved MPSIMS --> IMHO.
It’ll like itself more here.
Do something you’re proud of. Everyday, no matter how small. Opening a door, paying a compliment, lending a hand.
Also, never allow yourself to self reference in a negative way, no matter how witty and self evolved, it makes you feel. You can be accepting of your flaws without the reinforcement of announcing them, to all and sundry, and yourself, repeatedly. There is a world of difference between; 'I suck at math!", and, “I so wish I were better at math”. When you speak ill of yourself you are, in a way, creating a self defeat, somewhere in your future. Don’t Do It!
Every night, as you crawl into your bed, bring to mind one moment, of your day, where you felt pride in yourself.
This isn’t especially difficult, and it works pretty quickly. After all you’re really just trying to break the bad habit of slamming yourself. Now you’re replacing it with a good habit. And that good habit, will take you where you want to be, in pretty short order, once you get it.
Good Luck!
IMO part of one’s self esteem is formed in early childhood.
Adult caregivers can react to a child’s mistakes, either by assuring them that we all learn and grow from our mistakes, or by giving them the message that mistakes make us into failures.
Children may soak up adult reactions to the point -that it becomes a part of their own self image;
and it could be involved in some self esteem issues, for them, later during adolescence and adulthood.
I used to have low self-esteem when I was a teenager but that pretty well evaporated by the time I started university. I basically decided (and it is largely a choice) that I was fucking awesome, and that anyone who thought differently was stupid and wrong. Of course, you need something to back-up your belief that you’re awesome, so just make a list of your good traits. I think I’ve got quite a lot of them, I’m always friendly, unfailingly generous, extremely helpful, very funny (Top tip: count how many times you make other people laugh), and have a bunch of cool skills and talents (solid multi-instrumentalist, proficient magician, well read, polyglot, nifty graphic design skills, published author). I look at that list and I think “How the hell could anyone not like me? I’m awesome! If they don’t recognise that, obviously they’re the ones with the problem”. Try it yourself. I think that, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find you’ve got a whole lot more going for you than you previously thought.
Also, never miss an opportunity to remind yourself that you’re fucking awesome. As I’m doing with this post 
There’s a lot of good stuff in this thread, but I want to add one more:
Simply having a desire for better self-esteem is a fantastic start. You’re sending the message to yourself that you’re worth it. Show up every day to it and things will get better. And day by day you’ll find little tricks to help yourself out. You’re now open to seeing them.
I came out of my horrendous primary school thinking I was worthless and stupid. It wasn’t long before I slowly noticed I could do things, I wasn’t stupid. That bit came first: a small reversal of what I had always been told.
But I still wanted to hide, I still thought of myself as essentially worthless. Then one day I decided that I wasn’t going to act like that anymore. Not that I wouldn’t still feel worthless, or really still be worthless; after all, that’s who I was. But I just wanted other people to respect me. So I started acting confidently. I walked upright, smiled at people, looked them in the face, made sure I was the first to stick out my hand and say hello. The biggest thing was not being afraid to say what I thought, I was just going to say it and I wasn’t going to care even if it was stupid. I was only about 13 years old.
I didn’t realise that actually feeling that way would come to fit the way I acted.
Thank you for the responses so far. They’ve been intriguing and enlightening, if a bit… alien… to me.
In reading your responses, I don’t really understand how people bridge the gap between self-efficacy and self-esteem. On occasion – as long as I’m not in the middle of a recurring bout with depression – I’m actually a highly competent, intelligent, and kind individual, but that in no way makes me value myself more. In fact it just makes me hate myself more knowing that I could be a better person but am not because I am too X. After a lot of self-analysis, I’ve come to realize that the particulars of X don’t even matter. I’ve grown tremendously in the past decade and I’ve been adding to the piles of X, but even if I can intellectually measure and understand my successes both at external tasks and at internal adherence to my own values, that doesn’t translate into emotional self-worth to any significant degree. Essentially, I’ve come to realize that I’m lining myself up to become a great, worthless person.
That dichotomy is one I can understand but not seemingly overcome. I don’t apply the same unreasonable standard to others, but every time I examine my own life, my brain just makes up excuses as to why it doesn’t apply to me and why I will always be worthless. A shrink once called me “over-intellectualized” and I laughed it off… at the time I didn’t even think such a thing were possible, but now it’s really beginning to hit home for me. It’s like no matter what I do or who I am, my feelings about myself don’t change, perhaps because there is no emotional internalization of my successes.
To those that ask “What would I do differently if I had more self-esteem?”, I don’t really know because I can’t really imagine what that would feel like. Hmm…
You’ve been offered a lot of really good suggestions, why not try a couple of them, what have you got to lose, after all? Several of them would be very effective in helping you to ‘internalize your successes’.
If you want things to change, then you have to be willing to, y’know, change. Let go of how you’ve always viewed things, including yourself. You seem comfortable with having intellectualized why you are, where you are, quite well. The trick is not to attach to it, it will stymie your forward progress!
The only way to see with new eyes to let go of the known and open to the new.
As someone who once was in the absolute dregs and now is soaring like a falcon (literally almost), I’ll just say that you need to find your Passion, something which clicks with you and which it turns out you are good at and can’t get enough of (shh grammar police). And what Elbows just said.
This is why you’ll only develop self-esteem once you meet your own standards of esteemed behavior.
People have low self-esteem either because they really are worthless losers and they know it, or because the standards they have set for themselves are too high. What group do you think you belong to?
As for me, I’ve never had self-esteem. I went through therapy, and now I just don’t feel bad about not having it. Now I believe that if you wait until you feel good about yourself before you accomplish things, you’ll never accomplish anything.
Again, don’t let yourself use that sort of talk! When you put yourself down, correct yourself. To use examples of my own failings: ‘I’d be better, if I didn’t procrastinate so damn much.’ ‘Yeah, but I got this, this, and this done this week. That’s awesome.’
You might check out ‘Breaking the Patterns of Depression’ by Michael Yapko. I didn’t read it, but my mom did and she said it helped a lot with getting her out of the negative self-talk.
I disagree with practically everyone except the OP.
Self esteem has almost nothing to do with actions, goals, or being All You Can Be. I know evil selfish creeps with magnificent self-confidence, brimming with self-approbation, and I know talented selfless hardworking people with hearts of gold who tear themselves up inside every day.
Self esteem is a phrase with confusing connotations – I think simply loving yourself is where to start. It won’t happen without consciously overriding the voice in your head that says you are worthless. If you are an adult, you’ve probably had that voice inextricably embedded in you like an alien parasite since childhood.
Believe me, if the pain went away simply by doing good deeds or whistling a happy tune, I’d be the first to tell you that you just have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but such isn’t really the case.
You will have to re-parent yourself from within. Sometimes you’ll have to be the tough coach who believes in you and pushes you past your perceived limits, sometimes you’ll have to be the unconditionally loving comforter who sees your beautiful heart no matter what. It never stops needing to be done.
Since this is a pronouncedly atheistical board, I hesitate to say it, but it is pretty much what God is for, as far as I can tell. God is kindness, and that place within that says, you matter, and you are a force for good in this world – to me that is God talking. But you can give it any other name and it works just as well.
This is not a job for cowards. Good luck.
FWIW, self compassion is probably more important than self esteem. It gives the benefits of self esteem w/o the vulnerability or need to maintain an illusion of infallibility. Self esteem can be taken away by failure. Self compassion cannot.
Basically, learning to accept that you feel like a loser* and love yourself anyway is more important than trying to overcome your shortcomings.
*Most people feel like this though, at least some of the time. The hedonistic treadmill and all.
I am starting to realize that for me, it’s too tough to maintain a certain level of self-esteem. What’s more important is not letting myself to get the point where I hate myself. I can feel as bad as I want to, as long as I don’t dip into “hate”. This is a whole lot easier and realistic than cultivating self-love. To be honest, I don’t even know what this means.
I try to cancel out the bad with good. I like giving away my artwork after yoga class because doing the first mops up the bad feelings generated by the second. I have been giving free lessons in how to make maps and it makes me feel less guilty about spending the rest of my free time alone. Every time I think of something bad about myself, I try to balance it out with something good.
I disagree with the crowd that accumulating accomplishments will do the trick. On paper, I should have a very high opinion of myself because I’ve achieved some great things in my life. But I’m always able to convince myself that those things don’t matter as much as the things I haven’t done and will probably never do. If I think about this too long, of course I will be sad. So I try to steer my thoughts away from the topic of accomplishments or goals. I’m not a person who has ever felt competitive against other people, so why should I feel competitive against myself? I just try to focus on whatever is right in front of me at the moment. Let someone else keep score, if they care so much.
I like this; it’s true. And I like lists, so it’s doubly good.