Jane Wharam on......

Boosting Your Self-Esteem

Talking to a friend last night made me realise how lucky I was to have parents who helped me to believe I could achieve anything I wanted in  life.  There have been dark times when I have forgotten that it's true but on the whole, I do remember it and don't let setbacks bring me down.

My friend, however, isn't so fortunate and constantly belittles herself and her achievements, which is sad. So I thought I would remind myself and anyone who wants to read this, how I tackle the subject in my book, Emotional Intelligence: Journey to the Centre of Your Self (O Books)  http://tinyurl.com/79facbc

'Most people’s feelings and thoughts about themselves fluctuate somewhat based on their daily experiences. The mark you get in an exam, how your friends treat you, the ups and downs in a romantic relationship can all have a temporary impact on your wellbeing.Your self-esteem, however, is something more fundamental than the normal ups and downs associated with situational changes. For people with good basic self-esteem, normal ups and downs may lead to temporary fluctuations in how they feel about themselves, but only to a limited extent and they can generally take whatever curved balls life throw at them. In contrast, for people with poor basic self-esteem, these ups and downs may make all the difference in the world and can even be the trigger that sends a person over the edge.

Our self-esteem develops and evolves throughout our lives, as we build an image of ourselves through our experiences with different people and activities. Experiences during our childhood play a particularly large role in the shaping of our basic self-esteem.  When we were growing up, our successes (and failures) and how the members of our immediate family or teachers and peers treated us, all contributed to the creation of our basic self-esteem.

Our past experiences, even the things we don ‘t usually think about, are all alive and active in our daily life in the form of a Critical Voice, which we spoke about earlier. Although most people do not hear this voice in the same way they would a spoken one, in many ways it acts in a similar way, constantly repeating those original messages to us.

For people with healthy self-esteem the messages of the critical voice are generally positive and reassuring. For people with low self-esteem, the critical voice becomes a harsh inner critic, constantly criticising, punishing, and belittling their accomplishments. Very often, the phrases used can be traced back to a specific person or people –  ‘you’ll never amount to anything’ from a parent or teacher, for example.

One of the aims of the book is to help you boost your self-esteem but, if you are like most people, the chances are you have some issues with your own confidence in yourself. Low self-esteem can have devastating consequences.

• It can create anxiety, stress, loneliness and increased likelihood for depression.
• It can cause problems with friendships and relationships.
• It can seriously impair academic and job performance.
• It can lead to underachievement and increased vulnerability to drug and alcohol abuse.

Worst of all, these negative consequences themselves reinforce the negative self-image and can take a person into a downward spiral of lower and lower self-esteem and increasingly non-productive or even actively self-destructive behaviour.

So, how do we boost our self-esteem? The easiest way is to challenge the Critical Voice.  Let’s say that you’re in a situation with someone and you think:

“He looks angry. He hasn’t said anything, but I know it means he doesn’t like me!”

Think about this thought and then pretend you have a friend with you, who could maybe offer this suggestion: “OK, he looks angry, but you don’t know why. It could have nothing to do with you. Maybe you should ask him.”

Another way to boost your self-esteem is to look after yourself – as L’Oréal says, ‘because you’re worth it!’ – and do some things that make you feel good and don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. Maybe go for a walk, sit and look at the sunset, watch a favourite film, have a nap or pick on something good about yourself – your good manners, hair, teeth, eyes, and really praise yourself for that one aspect. Even if you don’t believe you’re worth the praise, it will become natural to you in time – remember the 21 repeats to form a habit. Write down the good things about yourself in your EI journal at least once a week. As you re-read, you will be amazed at how much longer the list gets as time goes on. 

Quick exercise – Good Things You Have Done

Get your Emotional Journal out (just a blank notebook in which you jot down how you feel or things you'd like to say to people but feel you can't) and make a list of what you ‘ve accomplished recently. This could be today, in the last week, month or even few months. If you ‘ve had an on-going hard time, it can be very easy to lose sight of your achievements. They may have been tiny, but remember the baby steps. To have achieved anything when beset with problems is remarkable. Maybe all you did today was put on your make-up or said  'No'. Great. It’s a step forward. Praise yourself for what you ‘ve achieved, out loud if practical. And/or send a close friend an email saying how proud you are of yourself and invite them to reciprocate. We’re all too often reticent about ‘blowing our own trumpet’ but it can do us the world of good to remind ourselves of how far we ‘ve come and what we’ve achieved.

Getting help from others is often the most important step a person can take to improve his or her self-esteem, but it can also be the most difficult. As we ‘ve just said, people with low self-esteem often don’t ask for help because they feel they don ‘t deserve it. But since low self-esteem is often caused by how other people treated you in the past, you may need the help of other people in the present to challenge the critical messages that come from negative past experiences. Here are some ways to get help from others:

• Ask friends to tell you what they like about you or think you do well.
• Ask someone who cares about you to just listen to you rant for a little while without interrupting, even with positive messages. Get it off your chest!
• Ask for a hug.
• Ask someone who loves you in any way to remind you that they do and why.

Sometimes low self-esteem can feel so painful or difficult to overcome that professional help is needed. Go to a recommended therapist or, if money is an issue, borrow some self-help books from the library and you’ll quickly realise that you are not on your own.'

 

The Final Taboo

Driving past a cemetary over Easter I saw a youngish man - maybe late thirtes - accompanied by two lttle boys, tending to a grave.  It was such a stark image that it played on my mind all the way home. My initial instinct was that they were at the grave of the boys' mother, but then I hoped that they were paying their respects to one of their paternal grandparents.  Of course, losing a parent at any age is sad, but to a child, the death of a parent must be incredibly difficult.

I have several friends in their fifties and sixties with aged parents and one who has just lost both of them.  The recently bereaved one now feels orphaned, despite being well into middle age herself. Another finds his parents' independence in the face of increasing frailty - which he sees as obduracy - very frustrating and can never relax, always fearing the call that prefaces an accident or worse.  Others had a fractured relationship with one or both parents, leading to feelings of guilt after their death over unresolved issues with them, such as anger or resentment.

But as adults, we are better equipped to cope with our parents' deaths - or are we?  When do we stop being children?  Is it when we have children of our own?  And what if we don't have any?  Can any relationship take the place of the one we have with our mother or father? Having had a difficult relationship with my mother and being one myself, the older I get, the more I appreciate  how difficult life must have been for her and I wish I had been able to see her more clearly while she was alive.  I don't have the sort of memories of her I hope my son will have of me but I now realise how much I learned from her. Maybe it took her death to show me that.

And the problem is that people still don't want to talk about death, seeing it as the final taboo, and yet it is something that must happen to us all and we will all probably experience the death of someone we're close to in our lifetime. Perhaps the best preparation we can make for a good death is to live well, and hopefully long, and, above all, communicate with those we love, before it hapens to us or those close to us.