It’s easy to confuse the terms self-esteem, self-respect, self-love and self-worth, and so we often interchange them. But these terms have very different meanings.
Self-esteem is an umbrella term that encompasses both self-respect and self-love.
Self respect is about how you feel about yourself and it’s the foundation on which to create a happy life. Self-respect doesn’t come from worldly success or anything you achieve but instead relies on you feeling good about yourself on a daily basis.
Self-love is about taking the time to care for yourself by fulfilling your core needs. It happens when you fill your life in such a way that honours your essential nature.
Self-worth is associated with a role you play in life. It occurs when you measure your value against something else, a person, society’s expectations, success. The problem with using this as your primary measure, is that when the particular role ends life can also lose its meaning.
The BUILD YOUR SELF ESTEEM WORKBOOK is available to support you to work through the ideas raised in this article. You can download it below.
While the article stands alone as an interesting prompt for you to discover more about yourself, writing down your responses and insights to the questions posed helps you respond with greater clarity and deeper insight.
The WORKBOOK is an excellent tool to access information that may not be available to your conscious mind, giving you access to deeper feelings and past programming. Use the workbook to draw on greater creativity as you fashion new possibilities for your future.
Download the “BUILD YOUR SELF ESTEEM WORKBOOK“
Life Choices to Support and Build Self Esteem
It’s essential to remember that you can’t give anyone else self-esteem, even your children. Self-esteem must come from within.
Self-Respect
Think of self-respect as being a scale. Consider where you stand on the self-respect scale.
✧ How do you feel about yourself? Is it normal for you to feel this way? Or do you only feel like this occasionally?
Identifying your self respect level is the first step to improving it.
Self-Love
Your ability to show yourself real self love is bound up in how much self respect you have. If it’s low you probably have difficulty practicing self-love that nourishes and sustains you while building your self esteem.
Consider these questions to guage your level of self-respect. Journal your thoughts if it helps you get clarity.
✧ Do you think happy thoughts?
✧ Do you speak kindly to yourself?
✧ How often do you talk about your problems? Or dwell on them?
✧ How much time do you spend running around looking for solutions?
✧ Is your default position crisis management?
✧ How reactive are you?
✧ Do you participate in activities you enjoy?
✧ Do you like the people you spend time with?
Self Love: How Do You Support Yourself?
Think of some activities that give you comfort.
When we’re trying to practice self-love we often include activities that are not really very good for us but which make us feel good in the short term. Things like eating cake or chocolate or crisps, a shopping spree, drinking alcohol, a manicure or bingeing on netflix all feel good in the moment. And we can convince ourselves we’re practicing self-love by indulging ourselves with these types of activities.
But while these are all something we enjoy at the time, they don’t support us to build a life we love filled with joy. Nor do they build and reinforce our self-esteem.
Self Respect: Feel Good About Yourself
✧ What needs to happen or change for you to feel good about yourself?
The key is self-respect.
Until you respect yourself you won’t find joy because your internal critic, ‘the judge’, will continue to always find something wrong with you, as well as with what you do.
When you indulge in the transient pastimes listed above in an attempt to practice self-love, ‘the judge’ will always butt in to remind you that you need to lose weight, save or make money, find love, be successful, or any other fault it can find.
Whenever you hear the voice of your internal critic it’s a sure sign that your self-esteem needs some work, right then and there. And to do that you need to make choices in your daily life that make you feel good about yourself.
How To Practice Self Love
Knowing exactly how to best love yourself is simple.
The clue lies in working out the ways you show your love to others.
By remembering that the world we experience around us mirrors our internal world we can find the answers. We only need to look at what we do for others and how we show them our affection to discover how we need to love ourselves.
The ways you show love and affection to others are also the ways you need to love yourself.
For some this may be through support, whether that’s physically or emotionally, or both. Others may need displays of affection to feel loved. Some may need gifts. Others may need time for themselves. There are so many ways in which we demonstrate love and how you need to do this is unique to you.
Honouring yourself comes from within. What truly honours your unique essence may not be what the world deems as normal or the ideal.
Striving to be your best is one thing but striving to be perfect disconnects you from your heart. To nurture and grow self esteem you need to be true to your heart and live in a way that honours your essential nature.
You will know when you are honouring your essential nature because you’ll be living in a way that makes you feel good about yourself.
✧ What are some ways you treat yourself with Self-Love?
Before you make a choice ask yourself “Does this choice make me feel good about me?
Does this choice respect me?”
Intuition And Self Esteem
To honour your essential nature, you need to become very aware of your needs. Only then you can make filling those needs a priority which supports your growth.
Engaging with your intuition and learning how to understand what it is saying to you is the most powerful way of knowing your own needs at a very deep level. Your intuition can help you become aware of what motivates you, so you can be proactive about making choices that support you.
Learn more about intuition in the Trust Intuition Category.
How Much Are You Influenced By Others?
Advice is fine when we seek it from those we value. But most of the influence we receive every day is unsolicited and comes from the Tribe.
The Tribe consists of family, friends, social media, peer group, church, colleagues, bosses, teachers, spiritual mentors and anyone else who has an undue influence on the choices you make. They influence your decisions, your behaviours and have a negative impact on your self-esteem. They’re the ones we feel a need to impress or those we feel we must conform with.
It’s difficult not to be influenced by others. Most of us accept unsolicited influence without question. We are usually not even aware of the extent to which we’re being influenced. As a result, we can easily pass on half-truths, limiting beliefs and myths without even realising it.
Tribal influence holds us on a treadmill of fear where everything we do is influenced by what others might think of us. This influence affects our beliefs, our values and the rules we live by. And it can affect our opportunities for joy and happiness.
Some people try so hard to NOT be influenced by the Tribe that they rebel and refuse to conform. However, this is just a different way that they are actually still being influenced by the Tribe.
Breaking free of the Tribe is fundamental to building self-esteem.
When we break away from the Tribe we become free to make our own decisions based on who we are and what we want from life. To do this it helps if we become aware of the extent to which we are influenced by others.
Think about whether any of these statements can be applied to your interactions with anyone, or anything, you know. If they are true for you they indicate where you are being ruled by the Tribe.
✧ I struggle to make decisions without talking over an idea (or consulting with) others first
✧ I worry about what others will think of me
✧ I make important choices (eg: career) based on what others say I should do
✧ I pretend I am better off than I am
✧ I pretend I am more in control of my life than I am
✧ I refuse to conform
✧ I brag
✧ I dress to impress
✧ I need praise, or to be acknowledged
The People You Mix With
The people you associate with regularly have a huge impact on how you feel about yourself.
Notice how you feel after spending time with someone. If you feel down in any way afterwards it is better to reduce the time you spend together.
✧ Make a list of people you need to limit the time you spend with because they don’t leave you feeling good about yourself
Strategies to Build Self Esteem
There’s a difference between being selfish and aware. It’s not selfish to honour your needs, to love yourself, take care of yourself and make your happiness a priority.
You support yourself whenever you do something that makes you feel great about yourself. Choices that make you feel better about you lead to something better in your life.
✧ What needs to happen for you to feel good about yourself?
Honour Your Essential Nature
Create a list of all the things you can do to honour your essential nature and make you feel good about yourself. (They can be small or huge)
Keep adding to this list as you become aware of more ways to honour yourself.
✧ Every day, at least for the next thirty days, choose three things to do for yourself from your list, and do them.
✧ After thirty days continue with this ritual.
When challenging and negative thoughts are undermining your desire to build your self-esteem positive affirmations can be a great way to set the process in motion. Positive affirmations are positive statements that help you to challenge and overcome these self-sabotaging thoughts.
As your self esteem builds the effect the affirmations have on you will also grow.
✧ Create some positive affirmations for yourself that you can use to build and reinforce your self-esteem. Make sure they are credible and achievable for you. Write them in the present tense. Re-frame negative thoughts into positive ones. Say them with feeling.
And remember,
The best ways for you to honour YOUR unique essential nature and build Self Esteem are:
♥ Turn off your inner critic
♥ Listen to your intuition
♥ Take your power back