How to Raise Self Esteem: Part One

Have you ever felt bad about yourself? Most people have at some point in their life, including the most exceptional of characters. It’s part of the human experience. A person that regularly experiences negative feelings such as, self-hate, guilt, shame and embarrassment is commonly referred to as having low self esteem. One of the main problems with breaking out of these emotional habit patterns is that a person with low self esteem tends to ‘beat themselves up’ with overly critical self-talk such as, “I shouldn’t be feeling like this” or “Why am I feeling like this”, and unfortunately this creates a looping effect which re-enforces the crappy feelings! So just how do you snap out of that kind of low energy level wretchedness and raise self esteem? Well, one of the master keys to using your brain is to keep in mind the fact that it goes in directions. Your thought patterns are ‘directionalised.’ Allow me to explain. If you kept having thoughts along the lines of, “I am a useless person”, then that would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because you’d set that up as the direction for your brain to go in you would keep finding ‘evidence’ that proved it was ‘true!’ There’s a great quote from philosopher, Robert Anton Wilson; “What ever the thinker thinks, the prover proves.” Basically you need to adopt a new thinking pattern that heads in an empowering direction. A really quick way to do this is to use a technique known as disassociation. Think of situation where you would like to raise your self esteem feelings and notice what you can see in this experience. Now imagine stepping outside of yourself and pushing that picture off into the distance over there onto a movie screen. So you can see yourself, in that situation, on the movie screen. That’s great! Notice how your feelings have already changed. It’s as if you’re having feelings about the feelings and this frees up your inner resources so you can gain new self - esteeming perspectives and insights. Looking at that movie with you in it ask yourself, “If I were to learn something useful about this situation what would it be?” And you can also ask the very powerful question, “If I act as if or pretend there is a positive intention behind my behaviour/feelings what would that be?” Don’t struggle with it. Just guess if it helps you get an answer. The main point is does it get your mind going in a more positive direction: Does it feel better? Why not run through some other scenarios with the procedure above and become aware of just how much more you really can raise self esteem with a little bit of effort. In part two of this Article I will introduce you to a very powerful technique from the field of NLP that is one of the fastest and most effective methods of creating change.