How To Improve Your Self-Esteem And Give Your Life A Lift

If you’re looking for ways to build more self-worth, follow our helpful tips below.

1. Take a look at your strengths

Everyone is good at something – from the job you do, to making other laugh - there is something you excel at. But, many of us never take the time to acknowledge this fact to ourselves and tend to focus more on our weaknesses. By providing positive reminders of our accomplishments and abilities, sometimes we can surprise ourselves with just how much we have achieved.

It’s a good idea to write down your achievements as they occur or as you remember them. Seeing them in black and white can provide an excellent reminder that we’re far more capable and accomplished than we’d at first imagine.

2. Write in your diary

Keeping a diary can have many beneficial effects on our self-confidence, especially when we go back and read what we’ve written in the past. The fact that we’ve had the confidence to commit our thoughts and experiences to paper helps to validate their relevance and, by association, makes our opinions equally valid.

It’s also a permanent record of what we have achieved and done with our lives. These may not seem like earth-shattering achievements at the time, but going back and reading about them at a later date gives a greater perspective on just how significant they may have been.

3. Surround yourself with positivity

Ironically, one of the most effective ways of gaining self-confidence in yourself is to be surrounded with overwhelmingly positive people. Once you start doing this, you’ll find that their enthusiasm is catching, which can spark all kinds of ideas and plans in you, too.

So if you’ve a passion or interest, look for others who share it – even if it’s to become outgoing and adventurous. This is especially relevant if your current circle of friends includes pessimists and negative thinkers whose attitudes can, unfortunately, be just as infectious as positivity.

4. Try to be more sociable

If you are trying to widen your social circle, then one of the biggest inhibiting factors is feeling uncomfortable in social situations. It’s perfectly understandable that when our self-confidence is low, we just can’t imagine what we could say that would be interesting to anyone else.

But like many things that arise when you’re wondering how to build confidence in yourself, it’s a question of taking the plunge. So don’t stay in to watch Netflix when you’ve been invited to a party. Get down there and prepare to sharpen your small-talk skills. It’s also important to remember that not everyone’s an extrovert, so there are bound to be lots of people feeling the same as you do. Go up and talk to them – it may help them as much as it helps you.

5. Give yourself a style makeover

You may be the sort of person who thinks that clothes don’t matter and what’s important is the person who’s wearing them. If you are, then you’d be surprised by just how much what you’re wearing can affect the way you feel and behave.

So why not start taking a little more interest in style and fashion magazines to define your own style? See how you could start to project the sort of image that could represent the new super-confident you. It could just be something as simple as choosing to wear brighter colours or getting a new hairstyle – small changes can have a big effect!

6. Challenge yourself

Building up your self-confidence can also be a question of moving out of your comfort zone and trying something new and challenging. This can be any kind of goal, from learning a new language or skill to running your first marathon. This will give you a new focus in your life as well as possibly pushing you beyond what you thought were your limitations.

Once you’ve risen to the challenge, you will be able to look back on it as being even more evidence that you’re an accomplished, self-confident person who is capable of anything.

7. Move to a new job

We spend around a third of our lives at work, so it’s impossible to estimate just how important it is to building our self-worth. It’s fine when we receive regular praise and know that we are doing our jobs well, but often it can feel like a distinctly undermining experience - for example if the work is unchallenging and repetitive.

The secret to building self-confidence at work is to either request a transfer to a role that you would find more satisfying or to move jobs altogether. Not only will the new role create a more stimulating atmosphere for you, the very fact that you’ve been chosen for it is certain to be a real confidence booster too.

8. Shape up and eat healthy

It’s a fact of life that if we feel good about how we look, our confidence radiates out. That doesn’t mean we need to have super model or film star looks, we just need to feel that we’re making the very best of ourselves.

One of the most effective self-esteem exercises we can do, is actual exercise. If this is also linked to a physical challenge that we’ve set ourselves, that boost of confidence will help us to grow.

It’s also important to consider diet too. If we feel that we’re eating healthily and making all the right choices, it can give both a physical and a psychological boost.

9. Take the philosophical approach

While all of the suggestions given so far have focused on action and decisiveness, if you really want to know how to improve self-esteem then you will also need to be a little more thoughtful and philosophical.

Things won’t always go your way and there’s nothing you can do about that. The one thing you can control is how you react to these setbacks . Try to see them less as failures and more as learning experiences. Then, next time a similar situation occurs, you should have the confidence to cope with it more effectively. And that, in turn, will do wonders for your overall sense of self-worth.