3 Simple Exercises To Strengthen The Parts Of Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is the great pending subject for everyone. Even those who believe they have good self-esteem. Personal growth, evolving, maturing, always involves touching a part of self-esteem in a transversal way.
Furthermore, every book or internet search always talks about loving yourself, accepting yourself, liking yourself, but we don’t know how to do that.
There are many ways to work on self-esteem and it is something very personal for each person, but in this article we will explain some of the exercises that can help you promote self-esteem by intervening in its parts.
First of all, we are going to differentiate three parts or levels of self-esteem.
1. Self-concept
It is the concept we have of ourselves, that is, it is the set of positive and negative qualities with which we describe ourselves. We usually have this idea of ourselves worked on in many cases, and we are capable of saying good things to ourselves. But it happens in a very common way, that we have not stopped to describe ourselves, so many times we know that we have good things, but we remain “blank” when it comes to verbalizing it.
It is also very common that after a certain age, we stop receiving reinforcement of good things, and it happens that society teaches us a sense of humility that we unconsciously take to the extreme, and it turns out that it generates guilt, discomfort and discomfort tell us the good things. We always tend to minimize this exercise, because society teaches us “that we must be humble.” There is a very fine line between this and undervaluing our capabilities.
It is the next level a little deeper, based on the confidence we have in ourselves. It manifests itself greatly in the feeling of “not being capable” of some activity , situation to face. It comes up a lot through the language of “I can’t.”
It may happen that the person feels that they are capable of many things, but we all have moments in our lives or specific situations where we feel insecurity and a lack of confidence that we can overcome or achieve what is expected of us or what we set for ourselves. . That’s why it’s important to work on it.
3. Self-esteem
This is the deepest part of the entire concept of self-esteem; refers to the deep, internal feeling/emotion of self-worth and self-love.
It is feeling that despite the mistakes, the limitations, the defects, I am valid, I am lovable, I am enough. It is being able to feel “I am worthy of love, and valuable enough only for who I am and not so much for what I have, or what I can do.” This feeling always needs to be worked on consciously.
Exercises to work on self-esteem from its parts
Once the three parts of self-esteem have been explained, we can carry out concrete and conscious exercises to reinforce each of the parts of self-esteem.
This work is always background work, doing small tasks in seasons, day by day or week by week, by periods, rather than doing many exercises at the same time, in a short time. Because all learning takes time for the mind to assimilate what has been learned.
1. To promote self-concept
Simply make a list with positive and negative qualities realize how difficult it is for you to find more positive qualities, from then on you will be making an effort to discover more about yourself, to find examples that describe your positive qualities.
Also when making the two lists, you may discover that you have more negative qualities than positive ones, so what you will have to try is to find examples every day where you see that you perform many positive qualities that you do not give importance to, such as smiling and being polite. , listen to your friend, ask how your partner’s day was, go shopping.
There are things that you take for granted as “normal” and, on the other hand, they have value. You don’t have to value them as extraordinary, simply recognize that they are there. Likewise, with negative qualities, it consists of telling oneself about one’s defects with less dramatic or negative language than the one in which I tell myself.
2. To build self-confidence
First of all, it is important to locate those “I can’t or I am not capable” messages.
Once located, a simple but quite effective task is change that phrase to “it is difficult for me, it is very difficult for me”. With this idea, you can get out of the absolute block and start visualizing the task in smaller steps.
Setting goals with simpler and more progressive divided steps can help you deal with situations. Of course, it is important to greatly reinforce the feeling of satisfaction every time you take those small steps and move forward.
3. To foster self-love
Many exercises are related to each other and when you work on some parts of self-esteem, the internal feeling of self-love improves; But if you have worked on the two previous parts over time, you will notice that this deeper part is more difficult to foster because you do not have poor self-esteem on a daily basis, but rather it appears more evidently in specific situations, especially everything that has to do with the most important ties (family, partner or friends).
That is why when doing self-love exercises, It is important to have a good connection with your emotions become aware of what deep emotions you are feeling, and from there, regulate those negative emotions and encourage other, more positive emotions.
An example of this would be that you connect with the present moment when you do some leisure activity, when you are with other people, and stop to consciously tell yourself “how good I am, what a good time I am enjoying, how I like this.” It seems like it doesn’t help, but somehow what you achieve by doing this several times is fostering the deepest feeling of internal satisfaction, of connection with the people around you and with yourself.
Somehow, by changing the internal dialogue, you generate positive feelings, you give value to your person, your situation, your environment.
In summary, self-esteem is a very broad concept that has many edges, which makes it difficult to work on it in a concrete way; That is why it is important to know how to divide it into parts, and above all to know that it is in-depth, medium-long-term work. But with very small gestures, you can start to feel better little by little.
