Practice self esteem

I noticed that I had become quite negative about people at work. I hate being the type of person who expects the worst from others and feels justified and almost glad when someone does something wrong.

This is not who I am, nor who I want to be!

I am in the process of spending 2 weeks consciously stopping myself from being negative and actively speaking up when others are being negative about each other. There is always something positive to say about everyone… sometimes you have to look really hard… but it IS there!!

I think this is a good way to ‘practice’ self esteem. I know I certainly feel much better about myself when I’m being positive about someone rather than bad mouthing them or being all smug when they make a mistake!!

But I HAVE been practicing! Having a job interview helps you to focus on your positive attributes, and I was surprised to find that is wasn’t difficult for me to do this.

This whole career change feels like a way to practice self esteem – making that choice was purely me looking out for myself and deciding what was best for me. I’m not thinking about anyone or anything else – this is for me... and it feels good!

Eliminating the phrase “have to” from my vocabulary is a fantastic way of practising self esteem! It’s empowering. It reminds me that I am making choices in my life, and that helps me to feel more confident.

“I have to go christmas shopping…” = thoughts of stress, chore, busy-ness…

“I want to go christmas shopping…” = thoughts of fun, choice, lucky that I have the $ to buy my family gifts

It’s a small shift, but it’s definitely more positive energy! Even replacing “I have to” with “I am” is powerful. It puts things in the “I’m already doing it” tense which makes it easier to acheive.

EG; I’m going to schedule a blood test

is WAY more empowering than

I have to schedule a blood test…

Am I making sense? I sure hope so, because I think is actually really important!

This idea evolved in a discussion about one of HoneyPumpkin’s entries about self esteem.

This is something I have worked on for most of my life – “building” self esteem… but while chatting with HoneyP I realised that maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. If we aim to just ‘build’ self esteem, it’s like building a beautiful palace to point to and say “see, I built that” with no intention of ever moving in.

Self esteem is something we should collect or gather and then practice. It’s a skill, yet we tend to think of it as something we learn once and then we’re all set. But as we all know – our self esteem changes every day… even several times throughout the day sometimes! So we have to have strategies and practice it daily.

I’m repeating some of what I posted on HoneyP’s thread, but I really want to put it here too. What I find extremely helpful is to think of someone I know who I think has great self esteem, then I write down all the things that that person does to convey that confidence. Once I have a list, I tick off the things that I already do and use the rest as a list of goals to work on.

I don’t know about other people, but when I feel like I’m actively making changes (or at least trying to) my self esteem automatically rises because I feel effective and empowered.

I plan to use this goal to remind myself regularly that I have self esteem (even though the levels may vary sometimes!) but it’s how I use it that actually counts.