You can not hope to fulfill your potential without a healthy self-esteem. Adjunct to, a society populated by people who do not respect themselves, value their person or trust their mind, cannot thrive. Cultivating the habit of how to develop a healthy self-esteem enables us to feel better and live better.
A healthy self-esteem stands on confidence in our ability to think, cope with the basic challenges of life. It is also livened by confidence in our right to be successful and happy. A healthy self-esteem holds with a feeling of being worthy and deserving, a belief that we are entitled to assert our needs and wants, fulfil our values and potentials, and reap the benefits of our efforts.In sum, it is the experience of our fundamental competence and value.
For good, a healthy self-esteem promotes rationality, realism, intuitiveness, creativity, independence, flexibility, ability to manage change, willingness to admit and correct mistakes, benevolence, cooperativeness and competence.
We cannot work on self-esteem directly since it is a result or by-product of internally generated practices.
The following conscious, intentional practices promote the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
1. Show Responsibility Toward Your Reality By Not Evading Discomfiting Facts.
Our self-esteem thrives when we act on what we see and know, without procrastination. This includes making amends for a perceived wrongdoing, thinking about ways of engaging fully with your job, spending more time with your family to correct an imbalance, changing to a healthy diet to improve your health. The actions enable us to build reputation with ourselves. Acquiring a good reputation with ourselves nurtures our self-esteem.
2. Cultivate An Active Mind, Not A Passive One.
Choose to be guided by the clearest understanding of which you are capable of. Cultivating our minds helps us to keep faith with the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
3. Be In “The Moment,” Without Losing The Wider Context
Creating a balance between being in the “moment” with what we are doing, and relating to the wider context of our reality, promotes a resourceful, empowered state.
4. Take Pleasure In The Use Of Your Mind
When the use of the mind becomes a source of pleasure and learning, we stimulate ourselves to develop successfully.
5. Modify Your Course Or Correct Your Assumptions Appropriately
To do this, you need to stay alert and curious to any information relevant to your needs, wants, values, goals and actions. Actively seek out new, helpful data.
6. Ground Yourself In Reality
You do this by distinguishing among what you perceive, what you interpret it to mean, and how you feel about it. Treating your feelings as the voice of reality often leads to disaster. You come forth for the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem, as you interpret your reality correctly.
7. Become Aware Of Your Avoidance Impulses
Our tendency to avoid what evokes fear and pain works against our self-interest, sometimes. Being aware of our avoidance impulses stimulates us to engage in self-examination, self-awareness, and examination of relevant external data, that promotes our self-interest. See fear and pain as signals to look more attentively, not to look away. Our conscious intention and execution of the foregoing exercises, help to foster the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem. Flawless execution is not necessary.
8. Bring Adequate Consciousness To Your Goals And Projects
Assess your goals and projects, and find out where you are at the present. Then, devise an action plan to move yourself forward. If your goal is to have a satisfying, successful marriage, what is the current state of your marriage, what action plan do you have in place, to fulfil your aspirations.
9. Align Your Actions To Your Purposes
Make your goals and purposes congruent to how you invest your time and energy. That which you profess to care about should get a major part of your attention. To constantly look for evidence of alignment or misalignment with your goals, helps you to rethink your actions and goals. By aligning your actions to your purposes, you help the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem to come into existence.
10. Search For Feedback From Your Environment To Help You Adjust Or Correct Your Course Accordingly
Heeding constructive feedback stimulates us to keep ourselves on the right path, in view of our goals. In the conduct of our lives, it proves wise to persist only in actions that produce the desired results.
11. Choose To Persevere In The Face Of Difficulties As You Pursue Mastery And Understanding
When you encounter difficulties in your official or personal capacities, choose to persevere, take a rest, or try a new approach, instead of giving up. Going forward, developing a growth mindset supports the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
12. Cultivate A Receptivity To New Knowledge And Willingness To Re-examine Old Beliefs
You come to growth by not being absorbed by what you believe you already know, but by being interested in new information. A healthy openness to new experience and knowledge enables us to take in new clarifications, amendments, and improvements, in our understanding. A notion to act on, a healthy openness holds with the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
13. Accept And Correct Your Mistakes
Do not allow your attachment to your ideas to keep you from recognising evidence that you are mistaken. Our loyalty to truth must come first. Striving to make ourselves right at the expense of truth, takes away from us.
14. Adopt A Commitment To Growth As A Way Of Life
See your life as a process of advancing from knowledge to new knowledge, from discovery to discovery. Commit to expanding your awareness. Only a commitment to lifelong learning can prime us to remain adaptive to our world. Stagnation results from believing that you have “thought enough” and “learned enough.” Idea to highlight, a dedication to lifelong learning helps you to find the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
15. Understand The World Around You
Understanding your physical environment enables you to manage it for the benefit of your health; your cultural environment, to cultivate the right values, attitudes, pleasure; your social environment, to nurture serenity; your economic environment, to improve your standard of living; your political environment, to protect your freedom; and your spiritual and religious environment, to foster a sense of meaning in your life.
16. Become Conscious Of Your Internal World
Awareness of your inner world of needs, feelings, motives, mental processes, enables you to identify areas of your life that are not working. To good, you can then do something to move yourself forward. Denying, disowning or rationalising your feelings, proves unconstructive for your overall effectiveness and well-being. Being conscious of your feelings stimulates you into mindful actions that nurture the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem. Wreckage hallmarks a life of self-abandonment and self-alienation.
Awareness of your feelings enables you to notice patterns of behaviours that are not serving you, early warnings of stress. To emphasise with, it primes you to do more of what excites you, to notice actions that are producing desired results and which aren’t, and to discover patterns that need to be challenged.
Intelligent self-examination stimulates us to ask the following questions: do I know what I’m feeling now? What impulses trigger my actions? Are my feelings and actions congruent? What needs or desires am I trying to satisfy? What do I want in a particular encounter with another? What is my life all about? What are my goals? Are they of my own choosing? Are they motivating enough? What am I doing when I particularly like myself? What am I doing when I don’t?
17. Become Aware Of The Values That Move And Guide You
Ensure that you are ruled by values that you have rationally adopted, not ones that you have uncritically accepted from others. Values drawn from irrational conclusions, harm our well-being and true interests. Choosing hypocrisy and dishonesty over honesty and integrity, works against our true interests. Equating your personal worth to your income, the status of your wife or husband undermines your self-esteem. To forge ahead, Drawing your values from rational conclusions speaks for the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
18. Be On Your Own Side By Practicing Self-Acceptance
Self-esteem arises from self-acceptance. Self-esteem is something we experience, a by-product springing from certain constructive attitudes and behaviours. On a different note, self-acceptance is something that we do. Your refusal to be in an adversarial relationship with yourself, stands as self-acceptance. Self-acceptance features as an act of self-affirmation, an orientation to self-value and self-commitment, deriving from the fact that you are alive and conscious. When you choose to value yourself, treat yourself with respect, stand up for your right to exist, you create the foundation for a healthy self-esteem. This primary act of self-affirmation stimulates you to take constructive steps to move yourself forward even when you have reached the lowest point in your life experience. Pressing on, you give support to the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem through self-acceptance.
To continue with, self-acceptance also rears up as our willingness to accept our bodies, emotions, thoughts, actions, aspirations, as real and valid. Fact to add, it stands as our willingness to experience, not disown, whatever may be the facts of our life at a particular moment. These dimensions of our life include our thoughts, feelings and reality of our behaviour. Self-acceptance enhances the clarity of our minds and our effectiveness. Accepting and experiencing our negative feelings enables us to let go of them. To take it further, self-acceptance embraces the act of acknowledging, experiencing, standing in the presence of, and contemplating the reality of unwanted emotions.
On another level, self-acceptance stands for the idea of compassion, of being a friend to yourself. Understanding the internal considerations behind your unconstructive behaviours prompts you into self-compassion and self-awareness, that helps you to arrest the unwanted behaviour.
Self-acceptance facilitates change and growth. For instance, in accepting that a mistake is yours, you stimulate yourself to learn from it and do better in the future. Self-forgiveness grows in the process. Through self-acceptance, you stand yourself to overcome a fear or correct a mistake since you do not deny their reality. To accept the reality of where you are now, stimulates you to begin the process of change. Denial leaves you stuck.
19. Cultivate A Sense Of Control Over Your Existence
This entails taking responsibility for your actions and the attainment of your goals. Self-responsibility features as a manifestation of self-esteem. It generates self-esteem. To practice self-responsibility is to be responsible for the achievement of your desires, your choices and actions, the level of consciousness you bring to work and your relationships. For emphasis, it includes being responsible for your behaviour, how you prioritise your time, the quality of your communications, your personal happiness and the values you live by. In line, it embraces being responsible for raising your self-esteem. When we accept responsibility for what we are doing, what we are not doing, our state of being, what we are getting, or what we are not getting, we motivate ourselves to take concrete steps to make things better. In the process, we build up our self-esteem. In effect, self-responsibility brings in the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
The importance of realising that no one is coming to save you or solve your problem, drives you to become responsible for making your life better. As you do so, you give a boost to your self-esteem.
20. Assert Your Right To Exist
When you honour your wants, needs, and values and seek appropriate forms for their expression in reality, you assert your right to exist as a unique being. In following with, to stand up for yourself, to be who you are openly, and to treat yourself with respect in all human encounters, defines self-assertiveness. Further with, the practice of self-assertiveness mirrors authentic living. You speak and act from your innermost convictions and feelings. Along with, it includes adapting appropriately to the different contexts of your life experience. For good, self-assertiveness May take the form of paying a compliment, maintaining a polite silence that signals non-agreement or refusing to smile at a tasteless joke.
When you commit to your right to exist, self-assertiveness, you begin to live out the idea that your life does not belong to others but yourself. As you own yourself, you rise to the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
21. Practice Purposeful Living First, Before “Hoping” and “Wishing”
Define your specific purpose and devise action plans for actualising them, in all capacities of your life. When you have a purpose, you create a standard for judging what is or is not worth doing. For better, you quit living at the mercy of chance. Associated with, you quit drifting and set yourself to a specific course. On that course as a purposeful person, you set productive goals commensurate with your abilities. The process of trying or achieving boosts your effectiveness and competence at living. With this, we can state that productive work stimulates a healthy self-esteem.
Purposeful living to note, concerning yourself with what you are trying to achieve. How you are you trying to achieve it. What means are appropriate. What feedback says that you are succeeding or failing. Purposeful living emphasises flexibility in weighing new information. You make adjustments in your course or strategy as the need arises. You rethink your goals. Achievements are not the root of our self-esteem. To clap on, the aforementioned practices stimulate us to experience a healthy self-esteem. To good, purposeful living helps to shore up the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem.
22. Practice Your Professed Standards And Values
A behaviour that conflicts with your judgement of what is appropriate causes you to lose face in your in your own eyes. You respect yourself less. Personal integrity arises when your behaviour aligns with your professed values. A misalignment, a breach of integrity, wounds your self-esteem. In the situation, healing can only come through the practice of integrity. The practice of integrity means being honest, reliable, trustworthy. In addition, it means keeping your promises, doing the things you say you admire, avoiding the things you say you deplore, and being fair and just in your dealings.
A healthy self-esteem is a by-product of conscious, mindful living. A fact worth repeating, the idea of how to develop a healthy self-esteem promotes self-acceptance, self-assertiveness, self-responsibility, self-self-affirmation and integrity.
Further Reading
Nathaniel Branden, “The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem” (New York:Bantam, 1994).
