How to Improve your Self- Esteem: (3-step guide) to Rapidly Change Your Life

You wake up each day excited to get the day started, with the light beaming in through your window, feeling confident and self-assured, purposeful, and fulfilled in all aspects of your life.

As you go about your day, you’re able to easily start up a conversation with anybody you like, the conversion flowing effortlessly, simply because you can. You’re someone who is completely at ease with themselves, confident, and happy.

This is the kind of freedom and happiness that having healthy self-esteem can afford us. But for many people, this seems like something they feel they will never achieve, especially if you are someone who struggles with low self-esteem. 

Low self-esteem makes us feel fundamentally inadequate towards life itself, as well as self-critical, and lacking in confidence, and it generates fear and anxiety. It permeates all aspects of daily life and holds us back from a life that we want.

If this sounds all too familiar to you, I’m here to tell you that with some work, you can become a confident and self-assured person, fulfilled in all areas of life! (coming from someone who spent much of their life with low self-esteem and anxiety!). 

What is self-esteem?

Most people don’t realise the importance of self-esteem in the greater picture of our lives, I myself didn’t until only a few years ago.

In the most basic sense, our self-esteem is our evaluation of ourselves, and how we experience our self evaluation affects all aspects of our daily lives. It plays a vital role in our overall psychological wellbeing and how much happiness and life satisfaction we are likely to experience.

It can be understood as how we experience our levels of self-confidence and self-respect. I paraphrased psychologist and author Nathaniel Branden from the six pillars of self-esteem there, in my opinion the greatest work on self-esteem ever written. Truly a life changing book for me!

Healthy self-esteem generates a feeling of enthusiasm and of being appropriate to life, whereas to have low self-esteem and a negative self-opinion carries the weight of a wide range of problems, resulting in lower confidence and the unshakeable feeling that we are “out of place” and ineffective in life.

How Low Self-Esteem Affects Us

In my experience, low self-esteem can be the underlying cause of a great many difficulties in life.

Low self-esteem perpetuates unhappiness, depression, anxiety, fear, and an underlying sense of inadequecy and ineffectiveness. It can keep a person from achieving a life that they deserve and desire.

It can increase our levels of social anxiety and shyness, potentially leading to social alienation and loneliness, and if you are currently struggling in these areas, then from my personal experience working on your self-esteem is a potent starting point to creating a better life.

My Experience of Low Self-Esteem

When I think back through most of my life, I had always been shy and anxious, unassertive, and unable to stand up for myself, and never knew why. I had never grasped how to directly work on my confidence, assertiveness, social and communication skills, and more.

I was unaware that my life was being dictated by a deeply rooted low self-esteem.

The truth is I had sort of surrendered to fear by convincing myself that I would have to live with many of these challenges which are emblematic of low self-esteem for the rest of my life.

I was utterly wrong. Everything in life takes work, and if it is worth striving for in order to create a better life, then all the anxiety, self-doubt and fear in the world need to be confronted and worked on.

But how do I know all this? Well, it has been one of the greatest challenges that I have overcome in my own life. Fast forward to now, I have grown significantly as a person by directly addressing my self-esteem!

My Life Changes

I had always thought of my challenges throughout my life in terms of low confidence and anxiety, and tried to tackle them from those angles. But in reality, these can be seen as symptoms of a deeper problem, low self-esteem.

Enter 2022, where I unassumingly encountered a book online when scrolling an online blog (I was in my self-improvement era). That book was the six pillars of self-esteem by Nathaniel Branden, as I mentioned above.

Reading this book was like going through a rapid personal evolution, and many of these tips are derived from his wisdom that I have applied in my own way to my life.

I have witnessed so much positive growth in my life by focusing directly on my self-esteem and realising its importance that I now specifically aim to coach people to build their self-esteem and confidence, to achieve greater happiness in life.

This first step is that moment in our life when we feel something has to change and that we want to live a happier and more fulfilling life, it is our inner voice trying to help us create a better life for ourselves.

How to Increase Your Self-Esteem: 3 Steps

Step 1: Gain clarity on your life

To begin to feel great about who we are, excited about life, and to feel confident, worthy, and empowered as a person, it is first necessary for us to gain clarity on the current state of our life. 

This step is detailed more extensively in a seperate article, but the following is a brief outline.

The fact that you’re here shows you have made that commitment to changing your life, and this is the essential starting point.

This is such an important first step and is vital to our personal growth. It eliminates any confusion that may exist about where we are in life and where we are heading. It’s difficult to feel confident and worthy as a person if we are utterly lost in our life’s journey.

It is a process of expanding our self-awareness, and to live more in touch with ourselves and everything that pertains to our life.

Asking yourself some of the following questions can typically kindle the process of gaining clarity on your life:

• Where are you currently at in your life? Are you generally happy, or is there an underlying feeling of dissatisfaction and unfulfillment?

• What is happening (or not happening) in areas of your life that is contributing to you feeling low, lacking confidence and undervaluing your personal worth?

• What areas of your life do you want to work on specifically that you have determined to be causing unhappiness, and that are most meaningful to you? 

Ultimately, what would your ideal life look like and flourish into? What are your ambitions and what would make you happy and fulfilled?

These are vital questions which can kick start the process of greater self-awareness within us, we become more in touch with our inner selves. It is impossible to have a positive self regard if we are disconnected from ourselves on a deeper level.

Getting clear on our life entails many aspects, and involves opening up a line of communication with our innermost desires, frustrations, goals, thoughts, and feelings. 

This is where getting out a journal and a pen is worth its weight in gold.

One of the ways that my life really began to change was when I started journaling. It is by far one of the best ways to understand yourself on a deeper level, and what you really want to do with your life.

Simply by sitting down and writing every evening with no particular format, I was able to gain a deeper understanding of my life as a whole, my past, present, and what I want to do with my future, and helped me process a great deal that was happening at that point in my life.

Journaling allowed me to identify frustrations and to create action plans to overcome them, as well as identifying meaningful goals that would enrich and progress my life.

Importantly, it helped me process a lot of change, it also made me realise how far I had come and how well I was doing, and allowed me to more deeply appreciate myself and how far I had come. This is so beneficial for self-esteem.

Through journaling you hold yourself accountable to what you want to achieve in life and what is meaningful to you, this helps improve self-esteem. It served as a catalyst for my personal evolution, and enhanced my self-awareness.

You don’t need to journal, but at the very least to lay the foundation for building your self-esteem, get out a notepad or use your computer, and start by asking yourself some of these questions. 

From there, we can begin to work at increasing your quality of life, and as a result, self-esteem naturally increases as you begin to feel better about the direction of your life. You start to walk a bit taller.

It takes a lot of being honest with ourselves, but this kind of honesty is exactly what contributes to becoming more effective in areas of our lives, and feeling better about ourselves.

So, by making a commitment to increasing your self-awareness by asking yourself some of the questions above or any you come up with yourself that are meaningful, you will be surprised at the process of personal transformation that it will initiate.

By becoming more in touch with yourself, you can kick start the process of generating greater control over yourself and your life, which in turn will make us feel better about ourselves, boosting self-esteem

Sit down and really think about where you currently are in life, and what would truly enrich your life and make you happy.

Once we have started to get clear on many aspects of ourselves and our life, this next step is vital!

Step 2: Take Action and Live with Purpose

To begin feeling great about ourselves and our life, we need to be progressing towards goals, purposes, or towards overcoming frustrations, in areas of our life we have identified through step 1. This helps to give greater meaning to our life and structure to our days, which organically allows us to grow in self-confidence and increase our happiness by feeling successful, and feeling better about areas of our life.

As I find myself sitting here writing this article, I am confronted with a choice. To continue writing, even if I don’t feel particularly inspired at a given moment, or to give in to distractions or allow procrastination to derail me from my goals.

It’s obvious which option is likely to make me feel good about myself as opposed to making myself feel like I’m not getting anywhere, which will make me feel bad about myself and ineffective as a person

After completing this article, I’m able to feel great about myself, because I persisted and made progress towards a goal that is meaningful to me, I also overcame any avoidance of personal responsibility and excercised discipline.

Once we have reflected on many aspects of life, our frustrations, desires, goals etc, we need to begin taking action no matter what if we are to start feeling better about ourselves. This of course at times involves confronting fear, anxiety, and overriding negative thoughts but it is necessary.

Maybe we are currently unhappy and frustrated with our social life and want to make a change and meet new people, but anxiety and low self-esteem is posing an obstacle to developing our social skills and meeting new people. 

Achieving something like this requires taking action by setting goals related to improving our social skills, and through courage to confront discomfort and anxiety in pursuit of greater fulfilment in our social life.

Building my own social skills was a difficult and uncomfortable process, but by being courageous and persistent I was able to develop them over time and make great friends along the way!

Taking action and living with purpose in life involves constantly asking ourselves:

• What goals can I set that are in alignment with what I want to achieve and experience in life, and what daily actions can I start taking to make them a reality? 

• What do I need to learn, and what skills do I need to acquire and develop to make my aspirations and goals a reality?

• Are my daily actions and routines actually contributing to my goals?

• How often do I find myself not acting on what is important in moving my life forward, and why?

It ultimately involves the realisation that we are responsible for ourselves and the achievement of our desires and happiness, and it takes self honesty.

If we have decided that these goals are meaningful to us, then we need to keep taking action towards them, regardless of how much discomfort, anxiety, doubt, or fear we have to persist through. This bolsters our sense of confidence and makes us feel more effective in life. We start developing greater trust within ourselves, and appreciate our skills and abilities more deeply.

It definitely takes courage, but is ultimately the unspoken truth about building confidence and self-esteem that few are willing to confront. Be one of the few who do in pursuit of a great life for yourself, you won’t look back once you do!

But what if we still feel unworthy and self-critical even after the previous steps? This final step is the fertile ground in which unshakable self-confidence and self-belief begins to grow on, and which is required for our life to really flourish.

Step 3: Nurture Self-Acceptance

Self-acceptance is a beautiful but elusive thing, it’s the fertiliser of any personal growth and enables greater self love, which many endlessly butt their heads against a wall trying to find ways to achieve. 

But it’s always been there within us, the whole time, and it’s simple to cultivate.

Self-acceptance is a difficult concept for many people to grasp, since we are conditioned with so many messages from a young age that we simply “aren’t enough”, and that what matters most is what others think and feel about us. 

This over the course of our lives creates the idea that our sense of self is determined by other people, which is incredibly disempowering.

The first thing that needs to be understood about self-acceptance is that it is unconditional. We fundamentally accept everything that we are, regardless of whether we particularly like or dislike some aspect of ourself.

It needs to be reiterated that self-acceptance does not necessarily mean “liking”. 

“Self-acceptance is a refusal to deny or disown any aspect of the self: our thoughts, emotions, memories, physical appearance, subpersonalities, and actions. Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself”. 

Nathaniel Branden – The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)

This is exactly what it entails. A refusal to condemn or hate ourselves, even if we don’t particularly “like” some aspect of ourselves.

We may not like something about our bodies, or our face, or an endless list of personal qualities we possess, but that doesn’t mean we can’t accept these aspects of who we are on a fundamental level. We accept that what is, is.

In my personal experience, self-acceptance was difficult to cultivate in the beginning. Like most people, I had insecurities and things about myself that I didn’t necessarily “like”, and criticised myself for.

But something profound happened when I started making the effort.

Once I started to completely refuse to dislike any part of who I am, my appearance, my lack of ability in some area of life and so on, my confidence began to rise significantly. 

Any self-conscious tendencies in social situations, or unconsciously comparing myself to others began to diminish slowly over time. My conversations with others became more effortless due overriding that critical inner voice and being in a more compassionate relationship to myself.

An attitude of self-acceptance and self-love also developed organically through the process of journaling and writing. 

There is a great fallacy in criticising and judging ourselves for aspects of our bodies or minds that we fundamentally have no control over. We don’t choose our DNA after all.

And if it is something we can do something about, for example, working out and developing a great physique, developing an attitude of self-acceptance makes us more inclined to take action on what we can change.

To fundamentally be a friend to ourselves, refusing to despise parts of ourselves is absolutely critical when it comes to building self-esteem. 

There is a lot more to say about it than can be covered in one article, so I will be discussing it more in depth in future articles.

Conclusion

In my experience, these 3 steps are a vital starting point in beginning to feel great about life.

I’d like you to know that if you struggle with low self-esteem, I have great admiration for you on your journey, you have made a commitment to change by looking into ways you can improve your sense of self and create a better life.

Like I said, personal growth and particularly building self-esteem is a heroic undertaking at times, especially for those of us who have struggled with anxiety and a low self-opinion our whole lives, but I am here to help you on that journey!

I hope this article has provided you with a good foundation to really start feeling more confident as a person and increasing your sense of personal worth.

To find out about my coaching and mentoring services, where I offer 1 to 1 programs to help you develop confidence, self-esteem, and to find fulfilment in all areas of your life, feel free to get in touch by emailing [email protected].

You can also fill in my contact form!

Stay tuned for more helpful articles and content!