1. Live as if you have no willpower
One of the biggest sources of low self-esteem is the habit of breaking promises made to yourself:
You tell yourself that you will do sports after work today. But as soon as you get home, you lie down on the couch, not go to the gym.
You tell yourself that you will become a better listener the next time your spouse talks about stress at work. But already in the next conversation with him, you find that you have "disconnected".
You tell yourself that there will be only one serving for dinner tonight, and in the end you eat a huge pile of the second one.
If you constantly break your promises to yourself, is it any wonder that your self-esteem is low?

2. Replace self-compassion with self-criticism
A strange fact about people who want to raise their self-esteem: They are incredibly kind to other people and complete jerks towards themselves.

If you think about it, how can you have self-esteem if you constantly criticize yourself:

criticize yourself for everything that is not perfect
, condemn yourself for things that are not even under your control
Constantly repeating past mistakes and shortcomings.
You don't need to be a doctor of psychological sciences to understand that constant self-criticism harms your self-esteem. But the question is, why do you criticize yourself so often? And why is it so hard to stop?

3. Worry on purpose, not by accident
It is no coincidence that people who want to raise their self-esteem are also prone to anxiety: Anxiety undermines our self-esteem because it makes us feel helpless and incompetent.
If you constantly put yourself in hypothetical scenarios that don't have a good outcome, you will constantly feel like a loser.

4. Spend more time with people who appreciate you
A strange paradox: people who struggle with low self-esteem are attracted to those who do not appreciate them, or, even worse, actively makes them feel bad.

For example, I once had a client who struggled with low self-esteem because she constantly compared herself with her peers and was fixated on the fact that she was not as competent as they were. One of the things we realized was that she had an unconscious pattern of avoiding people who valued her and introducing herself to social situations where everyone was significantly more competent in some sense. Therefore, despite the fact that she herself has done a lot of work to create a better attitude towards herself and self-development, self-esteem has remained in place. Her social environment sabotaged every step along the way. Learn to identify it.

5. Stop thinking so much about self-esteem
If you stop and think about it, then the concept of self-esteem is quite strange…

On the one hand, the idea that you as a person are worthy or not is terribly vague and general. Are you worthy as a spouse? An employee? A man?
Moreover, dignity is something you either have or don't have, like a ticket to a Broadway show? Or is it something you can have in different amounts, like chest hair?