Increase your self esteem
How you feel about yourself and the amount of self-trust you have can affect everything else that plays out in your life. Here's how and why to increase your self-esteem now
Here's how to increase your self-esteem with this one simple idea.
Our self-esteem is a feeling of knowing you can handle what’s ahead of you. A lot of people don’t know how to build their self- esteem and as a result of that they hold themselves back.
Think about two people playing a game of poker.
Poker is about taking risks. Making bets.
One person has on hundred poker chips. The other player is sitting across the table with just ten.
Who is going to take more risks?
Yeah, the person with one hundred chips, because they have more they can afford to lose.
Self-esteem is kind of like that. If we have low self-esteem we feel we have too much to lose—we need to protect what we have—so we hold ourselves back.
We won’t take action on the things that are going to be great for us and for our lives.
If we have higher self-esteem we’re going to be more likely to take the right amount of risks and move ourselves towards having a more fulfilling life.
So how do we build our self-esteem?
One way is increase the amount of self-trust we have. It’s a little bit different too the trust we have with others.
Imagine you’re going away for a week and you want to ask one of your friends to come over and water the plants.
You come back and they haven’t said what they said they would. The plants are in need of fast help.
Would you trust that person more or less?
I imagine the answer is less and some of you wouldn’t give them another chance. Yet some of you would, and here you are again, off for another weekend and believing your friend when they say this time they will look after your plants.
You come back—and again they’ve let you down, but they had really great excuses and reasons.
Do you trust them more or less? Yep, less. So when you’re taking a week off and want someone to look after your kids, it’s really unlikely you’ll ask them.
I imagine you’ll ask someone else who has a track record of taking care of the little things because that means they are worthy of the big things.
You won't trust them to keep promises they make. Question is, do you keep the promises you make to yourself?
I speak to a lot of people who say they would do anything for others but they let themselves off the hook.
The problem is you have a relationship with you. You are listening to yourself all the time. You are paying attention to everything you do. And when we say we are going to do something and don’t follow through, we’re breaking trust with ourselves.
We might not ever let down a colleague or loved one, yet we let ourselves down without a second thought.
A lot of us don’t have this awareness that this is an important thing to avoid. When I first heard this it was like a massive awakening.
I’d been saying yes to all these other people and letting myself down.
What I didn’t know was this was decreasing my own self-trust.
Imagine you have a trust bank, like an actual bank. It lives inside you and you can make investments and increase the amount of trust you have in the bank. The way you make an investment is you follow through on what you say you’ll do.
The way you make withdrawals—and we want to avoid that—is to let yourself down by breaking promises you make to yourself. Yes, even little ones like ‘I’ll sort out my banking today’.
The way to apply this is to practise with little things. Wake up at seven if you tell yourself you will. Meditate if you tell yourself you will.
The next step? Stop making commitments you can’t follow through with.
It’s better to say no to something right off the bat than say yes and not follow through. When you do that, you’re not prioritising yourself, you’re making withdrawals from your self-trust bank and you’re lowering your self-esteem.
Start prioritising yourself!
MATT LAVARS
One of Australia's leading coaches, trainers and speakers, and head facilitator at The Coaching Institute. In between mentoring thousands of coaches and leaders all around Australasia and helping others build incredible culture, Matt is passionate about fitness and music. His healthy office lunches whipped up in five minutes are the stuff of legend
