- There are concrete steps you can take to improve your self esteem, confidence, and sense of worth / value.
- To feel good about ourselves we need to be doing something routinely that we feel proud of.
- For us to feel proud of something it needs to be hard enough that it is a challenge, but not too hard that it’s overwhelming.
- If it’s too easy we won’t really feel proud of it, and if it’s too difficult we’ll feel overwhelmed or defeated.
- A common area of struggle in this arena is that many of us don’t actually hold realistic expectations for what’s “too difficult”.
- This is one of the reasons many new years resolutions fall apart – many of us don’t accurately assess where that sweet spot is between “a challenge” and “unrealistically challenging”.
- To be successful at setting and achieving realistic goals many of us have to wrestle with our “shoulds”.
- We can feel like “I should already be____”, so when we set a goal we are inadvertently trying to make up for lost time.
- This often backfires. When we try a challenge and it’s too far out of reach it actually DECREASES self-esteem, and can leave us feeling lazy, out of control, inadequate and generally unmotivated.
- Accept where you are now, pick a goal to work towards that it just beyond that, and gradually work to get to the final milestone.
Marsha Linehan outlines in her Dialectical Behavior Therapy Treatment Manual exactly how to increase your sense of self esteem and confidence, and it’s through a process she calls “Building Mastery”.
Taking on appropriately challenging activities, goals, and tasks is a tool we can use to help us boost our sense of worth, confidence, and self esteem. If you’d like to try building #mastery you want to pick a #goal to work towards that feels challenging, but is realistic with how you live your life. For that sense of mastery and #accomplishment to be built the goal needs to be just out of current reach, but still accessible with effort.
If you find you are often someone who doesn’t meet the goals you set for yourself, your ambition might be blinding you from what is realistic and sustainable in your life. For many of us, we set goals that require we make changes that are too far out of reach, we then can’t meet the goal, and wind up feeling defeated, lazy, and incapable. This puts us at risk of giving up, and over time, this can erode at our sense of worth, ambition, and ability.
If you find yourself in a position where you set goals and routinely don’t meet them it’s not a signal that you are failure, you “can’t do it”, or that there is no hope – it’s often a signal that you have selected a goal too challenging for where you are at this juncture in your life. And yes, something can be too challenging even if you think it “should” be simple.
When you find yourself at the crossroads of wanting to make a change, wanting to learn a new skill, or wanting to boost your self esteem remember the key concepts behind building mastery, which includes setting an appropriately challenging goal and building on it over time. If you cannot achieve it, find a way to make the goal a little less challenging. Maybe it’s too much to exercise 5 times a week, but maybe 4 times or 3 times is more accessible (at first). You can always keep setting end goals that are a challenge beyond what you’ve mastered, but the key is doing so in a way that maximizes sweet spot between not enough of a challenge and too much of one.
Notes:
1 . It’s not uncommon for people to hold beliefs like, “exercising is good for me, so I should be able to do it regularly” or “I want to be a person who________’s every day, so I’m going to start that now”. The challenge is, we start with the end goal in mind, feel overwhelmed by how much it actually requires of us, and often give up and feel defeated. We come to believe “I’m not a person who can _____, because I tried and it didn’t work”. And yes, we did try, but we didn’t try in a way that was within that window of “challenging enough”. Instead, we may have unknowingly picked a goal that was too challenging without recognizing it in that way because we believed it “should” be within our reach. Unfortunately, this approach actually diminishes our sense of self-esteem because we are unable to stick with a goal we set. Read here for more on how “shoulds” can show up in disguise and throw us off track.
2. For more information on how to set realistic goals for yourself, and how to make gradual changes see this post.
3. Been trying to make a change for ages and it just won’t stick? In addition to exploring the reasonableness of your goals, it may also be time to consider “Secondary Gains”.
4. Do you have a hard time letting go of the “shoulds”? This is not uncommon. Really. It holds many of us back. This post may help.