In this post: what to do to overcome feelings of low self-worth or low self-esteem, how you can build up your self-worth and belief in yourself and your capabilities.
Feelings of low self-worth are the worst.
When we have low self-worth or low self-esteem, we can feel like we are invisible in our society and don’t belong. We can even feel useless and undeserving. We hold ourselves back in life.
We think we are not good enough.
I used to battle with these feelings every day and it made my world seem very dark and grey. If you’re in that place, I feel for you, because I remember how bad it felt.
But I want you to know that you don’t have to feel that way forever. If you can change your thoughts and mindset (and I believe we all can!), then you can make your world seem a lot rosier just by changing how you feel about yourself.
Often feelings of low self-worth aren’t even based on any solid evidence, except for our own feelings and perceptions of ourselves and our behaviour. The problem is that, when we start to believe something about ourselves, we see proof it everywhere.
A little slip up in our day reminds us that we are the world’s clumsiest person, or if our plans don’t work out we feel like it is proof that we just can’t get it together. Because we are looking at them through a filter of low self-worth, we feel that they are a personal reflection on how worthy we are as a person.
When you take your own thoughts and feelings out of the picture and look at these scenarios from a more objective view, we can see that they don’t mean you are useless, they just show that you are human and make mistakes like everyone else.
Once that filter of low self-worth is removed, you will see that you are just as worthy and deserving of living a happy, full life as anyone else is.
(Want some help seeing just how amazing you really are? You’ll love my 80-page Self-Love Journal with 31 powerful journal prompts to guide you on a self-love journey. Click here to grab your copy and get started now!)
So how do we go about shifting that filter so we can see more clearly and positively about ourselves? I want to share with you a few things to try…
Think about the root cause of your low self-worth
Set aside some time to really think about why you have low self-worth. Is there a particular event that it stems from? Or maybe it has built up over time because you haven’t been encouraged to value yourself highly?
Grab a notebook and journal your thoughts.
Thinking about this might be confronting at first as it can bring up uncomfortable feelings, but being aware of what has caused your low self-worth can often have a freeing effect. Having the knowledge of where it comes from can help us to take stock and give us understanding.
You don’t necessarily have to do anything after you know, often low self-worth can be rooted in past events, our childhood even. But if you can identify some of the causes of your feelings, you can learn to accept them and move past them.
Related post: What Is Journaling?
Know that you are amazingly incredible
I just want you to know that you are genuinely and truly amazingly incredible.
No matter what came up for you in the past step.
Even if you have experienced someone telling you something along the lines of you not being amazing, it doesn’t make this untrue.
Why is that so?
Because of the simple fact that you are you.
You have come together to form an incredible living, breathing human being who is capable of doing remarkable things just by being alive.
And, even better, you are capable of thinking and acting and can make the world a better place (even if that seems impossible right now).
And, best of all? There is no one else exactly like you.
Yes, we all start out in exactly the same place, being born into this world with no choice of what our situation in life will be. But as you have grown, you have had different experiences, created individual talents and found your own unique perspective on life.
The world needs your light because no one else’s is exactly the same.
Related post: How To Love Yourself
Stop comparing yourself to others
Now that you know that you are a one-of-a-kind miracle, you might be able to see that there is no reason to compare yourself to others.
Sure, we share plenty of similarities to others and this makes it easy to compare on the surface, but when you really think about it, it doesn’t make any sense. Other people are different to you and they are on their own path, writing their own story. And each of us has value to share.
Comparing yourself to others is losing sight of that fact and it often leads us to judge ourselves unfairly.
We tell ourselves that we are worse than so-and-so because we can’t afford to go on the amazing beach holiday that they have shared photos of. We can feel like we are failing at life when we see someone receive yet another promotion at work, and we’re still stuck at the front desk.
It’s not fair to judge our worth on such material things.
Not to mention, when we do compare ourselves, we are not seeing the full story. People tend to only share their ‘highlights reel’ of their life. The good stuff without sharing the nitty gritty behind the scenes. We tend to hide the not-so-good from public.
Stop comparing yourself to others and keep your self-worth intact.
Related post: How To Stop Comparing Yourself To Others
Forgive yourself
It’s a lot harder to move forward and drop those feelings of low self-worth when we hold onto past regrets, resentment or guilt, so do yourself a huge favour and forgive yourself.
Now I can hear you saying that it’s not that easy and I get it. Regret used to really hold me back and keep me feeling less than worthy, but unfortunately we can’t change the past and all we are doing by not forgiving ourselves is hurting our future.
Reminding myself of this helps me forgive myself when I think about past regrets, big or small. Yes, it took some time for it to sink in but it has lessened the pain I feel and helps me to concentrate on my future instead of my past.
Another thing that really helped me to forgive myself was to write myself a letter. It sounds a bit woo-woo, but it worked! All I did was write “I forgive myself for:’ and then wrote a bullet-point list of everything that I felt regret or guilt about, then I read it out loud to myself. You can make your letter as simple or as detailed as you like.
(Bonus move: A letter like this can also be used to forgive others. You don’t have to give it to them, just write out and tell them you forgive them. Set yourself free from resentment and you’ll feel SO much better!)
Related post: 5 Reasons You Should Forgive Yourself
Talk positively towards yourself
Just like holding onto regret, resentment and guilt can gnaw away at your self-worth, so too can talking negatively towards yourself. In fact, how we talk to ourselves is really important to our overall mental health and wellbeing.
This is because these thoughts that we tell ourselves create our beliefs, which then impacts the type of filter that we look at the world through. And remember, a filter of low self-worth, can make us judge ourselves unfairly.
To change your self-talk from negative to positive can take time, but it might help to know that your self-talk or thoughts are actually completely within your control. It will be a process of creating a new pattern of thoughts that are more beneficial to our feelings of self-worth, but it is totally doable.
Here are some things to try:
- If you catch yourself saying something negative, immediately follow it up with positive words of encouragement. Work towards never putting yourself down, ever.
- Turn around your negative beliefs about yourself through journaling. Write down your negative beliefs and then rewrite them in a more positive and constructive way.
- Use affirmations. Affirmations are positive words that you repeat to yourself each day to better your mindset. You can even use the rewritten beliefs from the step above as your affirmations.
- Reframe your thoughts to see opportunities for learning instead of mistakes.
- Imagine you are talking to your best friend, or even your child, when you talk to yourself. Cheer yourself on to succeed. And if you wouldn’t say it to someone you love, then don’t say it to yourself either.
Related post: How To Turn Around Your Negative Self-Talk
Try self-love meditations
Self-love meditations are another way you can help you to build up more positive feelings towards yourself.
Like anything, meditation can feel uncomfortable at first (actually it’s probably guaranteed you’ll feel uncomfortable in your first few sessions), but you can reap a number of benefits from taking some time out of your day to meditate. See some of the benefits of meditation here.
While there are a heap of different types of meditation sessions, here I want to focus on meditations that are specifically designed to encourage us to feel a sense of love towards ourselves.
Here’s a run-through of a meditation that I have used to help me to feel more loving towards myself:
- Sit in a comfortable spot on the floor, couch or bed (but don’t lay down or you might find yourself falling asleep!).
- Close your eyes and breathe in and out deeply for about 5 breaths. Let any tension drain out of your body on the exhales, then continue to breathe normally.
- Think about something you really love, it can be anything – a person, a place, a thing.
- Let this love fill you up, feel it all the way from head to toe.
- Now imagine transferring this feeling of love onto yourself, so that you are now feeling this powerful love for yourself. Let yourself feel really good about yourself.
- Sit with this feeling for 5 minutes if you can and then slowly open your eyes and continue on your day
Doing this may feel a little weird or uncomfortable at first, especially if you’ve never meditated before, but hang in there and it could really turn things around for you!
Alternatively, if you would prefer to be guided in your meditation, just search for ‘self love meditation’ on YouTube or Google and you will find sessions you can try from anywhere between about 5 minutes to 3 hours (!!).
Nurture yourself
Even if you are still working on building up feelings of self-worth and self-love, start living your life as if you love yourself.
It goes along the same lines of the saying ‘fake it until you make it’. By taking actions that are in alignment with those someone who values themselves dearly would take, we can reinforce to ourselves that this is the belief we want to create.
Ways to do this include:
- Taking care of yourself physically by making sure you eat well, stay hydrated, move your body regularly and get enough sleep.
- Make time for you each day to do something you enjoy.
- Practice saying “no” gracefully so you don’t overstretch yourself or end up doing things you really don’t enjoy. Try saying something like “thank you for asking, I’m not ready to commit to doing anything right now.” instead of a begrudged “yes”.
- Be authentic to yourself and act in alignment with your values (do things and live your life so that you impress yourself rather than others).
- Invest in yourself by undertaking some personal development or doing something special just for you.
- Accept compliments graciously instead of brushing them off.
- Accept love instead of pushing people away because you feel unworthy.
Related post: 7 Daily Self-Care Habits You Need To Build Your Happiness
–
So I hope you can see from reading this post that there are plenty of ways to overcome feelings of low self-worth and value yourself more. And there are a lot of good reasons to start liking yourself (and even loving yourself!) including my favourite reason:
There is no one else exactly like you out there and the world needs your light.
When you start to build up your self-worth and start to belief in yourself, you can then step into your full potential and become the best version of yourself and live your best life.
Low self-esteem keeps us from trying anything new as we fear how we will ‘perform’ or how others will see us. We worry that we are not good enough. But all this does is limits us from being our true selves and living a life where we are at peace with who we are.
Increasing our self-worth and self-esteem allows us to be authentic and shine our light brightly in the world. It helps us to build our confidence so that we feel comfortable letting people see who we really are. We allow ourselves to create genuine connections with others.
We allow ourselves to be happier.
So to recap, some of my favourite ways to overcome feelings of low self-worth are:
- Think about the root cause of your low self-worth
- Know that you are amazingly incredible!
- Stop comparing yourself to others
- Forgive yourself
- Talk positively towards yourself
- Try self-love meditations
- Nurture yourself
Set aside some time to work through these steps and remind yourself every day that you DO matter. We all naturally experience ups and downs in life, but if you can keep your self-worth intact, the downs don’t feel quite so dark and desperate.
You can revisit these steps at any time and I recommend building yourself up on a regular basis, daily if possible, with some sort of self-development. At the very least, take the time to build yourself up a toolkit of things that work to bolster you up when you need it.
If you are ready to dive in even further to developing your self-worth, I’d love to guide you on your self-love journey with the help of my Self-Love Journal. It’s packed with 31 powerful journal prompts that will help you to uncover your true value. Click here to get it now!
Remember that you are amazingly incredible and once you have done the work to improve how you see yourself, you will be able to achieve even more in your life. You can continue on your personal development journey to reach your full potential and live your best life.
That’s all for now, but know that I am cheering you on every step of the way, I can see you successfully building up your self-worth – I believe in you!
Much love, Sarah xo
Did you enjoy this post? Please share the goodness by pinning the image below!
