Theresa Francis-Cheung

Improving your self-esteem isn’t about becoming selfish, loud, competitive and arrogant. It’s about taking care of yourself so that you have the strength and energy to help and give to others when appropriate.

You need to feel relaxed and happy in all aspects of your life to function optimally.

when self-esteem is low you are not in the driving seat. Other people or events are steering the wheel, while you crouch in the back wondering where they will take you next.

It’s about being yourself, and knowing that within you lies the power to create all that you want in life.

it is time to take a deep breath and deal with the present.

It’s easy to look back and blame the past, your parents, your siblings, your teachers, your partner for leaving you, and so on, but at the end of the day the way you feel about yourself now is your responsibility. You can choose now to respond to life without your old self-doubt, hesitation and confusion.

The problem with self-esteem based on temporary externals is that you only feel good about yourself when things are going well, but when things don’t go so well, you lose your self-esteem.

To prevent this, self-esteem needs to be grounded firmly in self-acceptance. The concept of self-acceptance is based on the knowledge that we are all fallible human beings, we all make mistakes and nobody is perfect. So although you would like to be 100 per cent perfect all the time, the important thing is to learn to accept that sometimes you will be wrong and you are fallible.

Self-esteem will not improve if you can’t free yourself from the past. If you keep going back to the time your mum forgot to collect you from school or the fact that you were always the last choice for your form’s sports team, it is time to take a deep breath and deal with the present. The past, however traumatic, can help you understand why you may feel a certain way but it can’t explain why you choose to remain that way. Countless people have survived the most terrible ordeals and faced the greatest adversity with courage, optimism and a positive sense of who they are.

If you want to improve your self-esteem you will be required to make an effort, but as self-esteem improves you will soon discover that life gets easier.

You may not believe it, but staying the way you are takes far more effort. It’s hard work worrying and feeling anxious all the time. It’s hard work adjusting yourself constantly to the demands of other people and events. Life gets easier when you start taking care of yourself and start doing the things you want to do. It’s a lot more fun, too!

That means looking at the way you live your life, the way you think and the way you feel. As you get to know yourself better you will start to recognise patterns of behaviour, responses or attitudes that make you unhappy.

And once you start to recognise what makes you unhappy you can start making positive changes. And the first of those changes needs to be in the way you think.