What score would you give yourself today?
How we feel about ourselves is a critical component of our mental health. It’s often referred to as our self-esteem. Essentially though, it is how you rate you. Your perception of you. If you like who you are, knowing of course that you’re not perfect, then the chances are you have a healthy self-esteem.
If you have a good healthy self-esteem, then those little internal dialogues you have with yourself are most likely kind, charitable, accepting and possibly even rewarding in language. You speak to yourself as you would to your best friend! “I’m so proud of you! I know that wasn’t easy for you but you did it.”
For those with a low self-esteem, the internal dialogue will be quite different. It will be unkind, uncharitable and in most cases not even true.
Imagine an empty jar. Let’s call it your self-esteem jar. Now imagine you have two bags full of marbles. One bag is filled with bright orange marbles. The other is filled with dark grey marbles. The bright orange marbles represent those kind thoughts about you, the ones you would say to your best friend. The dark grey marbles represent those unkind thoughts about you … these are the ones that damage your self-esteem and negatively impact your mental health.
At the end of the week, what’s the ratio of orange to dark grey marbles (the thought ratio) in your self-esteem jar? Your goal is obvious. You want at least 85% of your marbles to be orange!
But here’s the sting. If you’ve been shoving dark grey marbles into your jar for a while now then it’s become a bit of a habit. Your brain simply does what you’ve trained it to do. The good news is you can ditch this self-sabotaging habit. Our brains are adaptable which means we can retrain our brain to stop tossing in those dark grey marbles and start choosing orange ones. But how?
Detect a dark grey marble (listen to your internal dialogue).
If you’ve not focused before on listening to your internal dialogue then it will require your attention but it isn’t hard. Know this. Internal dialogue is always there when our brain is not occupied with some other activity. Our brain isn’t great at being idle. The moment you don’t have to concentrate, it starts to wander. And that wandering is your internal dialogue. Tune into it.
Change it to an orange marble (change the unkind assessment you’ve just made of yourself to one that you would happily say to your best friend).
This is often when people get stuck because they can’t think of what that orange marble might sound like! The easiest way to discover the orange marble is the ‘best friend’ trick. What would you say to your best friend in this situation?
Repeat that kind assessment and really own it because it IS true
We can always find faults in things we say or do but there are also things we’ve done well which we neglect to process. Even if that speech didn’t go as well as planned, you showed up. Or maybe you forgot your friend’s birthday recently, you haven’t every other year.
Self-esteem is one of many topics discussed in The Thrive Programme. You learn why it is critical, what your self-esteem score is, how to shift it, why it is only two weeks old, and how to keep it healthy and stable for the rest of your life.