How to Boost Your Confidence with this Mindfulness Skill

Food, clothing and shelter were always known as our basic necessities. What if I were to argue that as human beings, our ability to maintain a balanced self-esteem is also a necessity to thrive? Self-Esteem is something that we all have. Whether our self-esteem is high or low, depends strongly on our own deep-rooted beliefs formulated by ourselves and others. In order to thrive in a modern world we tend to focus significantly on what others think of us. We live in a time where social media has taken over the globe. It has allowed everybody to form their own stage and allow themselves to be critiqued by others. No pressure, right? We want everyone to see how important, cool, fashionable, blessed or accomplished we have become. Yet, many still have such low self-esteem. Why? How does this happen when we live in a time where we can paint our own self-portrait in any shade we want, with filters and editing features? It happens when we don't place value in our beliefs about ourselves and when we are too concerned with the perspective of others. We've become infatuated with how we are perceived by others and lose complete perspective of who we are to ourselves. 

Let's begin with self-esteem 101. Self-esteem is defined as "confidence in one's own worth or abilities." Confidence can be defined simply as "trust." In order to trust our own worth or abilities it requires us to have faith in ourselves and acknowledge our own strengths. When I have a client come to treatment, oftentimes self-esteem and confidence are problem areas for them. I often will start with the basics and ask them to identify their own personal strengths. This is a true struggle for someone with a lack of confidence in themselves and self-esteem issues. They often have a hard time highlighting anything that they are "good at" and usually come up with a list of strengths that are in relation to someone else. "I'm a good mom," or "I'm a good employee." They may be able to identify a few "roles" as opposed to the strengths of why they are good at that role. For example, someone may be a good mom because they are patient or loving. Someone may be a good employee because they have excellent time management skills or problem solving abilities. Breaking down those roles into character strengths is often a challenge for most people, but a necessity for beginning self-esteem work.

Despite my efforts in attempting to help clients identify these strengths, they will often return to session reporting that they have failed miserably at identifying additional strengths which is often the homework I leave them with. This doesn't help someone who already has low self-esteem. I allow them additional time to practice this task and instead shift gears to a different assignment which may help them with increased self-esteem.  I often have many clients who incorporate meditation or deep breathing as a coping skill for anxiety. To add to this coping skill that they already know how to do, I encourage them to use  deep breathing, however, when they are focusing on the breathing, to identify positive words with every breath they inhale and negative words with every breath they exhale. For example, when they breathe in they can say "inhale positivity," and when they exhale, they can say "exhale negativity." Additional examples can include: "inhale strength, exhale weakness," or "inhale peace, exhale chaos." The examples can be endless. This will give them the feeling that they are in control of their own feelings and also begin choosing what words they want to describe themselves. It also takes away the scary concept of identifying them as their "strengths," however, it will slowly allow them to have control and gradual confidence while practicing this activity. Try it. You will be surprised how calming it can be with practice.