Free Overcoming Low Self-Esteem Essay Sample
Self-esteem is the confidence one has about himself or herself and low self esteem becomes a major challenge as it can cause devastating effects in one's life. It can have negative effects on relations, academic performance, and ability to deal with other life challenges and also on a professional level. In my case low self esteem affected my relation with peers and had a massive effect on my social life. But the brighter side of it is that there are ways of overcoming low self esteem.
Among the worst things of having low self esteem is that we tend to put off things that we can do and that make us happy just because we have not achieved previous goals or things that we would want to achieve. At a point in my life I set a goal to become a better athlete so that I could be accepted by my peers who were better off than me. This never came to be until I took the decision to accept myself as I am first. It is always good to set goals in our lives but not to a point of putting our lives on hold. We should try and accept ourselves as who we are. This is a better way of boosting the self esteem and in this way we tend to achieve more than we have set down for ourselves.
Building one's self-esteem will require that you be kind to yourself also. Cut yourself a bit of some slack. In this way you will always find that the pressure to perform and become will ease a little bit and that natural way to do things will pick its way up. It wasn't until the moments that I decided to let go off the pressure to be accepted, that I realized I could become way much better that my peers. I found myself practicing out more and in the process I began to perform at my level. I no longer sort out my peers but they came in search of me.
Majority of the time when we have low self esteem, we tend to become afraid of doing new stuff. We lock ourselves out of things that can actually bring us real happiness. However, we should strive to do new things in life. I decided to eat healthy something which I had never dared before because I thought I would quit half way through. To overcome my fear of being a failure, I always decided to tell myself that my physical wellbeing was very important. Day in day out I repeated these words to myself until when I found myself automatically eating health and taking better care of myself. Trying out new stuff is a better way to building self-esteem
I also decided to have like minded people as it is also a better way of building up self esteem. Having people around you who make it feel fun in doing what you are doing will greatly boost the self-esteem. This is because enjoying what we do ease the pressure to perform. I decided to leave my peers for friends who would accept me as I was. These were people who performed not as good as my former friends but who enjoyed doing what they did. Having spent time with them during our free time I discovered other hidden talents in me. As I soon later came to discover, these were talents and gifts within me that would not have been realized had I stayed on with the wrong kind of group.
I decided to not always look at failure as a hindrance to us achieving our goals. I look back on what my life situation was back then and the failures that I faced. I saw myself as a failure due to the way my friends never accepted me. What I realize now that I never realized then is that my failure was a way out to finding myself. It moved me to realizing that there were certain goals I could achieve if only I detached myself from those who always put me down. This is a decision I would take even today if the circumstances were the same. We learn from failures and also our experiences from those failures.
At a point in life I always seemed to attract people that had no positive influence in me. Spending time with friends who did not accept me and always made me go under the pressure of performance did not improve on my self-esteem. Instead it made me hate myself the more. I decided that I should evaluate people and see if they have any positive influence in my life. If they do, then we can have a relation with them but if they don't, then there is no reason of having any relation with them as they do not add any value to our lives.
The friends that I came to have after leaving my peers improved greatly on my self-esteem as they made me appreciate myself and appreciate my talent. They had positive influence in my life and have shaped me today. Having decided to find people who had positive influence on me taught me that there is so much I can do if I will myself to it. Becoming a great athlete taught me that under the pressure to perform, you can achieve very little. The secret is to enjoy what you do and do it to the maximum. It is also very important to have the consistence of finishing what you start. In this way you start to trust yourself that you can face any hurdles in life.