If you’re feeling lousy about yourself, you have no motivation to do anything and you feel that everything you try to do is doomed to failure then you’ve got what’s technically called low self esteem.

Unfortunately these days it’s very common and there is one particular thing about us that causes more feelings of low self esteem than anything else. It’s something that all of us in the US will be only too familiar with. And some physicians and social commentators have said that it’s now reaching epidemic proportions. Have you guessed it yet? Of course — it’s being overweight.

Being overweight really sucks and leads to low self esteem

If you are overweight you are far more likely to have low self esteem and lower self-confidence than people of a normal healthy weight. Now this isn’t a website about weight loss, it’s about low self esteem, so I’m not in a position to give you any advice on how to lose weight. Apart from healthy eating and more exercise that is,  which to me, seems blindingly obvious. But,  of course,  I realise that many people, and you may well be one of them, struggle with their weight. And if you’re suffering from feelings of low self esteem as well then you may well be caught in a cycle of negative feedback.  You know the sort of thing I mean– it’s when you say to yourself “I’m fat because I’m useless and I’m useless because I’m fat”. You may not put it in exactly those words but that’s the essence of your low self esteem thought process.

Now I’m not saying that you’re automatically going to have feelings of low self esteem just because you’re overweight. After all, there are plenty of examples of people who are, shall we say, ‘larger than average’ who have risen to the top of their profession and are very happy with their life. So being overweight and problems with low self esteem don’t necessarily go hand in hand. But it’s a fair bet that if you’re overweight, especially if you’re very overweight, then you won’t be feeling too good about yourself and low self esteem is quite likely.

Losing weight requires a lot of motivation and willpower. And that’s difficult when you have low self esteem. There are no shortcuts and you cannot eat just when you want and still lose weight as the many slimming clubs will have you believe. So it’s not going to be easy. But if you can start to lose weight then you will find that your low self esteem feelings about yourself will become vastly more positive, simply through that achievement alone. And that is the first step banishing your feelings of low self esteem altogether.

Keep the momentum going

If you can manage to lose some weight and you begin to feel somewhat empowered then it’s important to keep that momentum and not slip back into the void again. This is easy to do if you have low self esteem. But this is where a short self-help course on low self esteem can make an enormous difference to your recovery. Check out the e-book below – I think it could help you a lot.

Let’s face it, our level of self esteem is very variable. We all have days when we feel we’re not as good as we should or could be. It’s completely normal for our evaluation of ourselves to go up and down all the time. It’s part of being human.

Just how do we go about evaluating ourselves? Well, when we evaluate anything we need a benchmark against which to make a comparison. In the case of self esteem what sort of benchmarks do we have? Well it seems to me that there are two possible benchmarks. The first is a sort of general average person against which we can compare ourselves. Probably not very helpful because as we all know the average person doesn’t exist. Secondly, and probably much more realistically, we tend to compare ourselves with our peers and the people that we spend most of our time with. This can really dent our self esteem

And this can be a problem because the people with whom we spend most of our time may actually be nothing like us and so we end up making a false comparison. Which may not be altogether flattering and is bound to affect our self esteem. Here are a couple of examples:

Self Esteem Examples

Example 1 – Who you’re with

I was lucky enough to do my Ph.D. at one of the top research universities in the world. I’m not trying to blow my own trumpet here, it just happens to be true. Now, having won a place at this prestigious institution I felt pretty good about myself. Everyone was congratulating me on getting in. My self esteem was at an all-time high. I thought I was one of the top brains in the country. It wasn’t long before I had my illusions shattered. Every day I’d be working alongside people whose abilities, creativity, levels of understanding and speed of thinking I couldn’t hope to match.

Within a couple of months I felt pretty rubbish about myself. I started thinking I was useless and no good at anything and my self esteem was at an all-time low. And yet what had changed about my abilities? Nothing, in fact, because I was working in such a top university and learning a lot they were probably improving. My self esteem should be going up, not down! Yet my perception of myself and my self esteem was definitely on the slide. I guess the point here is that we’re probably the person least suited to judging ourselves for self esteem purposes. Any view we have of ourselves is bound to be distorted by our perceptions of others and our self esteem suffers as a result.

Example 2 – What you’re told

This is slightly different because it shows how the way that other people judge us, or say they do, can have a profound effect on our self esteem. My kids started at a new school last year. At their old school they’d be told when they got things right and they’d be told when they got things wrong. The teachers weren’t hard on the kids,  but they did let them know when they weren’t performing. At the new school, the regime, in my view, is much less even-handed. The kids are given praise even when they get stuff wrong and not enough chivvying along when they’re underperforming. Self esteem is bound to become an issue.

The result of this constant praise is raised levels of high self esteem which are unjustified, in my view. The kids now think that everything is easy, that they’re excellent at everything and that the world owes them a living as a result. Their self esteem has gone through the roof. They couldn’t be more wrong and they’re going to get a nasty shock when they come under the proper scrutiny of a prospective employer. This sounds like a bit of a self esteem generated rant, I know, but it shows how self esteem levels can be too high as well as too low.

It’s a balancing act

As with all things, it’s important to keep a balance. Now, low self esteem is definitely more of a problem than excessively high self esteem. low self esteem can be very destructive both to yourself and to the people around you. It will lead you, and them, into a never ending cycle of despair and under-achievement. There’s never a right time sto start addressing the way we feel about the world, our attitudes, and of course our feelings about ourselves. But at some point we have to sit up and realize that unless we proactively do something then nothing is ever going to chnage. And dealing with self esteem issues should come first in any plan of alteration.

Life’s a bit of a balancing act. and it’s never going to be perfect. But if you feel that the balance is somehow tilted in the wrong direction and you want to get your self esteem back in balance, then I’d highly recommend that you check out the short course below.

And, for sure, people with low self-esteem do have all these feelings and internal discussions with themselves. But there are other, more subtle, low self esteem symptoms that are perhaps not so easy to identify. Let’s run through a few of them and see if any of them ring a bell all with you.

1. You avoid other people; what’s going on here is that, given your low opinion of yourself, it seems likely that most other people will have a low opinion of you too. So by staying out of their way you don’t give them the chance to judge you harshly. It’s easier all-round.
2. You find it difficult to concentrate; if you’re attempting to do a task of some sort you might find that the conversations in your head interfere with it. Instead of focusing on the job in hand you find yourself thinking about why you can’t do it and how your uselessness prevents you from getting it finished properly.
3. Depending on your type of personality you might find that you are aggressive to other people, and this may well include loved ones. I’m not saying that you blame them for your apparent worthlessness but your anger with yourself spills over into anger with other them. That’s not fair on them, as I’m sure you realize.
4. You harbor feelings of jealousy and envy about other people. Your feeling that you are no good at anything contrasts with the notion that everybody else is really good at everything. Well, that’s not true of course, most people are average at most things, and this particular low self esteem symptom should give you a clear indication of how distorted your thinking about yourself, the world, and your place in it has become.

I’ve listed just four low self esteem symptoms and, as you might imagine, there are lots more.  If you want to find out more about them and feel you are ready to start combating your negative feelings about yourself then help is available.

I wouldn’t recommend simply browsing the Internet for information because it’s very unstructured and some of it, frankly, is rubbish. You’ll be cast adrift in a sea of information. What I would recommend is that you sign up for a short course by professional in the subject that will give you a step by step pathway to resolving your problems. It will normally be in the form of a downloadable e-book and possibly some videos and mp3 tracks. You’ll find that this sort of paced approach to learning is extremely effective and hopefully you will be able to put your problems behind you in a matter of weeks. Check out the Course shown below for a great example of what I’m talking about.

Let’s think about them for a moment.

The first stage is to start thinking about ourselves a little more objectively. By this I mean that instead of immediately internally criticising ourselves for every little thing that goes wrong, we should stop and analyse the event in a little more detail. Not everything that goes wrong in your life is down to you. If you drop a plate while you’re washing-up it’s not because you’re useless at washing-up, it’s simply because on that particular occasion the plate slipped out of your hand. On average, people who do washing-up by hand drop 3.4 items per year. You should congratulate yourself on being normal instead of flagellating yourself for being clumsy. Now I happen to know the average rate of washing-up droppings because I checked it up, but you don’t need to check up statistics on everything you do in order to understand that dropping a plate (unless it is a valuable antique!) is no big deal and that lots of other people do it all the time as well. It’s a normal event in the everyday world and it shouldn’t have anything to do with your self esteem.

There’s lots going on out there

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s important to try to develop a wider view of the things that go on around you and not relate everything back to your own abilities or lack of them. One way to do this is to take an interest in current affairs and the news. It helps us appreciate what’s going on in the world, and gives us the opportunity to develop a more outward looking approach instead of the self-destructive inward-looking attitude that makes us consider everything to be our fault.

In the next post I’m going to be looking at one particular issue which lies at the root of many people’s feelings of low self-esteem, particularly in the USA and Western Europe. If you feel that I’ve hit the nail on the head then you will probably find the short course detailed below to be exactly what you’re looking for. It’s full of helpful stuff that will genuinely help.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

The trouble with low self-esteem is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By that I mean the more we think we’re useless at something, the more likely we actually are to be useless at it. And it applies in just about every part of our lives. If we convince ourselves that we’re not going to score any goals in a football match then we probably won’t. If we say to ourselves that we’re not going to get the promotion that’s on offer at work then we probably won’t. And if we tell ourselves that we’re never going to get a date with the good-looking guy or girl in the office then it will probably never happen.

Negative feedback

You can see that this sort of thinking leads to a negative spiral that just feeds on itself and makes matters worse and worse. This is what low self-esteem is all about and, if not handled in the right way, it can be very difficult to escape from. The worse we think we are the worse we become and the worst we become the worse we think we are.

Don’t worry, it’s not insurmountable

It looks like an insurmountable problem. But it’s not. With the right help and guidance we can extricate ourselves from this spiral of negativity can start to be more positive about ourselves, our prospects and their future. As I said at the beginning the sorts of problems you’re dealing with are not at all uncommon. In fact it is estimated that over 50% of us suffer from these sorts of feelings at least once a week. So the first step in understanding our self-esteem problem is to take on board the fact that we’re quite normal.

There are a lot of strategies that we can set to work in order to combat these feelings and in the next post I’ll talk a little about what they are. But, for a more structured and easy-to-follow guide on how to eliminate these feeling of low self esteem, check out the items below. You can read more about them here.