One of the hardest parts about being a teenager is dealing with self-esteem issues, self-confidence, and the lack thereof. Sometimes it’s so hard to know what you can do to actually increase your self-esteem or work on your self-esteem. But not to worry; at the end of this piece, I am going to give you four foolproof teenage self-esteem boosting tips that are going to help you through this difficult period where all of us struggle to know: do I like myself?, do I like how I project myself? It all comes down to our self-esteem and how we can improve it. Okay, let’s explore these tips that I want to share with you today on improving your self-confidence and self-esteem.
Tip 1: Recognize Your Self-Esteem Source
The first tip we will be looking at is to deeply, truly, sincerely ask and look into this question which is where does my self-esteem come from? Now, if you are like me, you never in a million years thought to ask yourself this question when you were in high school or when you were struggling with your self-esteem issues as a teenager because it is not something that comes obviously to most of us. However, this is why it is our first tip. This question is vital to improving your self-esteem. Many teenagers, dealing with self-esteem issues and self-confidence issues do not realize that their self-esteem is coming from a really unhealthy place. An example of some of those unhealthy places are; social media, friends, peer groups, the media all around you, including magazines. The trap is that sometimes these areas of our lives can be great, but when we anchor our self-esteem solely on these sources it can be very erratic.
When you get a thousand likes on social media, you are having a great day, right? Maybe your awesome popularity at school, all your friends look up to you and believe you are a nice person. That is awesome for a day like that. But what happens when that doesn’t happen and we have been there when we put something up on social media and we don’t get a lot of response right, or days when people think very little of you or you get to an environment where you are almost invisible, it seems as if no one cares if you exist or not. Well, if your self-esteem tends to crash on those days, you might be falling in this category of getting your self-esteem from some unhealthy sources. The challenge now is to take your self-esteem from those unhealthy sources and move them over to healthy sources.
The question now is: what are those healthy sources where your self-esteem should come from? First and foremost, it should come from this idea that you are a daughter or son of God and it doesn’t matter what you look like, who your friends are, or whether you are popular or not. It also doesn’t matter because you have value regardless of what is happening on social media with your friends. You have value because you are a person of infinite Worth. This comes down to knowing who you are as a spiritual and physical being and also believing in yourself and knowing your strengths and what makes you an astonishing person. So, the challenge for you is to figure out where your unhealthy sources of self-esteem are and transfer them over to healthy ones. Maybe you are like most people where you draw your self-esteem from several sources like your peer group, social media, and your knowledge of your self-worth. Maybe your self-knowledge is your healthy source. So, I will say shift all your self-esteem sources to this healthy source of self-knowledge. When you do this, it will radically change how you see yourself
Tip 2: Place Value on Yourself
The second tip for you is to be kind to yourself, reward yourself, and place some value on your person. It is easy to forget about you in the world today because there is so much focus on happenings and sometimes even when speaking about personal development, building self-confidence, we forget about the self, the person! This tip is so important because self-esteem starts with you; it starts with being kind to yourself and showing love to yourself. A teenager once shared her experience with me of how growing up, she felt very low on self-esteem because she had very few friends and most of her peers would not want to spend time with her because they say she was not cool or fun. She always thought something was wrong with her when her friends chose not to be with her or when someone did something bad to her she believed it was her fault.
“I always thought oh there must be something wrong with me right there I need to be better and Jane can’t you step it up and why aren’t you better”
Most teenagers go down this spiral of negativity without knowing that there is no reason for those feelings, especially when you know that you were created to be unique, you are incredible, an individual of infinite worth, regardless of what happens in the outside world. An important way to change the narrative and develop that belief is by being kind to yourself, placing value on yourself. So, forgive yourself, speak kindly to yourself, practice self-love, take time for you, and realize that everyone cannot be your friend. You will be a better brother, sister, friend, classmate or family member when you have taken time to love yourself.
[37] Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. [38] This is the first and great commandment. [39] And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [40] On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Matt 22: 37-40
Notice the last part of verse 39 which says; “love thy neighbor as thyself”. This means you are to show your neighbour the same love you show to yourself. So, God expects you to actually love yourself. Because the truth is if you don’t love yourself, you will be unable to love others. It starts with you.
Tip 3: Goal Setting
This third tip is one of my favorites when it comes to showing individuals how to increase their self-esteem. Most teenagers may be wondering how setting goals helps me increase my self-esteem. The reason setting goals is so amazing to boosting your self-esteem and boosting your self-confidence is because it distracts you from some of those outside forces as you take the time to center yourself to really think about what you want out of life, who you want to become and how you want to achieve them. Setting goals also makes you take a look at who you are as a person and who you want to become. This gets you really focused on the other part as to why setting goals is so important to self-esteem. The reason is that it shows what you can do, it’s like adding an arrow into your quiver of why you are amazing. It actually validates the fact that you are a person a great value and you can achieve anything.
I can’t tell you how much fun it is to look back at a list of goals and say oh my goodness! I achieved this. This goal was so difficult and I did that or I passed this class that I thought I was going to fail because I really put in my best. Achieving your set goal is a great way to remind yourself of how amazing you are because all of us need reminders every now and then of how amazing we are. Now, take a moment from reading this and challenge yourself to write down three goals that you would like to accomplish here in the next month. These can be small goals but any sort of goal will start you in the positive forward direction of improving your self-esteem. So, take a few seconds from reading this and come back when you have finished writing down those goals. Make the goals very specific with definite deadlines. An example is; instead of saying “I want to learn how to use Microsoft excel” you say “I want to complete a Microsoft excel certified beginner training by 30th August, 2020”.
Successful people and achievers in all fields all set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge, and helps you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life. We will do something exhaustive in the coming days on goal setting with practical steps to help you set effective goals and achieve your goals. I believe you took time out to set those three goals earlier; if not, you can also do that after reading the entire article to the end.
Tip 4: Stay in A Supportive Environment
The fourth tip is to surround yourself with people who support you, or staying in an environment with people that support you. Self-esteem can be built up and it can be destroyed. A major way to build up your self-esteem is to surround yourself with people who support the development of your self-esteem. Reverse can also be the case if you are constantly spending time in an environment or with people that don’t support the development of your self-esteem in which case your self-esteem can be destroyed.
For my younger readers – my teenagers out there – while you might have a lot of friends and a lot of peer groups that you interact with, not everyone there will support you in the way that is conducive to boosting your self-esteem. This is not because your friends are bad, but to simplify this, it comes down to the fact that some people are not emotionally mature enough to respect you in the way that you deserve to be or some people just are so worried about themselves and are dealing with their own issues in their own self-esteem that they cannot give you what you need to feel supported and loved. So don’t let this disturb you so much but make sure you are surrounding yourself with people who support and love you and make you feel loved and valued.
Also of great importance is your willingness to cut out some of these toxic people in your life and toxic seems like such a harsh word but it is the truth. There is no better term for people that don’t have your best interests at heart, so do that right now. Don’t postpone cutting off toxic people from your environment. It is important for young people to know that they do not have to feel bad for not hanging out with somebody that maybe doesn’t make you always feel like your best, just take this step and secure a supportive environment for developing your self-esteem.
All the best!
