Jessica Hylands draws on her experience as a Confidence Coach to share some advice for those of us with low-self esteem - a common side-effect of divorce and family breakdown.
"How good do you think you are? Do you like yourself? Going through a relationship break-up can leave you feeling less than great. Getting a divorce which ends up being adversarial can totally smash your self-esteem and make taking a non-adversarial route - using mediation or collaborative law - very challenging.
Your self-esteem is how you feel about yourself and your own value. It's a combination of self-confidence and self-respect
We can feel bad about ourselves either because of life experiences, or because other people have given us a bad image of ourselves.
Self-esteem, as the name would suggest, comes from you. No-one can make you feel anything. It's how you react to a situation that causes you to feel one way or the other, not the situation itself.
Hypnotherapy and NLP are very effective in helping with this.
Whilst you may feel bad about yourself now, do you remember a time when you didn't? That person, the real you, is still there. The real you knows that you are good and worthy. The real you knows that you have just cause to feel confident and proud. You can be that person again.
The key difference between having low self-esteem and high self-esteem is that the latter are happy with who they are. They don't feel the need to conform to other peoples standards, but will set their own. They are confident in their own self and so what someone else thinks won't cause them problems.
Some tips for raising your self-esteem:
- Write down everything good about yourself. Value those attributes and think of them often. Be honest about what you like about yourself.
- Don't feel bad about having done or said something that you deem to be stupid or wrong. When this happens, whilst you might cringe, the chances are that no-one noticed, or if they did, they won't remember it. To the degree that people care about you doing or saying something wrong, most people are only interested in themselves.
- When other people pass comment or criticism, listen, evaluate and make what you want of it. Just because their opinion differs to yours, doesn't make theirs right. If you prefer your view, stick to it.
You have the capacity to have high self-esteem which brings with it confidence, contentment, assertiveness and happiness. Does this sound good to you? Give the tips above some thought. I hope that thinking about these on a daily basis will start to change your opinion of yourself, thereby giving you more strength and conviction to get the results you want.
To have greater confidence and higher self-esteem in your life, the first stage is to recognise the difference it will make to your life - and then to take those first steps in making it happen!"
For free advice on how to avoid adversarial divorce, click here....