How to Build Your Self-Esteem

What do you think of yourself? Depending on who you are, that question may be easy to answer and won’t leave you feeling low. Alternatively, you may find yourself dwelling on the question and struggling to find a way to answer it positively.

Our self-esteem is fundamentally what we think of ourselves, our attitude towards ourselves. It is how we evaluate our self-worth and indicates what we believe, think, and feel about ourselves. Our self-regard says a lot about whether we think we have value. This, in turn, has an enormous impact on our success, relationships, and happiness.

Navigating life with self-acceptance and a positive outlook on our capacities is one ingredient to flourishing. Having proper self-esteem allows you to live life with an openness to criticism, the ability to show your curiosity, give and receive compliments, and enjoy the humorous aspects of your own life.

The good news about self-esteem is that you can develop a more positive attitude towards yourself.

How to Build Your Self-esteem

Your self-esteem is fueled by certain things. These may be as wide-ranging as certain life experiences, your personality, social circumstances, age, genetics, and how you compare yourself to others. To build your self-esteem in a meaningful way that won’t be easily upended by circumstances, you need to build your self-perception and what you think, feel, and believe about yourself on rock-solid truths.

To figure out how to build your self-esteem, here are a few precious truths to consider on your life journey:

You matter.

Regardless of who you are, you have infinite value. Knowing that you are a valuable human being who is worthy of love is a crucial part of the hard work of affecting our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs about ourselves. To build your self-esteem, believing this truth about yourself is key. It is objectively true, but you must see, feel, and think of it as being true of you for it to make a difference in your life.

There are great verses in the Bible about who we are as human beings and the infinite value we possess as beings made in God’s image. Verses such as, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalm 139: 14) or “…what is humanity that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:4) remind us of the loving attention God continues to lavish upon us.

If those verses aren’t quickened in our hearts, though, if they do not come alive to us and strike us as true in the places where we live, they won’t do us any good. Self-esteem is about how we are on the inside; to make a real difference, the truth must hit home and meet us where we are and transform us from the inside out.

Begin viewing yourself as God does.

An important part of the work of building up your self-esteem is to change your perspective of yourself. To be more explicit about what was hinted at in talking about understanding that we matter, the view we need to adopt of ourselves is God’s. As the One upon whom everything in existence depends, the One in whom “we live and move and have our being,” God’s perspective is the all-important one.

We don’t always view ourselves as we should. Because of sin, our vision isn’t 20-20. How we feel, think, and the attitude we have toward ourselves is unreliable – either by undervaluing ourselves, or else overvaluing ourselves. When we pay attention to what Bible verses are saying about us, we’re listening to God’s perspective and embracing God’s wisdom. Using God’s perspective to ground and inform our own allows us to align our inward reality with outward Reality.

Treat yourself gently.

Being compassionate toward yourself can help you begin to develop a healthy sense of self-esteem. Sometimes we can be overly harsh and critical with ourselves. This can feed negative or low self-esteem. Self-compassion will allow us to take our mistakes in stride and to be gentle with ourselves. Many people will exercise compassion toward others, but they are harsh critics when it comes to themselves. Healthy self-esteem requires that we nurture even our feeble efforts.

Speaking about the gentleness of Jesus toward people, Matthew quoted one of the prophets and said, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”

Jesus understands the sensitivities and weaknesses of his people; he does not ride roughshod over them, and that compassion is something we should practice toward ourselves. Sheltering our fragilities and giving ourselves room to grow seeds the ground for growing robust self-esteem.

Practice self-forgetfulness.

It is possible to have an over-inflated sense of ourselves, just as it is possible to have a low opinion about ourselves. We can fall into the trap of pride, where we have an exaggerated sense of the worth of our accomplishments. On the other side of that is the trap of false modesty, where we form low opinions of our talents and capabilities, confusing that for true humility.

As C.S. Lewis once wrote, growth in humility looks more like a person being in “a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. …[God] wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents… [God’s] whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man’s mind off the subject of his own value altogether.”

Instead of asking and focusing on what we think of ourselves, perhaps a better question to ask might be, “What does God think of me, and do I believe that and want to live my life in light of that reality?” Reshaping the question allows us to establish our lives on unshakeable ground.

Christians believe that when we enter into a relationship with God, God sends the Holy Spirit to dwell in us and walk with us. The Spirit helps to articulate God’s love to us in ways that may even surpass our understanding. As our minds are renewed in the light of God’s truth, we begin to live, think, feel about ourselves and our lives as God does. This is truly flourishing!

One of the paradoxes Jesus presented his followers was that if we live our lives centered on ourselves, instead of gaining our lives and being fulfilled, we will find ourselves empty (Mark 8:31-9:1). On the other hand, he said that to be fulfilled, to truly flourish, we need to practice self-forgetfulness.

This is so countercultural. We fight hard to be visible, to accomplish our goals, and receive accolades that feed our self-confidence. Jesus challenges us and says that we will never find our true selves in this way. Finding ourselves is only possible as we center our lives on God and become preoccupied with God’s interests.

Conclusion

The journey toward learning how to build your self-esteem does not have to be one you embark on by yourself. Surrounding yourself with a community and voices who encourage you is indispensable to your growth. Additionally, a psychotherapist can help you learn how to build your self-esteem as you dismantle some of the negative narratives you have imbibed that feed a poor attitude about yourself. They may also walk with you in reaffirming a more positive narrative and fair-minded self-assessment.

Self-esteem is about how you see, think, and feel about yourself. It is about having a positive outlook and attitude toward yourself. Proper self-esteem ultimately doesn’t rest on our accomplishments or the opinions of others, but on a decision that we make to our value in God’s eyes and to shape our thinking around that. That gives us a solid foundation upon which to stand.