In a video I did with Featured Speaker Souldancer during Speaker Palooza 2019, we talked about how your sense of self-worth can impact how your audience perceives you. High self-worth breeds confidence and confidence makes you a more effective speaker.
If your sense of self-worth could use some help, don’t worry—you can take it one baby step at a time.
Like most things, building your self-worth is best done in small, incremental steps. If you have low self-esteem, trying to feel more confident and worthy just like that might seem impossible. Trying to do everything at once is exhausting, will scatter your energy, and will most likely lead to less progress than you’d like. You risk feeling worse than when you started.
Where should you start?
My advice is to approach building your self-worth like a project and break it down into small achievable steps. Take one step at a time, and before you know it, you’ll be feeling much better about yourself.
Build self-worth one block at a time
Make a positive decision not to try to change everything at once. Acknowledge that this is just setting you up for failure, which is the last thing you need. But by making this a conscious decision, you’re setting out on a positive path of doing things calmly and building yourself a sure foundation. A foundation built on self-care and kindness.
And you’re off to a great start already! The fact that you’ve read this far means you’re self-aware and want to do the best for yourself.
Self-kindness builds self-worth
Positive self-worth builds on self-care and kindness. Here are five small, but significant things you can do to be kind to yourself, today and throughout the coming weeks.
- Build in regular mini-treats to make yourself feel good. A monthly massage or manicure, or a walk in the park a few times a week.
- Acknowledge your weaknesses and think of a positive action you can take to help yourself. Apps for time or money management perhaps, a fitness coach, or taking a class. Remember to tackle one action at a time.
- Journaling can be helpful in identifying, challenging and turning around negative self-perceptions. You can use a guided self-worth journal or a simple notebook in which you write down every positive thing you can think of about yourself. Think of things that are just about you, not things where you compare yourself to someone else. Are you a good writer? Are you kind? Do you have a good sense of humor? Do people love your pancakes?
- Start a daily gratitude journal. You might be grateful for clean air, water, enough food to eat and a house to live in for starters. Living in a place of gratitude keeps your brain looking for things to be grateful for, so you’ll begin seeing things all around you.
- At the end each day think of at least one good thing that happened that day. And upon waking think of a positive affirmation to take you through that day.
