Teens Meet Outreach

Self Esteem is basically the degree to which you are confident in your own skin. The degree to which you feel worth or respect for yourself. That is, how much you value yourself.

Self-esteem can be low or high. Healthy self-esteem is necessary for overall mental health. It helps maintain a sense of balance in your view of yourself, your relationships and the world at large. However, not everyone can clearly decipher if they have low self-esteem or not,.

Below are some common pointers that may be telltale signs that one has self-esteem issues:

1. You loathe yourself

Loathing yourself is characterised by hating your thoughts, your actions, and feelings of frustration and anger about the kind of person you are. You experience an inability to forgive yourself when you make mistakes regardless of how little those mistakes are. You are also obsessed with perfection. This means that regardless of how much you try or how much you achieve, you never feel quite good enough. You would always see someone that did it better or see some way it could have been better and so you always hate yourself for not doing enough.

2. You don’t feel deserving of love

Due to how low you view yourself, you never see yourself worth loving. This is why you find yourself in, and stay in, abusive relationships because you feel if you walk away, you’d never find anyone to love you. In rare cases where someone comes along who loves you and treats you well, you never feel deserving of the love and this can lead to distrust, suspicion and actions that are unhealthy for the relationship.

3. You think your ideas are not good enough

In a gathering where people are giving ideas or sharing their opinions, you feel reluctant to contribute as you feel others know better and that if your ideas are really good enough then someone else would think of it. Even when you are almost certain that you have a valid idea, you hold back because you are afraid of being laughed at and being embarrassed. You are also afraid that if you share your idea then it would be obvious to other people that they are really better than you and that you are not qualified to relate with them.

4. You are oversensitive

This is usually one of the common tell tales of low self-esteem and it usually shows forth in two extremes: anger and depression. That is, in light of criticism, you easily get angered or feel demolished. You feel as though every attempt at correction is an attack to your person. As a matter of fact, you find it hard to find the humour in friendly jesting because they all seem to you to attack and expose you for who you think you are.

5. You are fearful and anxious

You have an underlying belief that you are too insignificant and powerless to change anything in your world and this leads to a constant case of fear and anxiety. This makes you settle for a comfortable state where you are not challenged to do anything that stresses or threatens your current state and anytime you face anything that challenges that state, even when it is positive (like a promotion), you are fearful and anxious that you will mess it up.

6. When things go south, you blame yourself

Life is not perfect for any of us and we all face setbacks occasionally. While some of us take this in stride and understand it is a part of existence, if you have low self-esteem, you are more likely to blame yourself. This is your coping mechanism. You become overwhelmed with self-disappointment and shame and this holds you back from evaluating valuable feedbacks objectively so as to ease the situation at hand. This leads to an accumulation of setbacks that in turn leads to more defeat and more self-loathing.

7. You never decide

If you have low self-esteem, then you would very likely find it hard to trust your ability to make good decisions. You second guess yourself a lot, going back and forth on even the most basic decisions. Additionally, you ask other people for their opinion and you tend to esteem their decisions and choices higher than yours. In situations where you do make a decision on your own, you seek other people to validate your decisions, seeking some form of reassurance from them. Often, you make decisions that do not reflect what you really want or who you are but the fear of making a mistake keeps you from doing what you really want to do.

8. You are a people pleaser

With low self-esteem, you tend to see others better than you and so you want others to like, love and respect you. This pushes you to look out for what you think they want to see in you and then you act in line with that. This means that when you want to make decisions, even those as simple as what you wear, you tend to think of what someone would like you to wear and not necessarily what you’d like to wear or what you’d feel comfortable in. This is probably the greatest evil of low self-esteem, how it can lead to losing yourself to people’s opinions. If you have followed people’s opinions for so long, you might even find it hard to define who you really are.

There you have it, eight signs that show you have self-esteem issues. This matter is one that is central to how much you succeed and how much of life you enjoy and so it is important that attention is paid to it.

If the attributes above sound like you, then look out for ways to improve your self-esteem.

Don’t forget, it is a process. Don’t be too hard on yourself, you didn’t get to this state of mind in a day, you may not be able to improve in a day.

Refuse to settle. You are more than this. You deserve to live, you deserve to enjoy life. You deserve to be heard. You deserve to be seen. Embark on a self-discovery journey that would lead you to the knowledge of who you truly are and what you are truly capable of doing.

A good place to start? A relationship with God.

---

Do leave a comment below and don’t forget to subscribe to this blog to not miss a post.