Need to rebuild your self-esteem or reconnect with your faith in yourself? Here are some thought experiments, visualisations and writing exercises that will help you strengthen your self-belief.
1. See yourself as a friend sees you – ‘how to’ instructions here
2. Identify your values, what’s important to you. Studies have shown that this makes you feel better, apparently.
Values are most easily identified in a particular context (e.g. work and career, finances, relationships, health and fitness). So ask yourself ‘What’s important to you about work and career?’ ‘What else is important?’ and repeat until you run out of answers.
3. Identify what you are here on earth to do. All kinds of advice about how to do this out there on the internet
4. Visualisation: imagine an infinite source of love and healing and forgiveness above your head. Allow this to flow in through the crown of your head, filling you up, until it overflows out of your heart and into the people around you
5. Imagine your younger self. List all the ways that they would be impressed by what you have become and what you can now do that you couldn’t back then (there may be stuff they wouldn’t approve of, of course, but ignore that to focus on the positives)
6. “Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Remember this is also true of you!
7. Imagine your future self, looking back at you with compassion, wisdom and understanding. What could you do to become that compassionate, wise and understanding person sooner?
8. Think about what you love. The reason those people, those places, those qualities and actions call to you is because there’s something of them in you already!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z1kRhiPE0E
9. Think about a quality that you value, and that you know that you have – e.g. kindness. How do you know you have it? Chances are you will have some memories or images of situations where you showed that quality. Make those memories stronger, bigger, brighter and more vivid, and notice what happens to how you feel about yourself in relation to that quality. Repeat with other qualities.
10. Remember people you have helped.
11. Think of someone who is an inspirational figure or role model to you. Again, the only reason they inspire you is because you already have something of those qualities in you.
So, how are you like that person?
See also ‘How To Build Your Self-Belief’
11 More Ways To Reconnect With Your Self-Belief