If you're confident and have a good level of self esteem - how do you "talk" to yourself?

[ThinkThings]

I'm basically asking because I have very low self esteem, like pretty much non existent. I've been like this from a very very young age so my thoughts / beliefs are pretty entrenched and I honestly don't know if I can improve things.

As a result, I have very low self confidence and also social anxiety. As you can imagine, this has held me back massively in life, in my career and it's had a huge impact on my whole life trajectory. I feel like a failure tbh.

I've tried cbt, reading lots of books, watching videos etc and nothing really seems to work eg. Cbt, mindfulness, therapy, ACT, compassion focussed therapy - I'm going round and round in circles and feeling even more worse than when I started off as I feel so broken.

I'm wondering what on earth goes on in the minds of "healthy" brains that have a good sense of self esteem.

How do you think about yourself / how do you talk to yourself? How do you talk to yourself when you "fail" something? How are you in new situations like starting a new job. Show me a peek inside what I should be aiming for.

Transactional analysis really helped me, gave me an idea of my critical voice and what a nurturing voice sounds like.
I generally speak to myself with kindness now but we all best ourselves up from time to time, it’s catching and going into kindness that works for me.

*beat

Do you have any idea why you have low self esteem? There must be a root cause if you do then therapy to tackle it is the way forward.

People I know who have had low self esteem issues have often one or more of the following. Critical parents, a very bad relationship especially when young and then a pattern emerges, they are very unhappy with their own perception of their looks, possibly teased at school. Could be anything with weight a common factor, parents showing an obvious favourite.

I am one of six children, Mother played obvious favourite. Myself and my sister accepted this and didn’t do the love me more stuff that the other three did. Those three have had a lifetime of chronic low self esteem and it’s influenced them making some choices that were bad for them. Why myself and this one sister couldn’t be bothered to play the game I have no idea.

There’s a really good book, Chatter, on this very subject

Talk to yourself like you are your own friend, too often we are self critical but would never talk like that to a friend.

If I don’t succeed then I tell myself it wasn’t my fault as there were things I couldn’t influence. Or that I would have succeeded if I had chosen to try harder.
If someone doesn’t like me it’s probably more about them than me

I'm the confidant type with a high leval of self esteem and i don't have much chatter going on in my head aside what I might do tonight or make for tea.

I do have anxiety so will sometimes tell myself that I'm managing a situation well. But I do more thinking (usually about work) then a chatter in my head.

I don't think I have an absence of frustrating thoughts following a fail, it's just that that those thoughts are time limited and I think natural optimism that puts me quickly back on my tracks and looking for another way to approach the problem or work around it.

I think that's the key. If you can turn off the negative chat and just focus on the mundane things then you've got room for the positive. I also don't have a lot of chatter but what there is I try to make things that make me feel better.

I'm confident and also don't have a lot of chatter or talk to myself. So I guess maybe 'quit beating yourself up' would be the advice, just move on from failures and on to the next task / activity etc.

I am very much a work in progress, but nowadays I talk to myself gently more often than not.

In cbt I was taught that I should treat negative or intrusive thoughts like a puppy that keeps bringing you things you don't want. You wouldn't shout at the puppy because that would reinforce the negative behaviour. You would talk gently to the puppy and try to distract it from the negative behaviour.

Maybe I haven't explained it that well but it works well for me.

I just decided I don't give a crap what people think anymore lol

How do you think about yourself / how do you talk to yourself? How do you talk to yourself when you "fail" something? How are you in new situations like starting a new job. Show me a peek inside what I should be aiming for.

I'm not religious, and I'm not in AA, but I think my attitude is summed up by the Serenity Prayer.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

I try hard, if I fail I learned something and it will be less hard next time. I laugh at things a lot, which really helps. Fall over? Laugh. Spill something? Laugh. I find the positive as far as I can and talk about that. I treasure and collect times that 'failures' actually led to success. Some of the best times in my life have been redirected failures. I once walked into a room of 'challenging' young people I had just met and had to teach and spilled an entire Starbucks all over the floor. So embarrassing. But a couple of them helped me clean up and my effusive thanks and the bonding meant the session went incredibly. There's always an upside if you look.

Also, physiologically fear is the exact same as excitement. It's your conscious mind that interprets one negatively and one positively. So if I'm doing something new I think about it like a roller coaster or bungee jumping. It's exciting but the chatter makes it scary. See it as exciting.

I try and get out of my own head and look at something much bigger / older than my little world. Makes me feel more stable / gives me some perspective. Pictures from space, podcasts about history, learning something new, going for a walk to look at trees... that sort of thing.

Don't know if this is useful OP but here's what I did and it worked unbelievably well. It was back when I was a teen and going through a really bad family situation that I couldn't escape from.

• stop looking down and always look up and in people's eyes as I walked past them
• shoulders back with a posture that showed I felt proud of who I was which I wasn't initially
• never buy black clothes again, only colourful
• do exercise every day
• cut out people who were negative as far as I could
• choose positive music and films not depressing ones
• don't allow myself to say anything negative about myself. I was battling with some negative things and I made a decision to only dwell on them 1hr a day, no more.
• smile at people

All of that probably sounds glib but I did it as a teen and it set me on a journey. I am genuinely a really positive healthy person these days and honestly I never dropped those habits and it just made things better and better for me.

Don't think I can be much help, but I really don't talk to myself. If I get a knock back I don't dwell on it, just move on to the next thing.

Think that people like me, so am not a bad person. Think about nice things people have said in the past, how I have been there for friends etc. Remember positive stuff people have said about my work or me in professional setting if it's work related. In relationships try and focus on the fact that people do like me and find me attractive so even if one person doesn't it not personal if that makes sense. If is hard sometimes.

I understand how you feel. I’ve worked hard at this in psychotherapy! If you can’t afford that, I’d really recommend Abraham Hicks talks on YouTube as each segment/talk is like a mini lesson in how to ‘massage’ yourself into a better feeling place.

I think like PPs said, to a certain extent it’s about quieting your thoughts and mediation/Eckhart Tolle’s kind of philosophy works well for that (the power of now is great for anxiety - pulling yourself back to the present moment - like ET says it’s very rare that there’s actually a catastrophe happening in the present moment. Usually it’s that we’re dwelling on something that happened in the past (depression) or that we’re thinking too far ahead (anxiety).

But also it’s a bit about replacing your thoughts with more positive/loving thoughts and Abraham Hicks is good for that - they say, ‘you can’t leap from here to there’. So with positive affirmations, you can’t jump straight into an amazingly positive affirmation and expect it to make you feel better - the leap will be too great and it’ll make you feel rubbish for not truly believing it! You have to go step by step into the next best feeling place that you can really genuinely grasp.

How do you think about yourself / how do you talk to yourself? How do you talk to yourself when you "fail" something? How are you in new situations like starting a new job. Show me a peek inside what I should be aiming for.

I can’t get it wrong…
I can never get it done…
It’s alright…
I did my best…
I didn’t know any better…
I did the best I could with what I knew at the time…
Next time I’ll know better…
There’s no failure, only learning…
It’ll take time…
Baby steps…
I can’t do everything at once…
I can learn things bit by bit…
I can go slow…
I don’t need to be perfect or achieve lots…
Just need to breathe…

Thanks for starting this thread, op. It's really helpful.

Thanks everyone. I had a rare training day yesterday which I found just highlighted even more how I really need to sort this out. It made me really sad actually.

During my "intro* to the group, my voice was shaking, I was smiling but my mouth was shaking. I felt so embarrassed. I just went into panic mode and just wanted the ground to swallow me up. This is what I deal with on a daily basis. I just automatically go into this panic mode in most new social situations. Even if I prepare myself it's just so automatic that I wonder if i can ever change.

Did you see a therapist which specialised in this or was it something you did yourself. Could you explain how it works briefly as a quick Google is showing me parent / adult / child relationship stuff and I'm not sure how it can be applied to low self esteem. Thanks

If it's physically the talking,then maybe something like Toastmasters could help, where you have to practise speaking in front of others, and it can help you build confidence and manage panic in a supportive environment. But you may need therapy alongside it to build your self-esteem.

I don't really talk to myself, I just do most of the time.

As PPs have said, try and get out of your head, and speak as you would to a child with your difficulties. You’d be kind and supportive, I’m sure. And, to paraphrase Cersei from Game of Thrones, When you play the Game of Life, you win, or you learn, there’s no failure. You do what you can with what you know. When you know better, you’ll do better.

Be mindful, and notice what you are feeling, but as a disinterested observer. I’m feeling nervous. But don’t then go on to think, that means I’ll stuff it up. It just means your nervous, nothing more. Good luck, and thank you for starting this thread.

It's interesting isn't it, how siblings may have had similar upbringing but its affects could be different for each of them.

My low self esteem probably comes from being the youngest of 5 kids. The older 4 were close in age and there was a gap before I came along. So basically I was left out alot, played on my own mostly, ignored, not included, never got to choose what id like to watch on the one tv we had as everyone watched what they wanted. I literally used to hand over the remote if anyone else came in.
If I asked questions, or was curious my siblings would snap at me to shut up/ go away. Shut up was something that was told to me so often I think I just took it literally! I subconsciously thought I was unimportant. During family TV time I wouldn't join everyone else on the sofa. I would sit on the floor on the side where id be out of the way. I was also told alot that I was weird for being quiet, not normal, it was irritating, why was I like this. I also got this from cousins too. I just tried to stay invisible and out of the way really, then noone would shout at me for nothing. Unfortunately it now manifests as social anxiety/ low self esteem/ general feeling of hating myself.