Confidence and Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is what you think about yourself. It is how you think you are as a person and how good you feel about yourself.

Strategies for raising self-esteem

• Be positive

• Take notice of when you are negative towards yourself and try to stop the negative thinking.

• Remember the good things. Write them down.

• Think big, but be realistic.

• Try new things.

• Think about your qualities that have helped you in your life. Make a list and think about how you might use these qualities in the future.

• Get involved. Participate.

• Do things that you love doing and you know you are good at.

• Let yourself make mistakes. Learn from your mistakes.

• Try to believe in yourself.

• Try Positive Affirmations. Positive affirmations are positive comments or statements that you can keep telling yourself (either out loud or in your head).

Examples of positive affirmations:

• I can do it!
• I will get the assignment done by the due date!
• I am clever!
• We can win!
• I can get a part time job!

Sometimes trying to be positive can be very hard. Often when something goes wrong it is easy to believe that everything always happens to me. This is negative self talk. To check on your self talk you could ask:

• Am I focusing on the negative things, have I forgotten about what I can actually do?
• Are things as bad as they seem?
• Am I being negative?
• Am I being realistic?
• How can I be more positive?