Low self-esteem often stems from childhood or later life experiences but we can also generate it ourselves or maintain it, whatever the cause, and we do that by our negative self-talk. Many years ago, a friend asked me if I was aware that I was calling myself stupid on a regular basis and my response was that it was just a joke but she pointed out that I might have intended it as a joke but my mind would have believed it.

Many of us tend to focus on the negative and a recent client session was a good example. My client spent quite a long time telling me what she hadn’t done or hadn’t done properly or well and I then spent some time reminding her of what she previously told me she had achieved and how proud she was of those achievements.

So we have this horrible habit of believing the negative stuff or remembering the negative stuff and forgetting the positive. We all do it and the majority of my clients with anxiety are very focused on their failures or defects (as they see them) and I am the one to remind them of what they have achieved. Two things that I frequently say to clients are that we are the only person guaranteed to be with us from the beginning to the end so we should be our own best friend and none of us would talk to another human being the way we talk to ourselves in our head.

If a friend had told you about their week and there was some good and some bad you almost certainly would congratulate them on the good stuff, you wouldn’t say “well you’re obviously not very clever or you could have handled that a lot better”, which is the sort of stuff we tell ourselves.   Another thing that many of us do is to obsess about what we haven’t taken off the to-do list instead of congratulating ourselves for what we have done.

So my suggestion is to make a point of thinking about the positives in your life, the things that you have achieved or that you’re proud of or that make you happy or contented. It would be good if you could do that once a day, just think about one thing in the day that is a positive for you, something kind you said to somebody or a task you did that you’ve been putting off for a long time, whatever it is, even the smallest little thing. If you smiled at the person who checked out your shopping in the supermarket that’s a good thing because those smiles can make a huge difference to somebody’s life and not just that person. If you made that person feel a bit happier or better about themselves, they will go home and be nicer to the people waiting for them. So tiny, tiny little things can be hugely important for both you and others.

If you can every day, maybe just before you go to sleep, because it’s a nice thing to go to sleep on, think about at least one or, even better, two or three things you’ve done that day that you can congratulate yourself about, that you can feel happy about or proud of and  they don’t have to be major achievements. It’s the small things that actually make up our daily lives, not the major events like I’ve passed this exam or I’ve got this fantastic job or I’ve met this wonderful person. Those things happen quite rarely and it’s the day-to-day stuff that is important and that makes up the fabric of our lives.

This will help you become more aware of how you are talking to yourself and, the more aware you are of how you are  talking to yourself, the more you realise that you wouldn’t talk to another human being (even somebody you didn’t like very much!) in exactly the way you are talking to yourself. Then you can start trying to bring out the positive, rather than focusing on the negative and this is one important part of the work I do. Helping people to believe that they can take control of how they are thinking and feeling and thus making significant improvements to their live and the lives of everyone they interact with.