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Choosing Your Identity to Help Boost Self-Esteem

May 25, 2022 Will Redmond

In my last post, I talked about balancing pressure and self-esteem. I often place so much emphasis on my mental health that it becomes my entire identity, which can potentially negatively affect my self-esteem and denies me the ability to choose my identity.

I recently had a reader reach out to me asking what steps I've taken to stop putting so much pressure on myself. I've been reflecting on that question for a couple of days now and would like to expand on it in today's post.

How to Choose Identity to Help My Self-Esteem

1. Pay attention to your conversations.

The first step for me in identifying self-applied pressure has been understanding the motivations behind specific conversations. My mental health is crucial to talk about with those closest to me; it's how I keep myself in check. However, I started noticing it was becoming the topic of every conversation I was having. I realized that it had infiltrated even joyous occasions, like travel, and was disrupting my inner peace. At that point, I told myself that sometimes I need to accept a given problem as temporary and isolated rather than lumping it into the ongoing problem of low self-esteem.

2. Realize that some situations are isolated problems to be handled immediately, not another thing to add to the growing pile of problems.

The next step in my process is where I began looking at my circumstances as individual incidents rather than a giant storm of issues.

When I was classifying every problem under the I-have-mental-health-problems banner, they continued to grow in number without any solution. Now, I try to focus on each issue I have in an isolated manner. Let's say I made a mistake on a work project, and my boss reprimands me. Before, I probably would have let that negatively affect my self-esteem by thinking I was largely under-qualified for my role because I've made other mistakes at work previously. Now, I choose to look at it as a learning experience because it's an isolated incident in my mind and one that I can grow from.

The two different approaches could have drastically different outcomes. I could potentially worry myself out of a job with the negative method. With the positive method, I become a better employee.

Lumping My Issues Together Was a Bad Habit

Finally, I'd like to talk about breaking the habit of lumping all of my issues together. It's been a tough habit to break with a few bumps along the way, but being able to step back from a situation and confront it in a specific manner has helped me improve my self-esteem.

It also keeps me from letting these issues slip into my identity -- something I've struggled with previously. It allows me to overcome each setback individually rather than pushing it down the line for my future self to deal with. It's a very liberating feeling.

If you have any questions, please reach out to me in the comments below.

APA Reference
Redmond, W. (2022, May 25). Choosing Your Identity to Help Boost Self-Esteem, HealthyPlace. Retrieved on 2024, March 27 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/buildingselfesteem/2022/5/choosing-your-identity-to-help-boost-self-esteem



Author: Will Redmond

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