When Your Self-Esteem Needs Nurturing

Some days, your self-esteem needs a lot of nurturing.

Maybe it’s a day when you’re struggling to get things done but you can’t get any momentum going. Or you listened to a podcast that convinced you you’re not where you should be in life. You might even be about to enter a personal rabbit hole that triggers all of your perceived flaws, and your self-esteem needs help right away.

Before we go further, let’s talk about what self-esteem is and why it needs tender care.

To begin, your self-esteem rests on a bedrock of self-acceptance–recognizing that as a human you have inherent worth and value–in spite of what you might perceive to be your flaws or problems.

Carl Rogers called this unconditional positive regard, which we can have for others as well as ourselves. However, in today’s therapy speak, self-esteem is often separated out from other “selfies” like self-compassion, self-belief, self-confidence, or self-concept. 

More likely, all these selfies work together collectively, and reflect that healthy self-esteem needs the kind of loving care that is essentially a form of inner work. Most importantly, it is the work of moving away from seeing yourself as a problem and moving toward seeing yourself as fully human.

Not an easy journey to be sure, but definitely an important one. (I’ll come back to this in a minute.)

About a decade ago I had a therapy experience that helped me understand how much care and kindness we need.

It was late afternoon, a few weeks into the New Year. I came out of my office and into the waiting room, where my client was reading a magazine. (Yes, this was back in the day when we had waiting rooms, and they were full of magazines.)

She carried the magazine into my office and placed it on the coffee table. Then she started to cry.

It turned out she had deliberately arrived early, and was looking forward to spending some blissful “me” time thumbing through magazines in a quiet waiting room.

One hundred pages later, she was anything but blissed out. She was tense and agitated, with a crawling feeling of worry and self-defeat.

She felt flooded by page after page of advice, and wondered out loud: How did I miss this? What’s wrong with me? I’m so behind!

Like my client, your self-esteem has probably been impacted by experiences that seem benign on the surface. 

The magazine story I just recounted is quaint compared to today. Nowadays there’s unending information and advice 24/7, right at your fingertips about how to…

• be successful
• get organized
• have your best year ever
• get in shape
• eat better
• make decisions
• dress better
• set boundaries
• stop (fill in the blank): people pleasing, procrastinating, fixing, playing small, comparing, seeking perfection, being an imposter, etc.

And no matter how conscious you are of the stream of advice, it can still take its toll.

It may not make sense, but words meant to help can have the opposite effect on self-esteem.

Perhaps you know what I mean. Have you ever had one of those “gotcha” moments after taking in advice? You may have experienced a sensation of spiraling down, a knot in your stomach, or a sinking sensation.

A moment like that can pass quickly and happen at an almost unconscious level. Often you can’t connect the dots or even stop to catch what’s happening. Still, you may carry away some residual negative feelings about yourself as a result of it.

Sometimes you know immediately when your sense of self-worth has been wounded.

You might realize you’ve done exactly the opposite of what you’re being advised to do. Then, in the blink of an eye, you’ve uncovered something about yourself that you now perceive to be a problem.

You file it away. No big deal. But those experiences build up over time. And you feel wobbly.

You might feel confused, too, like your inner navigation is off. That’s because you’ve momentarily put aside the quiet wisdom that has always existed within you.

Your trust in that wisdom can start to fade. Like an eroding river bank, your contours begin to change, and it gets harder to hear that quiet wisdom.

The best way I know to nurture your self-esteem needs is to embrace your fundamental humanity.

Remember what I said earlier, about how boosting self-esteem is essentially a form of inner work?  And how we can shift things by moving away from seeing ourselves as problems while moving toward seeing ourselves as fully human?

It’s not always easy, but you shore up that riverbank within you when you embrace your full humanity and claim the inherent worth that has always been there. And, as a woman who embraces her full humanity, you can begin to shift your inner narrative right now. 

When you get right down to it, a sense of deep self-worth doesn’t rest on your actions to improve, it rests on your humanity.

Of course, self-improvement might bolster your self-esteem, but the fact that you are human means you may still struggle. Not because you’re flawed, but because struggle is a core human experience. And that truth has nothing to do with your inherent worth or value.

You may find this hard to take in, but things that you’ve been told (and probably believe) are flaws are actually common struggles that come not only with being human, but also from living during current times.

• For instance, did you know that up to 92% of people are affected by perfectionism?
• Furthermore, 20% of people are chronic procrastinators, with most people procrastinating sometimes.
• And finally, 49% of us identify as people-pleasers, with 92% doing at least one people-pleasing behavior often.

(Statistics courtesy of AI via Mental Health Match, Forbes, Tulane University, YouGov)

No wonder self-esteem needs gentle nurturing and time away from information overload.

I know it’s hard to tune out the noise, especially online. But that’s what I wish for you, for all of us: to swim away from the flood of advice, climb to higher ground, and open up to the deeper voice within that reminds you that you are a beautiful, imperfect human.

Because the thing is, you already know so much about how to live your life. Can you imagine what it would be like to listen deeply and trust that wise and soulful voice within?

We all have a better guide in ourselves, if we could attend to it, than any other person can be. –Jane Austen

Self-esteem counseling invites you to see yourself through compassionate eyes.

I offer women’s self-esteem counseling in Santa Rosa CA and online across California.