The Battle Of The Inner Critic With Our Self Esteem.

A person’s ability to perform their best in their life lays its roots in their Self-Belief. Everybody’s mental health depends on their self-esteem. Yet, we tend to overlook these needs and never acknowledge how we can enhance our self-esteem or build up more self-belief 

Millions of people suffer from social anxiety and depression because of their lack of self-belief. We repeatedly ignore the severity of these problems. We fail to acknowledge that an individual is suppressing his true potential because of low self-esteem or lack of self-belief. 

As Charles F. Kettering once said, A problem well stated is a problem half-solved, and this is what we need to implement! We need to acknowledge the importance of self-belief and its importance in every individual’s life.

The simple act of helping people introspect and understand the importance of believing themselves will help us build a better world altogether 

The belief of a person in himself to complete any task is called their self-belief. Every time we face a new challenge, we ask ourselves, Do I believe in myself? The more we ask ourselves this question, the more we find about ourselves, leading to bringing out an inner critic of sorts. 

Self-belief is integral for every human. It makes a person comfortable in their skin, helping them have a clear perspective when facing a new challenge.

It is not easy to build one’s self-belief. It takes a lot of time. There are an endless number of reasons people don’t believe in themselves. This isn’t because they aren’t good at what they do. People have achieved great feats in their life yet always feel like they don’t deserve what they have. Some people never see the potential that they have because of their inner critic eating up all their courage to take that first step 

Before we see how we can work on ourselves and build that believe we need to have to excel in our lives, we need to understand what self-esteem is. 

 A person’s self-esteem is the opinion he forms about himself. What’s different about a person’s self-esteem is that it never solidifies. It tends to depend on everything that is around them instead of what they feel inside them.  The problem arises when we limit our self-esteem to the system, we function in. For example, students attach their self-esteem to their marks.

If we think of a child who isn’t scoring good marks but is extremely good at music. Someone observing him from the third person would want him to focus on his talent instead of his marks. Yet, he feels like he has blinders on his eyes. All he can see is his marks, he keeps on feeling bad about himself, and slowly his self-belief is blown to shambles.  

Our mind begs the question, what pushed him to form an opinion like this?

 The traditional definition of self-esteem is an individual’s subjective evaluation of their worth. Now irrespective of child or adult, a person always tends to evaluate self-worth based on the people around them. This is why the child’s self-esteem was focused on his marks. Everyone around him valued academics more than talent. In an environment like this, the child’s inner critic kept on telling him that he isn’t worth anything until he scores good marks. 

We need to help people understand that they are not limited to a system. Their identity is built on more than one specific thing. We need to help people introspect and explore what their identity is. 

Self-Esteem Enhancement has been called one of the four basic psychological needs in the ‘consistency theory’ by German psychotherapeutic researcher, Klaus Grawe. At the end of the day, enhancing your self-esteem always relies on one thing and one thing only. It always comes down to battling your inner critic. To fight that irrational voice inside yourself that keeps on challenging your capability of facing a challenge.

Our inner critic can be our best friend yet our worst enemy. It can help us be the best version of ourselves, and at the same time it can break us down completely. We need to learn how to tame this voice to help us be the best version of ourselves.

Here are a few things everyone can do to enhance their self-esteem

Having a negative voice inside your head does not indicate that there is something wrong with your brain. The brain has the capability of conceptualizing an objective image of “self” giving it the responsibility of having a rationale which leads to the brain always looking at both the positive and negative side of things. 

We can’t jump off a ledge and think that suppressing all our negative thoughts will help us build a strong self-belief. What we need to do is to acknowledge their existence and accept that they are a part of our system.

Accepting negative thoughts does not imply that we can’t do anything about them. Whenever you feel a thought has gone overboard, you need to examine it. This can be very easy to do, you could figure out your process to do it but the easiest way to go about it is by paper and pen. Draw a line down the middle and lists things that make the thought reasonable and list the things that don’t support it.

Imagine a situation when you have a severe cold. When you’re at home lying sick on your bold, you feel like something very bad is going to happen to you.  Contrarily, your doctor has a very different point of view. He analyses the situation and treats you from a practical point of view. Be the doctor to your self-esteem. When you’re feeling bad about yourself, you need to sit down and analyze why you’re feeling this way.

Being kind to yourself doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to cut yourself slack. Being kind can be as easy as talking to yourself in a friendly tone. The next time you feel like you have done something wrong, you don’t need to beat yourself up. You need to console yourself in a kind voice and tell that inner critic that you’re going to get better and excel. 

When your brain starts bombarding you with negative thoughts, accept these thoughts. Although, you can’t stop there. You need to accept and improve. For the inner critic to not overpower your mind the next time you face this situation, you need to improve yourself. The point of doing all these exercises is to use everything you have to build healthy self-esteem which results in a powerful self-belief. You can’t blame your inner critic for everything, at the end of the day, the only way we can excel in our lives is by working on ourselves and being the version of who we can be.  

More often than not, we overlook our mental health. The reasons behind this can vary for everyone. By overlooking our mental health, we are missing out on the chance to live our life to the fullest. We need to pay attention to our inner self as much as we pay attention to our physical health. Our request is to talk about how you feel. As when it comes to our mind, everything is connected. In this case, the same rule follows. In order for us to build up a healthy self-esteem in our personal lives, we need to acknowledge the emotions we have in our personal lives.