3 Ways to Increase Positive Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

By Celine Healy

Why would I be thinking of ways to increase self concept and self-esteem?

Because I am all cooped up in lock-down and seem to be going through patches of chaos. Stuff keeps coming up.

All of this extra time in isolation, and seeing entertainers and others put up smart, clever and funny videos of them doing “hilarious and creative stuff”, has brought out some feelings of inadequacy.

In essence, you could say, when I compare myself to others, who are cleverer, my self-concept and self-esteem seem to reduce.

Now. I don’t want to harp on the negative, so I am just going to give some information I discovered, so you can see if you identify with this topic as well.

Firstly, let’s look at how self-esteem and self concept are related.

How Self-Esteem and Self-Concept Are Related

Smith and Mackie (2007) defined self esteem as follows:

“The self concept is what we think about the self; self esteem is the positive or negative evaluations of the self as in how we feel about it.”

How we think about ourselves, our self-concept, is derived from our self-image. Our self-image evolves from two aspects: our personal identity, and our social identity.

Our personal identity is made up of: our beliefs, our personality traits, and our various quirks and characteristics.

Our social identity evolves from the responses we receive from others, (whether positive or negative) and how we identify with external groups or collectives: our church, our communities, the people at work and so on.

Necessarily, if we have deeply held negative beliefs about our sense of self-worth, our goodness, our adequacy, or our worthiness of love, then our self-concept will be low or lacking.

If we receive negative feedback or responses from the people who we feel are important in our lives, and of whom we take notice, then this lack of affirmation can begin us down.

Another way of looking at how self-concept and self-esteem are related is this.

The picture of self-concept evolves from our self-image, as mentioned above. The self-image evolves from how we view our: physical characteristics, our personality traits and our social roles.

If we constantly compare ourselves to others, and measure up as being inadequate, then out self-esteem will be reduced.

If we expect others to give us positive response often, this expectation can lead to deflation when we receive negative response instead.

So, in essence, self-esteem is how we value ourselves, irrespective of our comparisons and our expectations that others should feed our egos.

If we constantly rely on others for our acceptance of self and our worth, then we will continue to devalue ourselves. Then our self-concept gets battered.

From that assessment of “value” that underpins self-esteem, we develop a picture of ourselves, our identity our self-concept.

Let’s look at three simple ways to increase our self-esteem and hence our self-concept.

Ways to Increase Positive Self-Image

1. This first recommendation comes from being more aware of your state of mind and how you feel at the time.
This is a technique often used in counselling and it is called:

What that means is: acknowledge that you have that thought/feeling/or unwanted behaviour. Identify where that
feeling is in your body. Give it a shape or a colour. Expand the feeling and really feel the intensity of that feeling.

Then dive into it and allow it to dissipate by breathing into it.

It will dissolve. The say “thank you” to your body for allowing this to be resolved. It does work.

2. Take baby steps towards identifying what the simplest, most effective and smallest step you could take right now to improve your life.

During coronavirus isolation many people have adopted things like:

drinking an extra 3 glasses of water each day.
getting up from your desk/computer and doing some stretches
each half hour.
Listening to some soothing music at some time during the day to disconnect from fears and feelings of inadequacy. Give yourself a mental break. Decide on one tiny action and do it as often as you can.

3. This is one of my favourites. Scientific evidence has proven that sound therapy heals the body/mind. It has often been Go to YouTube and type in something like this: healing for the vagus nerve.

Or, sound therapy. Or healing the body with sound, and, you will come up with dozens of short videos to follow along with. Check out YouTube for Videos on Vagus Nerve Stimulation

The results I had from listening to this for about 14 minutes was instant pain relief in my back. For best results listen every day for a week.