A guide to growing your mindset and building your self esteem

GROWING YOUR MINDSET

Your mindset describes your outlook on life, your resilience and coping skills, as well as how easily you find it to maintain a positive stance even when things go wrong.

Imagine the age-old analogy of the half-full/ empty glass. Simply speaking if you see your glass as half full you may have a more positive outlook on life and will make the best with what you have. However, people with a negative mindset tend to see their glass as half-empty, they don’t believe they have enough (whether it be money, a big enough house or scoring highly enough in an exam) and therefore are more likely to feel hard done by.

Having a positive mindset helps you to see the best in every circumstance and enables you to be more resilient when things go wrong. Growing your mindset is about becoming more positive and resilient, which in turn will improve your emotional well being.

You are what you think:

Imagine a huge fishing net cast out along the ocean bed full of hundreds of fish and lots of rubbish too.

Some of the fish caught in the net are valuable, they are kept and sold. However, amongst the prize fish are lots of rubbish and worthless inedible sea life, these are thrown back into the ocean (like negative thoughts THEY are unhelpful). Our thoughts are like those fish; we have millions of helpful and unhelpful thoughts each day. To improve your mindset, you need to recognise and choose the helpful and positive thoughts to focus on and recognise the negative thoughts to overcome and throw away.

The human brain is made up of millions of pathways and junctions called synapses and neurons. You can think of these pathways like road networks of different sizes and that all our thoughts are carried on these interlinking networks. The more frequently you have a thought the wider and smoother the neuronal pathway becomes, and the easier it becomes for your brain to choose that thought pathway. Over time the repetitive thoughts become the motorways of your brain. In contrast, things you think about infrequently are like the B-roads of your brain, it is more effort for your brain to choose these pathways as they are smaller and narrower. If you are constantly having negative thoughts, these pathways become the motorways of your brain and when faced with two options your brain will choose the wider road making it easier for you to have a negative thought.

You can retrain your brain by choosing the positive and overcoming thoughts.

It takes daily practice and perseverance but as you, day in day out choose a positive stance and shut down negative thoughts your neuronal pathways can rewire. As you do so the positive pathways and choices will become the motorways of your brain.

YOuR thoughts are like fish and rubbish caught in a fishing nets…

…you need to try and keep the positive thoughts and discard the negative ones….

Do your thoughts pass the litmus paper test?

If you remember back to senior school science lessons; you may remember learning about litmus paper. Litmus paper is used in chemistry to test if a substance is an acid or alkali. It turns blue in alkali and pink in acid. Amazingly, in nature, the plant’s hydrangeas do the same thing. If they are planted in alkali soil they grow blue flowers, and if they are in acidic soil they produce pink flowers.

TRY and evaluate your thoughts to see if they are in line with a positive benchmark. Are your thoughts TRUE, KIND and HELPFUL?

Many negative thoughts we have are simply not true eg. I have a headache, therefore, I have brain cancer or my friend didn’t reply to my message means that they don’t like me anymore. However, other thoughts may be true (eg. I failed my driving test) but dwelling on them is neither kind nor helpful. If they don't pass the test (are they true, kind and helpful) then rather than dwelling on them, it is better to try and replace them with something more positive. It’s really worth spending some time on this as If these negative thoughts are left unchecked they will pollute your mindset and make you feel more negative.

3 tests for your thoughts:

1) IS IT TRUE?

It sounds obvious but the first benchmark is “Is the thought you are having true?”.

Just because we are thinking something doesn't make it true. For example, you may be worrying that the headache your suffering from means that you have brain cancer. However, the truth is you have a headache because you’re stressed; some rest and paracetamol will in fact resolve your symptoms. Or, a friend may have appeared to ignore you, and you could start dwelling on a negative spiral of thoughts whereby you start to believe your friend doesn't like you anymore. However, the truth is that they have just had some bad news and hadn't noticed you. When you allow untrue thoughts to take hold they can wreak havoc on your mindset. Using these two examples, suddenly you've convinced yourself you have brain cancer and that no one likes you. This is how anxiety and depression can get a foothold. It all starts with negative thoughts which can take control of your thinking, they become like a short circuit in the brain. So, with every thought you think - you need to evaluate it and find out: is it true? If you’re struggling to see the wood from the trees and recognise if a thought is true or not I really encourage you not to ignore it but to take action.

Ask three friends for their opinion. Weigh the evidence with fact. It is worth taking the time to do this as one untrue thought that creeps in can have an exponentially negative impact on your mental health.

2) IS IT KIND?

Some negative thoughts you have about yourself or other people may have an element of truth but are unhelpful and negatively impact your well-being. Self-compassion is the idea of being kind to yourself through how you think about yourself and how kind you are to yourself. In terms of your mental health, it is really important to be kind towards yourself and others.

3) IS IT HELPFUL?

The final test for your thoughts is “Is it helpful?“. Is this thought making me feel better, or is it helping me? Often are inner voice is very self-critical and negative. These thoughts may appear harmless but they are not helping you make good overcoming choices for your mental health or improve your mindset. Unhelpful thoughts often dwell on the negative and the ‘what if scenarios’. You need to recognise when a thought may trigger your anxiety and replace it with something helpful.

Replacement Strategies

Exercises for growing your mindset

Have a “positive thought bank“ that you can replace negative thoughts with.

Write positive comments on post-it notes, on your phone and around your house. Every time you have a negative thought practise replacing it with one of your positive alternatives. Complete the exercise below and get practising! Every time you hear your “inner voice“ dwell on something negative write it down and come up with a positive replacement strategy. Try and focus on the positives instead of the negatives. it can take multiple times to replace a negative thought so don’t be discouraged if it keeps coming back, keep practising.

BUILDING YOUR SELF ESTEEM

Self-esteem or significance refers to how you see yourself, what you feel about yourself, and what you believe about yourself. If you have good self-esteem you will view yourself in a positive light and interpret events that happen to you positively. However, if you have low self-esteem or feel insignificant you will feel and interpret events in a negative light. There is a quiz at the end which can help you identify if you have low self-esteem. Often people are aware they don’t like themselves very much, but can be unaware this is due to their self-esteem and that it can be changed!

Our sense of self-esteem develops as we experience and process life events and circumstances. These experiences can be external (how our parents treat us) and internal (the negative self-critical inner voice of self). Over time people build up a detailed picture of who they believe they are, or a belief system about themselves. This can be good or bad depending on how positively or negatively you view the life events that have happened to you.

**It’s not FIXED**

You may believe that your self-esteem is fixed, that once evolved it is very hard to reset. You may think that self-esteem is part of your DNA, that it’s just who you are and that it is a consequence of your upbringing and therefore that it can't be changed. However, your self-esteem is **not fixed**. Reflect on how you feel about yourself at different times. You may notice your view of yourself fluctuates with your mood and the situation you are in. On a good day when things go well, you may perceive yourself as a success and likeable. However, on a bad day when things go wrong or feel rejected, you may feel completely different. The good news is you can grow your self-esteem.

**It’s not a FACT**

Has it occurred to you that your perception of yourself may also be very different from those around you? Just because you believe that you are lonely and unloved does not mean it is true! Self-esteem is not an established truth! Self-esteem is made up of a complex belief system that you have created it is not a fact! Your self-esteem is in fact just your current view of yourself. The people around you will almost certainly see you in a completely different light because they aren't wearing the same, negative self-critical filter that you are. **Only when you take the step to look beyond your own belief system and to the truth of who you are can you establish a more unbiased view of yourself.**

The effect of social media on self-esteem

We are seeing a rise in mental health problems in young people. One theory is that social media is inhibiting young people’s ability to develop robust self-esteem as they are looking to social media sites to validate themselves. The combination of the dopamine hit of social media and the instant, measurable validation of likes and followers makes social media the quickest and easiest way to find self-approval. However, it is very transient and in fact reduces your ability to grow your own internal self-esteem, which is much more powerful and protective.

A robust self esteem is a bit like a cactus:

It is resilient and grows slowly
It has protective spikes against negative comments
It has deep roots and can withstand drought (it doesn’t need constant affirmation).
It believes that it is powerful and not dependant on others

A transient/ low self esteem is a bit like a balloon…

It grows quickly with praise (especially from social media)
It doesn’t have deep roots so when things go wrong it deflates quickly
It is dependent on others for its sense of self-worth

“Social media can externalise self esteem and make young people dependent on likes and followers for their sense of self worth”

— PAPAYA

So the question is how I feel about myself NOW. We create our significance by the way we are thinking about ourselves at this moment. If you have identified that you have a low self-esteem then make a choice to change the way you view yourself now!

Self-esteem Quiz

Please complete the below quiz honestly, ticking those that apply more than half of the time:

Self esteem quiz

How to build your self-esteem

So you have recognised you have low self-esteem - what can you do about it?

Here are some great exercises to help

The following exercises can help you take back control and grow your self-esteem.

KEEP A HAPPY LIST EACH DAY

1) Write down a situation that was rewarding, positive or enjoyable.
2) Write down and reflect on what you would say to your best friend if they had experienced this.
3) Write down what you have learnt from the experience.
Read the list several times every day.

COLOUR CODE YOUR DIARY

Manage your diary! Give your self-margin and space to reflect and not being busy ALL the time. Look at your last week…
1) Colour in activities RED that were hard work and tiring, AMBER if they were neutral and GREEN if they were relaxing and enjoyable.
2) Take a look at how much red and green activities there are.
3) Now plan a week where you try to reduce the amount of RED activity and have something GREEN every day.
4) Reflect on how you feel at the end of each week…

EXERCISES TO build self esteem