Banish Negative Self Beliefs

Having self confidence is really important in all aspects of your life, both personal and professional.

But having a high self esteem can be difficult until you learn to banish negative self beliefs.

A person’s opinion of themselves is usually formed during childhood and learned from parents, teachers and other important role models.

As you grow older, you may hold on to many ideas about yourself that you are not even aware that you have.

By learning to identify these thoughts and challenge them, you can begin to take a more positive view of who you are and what you have to offer the world.

This in turn, will help increase your self esteem and comfort in social situations.

So how do you go about identifying and banishing negative self beliefs?

Therapists have used something called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (or CBT) to help people with this type of distorted self image identify the most common negative beliefs that people are raised with.

These are thoughts such as; “Nobody likes me”, “I can never do anything right” or “I don’t deserve to be happy”.

These types of thoughts are called cognitive distortions and some can be categorised as follows:

Thinking in “black and white.”

This type of thinking is to see things as either completely positive or negative, or thinking that there is only one or two ways to solve a problem without leaving any room for compromise.

Stuck on what “should” be.

This is having a preconceived notion of the way things should be and seeing anything that doesn’t measure up to that belief as a failure, whether it is reasonable or not.

 

 

Labelling

This is when a person directs insults at themselves. Such as thinking “I’m an idiot.” Instead of “I made a mistake.”

By learning to pinpoint these kinds of thoughts and challenging them, you can begin to change the way you think about yourself.

You might be shocked at how often you say these things to yourself.

Remind yourself there is zero value to these thoughts.

Make a commitment to yourself to stop reinforcing them, when you spot one don’t give it your attention.

Save your energy for positive thoughts and action.

The good news is that you’ll be pleasantly surprised how easily you can rid yourself of their negative effects.

Start to be your own best friend and notice the positive difference.