Raising self-esteem starts with the small stuff

Q: How can I raise my self-esteem? I have an appointment booked with a counsellor, but what can I do until then.

A: I don’t know why your self-esteem tanked, whether you had too many moments in despair as a young child, too many challenges from the staff room when you were a kid in school, innumerable disappointments when you applied for your big chance when you started looking for work, or whether you were heart broken a little too often when you tilted the windmills in the search for an intimate partner.

You will get a chance to explore all of that when you get to spend time with your mental health counsellor. Hopefully, that will give you a chance to reconfigure your life experiences and find yourself to be that person you had always hoped.

What we can do is try to better understand self-esteem to give you something to think about before you start counselling.

The first thing that you need to understand about self-esteem is that it is a verb, not a noun. Self-esteem is not something you can pick up at your local pharmacy. It is not a noun, it is a process, coming as it will from the verb “to love,” which in this case means to love yourself.

That is simple enough, but it is also where a number of people with low self-esteem fail.

The problem they have is that they seem to think that they have to wander the halls of the grandeur to love themselves and that is not true.

Self-esteem can be built on the list of daily chores which you or anyone else engage just to survive the truancies of the day. Take a few moments after you have made your bed in the morning to appreciate what a terrific job you did with it. And if you can’t, if you can’t admire the bed you have just made, do it again, and again, until you are satisfied.

Appreciate brushing your teeth, how refreshing it is for you, how creative you can be combing your hair and so on with all of your daily chores.

Now here is the trick. You are not doing any of this to raise your self-esteem. You are doing each chore to love yourself for having done it. Over time, with enough daily praising filtering in, your self-esteem will evolve and it will do so because it is a byproduct of all that has gone on, not the principle goal.

I am sure that you, along with any number of your farm neighbours, would love to farm a township. What a huge operation that would be, as would be the corporate equivalent of large herd of cattle. What you need to understand is that neither townships nor herds of livestock do much to build your self-esteem.

On the contrary, the headaches that such a huge operation generates are more likely to thwart your self-esteem than they are to nurture it.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with having long-term goals to direct your life’s journey. But in terms of self-esteem, you are more likely to get it from effectively working the land throughout your collection of quarter sections, from your lands where you have at least a modicum of control over the outcome than you are from the big push.

Big is not necessarily beautiful, or worthy of self-acclamation. Big is big, and beautiful is beautiful, and don’t forget to smile at yourself lovingly in the bathroom mirror after you have brushed your teeth in the morning.

Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.