When we talk about self-esteem, we are referring to self-love that is based on your concepts of yourself. These concepts are formed over time, are influenced by the people and events you have had in the course of your life, and do not define who you are, but what you think of yourself. The self-concept, by definition, are paradigms and ideas, they are not something objective. Some things are underpinned by reality, but many others are just completely subjective perceptions of who you are.
Self-esteem is damaged when these beliefs about you cause you suffering. If these paradigms are frustrating and limiting, clearly your self-esteem will be greatly affected, as well as your happiness, your fulfillment and your personal achievements. We refer to this with negative paradigms; not so much to a value judgment, but to the effect that these beliefs and ideas have on you, on the way you see yourself and how much you love yourself. Some beliefs have little impact, but the ideas about who you are and what you are capable of, are what will have the most relevance in your life.
But, like any belief, idea and paradigm, it can also be changed. You can modify what you think of yourself. You already know that it is a subjective concept, and as such, you can change it. You can eliminate all frustrating paradigms, and acquire new beliefs about yourself, more benign, more real and objective, and much more functional, that allow you to improve love for yourself, as well as your personal results.
Confrontation is one of the ways you can manage and change these negative paradigms. When we speak of confrontation, we refer to confronting these mental enemies directly and with adequate weapons. The weaponry you are going to use is the evidence, which is evidence of the opposite of what your negative paradigm tells you. When you confront, you show your mind that the belief you have is not supported by reality, or you show it that it is a partial or distorted reality, it is not absolute.
The first step in confrontation is, of course, knowing your enemy. The first thing is to make a count of everything negative and frustrating that you think of yourself. For this, you can use questions like: What do I think of myself? What do I think I am? How I look? How do I define myself? Write here everything that comes to mind, both what you consider positive and negative.
Once you have this, analyze well what you have written. Some of the things you will see are more insults to yourself, such as: useless, that is useless, silly, clumsy, toxic, among many other things. These insults are subjective appraisals based on anger towards yourself, they have no basis in real life. If you think that you are useless because you had a failure or because you have not been able to achieve a dream, then you are definitely not seeing yourself objectively, because something useless is that it does not serve, it does not have a function; and you, having talents, you do serve. Therefore, you must cancel the insults, reject them, because they do not even have a logical definition.
The next thing you will see regarding negative paradigms are some limiting characteristics that you think you have, such as "I am bad at relating to people", or "I am too irritable". In this case, you should look in your repertoire of experiences for evidence that this is not the case, since there have been, unquestionably, moments that you have related well or that you have been able to control yourself. So, a better paradigm would be "I have had moments where it has been difficult for me to relate to others, but it is something that I can improve with adequate training." That is more objective and more real, because if you have difficulties in socializing, that does not define you, you cannot personalize it, and it is something that you can work on.
Confronting your paradigms has many other considerations, but keep in mind what I have just told you, as it is vital to develop a healthy self-esteem.
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I invite you to take a look at the virtual book "Confronting Your Negative Paradigms", where I expose you in a very detailed way everything you have to do to improve the concepts of yourself through confrontation.
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I wish you the greatest blessings.
