Self-Esteem: What It Is and 8 Proven Ways to Boost It

Do you struggle with low self-esteem, or know someone who does? Are you constantly comparing yourself to others and feeling like you don't measure up? Or plagued by a feeling not-good-enough or self-doubt?  

Self-esteem plays a crucial role in our overall well-being and happiness. It affects how we perceive ourselves, how we interact with others, and how we navigate through life. Unfortunately, many people struggle with low self-esteem, leading to a multitude of negative consequences.

If you want to lead a fulfilling life and reach your full potential, it's essential to cultivate a healthy level of self-esteem.

The good news: Self-esteem can be strengthened. With insight, practice, and a few tools to help you shift the way you think and feel about yourself, you can boost your self-esteem level. 

In this post, you’ll learn how to recognize the signs of low self-worth, what healthy self-esteem looks like, what can cause it to drop, eight therapy-tested ways to start building a stronger, more confident you—and the tips and tools to make that happen.

What's in This Guide to Self-Esteem

What Is Self-Esteem? Definition, Meaning, and Importance

Self-esteem is about how you see yourself.

It has nothing to do with the mask you show to the world or how other people see you. It is an interior thing. It is how you think and feel about yourself. 

Self-esteem shapes your inner dialogue, influences your decisions, and impacts how you navigate challenges. It plays a powerful role in how you experience life—because how you feel about yourself colors everything else.

Is Self-Esteem the Same as Self-Confidence?

Self-esteem and self-confidence are closely related, but they aren’t exactly the same thing.

Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself at your core—your sense of worth and lovability. It’s internal and stable across different areas of life.

Self-confidence, on the other hand, is how capable you feel in specific situations. It can fluctuate depending on what you’re doing or how prepared you feel.

You can have confidence in a skill (like fixing things or cooking) but still struggle with low self-esteem. And you can have high self-esteem even when you're new at something and haven’t built up confidence in it yet.

Ideally, you want both—a healthy sense of worth and a growing belief in your ability to face challenges and learn new things.

What is Healthy Self-Esteem?

Healthy self-esteem is “I am lovable” and “I am capable of handling myself in my environment.”

When you don't feel lovable or capable, it's hard to feel good about yourself, and it's hard to have strong self-esteem.

Healthy self-esteem doesn’t mean thinking you’re perfect. It means seeing yourself realistically and still believing you have worth and the ability to grow.

It’s about owning your strengths, acknowledging your imperfections, and giving yourself room to be a work in progress.

Getting healthy self-esteem is an inside job.

"To me, self-esteem is not self-love. It is self-acknowledgment, as in recognizing and accepting who you are." - Amity Gaige

Healthy Self-Esteem vs Arrogance: What’s the Difference?

Healthy self-esteem is the balance between looking down on yourself and being self-inflated and arrogant. It is seeing yourself with real eyes and accepting what you see—flaws and all. 

It is a knowing that you are not perfect, and being OK with that, even while you strive to be better and better. 

Ironically, arrogance is often a sign of low self-esteem. Sometimes, people put on airs and boast about their knowledge, possessions, or achievements to counter the reality that they don't feel good about themselves. 

(Of course, arrogance can also be driven by other factors—like entitlement or narcissism—but it’s often rooted in a shaky sense of self-worth.)

What is Low Self-Esteem?

Low self-esteem is an inner sense of not being good enough.

It’s the feeling that there’s something wrong with you—even if you can’t quite name what it is. You might feel flawed, unlovable, incompetent, or like you’re faking your way through life.

Low self-esteem can lead to hiding parts of yourself, shrinking your goals, or constantly seeking approval. It can leave you doubting your worth and questioning whether you belong.

And while it often lives under the surface, it can show up in ways that shape your choices, relationships, and self-talk every single day.

How Low Self-Esteem Keeps You Stuck 

Once low self-esteem takes hold, it often feeds on itself.

Even if the original cause is in the past, certain emotional and mental patterns—especially unresolved shame, guilt, and distorted thinking—can get in the way of you moving forward.

How Shame and Negative Core Beliefs Fuel Low Self-Esteem

At the heart of ongoing low self-esteem are painful emotions and harsh self-assessments that can be hard to shake (especially if you don't know what to look for or how to challenge them).

• Internalized shame – Shame can linger long after the original event.  When left unresolved, it fuels a sense of being fundamentally flawed.

• Negative core beliefs – Common low self-esteem thoughts like “I’m not enough,” “I don’t matter,” or “I always mess things up” running in a loop in the background reinforce a negative view of yourself. 

Cognitive Distortions That Keep Self-Esteem Low

When you already feel not-good-enough, your brain is more likely to distort reality to fit that narrative.

That's where cognitive distortions come in. These negative thinking patterns are a major focus in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) because of how common they are and how much they negatively influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Here are two that often play a starring role in keeping low self-esteem alive:

• Mental filtering – You focus on your flaws or mistakes and filter out anything positive. Praise, progress, or compliments get dismissed, while criticism or setbacks loom large.

• Black-and-white thinking (polarized thinking) – You see things as having only two polar opposite possibilities: If you aren't a total success, then you are a total failure. If you aren't perfect, you are fatally flawed, lazy, not-good-enough, or other pathetic versions of yourself that would belong on the opposite end of the excellence continuum.  

The good news is that these patterns are learned—which means they can be unlearned. When you recognize them, you can begin replacing them with more balanced, self-supporting ways of thinking.

The Impact of Low Self-Esteem

Being unhappy with yourself taints every aspect of your life.

Feeling not-good-enough is draining. It can fuel chronic stress, depression, and anxiety. It can get in the way of trying new things or standing up for yourself with tactful assertiveness. It can drive perfectionism and even arrogance, which are attempts at quieting that gnawing sense of being fatally flawed. 

If you don’t recognize that your unhappiness is rooted inside, you may mistakenly attribute your unhappiness as being caused by something or someone else, like your job, partner, or house. You might then conclude that you’d feel better if you could just change your job, dump your partner, or move. But there’s a saying about the disappointment that can come when you do something like move in order to feel better and then discover you’re still unhappy: Everywhere you go—there you are.

Signs and Symptoms of Low Self-Esteem

What does low self-esteem look like? How do people with low self-esteem act? What behaviors point out that you might have low self-worth?

The signs of low self-esteem aren’t always easy to spot, especially because they don’t always look the same.

Sometimes it shows up as self-doubt or avoidance. Other times, it takes the form of overcompensating: putting on a overly confident or superior front to hide deeper feelings of inadequacy.

You might even experience both, depending on the situation or who you’re with.

Here are explainations of some of the most common low self-esteem signs and symptoms:

When Low Self-Esteem Holds You Back

• Negative self-talk – You regularly criticize yourself or replay harsh messages in your mind.

• Low self-confidence – You doubt your abilities, hesitate to speak up, or second-guess your decisions.

• Difficulty accepting compliments – You brush compliments off or assume the other person doesn’t mean it. You hear a "Yeah, but...," or "If they knew more about me, they wouldn't say that," or "It wasn't that good" in your head after the compliment. 

• Fear of failure – You avoid trying new things because you're afraid you’ll mess up.

• Perfectionism – You hold yourself to impossibly high standards and feel like a failure when you fall short.

• Feeling unworthy – You struggle to believe you deserve love, success, or happiness.

• People-pleasing – You try to earn approval by putting others’ needs ahead of your own. (Compulsive people-pleasing is the fawn automatic response to stress, which I detail in this post: Four Fs of Stress and Trauma: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn Explained.)

• Indecisiveness – Fear of thinking, saying, or doing something "wrong" can get in the way of making decisions and lead to inaction. 

When Low Self-Esteem Puts on a False Front

• Driven to prove yourself – You constantly chase achievements, productivity, or praise to feel good enough.

• Arrogance – You act superior or boastful to mask insecurity.

• Judgmental of others – You focus on other people’s flaws to deflect from your own self-doubt.

These patterns often develop as coping strategies—ways of managing fear, shame, or past hurts. Recognizing the patterns—whether quiet or loud—is the first step toward building a healthier sense of self-worth.

What Causes Low Self-Esteem?

Low self-esteem is usually shaped by painful experiences, unmet needs, or internalized messages that chip away at your sense of worth.

Many people who struggle with low self-worth were exposed to one or more of the following experiences:

1. Harsh criticism or rejection – Repeated disapproval, ridicule, or being made to feel like you never measured up can erode your sense of value. This might come from parents, teachers, peers, or partners.

2. Bullying or social exclusion – Being bullied, mocked, or left out can leave lasting emotional scars, especially during childhood and adolescence.

3. Perfectionistic expectations – If love or approval felt conditional—based on perfect performance—you may have learned to tie your worth to unrealistic and unattainable achievements. 

4. Abuse or trauma – Emotional, physical, or sexual abuse can deeply damage your self-image and create an enduring feeling of being fatally flawed.

5. Neglect – Being ignored, emotionally unsupported, or consistently overlooked—especially by caregivers during formative years—can lead to the belief that something about you makes you unworthy. (The reality is, it wasn’t about your worth. It was about their limitations and inability to show up in a caring way.)

6. Learning difficulties, disabilities, or other limitations – Struggling in school or other areas of life can create the belief that you're “not good enough.”

7. Having done something you regret – Past mistakes or poor choices can weigh heavily on your self-esteem.

8. Failing at something that mattered deeply – When your identity or self-worth is tied to a goal—like making it as an athlete, musician, or entrepreneur—and that dream doesn’t pan out, it can feel like more than a disappointment. Instead of thinking "I tried but didn't make it," or even “I failed at this,” you internalize it as “I am a failure.”

9. The “Pride is Bad” rule – Some people are taught that feeling good about themselves is wrong: that pride is arrogant or sinful. If you absorb that message as truth, it can block your ability to internalize accomplishments or view successes as signs you’re doing well or even OK. (Reality check: While it’s not healthy to be boastful or arrogant, it is healthy to feel a sense of earned pride and self-worth.)

Even if you didn’t get the emotional support you needed early on, or if painful experiences are weighing you down, it’s still possible to build a stronger, healthier sense of self now.

Benefits of Healthy Self-Esteem (Backed by Research)

Healthy self-esteem isn’t just about liking yourself—it plays a powerful role in how you show up in life, how you handle challenges, and how satisfied you feel day to day.

Research consistently shows that people with higher self-esteem tend to thrive in key areas of life. A comprehensive research review by psychologists Ulrich Orth and Richard Robins (2022), Is High Self-Esteem Beneficial? Revisiting a Classic Question, pulled together data from hundreds of studies and found strong evidence that high self-esteem supports success and well-being across many life domains.

Here a few of the self-esteem benefits Orth and Robins' research identified:

✅ More Fulfilling Relationships

People with positive self-esteem tend to form more supportive, stable, and satisfying relationships. They’re more likely to set boundaries, communicate openly, and avoid patterns of neediness, defensiveness, or people-pleasing.

✅ Better Performance at School and Work

Self-esteem boosts motivation, persistence, and resilience—key ingredients for success. Whether it’s in school, the workplace, or creative pursuits, people who feel good about themselves are more likely to take initiative, bounce back from failure, and stay focused on long-term goals.

✅ Improved Mental Health

High self-esteem is associated with lower rates of anxiety, depression, and stress. It helps you recover from setbacks more quickly and cope with life’s challenges without falling into despair or self-blame.

✅ Greater Resilience and Adaptability

When your self-worth isn’t constantly on the line, you’re more flexible and emotionally resilient. You can take risks, accept feedback, and grow from mistakes—without crumbling or overreacting.

✅ Healthier Lifestyle Choices

Self-respect can fuel self-care. People with strong self-esteem are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors like exercising, eating well, and avoiding harmful substances.

✅ Overall Life Satisfaction

Orth and Robins also found that self-esteem is a strong predictor of general life satisfaction:

“A voluminous body of research suggests that high self-esteem helps individuals adapt to and succeed in a variety of life domains.”
— Orth & Robins, 2022

In short, healthy self-esteem helps you handle life with more confidence, flexibility, and emotional strength. And just like other life skills, it can be built and strengthened over time.

8 Ways to Increase Self-Esteem and Confidence

Improving your self-esteem takes time, but it’s absolutely doable—and worth the effort. You don’t need to overhaul your entire life to feel better about yourself. Small shifts in how you think, what you focus on, and how you treat yourself can lead to big changes over time.

Here are eight practical ways to start building a healthier, more confident sense of self:

1. Root Out Shame
2. Deal with Your Mistakes
3. Strive for Excellence, Not Perfection
4. Counter Negative Self-Talk
5. Challenge Cognitive Distortions
6. Give Yourself Credit Where It’s Due
7. Acknowledge that Life is an Experiment
8. Consider Therapy for Extra Support

Don’t feel like you have to try them all at once. Start with one that feels doable or speaks to what you need right now.

If you’d like more structured support, add #8 to your to-do list, or scroll to the bottom of the page to check out my Building Skills to Uplevel Life Workbook (a step-by-step guide to help you strengthen self-esteem and emotional resilience).

1. Root Out Shame

Shame and guilt are in the same family of emotions. Guilt is "I have done something bad." Shame is "I am bad."

Shame tends to weigh a person down. It is also often imposed by others who shame us.

Guilt can be a more productive emotion than shame. Guilt can help you look at your mistakes and learn from them. 

2. Deal with Your Mistakes

Healthy self-esteem isn’t about ignoring the mistakes you’ve made in the past or allowing yourself to repeat those mistakes in the future.

It is about engaging humility and courage so that you can examine mistakes:

• Gather the wisdom and understanding the situations have to offer
• Make adjustments and possibly amends
• Acknowledge to yourself that you are human and therefore will make mistakes

3. Strive for Excellence, Not Perfection

Perfection is unattainable. If you expect perfection from yourself, you will be chronically disappointed in yourself.

Excellence is doable. Striving for excellence allows you to take into account individual circumstances and adjust priorities for your time and energy according to those circumstances.

4. Counter Negative Self-Talk

Negative self-talk may be words or phrases that you heard many years ago popping into your mind again and again.

When you become aware of the negative messages, you can challenge them.

In my thirties, I realized I would commonly hear “You’re stupid” in my mind. I began to challenge it each time I heard it, saying to myself: “Reality check. You’re not stupid.” And then remind myself of the evidence that I am actually quite smart. Eventually, the “You’re stupid” message went away.

5. Challenge Cognitive Distortions

Low self-esteem is often fueled by distorted thinking—like filtering out the positive or taking a black-or-white, polarized view of things.

These cognitive distortions warp how you see yourself and your experiences, reinforcing the belief that you’re not good enough.

One practical way to challenge these patterns is to use the CBT Catch, Check, Change method:

• Catch the thought – Start by noticing when a negative or exaggerated thought pops into your mind.

• Check it – Ask yourself: Is this really true? Is it the whole picture? What evidence do I have for and against it?

• Change it – Replace the distortion with a more helpful, balanced, realistic thought—one that supports your self-esteem rather than tearing it down.

For example, if you think, “I always mess up,” catch the thought, check it against the facts (“Actually, I’ve handled a lot of things well”), and change it to something like, “I’ve made some mistakes, but I also have a lot of strengths.”

Practicing these CBT strategies helps you rewire negative thought patterns and build a healthier, more supportive inner voice.

6. Give Yourself Credit Where It’s Due

A client told me about this saying that was common in her AA group: “If you want self-esteem, do esteemable things.” It’s true—your actions matter. But it’s not just about doing good things—it’s also about giving yourself credit for them.

Many people with low self-esteem minimize their accomplishments or overlook everyday moments of integrity, effort, or kindness. Big and small accomplishments get dismissed as luck or “not a big deal,” while mistakes take center stage.

Start paying attention to the ways you show up:

• When you follow through on something you said you’d do

• When you handle a tough moment with grace or patience
  

• When you have a success, even if it's a micro-win

Noticing esteemable acts can help quiet self-doubt and remind you that you are already doing things that reflect growth and strength.

7. Acknowledge that Life is an Experiment

As we go through life, we are constantly trying to figure out what works and doesn't work.

Life is an experiment. 

Learn to accept yourself while you strive to improve yourself.

Another way to look at it: Grow through what you go through. 

8. Consider Therapy for Extra Support

Sometimes low self-esteem is rooted in experiences, like trauma, childhood difficulties, or deeply ingrained beliefs, that are hard to untangle on your own.

Therapy can help you explore those roots, recognize blind spots, and build new ways of thinking and responding. A good therapist can guide you with tools, insight, and support as you strengthen your sense of self.

You don’t have to do all the heavy lifting alone.

If you'd like to work with me and live in Washington State, I offer in-person counseling for adults in the Gig Harbor area and teletherapy far and wide. Fill out the counseling contact form, and we can talk about how I can help. 

Self-Esteem Activities and Exercises for Teens and Adults

If you have low self-esteem, you don’t have to stay there.

You can work through past experiences and challenge the old messages that shaped how you see yourself. The impact those experiences had on you can change.

Self-esteem is something you can build with insight, intention, and practice.

And you don’t have to do it all at once. Confidence grows step by step.

Uplevel Life Workbook: Tools to Help Build Self-Esteem and Emotional Intelligence

If you’re ready to put these strategies into action, my Uplevel Life workbook can help.

The Building Skills to Uplevel Life: Silver Lining Emotional Intelligence Workbook is packed with tips, tools, and worksheets designed to support lasting self-esteem growth. It expands on many of the same principles covered in this post—including:

• Healing shame

• Reframing mistakes and failure

• Addressing perfectionism

• Identifying and replacing negative self-talk

• Understanding and challenging cognitive distortions 
  

• Recognizing your strengths and accomplishments

• Learning to take a compliment 

• Managing emotions effectively
  

This workbook helps you move from insight to implementation—one step at a time. Whether you're working on your own or using it as a resource in therapy or coaching, it's a powerful companion for anyone building self-esteem and emotional resilience.

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