Feeling the Part

Being positive and feeling good about one’s self is the key, you must feel the part. Positivity is a leading factor in one’s self confidence, it will help you keep a feeling of worth. Staying positive will provide you a great asset in regards to self-talk and recognizing and working with your strengths. Everyone has weaknesses and by being positive you can recognize your weaknesses and then work on them to lesson to remove them all together.

Identifying Your Worth

Worth is defined as “sufficiently good, important, or interesting to justify a specified action.” People with a sense of self-worth exude confidence in themselves. They feel in change of their own destiny, and are happy. To create a picture of your self-worth, take a self-concept inventory, analyzing multiple attributes in your life.

Creating Positive Self-Talk

Positive self-talk allows you to recognize, validate, and apply your full potential with respect to all that you are, and do. Also called affirmations (to make something firm), positive self-talk serves as your own personal accomplishment scale. Below are some tips for positive self-talk:

1. Use the present tense; deal with what exists today.
2. Be positive – rather than affirming what you don’t want. 
3. Remain personal; self-talk must relate to you and you only.
4. Keep sentences short and simple.
5. Go with your gut. If it “clicks”, then just say it. Self-talk should feel positive, expanding, freeing, and supporting.
6. Focus on new things, rather than changing what is.
7. Act “as if”; give yourself permission to believe the idea is true right now. 

If self-talk is new to you, it is a good idea to first think about the things that are wonderful about you, such as: 

• I have someone I love, and we enjoy spending time together
• I am a mother or father, fulfilled in this role
• My career is challenging and fulfilling.
• When I learn something new, I feel proud.
• I am worthwhile because I breathe and feel; I am aware.
• When I feel pain, I love, I try to survive. I am a good person.

Identifying and Addressing Strengths and Weaknesses

After an individual has listed words and phrases for self-attributes, they can be classified as strengths or weaknesses. This exercise also allows participants to re-frame weaknesses into message that don’t feed a negative self-worth.

Case Study

Being a teacher can be a challenging job in the best of times. Johanna had an especially difficult class with numerous disruptive students. They generally had a “don’t care about anything” attitude. This fact saddened Johanna a lot. She loved teaching and when she encounters this type of attitude it weighed on her.

She decided to take some time and start showing the children how much they actually meant to the world. Giving them a positive talk and complimenting them got the students engaged and allowed them to identify their self-worth. Johanna encouraged her students to use positive self-talk and to recognize their strengths in themselves. The overall idea was to encourage her class to improve their lives and personal opinions.