As school has ended and summer is upon us, I wanted to take a moment to talk to students of all ages — but especially those in their pre-teen and teenage years — about building your own self esteem. 

Building Self Esteem With the Help of Others & Yourself

I believe that self-esteem comes from being around supportive people. If you have a friend, mentor, parent, or coach — that’s one way to have a support system that helps with self-esteem. That being said, the most important thing to realize is that even if you don’t get external validation, you can (and should!) always create your own internal self-esteem through your connection with yourself.

If you haven’t been feeling like yourself, don’t know what you want to do with your life, don’t feel good about yourself or just aren’t sure how to cultivate happiness with yourself, it’s so important to work on building a one-on-one relationship with who you truly are. I always say it’s important that internal matches external, and I’d love for you to feel at peace with your inner self being portrayed outwardly as well.

Get in Touch With Yourself & Stay True to Your Word

To discover who you are and to start building self esteem, you might want to meditate, stretch, workout every day or go to therapy once a week — whatever you do, it’s all about consistency. When you say you’re going to do something and do that micro action, it builds a little bit more micro self-esteem. 

It’s all about the compound effect. If you do something that you told yourself you were going to do — no matter how small that action is — for 365 days a year (even if you missed a few days here and there but always got back on track), at the end of each day you can reflect back on that micro action and know that you kept your word. 

Even better, at the end of the year you can reflect back on all those days put together and feel even more self-esteem for all those small actions repeated over time that you turned into a positive habit or routine. 

Using Self-Esteem to Stand Up to Peer Pressure

I believe this way of building this internal self-esteem is very powerful for children in middle school, high school, and young adults in college who are trying to cultivate what they think about themselves, the world, and who they are. And it is very important to build this self-esteem, especially for these groups of children, teens, and young adults, since they are exposed to the most peer pressure.

The greatest antidote to peer pressure is self-esteem. 

My brother passed away as a teenager from a peer pressure situation, so I’ve been fascinated ever since with ways to help younger people grow their self-esteem. 

Especially around graduation time and the end of school when summer hits, there may be more opportunities to get into peer pressure type situations. Most people who will say no to peer pressure have internal self-confidence and know where they’re going. That’s the macro. How do you know how to say no to a short term peer pressure situation? Because you know where you’re going — you know the macro of what you see for yourself. And that is all built from creating your own self-esteem.  

I also truly believe that time blocking is a practical tool that helps people build self-esteem and say no to peer pressure, which is why it even works for young adults. By using this tool to manage your time, you can focus on the things you need and want to get done to accomplish your goals day-to-day and overall in life. And when you follow through with your daily micro actions through time blocking, you’ll build your internal self-esteem and find out who you truly are.

All the best,

MaryRuth