How To Change What You Believe About Yourself

What we believe about ourselves has a huge role in our wellbeing. It impacts what we attempt to do and has huge implications for how we feel about our places in the world.

But, is it possible to change how we feel about ourselves? It is possible. But to know how to change what you believe about yourself; you need to know where these beliefs come from.

 

How We Form Beliefs About Ourselves

 

Our beliefs about ourselves come from three main sources.

 

The first source is what we believe other people believe about us. If other people usually praise us, we are more likely to think positively about ourselves and if other people talk negatively about us, we are more likely to think negatively about ourselves.

The second source is our own perception of ourselves regardless of what other people think about us. Sometimes you do something completely for yourself or know that something that you have done is good before anyone else even knows about it. These feelings can have a huge impact on what you believe about yourself.

 

Finally, your brain has a way of putting these two things together to form an aggregate opinion about yourself. If everyone says good things about you but you aren’t proud of your own actions, you won’t feel great. Similarly, if you are happy with what you do but other people don’t respect or appreciate you it can be hard to feel truly good about yourself.

 

All three of these elements work together to help you develop beliefs about yourself.

Now that we’ve discussed how we develop beliefs about ourselves, we can talk about how to change that.

Changing How Others See Us

 

The first two ways that we can change our beliefs about ourselves is to change what other people say about us. There are two main ways to do this.

 

The first way is to create a healthy environment by removing toxic people from our lives. The idea isn’t to surround yourself with only people who say nice things about us. Criticism is important and if you try to weed out all of it you will eventually come to believe things about yourself that aren’t true. While this can feel good it can be dangerous. 

 

However, some people really do put us down and make us feel bad regardless of what we do. They may do this because they are jealous or because they want us to feel bad about ourselves so that we will think more highly of them. These are the kinds of people that you want to identify and avoid.

 

The second way to change what other people say about you is to change the way that you present yourself to others. It could be that others aren’t supporting you because they are unaware of your aspirations or endeavors. Being more involved in your community and taking on more positive outreach projects can help you to grow a larger and more supportive community.

 

Changing How We See Ourselves

 

Changing the way that you feel about yourself is similar to the second element that we discussed under changing how other people see you. If you aren’t proud of yourself or happy with yourself, it could be that you aren’t doing enough to be proud of yourself for or that you aren’t working toward your ambitions. If this is the case, try to identify more opportunities to do things that are important to you, even when other people aren’t watching.

 

Changing How We Process The Information

 

Finally, you can change the way that you think about yourself by changing the way in which your mind processes the information that we’ve been discussing. As discussed above, your mind works to create an aggregate opinion of yourself based on its understanding of what you think about yourself and what others think of you. This happens in what some experts call your “monkey mind” - you can look at it as what you’re thinking about when you aren’t thinking about anything.

 

Your monkey mind can form feedback loops where it takes something negative and then dwells on it. It takes this one negative thing and makes it seem more and more important until it taints your entire perception of yourself. 

 

This kind of thing can be difficult to combat because most of us aren’t aware of what the monkey mind is doing most of the time. To keep a closer eye on the monkey mind, consider developing a mindfulness practice so that you can better understand what your monkey mind is saying about you and how to correct it.

 

Changing what you believe about yourself takes time, but it has so many benefits. It helps you to have a more accurate understanding of your abilities which can help you challenge yourself in new and exciting ways that help you to develop yourself into the person that you want to be.