Measuring Improvements in Your Self Esteem

Your self esteem has a profound effect on your life. It can affect your health, your happiness, your career, your home life, and just about everything else. If your self esteem is low you can start measuring improvements in self esteem by keeping a journal of your behavior, thoughts and feelings and use it to rate yourself over time. It may be good to evaluate your journal and rate yourself once a month, or less if you prefer. Just try not to rate yourself too frequently or you may get discouraged or feel that your progress is moving too slowly. If you are starting out with a low self esteem a journal is particularly helpful as you will be able to see what may have made you feel negatively about yourself and then you will know what areas to target in order to improve your self esteem levels.

The most effective method of measuring improvements in self esteem is by paying attention to your thoughts, emotions and actions. By doing this not only can you see potential causes of your negative self thoughts but you can see progress that you are making as well. Being able to see your progress will help boost your self esteem even more and help you develop a healthy self image faster. Some things you should especially take notice of are the way you dress. Changing some things in your wardrobe could make subtle but effective changes in the way you feel about yourself. For example, studies have shown that just getting out of bed and getting dressed each morning improve self esteem, so take off the pajamas and get dressed!

Another good way of measuring improvements in self esteem is by paying attention to the way others act around you and treat you. You could record these in your journal as well. People will tend to act in a more positive manner around you when they can see you feel better about yourself or when they see you are taking care of yourself. If you do not always have a negative attitude, their attitudes towards you and around you will improve also. As your self esteem improves you should notice you get more compliments and more smiles from the people you interact with on a day to day basis.

Before you start measuring improvements in self esteem, you should first make out a list of short and long term achievements you would like to accomplish along your journey to a healthy self esteem. When making this list consider the things that lower your self esteem the most and set a realistic goal for how long it should take you to see improvement in this area. After making your list brainstorm some ways that you can achieve these goals and write those down also. Then take some time to think about one or two you are capable of starting right away and get started, a healthy self esteem is not far away from you now!

Wendy Pan is an accomplished niche website developer and author. To learn more about measuring improvements in self esteem, please visit Personal Development Today for current articles and discussions.