The benefits of improving your self esteem - a Tutor Impact guide!
- Ava S
- Dec 11, 2025
- 3 min read
Ava S
University of Oxford - BA in modern history
If you have low-self esteem, it is important to learn how to alter the thoughts and core beliefs that are influencing this behaviour. Low self-esteem can be responsible for an overall negative quality of life, in school, in the workplace, and can even impact your physical health. Self-esteem is crucial to developing and maintaining the relationships that are core to adult satisfaction, and can even impact the ways in which your children will grow up to view themselves. However, there are many ways you can work on boosting your self-esteem that are both physical and mental.
Self-esteem, at its core, is how you feel about yourself and your abilities, talents and capacities. Everyone will have times in their life where they will have negative thoughts about themselves, but it can become a larger problem when this becomes intrusive negative thoughts. It is important to address the causes of low self-esteem from their root in order to stop them from developing into a longer mental health issue.
1. Have a positive outlook on yourself and your ability.
You have to first identify and then challenge your negative beliefs. If you catch yourself speaking negatively about yourself, or your beliefs or capacity, write this down and begin to think of five different ways this may not be the case and why you may be wrong. This is a way of logically combatting those often irrational thoughts and tracking how they develop, not letting them spiral out of control as a result.
2. Focus on your strengths as opposed to your weaknesses.
Starting a gratitude journal can help you to identify all the positives in your life and about yourself. Each night, identify three things about yourself that you are grateful for, and three things in your life that you are grateful for. This can help boost you to boost your sense of self-esteem.
Positive internal dialogue is a big part of improving your self-esteem. You can learn more about positive self-talk by checking out our YouTube webinar Tutor Impact TV with Toby here:
3. Surround yourself with people who see your worth and care about you and your future!
There are certain types of people that will make you feel more secure in your relationships with them, and will make you feel better than others. If there are people who make you feel bad about yourself, they are not worth investing much time into. It is better to foster and focus on relationships that make you feel worthy and loved.
4. Learn to set boundaries
People with low self-esteem are often prone to people pleasing tendencies and have poor capacities to set up and maintain personal boundaries. As a result, they may take on too much work and will be unable to complete it all, leading to negative beliefs about themselves and their own capacity. Developing your ability to set boundaries and be assertive, therefore, can help to improve your sense of self-esteem. This means you can prioritise tasks better and increase time for your own self-care, which means you will be able to be a better friend when others do need your help.
5. Get active!
Eating well, exercising and drinking enough water is crucial to helping us to feel good about ourselves when we are fit and healthy. If you have low self-esteem, it may be more difficult to find the motivation to look after yourself. At the root of low self-esteem is the belief that you are unworthy, and this can leak into maintaining your physical appearance and health. Doing more exercise, eating well and sleeping enough, alongside allocating time for relaxation can, therefore, be crucial to changing your overall outlook towards yourself and others.
I hope you found this blog post useful and that you are able to take the time to look after yourself effectively!
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