Your self-image is the “I am” definition of how you evaluate yourself. How you picture yourself determines your personality, behaviour, action and your relationships.

Self-image is the image you have of yourself, that is the way you see yourself as relating to your friends, your work, your talents, your family, etc. Self-image is important; if you have a positive self-image you’ll generally do positive things and if you have a negative self-image you’ll tend to do negative things, or do nothing at all. However, this rule doesn’t always apply, because there are plenty of people with low self-esteem who do positive things. Fact is that there’s a good chance that they’re not being as effective as they could be, and there’s also a good chance they’re not as happy as they could be. A poor self-image affects your self-esteem and accomplishments.

You may need to improve the image you have of yourself if you find the following to be self-descriptive:

    • Excessive shyness and timidity
    • Extreme humility
    • Feeling defeated and inadequate consistently
    • Remembering past hurts and failures and feeling remorse
    • Comparing yourself unfavourably with others and feeling inferior
    • Ashamed of how you look and feeling self-disgust
    • Recurring chronic problems.

Some tips for improving your self-image

    • Not all of us are born attractive, but we can exercise, eat healthy and do a lot of things to look and feel as good as we can with what we have received in life. This is one way of improving our self-image that seems to work consistently.
    • Self-image is often tied to accomplishment; however, accomplishment doesn’t necessarily mean success at work. It’s important that we work as hard as we can at our jobs; being lazy or dishonest will definitely subtract from our self-image. But we can do things outside of the workplace, too, that will go a long way towards improving our self-image. For example, we can develop a skill or an art that will bring us hours of pleasure and satisfaction and perhaps help others feel pleasure and satisfaction too. Is there something you’ve always wanted to do, but didn’t have the time, money, or courage for? Now may be the time to act. There’s nothing like positive accomplishment for improving the self-image.
    • Self-image can improve when we make good friends. To make good friends, we need to be in places where we’re likely to meet people with similar interests to ours. Whether this is in a church, a community theatre group, a reading club or an Internet chat site, we need to be in those places where people with similar interests to ours gather frequently.
    • There’s nothing like charity to improve self-image. Charity works subtly on you and deeply in you. Volunteer to read to children at a local children’s hospital, volunteer to visit and entertain the elderly, organise a food drive, etc. Even if it just comes to making someone feel better (say, someone at work who’s recently lost a loved one), your self-image will improve dramatically. When we forget about ourselves and focus on others, our self-image will improve.
    • Another thing to consider about improving self-image is to make use of therapy, counselling or a life coach. Therapy isn’t always the answer but a good therapist can help you see where your talents and strengths lie, and can offer you good advice on improving your lifestyle in such a way that your self-image improves along with it.

 

Sources

How to improve your self-esteem: 12 powerful tips. Retrieved from http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2013/09/11/improve-self-esteem/
Improving your self-image. Retrieved from http://www.mtstcil.org/skills/image-3.html

 

(Revised by M van Deventer)