Theresa Francis-Cheung

Improving your self-esteem isn’t about becoming selfish, loud, competitive and arrogant. It’s about taking care of yourself so that you have the strength and energy to help and give to others when appropriate.

The problem with self-esteem based on temporary externals is that you only feel good about yourself when things are going well, but when things don’t go so well, you lose your self-esteem.

To prevent this, self-esteem needs to be grounded firmly in self-acceptance. The concept of self-acceptance is based on the knowledge that we are all fallible human beings, we all make mistakes and nobody is perfect. So although you would like to be 100 per cent perfect all the time, the important thing is to learn to accept that sometimes you will be wrong and you are fallible.

Self-esteem will not improve if you can’t free yourself from the past. If you keep going back to the time your mum forgot to collect you from school or the fact that you were always the last choice for your form’s sports team, it is time to take a deep breath and deal with the present. The past, however traumatic, can help you understand why you may feel a certain way but it can’t explain why you choose to remain that way. Countless people have survived the most terrible ordeals and faced the greatest adversity with courage, optimism and a positive sense of who they are.