How Psychologists Help People Improve Self-Belief

What we’ll be discussing in this article:
The fakeness of social media
Humanist psychology
Building self-awareness
Cognitive-behavioral techniques
Coping Strategies

I’ve come to realize that with many of my counseling clients, they come to me with one overall problem but after a meeting or two it becomes evident that the actual problem lies deeper.

My job then as a counselor is to help them get through the problem and one of the things that needs to be done to do so is to guide them to become confident enough to face the issue head-on.

The fakeness of social media

It’s a strange old world we live in.

Take a look at social media, places like Facebook, Instagram etc. and you could easily fall into the trap of thinking that the world is full of confident, fulfilled people all across the globe.

Yet we know that people are incredibly unhappy and struggle to find contentment in their lives.

We imagine our goals as lofty things to be achieved but most of us procrastinate and label ourselves as unworthy because we lack the confidence to go for them.

Humanist psychology

The humanist psychologist Viktor Frankl developed a method called “Logotherapy” which was all based on finding meaning in life. Abraham Maslow went further and spoke about the hierarchy of needs. They are: Physiological needs;
Safety;
Belongingness and love;
Esteem; and
Self-actualization.

Inherent to both schools of thought is the fact that we need to be able to face life’s challenges as and when they come.

Building self-awareness

I like to begin with my clients by working on building their self-awareness.

I ask them to begin a daily journal and during our next meetings, we’ll talk about the issues and thoughts they’ve had over the previous week that they want to address.

Then I ask them to engage more with the things they love to do, as long as it’s something creative and not work-like. These can be things like playing an instrument, painting, drawing, gardening, cycling, model building, car restoration, sports, etc.

Basically, it’s alone time where they’re being either creative or physically active.

When we do things we love doing we begin to set internal goals without even needing encouragement and even if we don’t meet those goals we know that we’re trying to meet them and this is where confidence comes from.

It’s not in the achieving of goals, it actually comes from putting in a ‘best effort’ towards achieving them.

Cognitive-behavioral techniques

Next, we will look at tackling things like ‘limiting beliefs’ and negative thought patterns. Thanks to the journaling above things like these will become evident and it’s the job of the counselor/psychologist to help clients to look at the elements that underlie these thought patterns.

We analyze them, interpret them, prod them, poke them, and discuss them with honesty and openness, from their side and mine so that we can get to the root causes.

Once these root causes are seen, we can get past why previous experiences, buried deep in the past, are still having an effect on current situations and in coming to terms with the past we learn to deal with situations in the present without them being colored by previous experiences.

Coping Strategies

It’s important too to guide people when it comes to using coping strategies when they will face any setbacks.

Often in therapy, we’ll find that a client responds well by using the technique above and makes great progress.

But when a setback comes along, and they most certainly will, they can regress. This is very much normal but how it will effect them will be quite different from person to person.

And so we must rely again on things like journaling mentioned above. We examine their thoughts and feelings expressed in their own words as they felt the hurt of the setback. We do this so that we can more objectively look at the feelings felt, discussing them with full honesty. Again we’ll be able to unpack them and see the underlying issues.

In these discussions we often see those lightbulb moments when people realize that they’re behaving in a manner that comes from a habit picked up in the past and they realize they don’t have to continue acting in that way.

Of course, this article is just a summary of what counselors and psychologists can do for their clients but if I could even summarize it further and leave people with one overall tip, it would be to say that by examining our feelings and behaviors thoroughly we can come to learn to master them fully.

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Would you like to work on your self-confidence? Contact me here if you’d like to book a one-on-one life coaching/counseling session with me.

Thanks for reading my article about developing self-esteem.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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