Christi Lukasiak: Okay, question. Do you struggle with self-esteem?
So many of you have reached out to me in different platforms in different ways and told me that
self-esteem is your number one thing that you wish you had more of or that you would
change. So if self-esteem is something that you struggle with, by the end of this video
today, you are going to have five easy tips and tricks that you can apply to your life
today that can help start improving your self-esteem. There are things I use, there are things I
teach my girls. There are things that I think are going to make a huge difference for you
because if you don't have good sense of self or self-esteem, really everything else around
you doesn't matter. If you want more videos like this, make sure that you subscribe to
my channel and hit the little bell, I don't know where it's going to end up, so that you
get notified every Wednesday when I post new videos.
Christi Lukasiak: Okay, if you ever watched me on Dance Moms,
or if you follow me on any of my social media, you know that one of the things I pride myself
most on is raising my girls to be strong, independent, they don't care what other people
do or say because they have such a good sense of self. I also love a pep talk, not going
to lie. I hear so often from you, "Oh, I wish that you were my mom," or, "What would you
tell me if you were my mom?" Or, "When I'm older and I have kids, I want to be a mom
like you," or, "I have kids and I'm going through the same thing that you are." So it
is official. It is now your turn. I'm going to adopt you, I don't know if I can afford
you, I'm going to try. However, welcome to the Lukasiak family because I am going to
be giving you all the same advice that I give to my girls. Let's start from the top.
Christi Lukasiak: So I think people often confuse the term self-esteem
and self-confidence. So let me tell you the difference between the two and today we're
going to be talking about self-esteem. So self-esteem is really how you feel about yourself.
Do you like yourself? Do you feel good about yourself? And self-esteem shouldn't be based
on any qualifying outside circumstances. Now self-confidence, on the other hand, is a little
different. Self-confidence isn't about how you feel about yourself, self-confidence is
how you feel about yourself in a situation. Are you confident in the way that you can
present in front of a class? Or are you confident in the way you handle yourself in an argument?
That's self-confidence. Self-esteem are the feelings that you have at night when you're
falling asleep and it's just you and your own brain. We're going to talk about self-esteem
and the little things that you can do to help increase that because once you have good self-esteem,
self-confidence is easier to come by. So we need to start at the top.
Christi Lukasiak: Number one, practice positive self-talk. What
does that mean? That means that I want you to talk to yourself like you would talk to
anyone else in this world because I guarantee you the things that you're telling yourself
in your own brain, you would never say out loud to another person. I can think of so
many examples where people were like, "Oh God, he didn't text me back because I'm ugly.
My nose is so big, I don't deserve to have this. I'm stupid. My friends don't like me
because I'm a loser." Somebody very wise once told me to think and talk to yourself like
you would when you were six. Think of yourself as a six year old child, if you were babysitting
yourself. How you were when you were six. You were probably so excited. You were friendly.
You thought anything was possible in the world. So when you're talking to yourself in your
own mind and you're saying all those hateful things, start to be kind to yourself.
Christi Lukasiak: Would you ever say to your six year old self,
"You're not good enough?" Of course not. You'd be like, "You could do anything. Oh my God,
that's amazing." Just changing the way that you have a conversation in your own mind is
going to start shifting things around you and it could be tiny little things at first
that maybe you don't notice, but they will start to pile up and before you even realize
it, things are going to shift in a big way and you're going to go, "Well, how did that
happen?" You believe what you hear. So if you're always hearing that you're a loser
or you're ugly or you don't deserve that, of course you're going to believe that. You
need to switch the way you talk to yourself. Seems simple. Seems trite. Huge differences,
I promise. Christi Lukasiak:
Number two, practice self-compassion. Now, what exactly does that mean? Practicing self-compassion
can be summed up really easily and that is you need to forgive yourself. People hold
onto mistakes that they've made in the past and they never really forgive themselves for
it. In order sometimes to move forward and to feel better about yourself, you need to
forgive yourself for mistakes that you've made in the past. By forgiving yourself, you
give yourself permission to make a new mistake and to move on because guess what? Your whole
life is going to be decisions and do you think that every decision that you're going to make
for the rest of your life is going to be exactly perfect and right? No. Could you imagine if
I held on to all of the mistakes that I've made in the past? You've seen a lot of them
on TV. If I was holding on and punishing myself for every mistake I made, oh my God.
Christi Lukasiak: Well first of all, I would never move on and
second of all, I could never forgive myself for just my fashion choices alone. So you
need to let go of your past mistakes, move on, forgive yourself because you're going
to make mistakes for the rest of your life. And if you're always beating yourself up because
of that mistake, guess what? You're going to spend a whole lot of time self-loathing
instead of building up your self-esteem and then you're going to miss out on so many other
great things that you're supposed to be doing instead of hating yourself.
Christi Lukasiak: Step three, give yourself something to be
proud of. Let's say that you are a dancer and your goal is to do 14 turns in a second
or a la second, depending on if you're a ballerina or if you're a jazz dancer, whatever, you're
not going to start with, "I need to do 14 turns perfectly today." Where you would want
to start is, "I'm going to do one," and you start working towards that goal and you practice
it and you figure out the way to make it just right so that you can do it, land it, feel
solid and that is your attainable goal. You're proud of that because you accomplished it.
So then you do two, then you do three and you work your way up to 14. If you want to
write a book, you don't start with, "Oh, I'm going to write a book today," because chances
are you're not going to sit down and write a book today. But maybe you could work on
the first chapter. That's a great example. And then when you do that, you can celebrate
that goal. Christi Lukasiak:
It doesn't have to be something that big either. I know that there are days that I don't think
I'm going to be able to get out of bed. Maybe your goal for the day, something that you
can be proud of, is just getting out of bed, putting on a pair of sweatpants and brushing
your teeth because trust me, there are days when that is worth celebrating. Give yourself
something to be proud of and when you achieve that goal, you celebrate it and you celebrate
it, you say it out loud, turn on a song, dance around your house. I'm not kidding. These
types of things make a difference. It sounds cheesy, but when you start putting these types
of things into action, you're going to be like, "I can't believe what a difference it
makes." Christi Lukasiak:
I do this for my girls all the time. If they do the slightest thing that is exciting that
they were working towards, we celebrate it. We're like, "Oh my God, I can't believe that
you achieved that," and I think that is one of the biggest reasons why they have such
a good sense of self. I want you to comment, "Yes," below if you're going to give yourself
a goal and when you reach it, if you're going to celebrate it. Just a, "Yes." Are you going
to dance around your house or you going to eat a piece of cake? Are you going to call
your best friend? As long as you celebrate it any way that you want to, that's the most
important thing. Christi Lukasiak:
Step four, acknowledge effort, not outcome. Now that sounds a lot like step three, but
it's actually a little bit different. Let's take a math test for example. Let's say I
had a math test. I'm going to be honest, sucked in math. I knew that I wasn't going to get
an A in math every time I took a test. It wasn't going to happen, my brain just doesn't
work like that. So if I said to myself, "I have to get an A or this wasn't good enough,"
I was never going to be good enough, so I'm setting myself up for failure. However, I
knew that the best thing I could do was to study hard, prepare as best I could for the
test, go in there, do my best, take whatever the grade was. If I did my best, there was
nothing else I could do. The rest was out of my hands. I needed to reward myself or
acknowledge the effort that I put in, not the outcome.
Christi Lukasiak: So when Clara comes home and she's like, "I
talked to a new person on the playground, but they didn't really want to talk to me."
Okay, that's fine. She can't control what that person does, but she can control the
effort that she made. So I will say to her, "Clara, I am so glad that you went out of
your comfort zone and you talked to a new person on the playground. That's amazing."
Now, if I had been focusing on the outcome, I would've been like, "Oh, I'm so sorry you
don't have a new friend." That's not the same thing. So you want to acknowledge the effort,
not the outcome. Make sense? Christi Lukasiak:
Tip five, and I think this one is probably going to be the one that you take away that's
the easiest to apply. Well actually, this might be the hardest to apply and that is
I want you to try to stay off of social media an hour before you go to bed at night and
an hour after you wake up in the morning. That seems really impossible. So maybe not
start with an hour, maybe start with 10 minutes. 10 minutes before bed, 10 minutes when you
wake up, then go to 15, 20. Do it in increments so that it's an easier thing to implement
than just going like, "Okay, it's an hour." I know that's hard.
Christi Lukasiak: What is that going to do for you? Well, I
think we all know that social media is a place that we tend to compare ourselves to others
easily. You're always like, "Oh God, I'm not that skinny. I'm not that pretty. I don't
have that much money." Right before you go to bed, take those last few minutes before
you go off to sleep. Instead of feeling badly about yourself, lay there and think of that
positive self-talk that we talked about earlier in this video. Or go through the things that
you want to try to accomplish tomorrow. Don't focus on somebody else and how you don't measure
up to them, but rather go inside of yourself and celebrate who you are instead of comparing
yourself to somebody on social media. Same thing in the morning. When you wake up, it's
so easy to jump right on social media and if something goes down at night, because I
have been guilty of this and you see it on social media, it can put you in a bad mood
for the rest of the day. Christi Lukasiak:
Okay, so now you have five easy tips and tricks that you can apply to your life today to help
begin increasing that self-esteem and if you want more ideas like this, make sure that
you click the link in my description box and sign up for my newsletter because I would
love to share more tips and tricks like this with you. If you like this video, make sure
that you hit the like button, share it with a friend, subscribe, all the things. But most
importantly, leave a comment below and let me know which tip you liked the most or that
you think you're going to try because I would really like to know, and I hope it was helpful.
So I'll see you next week. Bye.