Doubts and self-criticism can discourage you from ever trying to make changes in your life for the fear you’ll fail or make a fool out of yourself. Fortunately, you can fix these problems as neither self-doubt nor self-criticism are lifelong sentences that will forever deter you from bettering yourself through exercise.
The three most common reasons for self-criticism when thinking about exercise are:
Long-term physical inactivity can lead to thoughts like “Who am I fooling? I’ll never be able to exercise.” It’s nothing but pessimism reinforced by years of unsuccessful tries or intentions you never acted upon.
As much as I would love to give you a foolproof way to solve this problem, pessimism never disappears overnight and takes consistent practice, self-awareness, and willingness to make changes to develop a more positive outlook.
There are a few things that can help, though:
a. Support
If people around you are pessimistic, they won’t help you fix your negative attitude. If, on the other hand, you can find support in people close to you and be open to their positive influence, they’ll help you escape the trap of pessimism.
b. Gratitude
Expressing grateful thoughts on a daily basis, especially when related to your health and fitness, will help you break through the layer of pessimism.
When you start exercising, you can experience gratitude that you were able to have a 30-minute walk without struggling to catch your breath or do five laps in a swimming pool without a break. These positive thoughts – instead of berating yourself for how weak you are – will help you associate exercise with feeling good instead of feeling guilty for letting yourself go the past few years.
c. Positive surroundings and habits
In addition to surrounding yourself with positive people, make sure to eliminate all kinds of negative stimuli from your environment. For example, I don’t read news nor visit any sites whose only objective is to make you feel negative. I also stay away from negative behaviors and habits like complaining, worrying, making yourself feel like a victim, etc.
You’re most likely well aware of what websites, places, habits, and other stimuli make you feel negative. It can be a news site, a fitness magazine that tells you that you’re never thin enough, your habit of worrying or complaining, or a local fitness gym where newcomers are met with skepticism. If it’s something with a positive alternative, find it.
Make sure that what surrounds you is what builds you up instead of dragging you down. All these little changes, when combined, will support you to give up negativity and focus on the bright side of life, thus helping you introduce a habit of exercise in your life (that will further develop your optimism).
Self-efficacy refers to the belief in your abilities to succeed in a specific situation[lxxxii]. You can have high self-efficacy for, say, knitting, and low self-efficacy for exercise. As long as your belief in your ability to exercise is low, it will be difficult to persist when faced with obstacles. It will be tricky to maintain your routine and will put limits on what you can accomplish.
In my book, Confidence: How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs and Achieve Your Goals, I talk about the Galatea effect[lxxxiii], a type of self-fulfilling prophecy that makes your self-expectations largely determine your performance.
If you have high self-expectations, you’ll enjoy high performance. If you don’t expect much from yourself, your performance will suffer, most likely leading to a drop in motivation and failure.
I go deep into the science and practical advice for developing self-efficacy in the aforementioned book. For the purposes of this book, the most crucial piece of advice to build self-efficacy is to ensure small wins.
The strategy of setting tiny goals and achieving them while constantly pushing the boundaries further and further will help you develop more belief in yourself, which will lead to better performance and less feelings of self-criticism and discouragement.
The smaller and easier the initial goals, the more likely it is you’ll continue with your routine until it’s a well-oiled machine.
For instance, if you want to start swimming but you’re afraid you’ll start drowning and embarrass yourself, start treading water in a shallow pool first. Remind yourself how it feels to swim (if you know how to swim, but haven’t tried it for a long time), and each subsequent workout try to introduce a more challenging thing to try.
During the first few weeks, don’t try anything that has a high chance of a failure as it can decrease your self-efficacy. After a streak of small wins you’ll be less susceptible to discouragement because of one failure.
If you don’t know how to swim at all, find an instructor or attend swimming classes aimed at complete beginners. The right teacher is aware that water can make people feel insecure and overly nervous and will lead you by the hand to build your self-efficacy tiny step by step.
If you don’t feel you’re ready for classes, get used to the swimming pool by simply treading water. Use a kickboard and other floatation aids to reduce your fear and gradually get used to what it’s like to be in the water. If you continue with such a routine for a few weeks, your fear will eventually diminish, allowing you to consider swimming classes.
Low self-esteem is different than self-efficacy because while self-efficacy refers to specific beliefs about your abilities, self-esteem relates to your general evaluation of yourself. A more telling synonym of the word “self-esteem” is “self-respect” because that’s what it comes down to in the end – low self-esteem means you have little respect for yourself.
How are you supposed to take care of your body if you care so little for your entire being? Some common tendencies of people with low self-esteem include:
- criticizing themselves for everything. Self-criticism makes it challenging to introduce any new habit because you’ll constantly get angry at yourself for being so [fill in the blank].
- hypersensitivity to criticism and excessive will to please others. If you have friends who aren’t physically active, they’ll try to make you give up your goal to become fitter and probably succeed if you can’t bear people criticizing you.
- chronic indecision, fear of failure and/or mistakes, and perfectionism. All of them will paralyze you when trying to introduce a habit of exercise.
Do you want to turn into a person with high self-esteem? Become aware of your current thought patterns, behaviors, and habits, and remodel them one by one to resemble the person you want to become.
In the past, I too suffered from low self-esteem. For me, it was a long process of self-discovery and changing my entire identity one block at a time.
First attempts at exercise (while I still thought I was a fitness failure because I was always one of the worst students during my physical exercise classes), first attempts to think in a more positive way (while I was still used to complaining every single hour of the day and having suicidal thoughts), and first attempts to exhibit a more confident behavior (while I was still paralyzed with fear among strangers, particularly women) were all the stepping stones on which I built the entire new foundation.
I can’t sum up my story in a few paragraphs, and it would be a disservice to you to simplify it to such an extent.
Out of all the people with low self-esteem I’ve known, each had to take his or her own journey of self-discovery. These journeys usually took years before becoming firmly established in the mind. What each person had in common, though, is that he or she started – despite fear, self-criticism, perfectionism, indecision, and resentment.
NLP (an approach to communication and personal development) – particularly Tony Robbins’ books, Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within – contains countless powerful techniques for self-change that go far beyond the scope of this book and will help you on your journey toward high self-esteem.