Stop Being Too Hard On Yourself

By SC Chua for Yahoo! Southeast Asia

You never like what you see in the mirror. You are always telling yourself that you you're not good enough and that you shouldn't even bother. You get upset because you didn't go to the gym, ate that chocolate cake, and the list goes on.

Like it or not, we all have an inner critic who is the first one to put ourselves down and dish out the insults. "This is the voice of your Inner Mean Girl. She's negative. She's catty. She's judgmental. She compares your worst to everyone else's best," says Christine Arylo, author of Choosing ME before We and co-founder of Inner Mean Girl Reform School (www.innermeangirl.com), a series of programs that give women tools to transform their self-sabotaging patterns into new self-empowering habits.

The problem when you pay too much attention to that voice? You restrict yourself from trying your best and instead stay stuck in status quo simply because you really believe that you are not good enough. "These negative voices slow you down, and make it way harder—sometimes impossible—to achieve the happiness and success we all deserve," says Amy Ahlers, author of Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves.

So how do you shush your Inner Mean Girl? Here are five things you can try.

1. Stop comparing yourself to others.
It won't help if you are keeping up with the Joneses because there will always be someone who is richer, skinnier, smarter, prettier and better. Comparing yourself to others is a sure killer to your self-esteem.

2. There is no such thing as perfect.
Why? Because it is an illusion your inner critic made up. The thing is nobody is perfect and nobody has it perfect as well. In some point of our lives, we are all struggling with something—whether it's in terms of financial, your career, your health, or your relationships. So learn to love your imperfections and bumps in life. Embrace and accept them, and if you want, let them motivate and inspire you to do better.

3. Prioritize and recognize what matters.
Is it really important that you wear branded clothes? Or that not a strand of hair is out of place all the time? We didn't think so. Neither does Catherine Birndorf, MD and co-author of The Nine Rooms of Happiness, who thinks that it is more important to focus on things that deserves priority in your life and not obsessing over the other little things that aren't as necessary. "It's important to recognize who you are, how you do things. Once you have this self-knowledge, you can start to determine where obsessing over details matters and where you can let it go," she says.

4. Stop saying negative things to yourself.
By saying it, you mean it. And by telling yourself that you're not good enough, you'll eventually come to mean it too! To stop pilling on the negatives, do as Arylo suggests. "List the word-for-word statements your Inner Mean Girl uses to get and keep you down and distracted. And then next to every one of her toxic statements, write a self-loving, self-empowering statement. Say these positive affirmations daily for 30 days and you'll make your inner wisdom's muscles stronger than your inner mean girl," she says.

5. Celebrate the small victories.
Small things do really matter, especially in the case of beating your inner critic. So with every achievement you've made—whether big or small—remember to give yourself a pat on the back as an acknowledgement.