Managing your money is an important life skill, and includes keeping your money safe, making sure you have at least enough to pay for your needs, and staying in control of any payments you have to make.
Self-esteem rises when you know you can trust yourself, when you trust your own instincts and intuition over the ideas of others, and when you’ve proven to yourself that you can face disappointment and frustration without becoming destabilised.
Take time to identify what matters most to you. Measure all your choices and actions against these core values, making sure they match up.
You can’t be so hard on yourself for the little things – everyone makes mistakes, and it can be good to accept them, learn from them, and move on.
For every feeling and situation, you can accept that there is an alternative – you can choose to interpret the situation a different way, soothe yourself, and then feel something different. No one else causes our feelings. Only we can choose and change them.
Find the cause of the feeling you’re having and notice the effect, e.g. you didn’t give yourself enough time for homework, so now you feel stressed. Anytime you feel something uncomfortable that you’d rather avoid, put a magnifying glass on it. Once you know what you feel, you can now challenge both the cause and the effect.
It’s not always easy to understand a feeling when it happens, especially if you think you shouldn’t feel it – but forget about ‘should’. Instead, try to pinpoint exactly what you feel – scared, frustrated, ashamed, angry – and then pinpoint what might be the cause.
You’ll study better if you take care of yourself. Make sure you eat well and get enough sleep and physical exercise. Don’t reward yourself with too many sugary or fatty snacks or push yourself to study late into the night, and make sure you drink plenty of water.
It doesn’t matter where you study as long as the space is quiet, comfortable and distraction-free. Wherever you choose to study, put up motivating quotes, pictures, or anything else that makes you feel good.
Tough times are always accompanied by growth. Every time you go through hardship, you learn how to survive it. You will survive the tough times.