Michelle Obama’s much-anticipated follow-up to her 2018 memoir Becoming has just been released, and it sees the former first lady speak about her insecurities, and the strategies she has developed to counter them, with refreshing candour. 

In The Light We Carry, which Obama has described as “a collection of stories and practices that have helped me sort through all the challenges and questions that keep us up at night”, she opens up about her experiences with negative thoughts, the result of her “fearful mind”.

These thoughts, she explains, are often fixated around her dislike of her appearance, with Obama revealing that her height (she is 5’11”) has long been a source of insecurity: as the tallest person at school, she writes, she was always “bringing up the rear”, which “created a small wound in me, the tiniest kernel of self-loathing that would keep me from embracing my strength”.

Even now, she reveals, there are “plenty of mornings” where she turns on her bathroom light, then “desperately want[s] to flip it off again” when confronted with her reflection.

Though most of us would rush to give our friends and family a self-esteem boost, it’s not always easy to do the same when it comes to ourselves. Indeed, even the outwardly assured-seeming Obama admits that self-love is very much a work-in-progress for her, something which she tries to practise “every single day”.

So, how does Obama raise her self-confidence? The former FLOTUS says she starts the morning by greeting herself with “a positive message”, and according to a tweet she shared last year, one mantra that she keeps returning to is: “Am I good enough? Yes, I am.”

Obama, it seems, is a fan of the mood-boosting effects of positive affirmation, a technique that can help reframe your attitude by using uplifting statements to challenge the negative thoughts which might automatically spring into our minds. 

A negative internal voice, explains Dr Jenna Vyas-Lee, clinical psychologist and co-founder of Kove, uses any evidence at all to “reinforce the message that we are not good enough, often ignoring all of the evidence to the contrary”. Negative talk, she notes, can often become habitual: “You actually use it as a strategy to cope [with difficult situations] – and this needs reversing.”

In order to beat it, she says, we may have to consciously tell ourselves the opposite: “Positive affirmations are a really effective way of being compassionate to ourselves, providing our minds with a better, more balanced view of ourselves.”

Telling ourselves uplifting things, she says, is likely to calm our nervous systems, make us feel more relaxed and therefore allow us to think in a more optimistic and motivated way, creating a positive cycle: “The more positive we feel, the more positive we think, and therefore the more positive action we are likely to take.”

Taking the time to do this in the morning, before our day has started and before we’ve been buffeted by quotidian stresses of disrupted commutes or passive-aggressive work emails, means “we are setting an intention to spend the day being compassionate to ourselves”, Dr Vyas-Lee adds. 

To get started, think carefully about the sort of messages or phrases that usually help to lift your mood: “[Put] aside some time and write down 15 to 30 affirmations you love, then use these as a pool to pull from each day,” recommends positive psychologist Dawn Baxter.

If you’re used to speaking to yourself negatively, of course, this will inevitably seem difficult to begin with. One way to tackle this, Baxter suggests, is to think of yourself as talking to someone else. “Sometimes we talk to ourselves in a way that we wouldn’t talk to other people,” she says. “Imagine if it were your best friend in the situation and see how you would respond to that person… If we speak to ourselves the way we speak to other people, it allows you to give yourself a bit of a break and a reminder that you deserve self-respect and love too.”

Another tactic, Dr Vyas-Lee explains, is to address the younger version of yourself: “What would you say to the five-year-old you that was having a bad day and feeling negative about themselves?” 

Eventually, as well as developing a more self-confident mindset, she says, it’s important to identify when the negative voice starts to creep back in and stop it in its tracks. “You want to develop some skills to catch the negative voice, to catch the inner critic when they are awake, alive and kicking,” she notes.

“When you identify that that’s what your mind is doing, you can work on shutting it down very quickly.” That might be by acknowledging the thought, then countering it with a more positive one, sharing it with someone you trust or even by writing it down (then throwing it away).

If it works for Michelle Obama, we’re on board. Now repeat after us: “I am good enough…”

Images: Getty