I work a lot with young people and their families and often the reason they are in therapy is behaviour issues at school and / or home. Often the young person will feel a lot of remorse about how they have behaved and will attribute the problem to who they are as a person. So in many cases the secondary problem to treat is self-esteem. This is due to each instance of the behaviour providing further evidence of their failure as a person.

Often the approach to treatment includes behaviour change work via rewarding this changed behaviour, and managing but not responding to the unacceptable behaviour as a way of extinguishing this. Often this approach increases self-esteem as every time the new behaviour is successfully applied and rewarded the young person  starts to feel better about themselves.

I think this concept can be applied more broadly. In psychology there has been work done on what we call attribution biases.  Often positive outcomes can be associated with luck and negative outcomes attributes to personal efforts.  In this case self-esteem is never increased and only reduced as a result of unfavourable outcomes.  If we can partially flip this bias around, then positive outcomes can increases self-esteem as they are attributed to personal effort and we are protected from the impact of negative outcomes. Some would argue that this approach reduces expectations and would result in less striving and therefore goal achievement. I think the opposite is true. Rewarding our successes increases our self-esteem and increases the chances of further successes. The bottom up approach looks for successes and evaluates  any progress in the right direction as a success. Top down, whilst assuming success is the default, can have a more significant negative affect on the individual as its focussed on failure, and this can tend to lead to more failure as confidence reduces.

To implement bottom up it is just important to reflect on what would  be considered progress towards a goal and to notice this activity and treat it as success.  Also remember to reward yourself for this progress. Enjoy !!