Self-esteem is a person’s beliefs about their own worth.
It is also related to the feelings people experience depending on their sense of worthiness or on the contrary, unworthiness. Self-esteem is an important topic because it influences a lot of your choices and decisions.
Self-esteem serves a kind of motivational function to make people want to care for themselves and explore their full potential.
People with high self-esteem will have a stronger drive to attain their personal goals and follow their aspirations while people with lower-esteem, on the other side, don’t tend to regard themselves as worthy and will more likely see bad outcomes than happy ones, and may not believe they can achieve those things, and this, tend to be less persistent in terms of overcoming adversity.
Even though they may have similar goals as people with higher self-esteem, they are generally less motivated to go on the ends of their projects.
Self-esteem remains in itself a somewhat abstract concept; it’s hard for someone who hasn’t got it for example to even imagine what it would be like to have good self-esteem. A way for people who have low self-esteem to imagine what it would be like to have higher self-esteem would be to picture how they feel about things in their lives that they attribute value to. For instance, some people really love cars. Because they “value” cars so much, these people take really good care of their car, better than of themselves!. They will make good decisions about where to let their car park, about how often to get it cleaned-up, and how to drive that car! They may even pimp the car and then show it of with pride. Self-esteem is like that example of the car, except it is yourself that you love, take care of, and feel pride about. Self-esteem is supposed to occur on a continuum, meaning that it varies from low to high, and it also varies in another way which we might describe as reasonableness.
It turns out that not all example of high self-esteem are the same. Some people with good self-esteem have it that way because they accomplished real things, real challenges in life.
In contrast, there are other people whose high self-esteem seems totally blown out of proportion to their real accomplishments. These people to think very well of themselves, sometimes without really real-life reasons, and based more on a sense of entitlement. This entitled way of high self-esteem is considered to be less healthy psychologically speaking, than the more proportional variety of self-esteem, because of the self-centered ways that goes with the sense of entitlement – this type of entitlement can even be linked to some form of narcissism in some cases.
Research has also shown that a person’s self-esteem has a strong impact on his or her relationships, on her behavior. Unhealthy self-esteem has been linked to narcissism, as we said, but also with abusive relationships for example.
Just as self-esteem can be a little too high in proportion to a person’s real life accomplishments, it can also be too low. Those people who have poor self-esteem may have had as many challenges as the others and may have overcome them, but because they tend to be more depressed, envious, or because they may have been abused earlier on, they may not recognize these accomplishments and actions as a things to be proud of.
They may have an unreasonably high standard of perfectness which gives them emotional distress as they cannot possibly meet that internal perfectness they want to achieve.
That is where an outside observer like a life coach or a psychologist can help them view themselves through an outside lens, based on accomplishments and actions.
Self-esteem consequently varies both in terms of strength and in terms of its reasonableness.
Parents seeking to develop a good self-esteem in their child need to nurture and cultivate both of these dimensions. To do this, it is important they acknowledge the child’s strengths and abilities, reassure him regularly that you love him, and teach the child coping strategies like journaling, talking to others, managing his anger in a healthy way, resolving conflicts, and dealing with stressful situations.
A child with a healthy self-esteem will grow in to a stronger adult because it will allow him to cope better when things go bad or that unexpected things happen!
Working on growing your self-esteem, as a child or as an adult will only bring positivity to your life!
You will be happier , as self-esteem generally brings positive feelings, plus, high self-esteem
increases initiative. It gives you more confidence in your own views and in your ability to do what is right and appropriate. And, you will be more willing than people with low self-esteem to reject advice in favor of following your own point of view, to speak up for yourself, or take the risk to criticize !
Finally, you will also respond much more positively to failures or rejection, either by perseverance and trying harder or by switching to something else or someone else that is more positive.
Grow your self-esteem, you will thank yourself later!
