Self-Esteem – royal road to life success
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Self-esteem is a term used to reflect a person’s perception and overall appraisal of his or her own self-worth.
Self-esteem is concerned with the beliefs a person may have, the emotions that accompany these beliefs, and the behavior that is reflected from these beliefs and emotions.
As an example, a person may believe:
I am a competent person
This will give him or her the emotion of pride and self-fulfillment which will lead to the behavior of assertiveness and confidence.
On the other hand if a person believes:
I am an incompetent person
there will be emotions of despair and shame leading to behavior that may reflect shyness, caution and unassertiveness.
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The Role of Self-Esteem
The importance of self-esteem cannot be underestimated.
When you have high self-esteem, you create the energy to make things happen and to achieve your goals. The more you feel good about yourself, the easier it is to be bold and to push your boundaries – to try new challenges and continuously reinforce your belief of self-worth. This confidence helps you to expand your circle of influence and achieve new successess. And as these successes stack on each other, your belief about your self-worth and ability to make a difference will correspondingly increase – until your belief of self-worth becomes a conviction.
People who have high self-esteem do not put any limitations to what they are able to achieve. There is no sense of being too young or too old to achieve their goals.
Their energizing presence is like a shaft of light that brightens the people around them.
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People who have high Levels of Self-esteem are:
- able to take criticism without being too defensive
- confident without being aggressive or overbearing
- resourceful and self-reliant
- active and achievement oriented without being workaholics
- mostly satisfied with themselves and with their achievements
- able to have positive regard and respect for themselves and for others
- able to learn from their mistakes and take good advice from others
- able to laugh at themselves
- open to other’s successes and do not put others down
- committed to success and do not easily give up
- not excessively driven with the need to prove themselves to others
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The Effect of low Self-Esteem
On the other hand lack of self- esteem can cripple your journey towards Life Success, fulfillment and happiness.
Low self esteem feeds your negative thinking and makes you believe negative comments others make. This can cause you to lose confidence and the ability to value yourself . There will be a tendency to protect yourself from taking new risks because you constantly fear failure. This fear of risk will create self-fulfilling prophesies and you may actually materialize into reality the failure you fear will happen when you are forced to try out new things. This creates a vicious circle where fear of failure actually leads to failure….which further reinforces your fear of failure and a retreat into the ‘safety’ of your comfort zone, and away from actively seeking to achieve your Big Dream.
Lack of self- esteem and the dwelling on negative and self-limiting thoughts can spread like a cancer. It could grow bigger and adversely effect your whole being if you do not challenge it and work on enhancing your views about yourself.
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But Not Everyone Agrees About this…
While everyone agrees about the positive effects of having a healthy self-esteem, there is some controversy about the concept itself. People like Carl Rogers, Paul Tillich and the Dalai Lama have criticized the excessive importance that some people give to the concept that to be successful you need to have a huge self-esteem. This may create big demands upon you which can make you strive for the need to be viewed as successful by others. There is also the danger that if a person has low self-esteem this will further reinforce the feeling that ‘something is wrong’ with him or her due to the high emphasis there is in society about self-esteem.
American psychologist Albert Ellis goes as far as to say that the fixation on self-esteem can be self-defeating and ultimately destructive. He claims that such ego centric focus on self-value can lead to unrealistic, illogical and self- and socially destructive behavior especially if it is based on perfectionistic and grondiose thinking.
The healthier alternative to self-esteem according to him is unconditional self-acceptance and unconditional other-acceptance and these concepts are incorporated in his therapeutic system Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).
Clearly as in everything else one must strive for a healthy balance in life
Certainly negative irrational thoughts and beliefs must be challenged and a healthy self-esteem is something to be desired. However it is also a fact that if one finds that the search for self-esteem is causing disharmony and stress, a balance should be achieved. Life success and self-esteem should be acknowledged as desirable ideals but the most important thing is to achieve a sense of self-acceptance and a clear life purpose that provides true fulfillment.
To assess your level of Self-Esteem you can download a Self-Esteem Assessment Form that gives you an automatic score: To Download click HERE
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