Boost Your Self-Esteem

Have you ever been in a class and refused to answer up because you figured that what you had to say wasn’t a good enough contribution? Have you ever been to a party and felt painfully as if others in attendance looked far better or seemed far more interesting than you were?

What is Self-Esteem?

Self-esteem relates to the level at which you love, value and accept yourself and your overall evaluation of your worth. You might have heard such comments as “He doesn’t have any self-esteem at all.” What is being said here is that the individual has low self-esteem, since an individual’s self esteem could be high or low or anywhere in between, if we for example, imagine that person being placed on a scale from 1 to 10.

A person’s overall self-esteem is fairly constant over time, unless profound changes occur for the better or worse. For example, an individual’s self-esteem could be lowered by a traumatic event such as death of a parent or close sibling or could be raised through counseling, mentoring, achieving planned academic improvements and so on.

There are some brief variations in self-esteem that occur at certain points and these make up what is called state self-esteem. For example, you may suffer a low grade on a subject in which you usually excel and you may feel down on yourself for a short time. You can prove yourself on the next test, through hard work or perhaps through discovering that other students who typically excel in the subject also performed poorly, perhaps because the test was pitched at a very difficult level.

How is Self-Esteem Developed?

Self-esteem is developed through a person’s interaction with his or her social and physical environment from the time he or she is born, if not before. The combination of approval from parents, other family members and peers for such areas as physical appearance, social skills, academic achievement, along with the sense of mastery a person gains through problem-solving within their physical environment (e.g. a toddler’s mastery of stairs to a teenager’s learning to drive) contribute to the development of self-esteem.

How do People Judge Their Self-Esteem

You may not be fully aware that you are assessing yourself in a number of areas which contribute to your notion of your level of self-esteem. This is because people tend to more readily express joy over being valued or feeling competent or sad over feeling unvalued or incompetent, without necessarily relating such feelings to self-esteem.

A false sense of esteem is typically based on superficial things such as social class or the brand and level of expense of the clothing that we wear. Far too often individuals spend time comparing and displaying possessions, rather than on sharing thoughts and ideas for building up the inner person in terms of intellect and quality of character, or in terms of values and the expression of those values, through wholesome behaviours and activities.

Your level of self-esteem may relate to an overall conscious or partially conscious self-assessment and may be composed of a wide range of elements, depending on what you, your family or peers deem to be important. It could also possibly be focused on just one or a few areas that are deemed of high significance for particular reasons. Among these may be the following:

The Importance of a Positive Self-Esteem

Those with a positive self-esteem have been observed to:

How You Can Take Charge of Your Self-Esteem