By Personal Growth Counseling| 2017-09-26T04:18:31+00:00 July 29th, 2015
How we feel about ourselves affects every aspect of our life. Our responses to events are shaped by who and what we think we are. The dramas of our lives are the reflections of our most private visions of ourselves and others. Self-esteem is the key to success or failure in any endeavor.
Apart from biological issues, there is not a single psychological difficulty—from anxiety and depression, to fear of intimacy and/or success alcohol and drug abuse, underachievement at work or school, domestic violence, child abuse, emotional immaturity, sexual dysfunction, to suicide and other crimes that cannot be directly traced to a poor self-esteem. Because there is such a strong mind/body connection, many physiological disorders, diseases and chronic pain are also related to a poor self-esteem.
Positive self-esteem is a requirement for a fulfilling life. There are two primary components:
- Personal competency—self-confidence
- Personal worth—self-respect
- Live our beliefs
It reflects your judgment of your ability to manage your life. To have a high self-esteem is to feel confident, appropriate to life. To have low self-esteem is to feel inappropriate to life and wrong, not only about the issues, but about yourself as a person.
Many people suffer from feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, self-doubt, guilt, and fear of full participation in life. They have the vague sense of “I am not enough.”
In the process of growing up and living in a negative world, we may find it impossible to form a positive self-concept. This may be because of the emotional input from others or because of our own real or perceived failures in honesty, responsibility, integrity, and self-assertiveness. As children our self-confidence and self-respect can be undermined or nurtured according to whether we are respected, loved, valued and encouraged in our early choices. Even in the early years, our own choices and decisions play a crucial role in the level of self-esteem we develop
We are usually very understanding and forgiving of the mistakes and/or failures of others. However, we tend to judge our own inadequacies without understanding or compassion. We are not intended to be passive receptacles of other people’s views of us. It is tragic that so many people look for self-worth every place but within themselves. We need to understand and “get that” we don’t get to be perfect and that every mistake is not because of our failure.
Everyone makes mistakes, and we need to understand that mistakes we make can be the best learning experiences we have. It is not necessary to hate our self or to get defensive. We need to find our resilience and go again after the desired outcome.
The higher our self-esteem is, the higher our ambitions tend to be. It is true that to be fully successful, we have to believe that we are capable of accomplishing what we set out to do. This is true in finances, as well as relationships, creativity, and spirituality.
Self-esteem is the antidote for envy, inappropriate anger, gossip, impatience, lack of appropriate goals and many more negative behaviors that we tend to hate in ourselves.
One of the most significant characteristics of a good self-esteem is that we are not at war either with ourselves or with others.
To develop a healthy self-esteem, we must give up the need to know who we are, understand, accept, and most of all live by our own values. When we have integrity, tenacity, resilience, courage, strength, and determination, we no longer allow others to define us either a positively or negatively. To accomplish this, we must rip out and burn the outdated tapes in our brain that pulls us into a downward spiral. We must update our brain to include who we really are today, being totally honest. Our self-concept shapes our destiny.
Call us to register for our 6-week classes-Building a Positive Self-esteem.