You, Your Self Estem, and Its Importance in Your Growth!

Introduction

Did your boss, took you for a ride? Did your girlfriend/ boyfriend ditch you? Did your friends take you for granted? And you feel that you are useless and you feel that they are hurting your self esteem.

Understanding Self-Esteem

To understand self-esteem, it helps to break the term into two words. Let's take a look at the word esteem first. Esteem is a fancy word for thinking that someone or something is important or valuing that person or thing.

And self, means, you. So when you put the two words together, it's easier to see what self-esteem is. It's how much you value yourself and how important you think you are. It's how you see yourself and how you feel about your achievements. Self-esteem isn't bragging about how great you are. It's more like quietly knowing that you're worth a lot (priceless, in fact). It's not about thinking you're perfect - because nobody is - but knowing that you're worthy of being loved and accepted.

In the words of Dr Nathaniel Branden, widely regarded as "the father of the self-esteem movement", self-esteem is "the disposition to experience oneself as competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of Happiness."

Importance of Self-Esteem

Self-esteem isn't like a cool pair of sneakers that you'd love to have but don't have to have. Good self-esteem is important because it helps you to hold your head high and feel proud of yourself and what you can do. It gives you the courage to try new things and the power to believe in yourself. It lets you respect yourself, even when you make mistakes. And when you respect yourself, others usually respect you, too. Having good self-esteem is also the ticket to making good choices about your mind and body.

If you think you're important, you'll be less likely to follow the crowd if your friends are doing something dumb or dangerous. If you have good self-esteem, you know that you're smart enough to make your own decisions. You value your safety, your feelings, your health - your whole self. Good self-esteem helps you know that every part of you is worth caring for and protecting.

What Self-Esteem Is Not

Self-esteem is the experience of feeling and knowing that we are competent to live and worthy of living and being happy.

Genuine self-esteem is not primarily dependent upon the approval of other persons in one's social environment. While it is indeed desirable to have the realistic good opinions of others, no one can give us self-esteem except ourselves. The person who ties his self-esteem to the approval of others is already handicapped in self-esteem and is constantly in jeopardy of further loss of self-esteem.

Contrary to what one sometimes hears or reads, self-esteem is not just a synonym for any positive feeling about oneself. Thus, self-esteem is not egotism, arrogance, conceitedness, narcissism, or a desire to feel superior to others. Indeed, these attitudes betray a lack of genuine self-esteem. Self-esteem is not the euphoria that might be temporarily induced by a job promotion or a new love affair. In fact, if one feels incompetent to handle the job or unworthy of love, these experiences can be a challenge to an already impaired sense of self-esteem. One can feel like an "imposter," who might be "found out" at any moment.

Self-esteem - A Psychological need (Some facts from Research)

Self-esteem plays a crucial role in psychological well-being. Individuals who are high in self-esteem tend to be at less risk for Depression (Crandall, 1973) and hopelessness (Abramson, Metalsky, and Alloy, 1989). Self-esteem is a better predictor of satisfaction with one's life than any objective characteristic of individuals, such as income or age (Diener, 1984). High self-esteem has been implicated in good mental health (Baumeister, 1991; Bednar et al., 1989; Taylor & Brown, 1988).

Most people who seek psychotherapy do so because of general feelings of low self-esteem. Low self-esteem has been linked to problems such as Depression, use of drugs (Brehm and Back, 1968), alcohol abuse (Wahl, 1956), suicide, and eating disorders. Relative to high self-esteem p