06-21-2008, 04:21 PM
Increasing Your Self-Esteem
Self-Esteem: What is it?
Written by: Dean C. Dauw
Researchers defines self-esteem, on a subtle and often unconscious level as how one actually feels about oneself, based on your own individual sense of personal worth and importance. How much do you value yourself? The answer to the question is your level of self-esteem.
The main reason why it is hard to make or perform the self-esteem is because your present level of self-esteem is the result of your entire life's history. From our earlier childhood we have developed subtle and non-conscious feelings that have become unconscious factors in your awareness.
High self-esteem principally comes from your accepting complete responsibility for your personal well-being and taking complete charge of your own life. High self-esteem basically means you have to learn to accept yourself completely as in inherently valuable person, regardless of past mistakes, problems, and non-achievements of your goals.
Low self-esteem, on the other hand, can come about because of unrealistic comparisons and/or irrational beliefs about perfection. For example, you can be happy today even if you are not rich as Bill Gates. You do not have to be comparing yourself with billionaires. You can be a desirable woman today, even if your bosom is not as perfect as a Playboy Playmate. You need not and must not be constantly comparing yourself to others. You can be very successful today, even if you are not a president of a company. You need not be always making comparisons in every way.
Many people have developed unconscious irrational beliefs about their need for perfection. So, you may be haunted daily by feeling that you are not really worthy; that you must or should be better. And, of course, you may not really know why, at a conscious level, you must be perfect.
Low self-esteem typically results from many negative feeling and negative emotional reactions that have in turn led you to feel dependent, inferior, or badly about yourself. Your parents, for example, may have repeatedly made statements to you like "Mom and Dad knows best!" Such comments could have led you to feel poorly as if you are not being treated with respect.
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so does your self-esteem brighten or darken your perception of your surroundings. In the same way, your self-esteem influences all your emotional responses, moods or attitudes, which includes your feelings of loneliness. If you have low self-esteem, you will tend to feel inferior, and thus have difficulty accepting a compliment. So you may suspect whoever gives you a compliment as a hypocrite or a manipulator, because you yourself know how bad you really, really are.
Your self-esteem is not an intellectual, cognitive idea but rather a feeling or a whole host of feeling deeply hidden. Most people do not even give conscious attention to their feeling of self-esteem.