Self Esteem
September 22, 2009 by ursula
Filed under Personal Development
Get The Self Esteem You Desire
As a person seeking excellence, it is important to assess both your strengths and the barriers that keep you from achieving the improvements you want in your personal and professional life.
A Never Ending Process
Continuous improvement implies a never-ending process. The changes we will need to make may require breaking down our habits into routines we can assess; then we will be able to combine strategies for change into easily achievable steps.
Self-improvement requires self-mastery. We are masterful when we can accomplish our personal dreams and goals. To achieve self-mastery we need to develop some personal characteristics.
- Self Awareness: readiness to look at past or present information about ourselves.
- Self Knowledge: after examining our past we will have a basis for comparing personal observations with feedback from others.
- Self Discipline: we need to be able to make our behaviour conform to our personal goals by controlling our thoughts, feelings and actions.
Self-esteem is a state of mind. It is the way you think and feel about yourself and others;
and it is measured by the way you act. Your self-esteem serves as the bridge between who you are and what you do. It can also be defined as your internal belief system and how you experience life externally.
High self-esteem means that you have a positive sense of your inherent worth as a person. Self-esteem is self-confidence, self-worth and self-respect. The key to improving self-esteem is your willingness
to take responsibility for your feelings, desires, thoughts, abilities and interests, and to accept your overall strengths.
Your self-esteem affects everything you do. It reflects ‘you’ to everyone you come into contact with. Each of us is born with the capacity for positive feelings, but it is possible to learn not to like yourself through your life experience.
Self-esteem is not fixed. It changes (often daily) depending on what you experience or how you are feeling. Most low self-esteem is caused by negative emotional reactions. Childhood experiences, criticism from adults, peers, your environment, media and society in general can cause feelings of inferiority and low self-esteem. If these feelings are reinforced by negative belief patterns, they will become habit forming and low self-esteem will be the result.
As you become an adult, you depend on others for a sense of importance. Negative feelings and thinking patterns can become so powerful they seem like the truth and your mind can then form value judgements as a result.
Self-esteem is both conscious and unconscious. It is an ongoing evaluation of yourself, a belief about what you can and cannot do. Self-esteem can be learned, but it does not happen overnight.
