High self esteem building is a key to life. In my line of work, I often come across stressed students, erratic employees and burnt out business people. One of the common themes I see in such people is that they are too critical of themselves and frequently judge themselves harshly in comparison to others.
I know that building high self esteem in such people will require me to become aware of a range of low self esteem signs such as beliefs of inadequacy and teach them how to overcome fear of failure.
Do you know a person who often feels inadequate in comparison to other people because those other people never have to try as hard as them, and yet they always seem to do better than them? Now let me assume that that person at times is you. Part of these inadequate feelings may be due to your negative perception of yourself and they don’t actually always do better than you.
But let’s say for arguments sake that they do. You are completely accurate about this scenario. What is likely to happen? You beat yourself down. You say things like ‘I’m not smart enough’, if I was smarter than I should be able to learn it quicker and produce better results. Some will even go so far as to say I am a failure. Because I didn’t produce a grade or result as high as this person, then I am a failure. And you know what, you’re right. You are a failure! A failure in regards to how you are looking at the situation.
Let’s take a different perspective. You have worked twice as hard as this other person and your grade or result was a little bit less. Now, if you gave everything you got and produced a great result for you, and they didn’t try very hard at all and they obtained a reasonable result in comparison to what they could get, who should be more proud?
Who do you respect more in this scenario? And if the person who has to work harder has the right attitude, they will actually enjoy the process more than the other person. While the other person is bored, as you reach your potential you are much more likely to move into states of flow which is where you become enjoyably engrossed in the activity.
Building high self esteem requires developing the correct perspective. I believe that the most important factor in building high self esteem is learning how to focus on your effort, not success. With continued effort, your own individual success will increase. If you are focused on success without a true understanding of effort, then you will fail.
Furthermore, this is only one side of the coin. This person has more ability than you in this particular area, but there are other areas where you will have more ability than them. During my studies, I was surrounded by brilliant people with much greater strengths in certain areas than I. Rather than feel inadequate; I would use the opportunity to learn. Rather than be disdainful of those kind of people, I would be respectful and create friendships so I could learn from them. (Though I do admit, that at times, those kind of people can be very, very annoying, especially if they boast about not needing to try). By learning from them, they would pull me up with them.
My results would improve, I wouldn’t go as high as they would, but I would go higher than I could before. I would genuinely ask about their skills (their brilliance) and thank them for sharing some of their insights with me.
That being said, what about the ways I (or you) may have helped others. A lot of the contributions I made did not increase any of my marks. I was good at using metaphors, simplifying ideas and concepts, helping others feel more confident and less burnt out, joking and playing at times.
Out of all these things, none of them were assessable or gradable in an objective sense. There was no test telling me how important any of these attributes were! However I know these factors are incredibly important and I know that you too have incredible talents that are not measurable or recognized, but are essential for building high self esteem.
To your Success and Fulfilling Happiness,
Aleks Srbinoski
