Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is important for people to have positive mind. If one has low self-esteem, one behaves passively and feel easily to be damaged by others. On the other hands, if one has high self-esteem, one thinks positively and behaves confidentially. Why does self-esteem effect one’s mind and behaviors? What is self-esteem?

Self-esteem is a hot topic for Psychologists. They have conceptualized self-esteem and tried to find its composition factors. Some researches found that self-esteem is a disposition which a person has that represents one’s judgments of one’s own worthiness. Psychologist Branden insisted that self-esteem is the sum of self-confidence and self-respect. While self-esteem composed many kind of self-evaluations, it has some characteristics.
First, self-esteem is very subjective, biased and emotional. For example, a man does not feel himself valuable even he graduated from a famous university and has a good job. Because his family or his friends have better social conditions than him, he could have higher standard of social comparison. On the other hands, a man thinks himself is excellent despite of his inferior conditions. One’s self-esteem should not be related to objective social evaluation standards: social economic standard, scholarship, parent’s education levels and so on.
Second, self-esteem effects one’s performances. Researchers proved that self-esteem relates closely to one’s performances. One, who has high self-esteem, performs well compared one’s real capacity because one believes that one can do it. However, one, who has low self-esteem, worries about failing so that would not perform well.
In that case, is High self-esteem always better than low self-esteem? High self-esteem is good for one’s performance, but it sometimes make some interpersonal troubles. If one has excessively high self-esteem, one does not judge objectively. He/she often confuses either their own capacity or contribution. Even if there is a thing that one is not able to do, one could say that he/she is able. In spite of team cooperated works, one would ignore other’s contributions and pretend that it is done all by oneself. It made people feel unhappy and annoyed.

In fact, to pretend excessively high self-esteem is fake self-esteem. Why does someone pretend to have overly high self-esteem? It is rooted in one’s weak self-esteem. One who has weak self esteem does not believe one’s thought and evaluation. They are nervous and anxious because they do not know if they evaluated right or not. They would feel relieved if others say that they did really good. One, who has really high self-esteem, does not need to prove one’s ability by other’s recognitions. We need to raise our true high self-esteem.