Impact of Self Esteem on Daily Life Essay -- Confidence

This paper is about the impact of self-esteem on daily life. The more negative thoughts and feelings you have about yourself, the lower your self-esteem. People with low self-esteem often have little confidence in their abilities and question their self-worth. A common scenario, which exemplifies a lack of self-esteem, features college students who say, "It won't do any good to study. I won't make a good grade anyway." These students think they are doomed to failure because of poor performance in the past or their current fears of failure. Consequently, their lack of self-confidence results in passivity with little or no effort to establish goals. Even when they do make worthwhile accomplishments, these students perceive that the performance of other students looks better in comparison. They let events happen to them instead of making them happen and minimize their successes. As a result, these students feel little control over their lives and often find it difficult to set goals and develop close personal relationships. On the other hand, high self-esteem consists of the positive thoughts and feelings you have about yourself. In addition, it affects how you think, act, and feel about others, as well as how successful you are in life. The acquisition of high self-esteem involves you becoming the person you want to be, enjoying others more fully, and offering more of yourself to the world. High self-esteem is not competitive or comparative, but rather it is the state where a person is at peace with himself or herself. Self-esteem is the value we place on what we believe to be true about ourselves. Put simply, our self-esteem is how we feel about ourselves. It's an emotion we hold true about ourselves. People with high self-esteem consider themselves worthy, and view themselves as equal to others. They do not pretend to be perfect, recognize their limitations, and expect to grow and improve. Those low in self-esteem generally experience self-rejection, self-dissatisfaction, self-contempt, and self-disparagement. We all have an inner child and the wounds our inner child received can and do continue to contaminate our adult lives. Our parents helped create this inner child part of us, society also helped with the creation. When this child self is not allowed to be heard or even acknowledged as being real, a false or co-dependent self emerges. We begin... ... self-concept, and that it is either positive or negative all of the time. You have many self-images, and they vary from moment to moment. If you were asked, "Do you like yourself?" you might be inclined to lump all of your negative self-thoughts together into a collective "NO." Breaking down the areas of dislike into specifics will give you definite goals to work on. You have feelings about yourself physically, intellectually, socially and emotionally. You have an opinion about your abilities in music, athletics, art, mechanical undertakings, writing, and on and on. Your self-portraits are as numerous as your activities, and through all of these behaviors there is always YOU, the person that you either accept or reject. Your self-worth, that friendly ever-present-shadow--YOU EXIST--YOU ARE HUMAN. That is all you need! Your worth is determined by you, and with no need for an explanation to anyone. Your worthiness, a given, has nothing to do with your behavior and feelings. You ma y not like your behavior in a given instance, but that has nothing to do with your self-worth. You can choose to be worthy to yourself forever, and then get on with the task of working on your self-images.