Strong, Healthy Self-Esteem - Not Over-Rated

In another post, I expressed the idea that even if you never get caught, you would always know you did the wrong thing and the presence of this fact in your memory would "tear down your self-esteem."

A cynical person might say, "So what? Self-esteem is over-rated."

But a low opinion of yourself can set you up for failure, because it can cause you to:

• Feel ashamed and unsure of yourself because of past misdeeds, shortcomings, issues, and failures
• Compare yourself to others who have more character strength and success, which making you feel inadequate
• Feel anger towards stronger, more gifted or accomplished people
• Interpret advice, suggestions and input as criticisms and put-downs
• Don’t appreciate your good qualities or give yourself credit for your accomplishments
• Habitually criticize yourself and put yourself down
• Feel unattractive, unlikable, unlovable and undesirable
• Feel unworthy of relationships with people who have high self-esteem
• Tend to repel strong, capable people, who are put off by manifestations of low self-esteem
• Be more comfortable associating with other people with low self-esteem, who are more likely to contribute to your failure than to your success
• Be vulnerable to peer pressure, because being excluded is painful
• Exaggerate or lie about accomplishments to compensate for inadequacies, shortcomings, issues, mistakes, and failures
• Have a pattern of self-deception and self-loathing
• Feel unworthy of success, and so you don’t seek or welcome new challenges and opportunities
• Are likely to abuse alcohol or drugs to medicate the pain of failure, self-loathing and exclusion

You can see how insidious low self-esteem can be. No, strong, healthy self-esteem is not over-rated.











Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2013. Building Personal Strength .