Building Self Esteem can be a challenge. In my experience of conducting stress management programs and counseling for over 20 years, I found that roughly 99% of those I’ve worked with felt that they needed to improve self esteem. How could this be?
It’s because most of us have been taught to base our self-worth on our accomplishments, skills, physique, financial worth and earnings, ability to help others… Little wonder then when we: • lose skills because of injury; • lose a close family member on whom we’re very dependent; • lose our financial nest egg because the stock market collapses; • do poorly in a course of study; • have a bad hair day; or • don’t live up to our own expectations… we don’t feel good about ourselves and our self esteem and self confidence are challenged. Ultimately, this may: • jeopardize our health;• jeopardize our emotional well being;• set us up for failure mechanisms;• have us constantly trying to impress others;• lead to an identity crisis;• contribute to suicide;• cause chronic depression…
Why is it when there are so many programs available for building self esteem and building confidence that is there a tremendous shortage of those who have self esteem?
The answer is that if you analyze most programs, trainings, and techniques for building self esteem, you’ll see that they actually create the path to easily put your self esteem self confidence in jeopardy with the first calamity that comes along in your life. Five things you might want to know about building self esteem.
1. Many programs focus on having you to:• Acquire skills.• Accomplish achievements.• Change you physical appearance.• Develop a talent.• Obtain additional education…
Building self esteem on something you can acquire can set you up for a big let down, life crisis, anxiety panic attack, and loss of self esteem because these things are not the essence of you but superficial. While you certainly will accomplish many things, when you build self worth the right way, you will never be at risk of losing your self esteem. While talents, skills, accomplishments and so on may come and go, you want your self esteem to be impenetrable.