What is Self Esteem?
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Self Esteem Defined:
"The experience of being capable of meeting life's challenges and being worthy of happiness."
From the National Association for Self-Esteem
Many people think that self esteem is simply "feeling good about yourself" however, it is a much larger concept than that. Self esteem refers to how much you value yourself, how important you feel you are, how you feel about and deal with your accomplishments and failures, your ability to set goals and achieve them, how much you like and respect yourself, and how you perceive yourself as a human being.
Low self esteem can harm you in so many more ways than just feeling bad about yourself. It can cause psychological or behavioral problems. Low self esteem can lead to terrible difficulties such as alcohol, drug or other addictions, eating disorders, co-dependency, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school, low grades, poor job performance (or inability to even hold a job), suicide or suicidal thoughts, isolation, loneliness, and more. If you suffer from low self esteem you may find yourself repeating the same mistakes over and over in your life....stuck in unhealthy relationships, constantly at odds with your job, always feeling like there should be something more to life and looking for that "something" in all the wrong places.
"A man who finds no satisfaction in himself will seek for it in vain elsewhere."
La Rochefoucauld
This quote defines one of the major problems with low self esteem that eventually leads to so many of the negative consequences. Because a person with low self esteem has no satisfaction with themselves they seek happiness from external sources which all inevitably fail. The only way to truly be happy is to learn to be happy with yourself.
With low self esteem, a person uses how they are doing at the present in their lives to judge their own worth. If things are going badly for them in life, they turn this around in their minds to mean that they themselves are bad people. In the same situation a person with healthy self esteem could separate themselves from their experiences and see that just because they had a bad experience doesn't mean that they are a bad person.