Your Most Important Relationship: The Importance of Self-Esteem

The dimensions of “real” self-esteem

In order to have mental health, healthy families, and healthy societies, every man, woman, and child needs to have positive self-esteem, a true sense of personal worth.

Unfortunately there has been a lot of confusion about its definition. Many people mistakenly equate self-esteem with selfishness, arrogance, conceit, narcissism, and a sense of entitlement or superiority. These definitions are incorrect.

Real self-esteem is “the experience of being able to face life’s challenges and being worthy of happiness.” It involves three dimensions:

1. Cognitive refers to one’s thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge.
2. affective refers to one’s feelings and emotions.
3. behavioral The dimension refers to one’s own actions, for example, being respectful, assertive and resilient.

Unfortunately, there is a long established tradition in our society that convinces us that we are not well. The most devastating aspect of the problem is that most of the shame is related to who we are, what we cannot change. We cannot change our nationality, color or height, for example. We have bought a bill of goods that has made us very sick. They have convinced us that we are supposed to be caterpillars forever and never turn into butterflies.

Every person wants and needs to feel important, capable, kind, and valuable. To regain self-esteem we must be willing to move from shame and self-rejection to acceptance and self-love. We are not profane beings, but sacred.

However, we now have the opportunity to look at ourselves with new eyes, to reclaim and “remember” the missing pieces of who we are. We are adorable. We are valuable. We are precious. We are and have always been fine just the way we are; we have done our best given the information we had at the time.

Where we have done wrong, we can learn to do good. Where we have made mistakes, we can correct them. Where we have caused harm, we can acknowledge it and learn to heal. And where we are innocent, we must treasure it, not hide it.

– THINKING OF THE DAY –

“For adults, self-esteem is not determined by what others think of you.

but by what you think of yourself.”

-of On the wings of self esteem