Self-esteem is your opinion of yourself. How capable or incapable you think you are. It is a measure of how content you are with yourself and your abilities, in who you are. Self-esteem is relatively stable and enduring, though it can fluctuate in some cases.
Healthy self-esteem makes you resilient and hopeful about life.If you have healthy self-esteem, you feel good about yourself and see yourself as worthy of respect from others. When you have low self-esteem, you put little value on your opinions and thoughts. You constantly look for validation from people around you.
When you value yourself and have good self-esteem, you feel secure and worthwhile. You have generally positive relationships with others and feel confident about yourself. You’re also open to criticism, which can help you learn and introspect making you a better version of yourself.
When self-esteem is healthy and grounded in reality, it’s hard to have too much
of it. Boasting and feeling superior to others around you isn’t a sign of too
much self-esteem. It’s more likely evidence of insecurity and low self-esteem.
Impaired self-esteem negatively impacts our ability to manage difficulty and life’s disappointments. All of our relationships are affected, including our relationship with ourselves. When our self-esteem is impaired, we feel insecure, compare ourselves to others, and doubt and criticize ourselves. We neither recognize our worth, nor honour and express our needs and wants. Instead, we may self-sacrifice, defer to others, or try to control them and/or their feelings toward us to feel better about ourselves. For example, we might people-please, manipulate, or devalue them, provoke jealousy, or restrict their association with others. Consciously or unconsciously, we devalue ourselves, including our positive skills and attributes, making us very sensitive to criticism. We may also be afraid to try new things, because we might fail.
The high self-esteem movement began around the 1970s and it’s a complete failure. High self-esteem is fragile and shallow and no better than having low self-esteem. This began with parents encouraging their children and applauding them irrespective of being successful or not.People with fragile high self-esteem compensate for their self-doubts by engaging in exaggerated tendencies to defend, protect and enhance their feelings of self-worth. If you think about it sociopaths have high self-esteem.
In today’s world digital media has created a world of high self-esteem with likes followers and number of views. The modern generation is a product of this high self-esteem movement. The issue is that we as a society that we think that every child is special. No one will fail, this is evident even in our education system. The Higher Secondary Certificate class board examination has said that from 2020 the word ‘Fail’ will not be used in board examination as per Government Regulation they will use Eligible for Re-examination. Like parents even our government is an accomplice in building false self-esteem of children of our nation. Life isn’t easy even nature says it survival of the fittest if we cannot make the next generation aware of the challenges that face them at least we should not create a façade.
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Lets entertain the idea how every child is special and we must build their self esteem what happens when they become adults. Is Every adult special too? If not then at what age do we magically go from being special to being not so special? People may argue that children are the future and we must protect their self-esteem but if we think of it by the time the future arrives they wont be children anymore. We need to build them for reality of life and not create high self-esteem.
To conclude it is best to have if one has healthy self esteem. But as we know we don’t live in a perfect world some us will have low self esteem and sometimes it can be a good thing, For instance lets say in a marriage of thirty years the husband can believe his wife is still attracted to him and vice versa, so whats keeping them together a profound sense of low self esteem. The real scary part is people growing up with false sense of or high self esteem. These are the children who will grow up to be incorrigible and feel entitled to everything in life.
MindYog
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