How to Boost Your Self Esteem

How To Boost Your Self Esteem

Self esteem is the feeling that you are able to accomplish your goals and that you are worthy of enjoying the benefits of those accomplishments.

Often people will tell us that since self esteem is a feeling, we should work on our feelings in order to boost our self esteem (self esteem is good to have to a large extent, and so most efforts have gone into trying to boost self esteem among those of us who feel we don’t have enough of it; too much self esteem is not generally called self esteem but rather pride, arrogance, or hubris).

The problem in trying to boost self esteem by addressing our feelings directly is that we feel self esteem only as a result of our actions and behavior — so when we try to boost self esteem directly we find ourselves doing no more than repeating pleasing mantras of self-affirmation in the manner of Emile Coué, and though this can help marginally, it doesn’t get at the root of our problem.

The way to do it

Here’s the way to boost our self esteem:

Accomplish something that we find both challenging and worthwhile.

So…

1. it must be something that we do
2. it must be something that we find challenging or difficult
3. it must be something that we believe is worthwhile

Something that we do

This part actually makes it easier to approach. A feeling is hard to measure but we can see an action and measure it; we can see its results and judge how effective we have been. Doing something easy will not increase our sense confidence that we can cope with life and its difficulties, or that we are able to achieve our goals — so our sense of self esteem won’t rise. Every time we accomplish something challenging, on the contrary, we find ourselves feeling that we are able to do other things that seem difficult. But also when we do something many times we lose our sense that the thing is a challenge for us personally — and this will lead us to face even greater challenges in the future if we want to go on boosting our sense of self esteem.

Something challenging

This part is relative to our own individual and particular abilities as we see them. So we can start wherever we find ourselves and we can follow it as far as we can grow and improve ourselves.

Something worthwhile

This part is relative to our own individual and particular notions of what is moral and good. And so it will change as our notions change of what is the good. Doing something we feel ashamed of will not boost our feelings of being worthy of enjoying the fruits and benefits of our accomplshment. But when we do something that we feel proud of, we feel it is proper and right that we should enjoy whatever good things flow from our accomplshment as a result.

Clarifications

I should note that our sense of what is “moral and good” is never wholly relative. We all evolve our individual sense of what is proper and good out of the larger context of what those around us have seemed to believe when we were growing up and forming our first beliefs. And what our family and elders believed grew in turn out of what their foregoers believed. And in the end all mankind’s beliefs over the hundred or so millennia since modern man first walked the face of Africa must (we have to assume) have been fitted to the realities of life on Earth — so that in general we could say that “absolute morality” refers to all that is good and sustainable for us to survive and prosper on our Earth.

But that’s another tale for another day.

Have a better year in front of you than the year you leave behind.