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Gaining Self Confidence And Succeeding

4th October, 2010 - Posted by health news - No Comments

Self-esteem is defined as “Personal feelings or opinions of oneself”. Gaining self confidence seems to have come to be the third-most frequently occurring subject in psychological literature and by 2003, there had been over 25,000 articles and books on the topic. Since that time, the quantity of new articles and books has increased considerably. If you query “self-esteem books or self-esteem articles” on the search engines, you will get 2.27 million hits which shows how preoccupied most of us are becoming with this subject.

Unfortunately, psychologists can’t agree on whether or not self-esteem is good for you or perhaps detrimental. In fact, they cannot even agree on exactly what self-esteem is and what function this plays in an person’s life.

What’s known is that self-esteem encompasses a person’s beliefs about himself or herself. Psychologists typically regard self-esteem as an enduring personality characteristic, although they also admit that short-term variations in a person’s self-esteem may be caused by outside events that impact that particular person.

If you do something well, particularly if you happen to be praised by someone else for what you have done, your self-esteem will be higher than normal. Conversely, if you fail at something, your self-esteem will be lower than normal.

Self-esteem may apply to a specific trait or ability (for example, “I believe I am a very good golfer and feel proud of that particular ability”) or have an overall scope (as an example, “I believe that I am a very good person and feel proud of myself in general”). Here, we aren’t referring to a narcissistic opinion about your self, but a deep-rooted knowledge that you happen to be genuinely a very good person. This deep-rooted knowledge will be supported by your actions and deeds.

Self-help writers and psychologists have long believed that possessing good self-esteem ensured success at a person’s undertakings. However, recent studies of students have uncovered that working to gain self confidence alone, rather than increasing the student’s grades actually caused them to decline. More studies in this regard are underway to find out why this happened and whether the lack of correlation between grades and self-esteem is factual or perhaps if the technique of increasing the subject’s self-esteem was flawed and invalidated the results.

One intriguing fact has become known from all of these studies. It has been established that western societies are fixated on self-esteem and the role this plays in the person’s success, while various other societies, that place little emphasis on self-esteem, seem to have as many or actually more successes.

Perhaps in our over zealous pursuit of success, we have placed so much emphasis on gaining self confidence and self-esteem that we have created our very own fantasy. Perhaps success depends more on doing things than it does on beliefs and perceptions. What do you think?