Self-Hypnosis For Dummies by Mike Bryant

Author:Mike Bryant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Signing Up to Self-Esteem

In This Chapter

Understanding your level of self-esteem

Accepting who you are

Knowing that you can change

Becoming the person you want to be

Self-esteem’s a phrase we happily throw around every day without thinking about what the term really means. How often have you heard phrases such as ‘She is full of her own self-esteem’ or ‘Well, that really knocked my self-esteem’? Many people make the mistake of assuming that a good sense of confidence is an indicator of high self-esteem. As we reveal in this chapter, this isn’t necessarily so. The media often write about celebrities who apparently can take the world by the horns and lead the way in their chosen field, but complain that they lack self-esteem. In fact, many confident people have very little self-esteem.

Self-esteem refers to how you feel about yourself, how you value your role in your family life and in society proper. Self-esteem isn’t simply one feeling, rather it’s the result of bringing together a variety of negative and positive feelings and behaviours that include the following:

Behaviours such as shyness or assertiveness.

Personal beliefs such as ‘I’m incapable’ or ‘I’m capable’.

Emotions such as anxiety or happiness, shame or pride.

Your self-esteem isn’t necessarily something that applies to every aspect of your daily life. You may hold yourself in high self-esteem with regard to your career but have very little self-esteem in relation to your role as a parent, for example. Even within these roles self-esteem can fluctuate day to day, even hour to hour.

This chapter helps you to explore your own level of self-esteem and gives you ways of boosting how you feel about yourself and the world around you. From this foundation you will be able to deal more effectively with the challenges that life has a habit of throwing in your way.

Developing Greater Self-Love

Loving yourself doesn’t mean standing in front of a mirror whispering sweet nothings to your reflection, although if that’s what rocks your boat, nothing’s wrong with that. Loving yourself means that you develop greater understanding and respect for who and what you are. In order to develop a greater love for yourself, you need to begin to understand yourself. This gives you a baseline from which to work.

Morris Rosenberg developed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and published it in 1965 in Society and the Adolescent Self-Image (Princeton University Press). Psychologists and sociologists the world over use this measure of self-esteem.

Have a go at answering the questions in the scale, as shown in Figure 10-1. Have the courage to be honest with yourself as you do so. This is an information-gathering exercise that helps define the areas you can work on in order to help you become the person you want to be.

You may wonder why some of the scores are reversed on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The answer has everything to do with statistics. If you look at the statements on the items without an asterisk, they’re all positive. Those on the items marked with an asterisk are negative.

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