How Healthy Is Your Self-Esteem?

How do you rate yourself generally as a person? As a friend, parent, sibling, child, colleague, worker, and/or manager? Out of 100. Is it less than 85%?

Your self-esteem is your belief about your self-worth. In other words, how you feel about yourself. It is your perception of how worthy you are, how likeable you are. If you have a good healthy self-esteem (>85%) , you believe you’re a good and deserving person. If your self-esteem is low, the opposite is your view.

It’s not fixed which means you aren’t born with a set-in-stone self-esteem rating. It’s not part of your genetics like the shape of your nose or size of your feet. So the statement “it’s just who I am” is nonsense.

It is a belief. And a belief is simply a thought you keep on thinking. If your self-chatter is a constant critic, then you will have low self-esteem. Fact.

The problem with our self-esteem being a belief, is that like all beliefs we have, we only see and hear things that align with our beliefs. You may have heard of the term “confirmation bias”. We have a “bias” to “confirm” what we believe to be true. This also means we tend to ignore those things that challenge our beliefs.

Let’s take the example of someone paying you a compliment.

If you’re looking through a low self-esteem belief lens, you’re likely to brush away their compliment, and tell yourself they’re just being overly nice, and that they don’t really mean it. “I bet they say that to everyone!”

There was a great opportunity to accept the compliment, feed your self-esteem with a piece of genuine and honest feedback, and give it a little nudge towards being healthier. Instead, you swatted it away and allowed your low self-esteem to sit there all smug knowing that it won yet again.

Your self-esteem plays a critical part in your life. Thriving people have a good, healthy self-esteem. They don’t have unrealistic and grandiose beliefs about themselves. They simply like who they are. They accept compliments. They give compliments.

Assessing your current self-esteem and then knowing how to build and maintain a healthy, thriving self-esteem is a key component of The Thrive Programme.

If you want to love life, start with you.