Gaining Self Confidence And Triumph

Self-esteem is defined as "Personal feelings or opinions of oneself". Gaining self confidence has become the third-most frequently occurring topic in psychological materials and by the year 2003, there had been over 25,000 articles along with books on the topic. Since that time, the quantity of new articles and books has increased dramatically. Should you query "self-esteem books or self-esteem articles" on the search engines, you will get 2.27 million hits which reveals how obsessed we have become with this topic.

Unfortunately, psychologists can not agree on whether self-esteem is good for you or harmful. In fact, they can not even concur on precisely what self-esteem is and what function it plays in an individual's life.

What is known is that self-esteem encompasses a person's beliefs about himself or herself. Psychologists generally consider self-esteem as an long lasting personality characteristic, although they additionally admit that short-term variations in a person's self-esteem might be caused by outside events which impact that specific person.

Should you do something well, especially if you're acknowledged by somebody else for what you have done, your self-esteem will be greater than normal. Conversely, if you fail at something, your self-esteem will be lower than normal.

Self-esteem may apply to a particular trait or ability (for instance, "I believe I am a very good golfer and feel pleased with that particular ability") or have an overall scope (as an example, "I believe that I am a very good person and feel pleased with myself in general"). Here, we are not referring to a narcissistic opinion about one's self, but a deep-rooted knowledge that you're truly a very good person. This kind of deep-rooted knowledge will be supported by your actions and deeds.

Self-help writers along with psychologists have long considered that having good self-esteem guaranteed success at a person's endeavors. However, recent studies of students have revealed that attempting to gain self confidence on it's own, instead of increasing the student's grades actually caused them to decline. More research in this regard are underway to determine why this occurred and whether the lack of correlation between grades and self-esteem is truthful or if the technique of increasing the subject's self-esteem was flawed and invalidated the results.

One interesting fact has become known from these studies. It has been determined that western societies are fixated on self-esteem as well as the role it plays in a person's achievements, while various other societies, that place smaller emphasis on self-esteem, appear to have as many or even more achievements.

Maybe in our over zealous quest for success, we have placed so much emphasis on gaining self confidence and self-esteem that we have created our very own myth. Maybe success relies more on doing things than it does on beliefs and attitudes. What is your opinion?