Healthy vs toxic forms of self-esteem

Self-esteem was a measurement of how a person felt about themselves. If you have confidence in yourself and can accomplish your goal, you have high self-esteem. If you feel unaccomplished with little success, you have low self-esteem.

The theory is that if everyone has high self-esteem, then everyone will be successful and live a happy life. If a society was inoculated with high self-esteem, it would end poverty, crime, and violence.

But, one should take into account that high self-esteem could be the result of success, not necessarily the cause. Also, thinking that only one thing can explain how to be successful, is probably naive.

There’s actually very little correlation between self-esteem and success.  Research on self-esteem strongly correlates with how good people feel, in general. 

Self-esteem is complex and can be a good or a bad thing, depending on what is measured. 

Researchers have found that there are different types of self-esteem. There are two broad categories:

• Healthy self-esteem. You base the way you feel on the things you can control in your life.
• Toxic self-esteem. You base your self-worth on external, uncontrollable things in your life that can make your life fragile.

Toxic types of self-esteem arise when we pursue self-esteem for its own sake, instead of letting it be a byproduct of being a well-adjusted human being: trying to feel good about something instead of becoming good at something.

Setbacks are inevitable in life, but that is what grows us. If we believe that we always deserve to feel good regardless of circumstances, we can develop a delusional sense of entitlement.

Toxic self-esteem is easy to notice. One can see a disconnect between how the person sees himself, and how the world sees him.

It is your coworker who’s incompetent in their job but takes credit for other people’s work.

Those with a toxic self-esteem feel good about themselves but are very fragile. In order to keep up their self-esteem, they need to constantly feed it.

Self-esteem is how we think we are doing in our own worlds. It is made up of an internal valuation of ourselves. It cannot be an objective assessment, as we decide what our metrics are.

Prioritize your good self-esteem (for instance, how honest or compassionate you are) over the toxic ones (how nice your shoes are.)

First, give yourself the headspace to work on a solution by accepting your feelings surrounding your low self-esteem. Your feelings are temporary. Accept them for the moment. Don't cover them up. Don't try to overcompensate for them.

Put your focus on the skills you need to acquire, not on how you feel.

People with low self-esteem tend to be hard on themselves and take everything very personally.

When you catch yourself being very critical of yourself, stop. Take a step back and see the situation from the viewpoint of a good friend. Ask yourself if it is really that bad. Remember that there are things you can't control.

True self-esteem is not thinking that you lack nothing - it's being comfortable with the fact that you're not great at everything. Accept it and move on.

Accept yourself for who you are with all your flaws and peculiarities.