Self-esteem vs. Self-confidence
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The women who seem to have it down pat, are healthy, uncomplicated, practical, self-sufficient and confident are women who embody Athena energy. Structured with nose to the grindstone, make a plan and get it done, no fuss, no muss females. Dressed in more masculine, tailored business attire, they set out on a mission and nothing gets in their way. They seem so together with high self-esteem and lots of self-confidence….
Do you know anyone like this? Is their high self-esteem genuine?
This got me to thinking about self-esteem vs. self-confidence.
There has been so much said among educators and in parenting and self-help books about raising our self-esteem. How many times have you said, or heard, “If only I (or she) had better self-esteem.”
I have known many women who put on the mask of high self-esteem and only end up constantly telling people how great they are - which just comes off as vain and arrogant, not a very attractive feature.
To me, if you have high self-esteem and are confident, you don’t have any need to tell others about the fact.
So, is there a difference between good self-esteem and self-confidence?
Self-confidence is a way of acting and living. It is knowing who you are, what qualities you have, what you like, need, desire etc. It is also having the competence to deal with people and situations, knowing when and how to get help and to find solutions. It is about taking care of yourself in all areas. It is something we can learn to have.
Self-esteem is - “A set of amorphous feelings about how much we like, value and approve of ourselves”.
Our self-esteem is created by what took place in our childhood within our family, community and culture and the things we have gone through as adults and how we felt about them. Our self-esteem is rooted in our feelings…which change day to day and change with our enviroment. We can go through a rough time and feel, due to guilt or the remarks of others, that we are not valued and not worth much. We then tend to ‘not like’ ourselves, lowering our self-esteem.
There are psychologists who say that self-esteem is resistant to change, it is something that we have little or no direct control over.
Self-esteem is simply a meter of how well we are doing in the world at any given moment. If our dealings with people and our place in life is going well, we then feel good about ourselves and our ‘esteem’ is high.
It can seem that the two are the same…that if we have good self-esteem, we will be self-confident and vice versa.
Here is the difference: You do have control over your self-confidence regardless of what you are going through at any given moment, and it is controlled by what you think and do.
You can be in the middle of a crisis, but react to it with confidence.
There are confidence damaging actions and thoughts and confidence building actions and thoughts.
I had never stopped to view the difference between the two until I did some research when the question came up for me.
What do you think? How do you view self-esteem vs. self-confidence? Do you think that you can change your self-esteem?
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