Self Efficacy, Self Respect And Self Esteem

• Self respect and self efficacy are the foundation of self esteem.
• Self esteem can go up or down. But it’s your average level that counts.
• Define your current level of self esteem, so you know what you need to improve.

If you want to improve your level of self esteem you first need to understand exactly what self esteem is. So in this article, we shall be taking a look at the two interrelated components that make up self esteem.

The first component is self efficacy. This involves having a basic confidence in yourself and your abilities, in the face of the many challenges life will throw at you.

The second component of self esteem is self respect. This involves recognising that you are worthy and deserving of happiness and success in your life.

When you put self efficacy and self respect together, you get self esteem. However, in order for your level of self esteem to be high, each component must also be at a high level.

What Is Self Efficacy?

Self efficacy means having confidence in the functioning of your mind. It means you are confident in your ability to learn and understand new information, and then think about that information and make decisions based upon it.

In addition, self efficacy also means understanding the consequences of your actions, and recognising what you must do to achieve your goals and desires in life.

To summarise, self efficacy simply means having a basic level of self trust and self reliance. In other words, knowing you can count on yourself to do the right thing.

What Is Self Respect?

Having self respect means having a belief in your value and worth as a person. It means recognising that you have a right to be successful and happy in life, and acting accordingly.

With self respect comes an assertion of your thoughts, your wants and your needs. When you have self respect you look after yourself the best you can, and do not tolerate other people who try to put you down.

In short, self respect means recognising that happiness and fulfillment are your natural birthright.

Are You Lacking Self Esteem?

For you to have a high level of self esteem, you must also have a high level of self efficacy and self respect. If one component is missing, or underdeveloped, the consequences will be a lack of self esteem.

For example, if you currently do not feel confident facing the challenges of life, or you lack a basic level of trust in yourself and your abilities, you will suffer from low self esteem. This is true no matter what other assests you may possess.

Similarly, if you lack a basic level of self respect, feel unworthy of the love or respect of others, unworthy of happiness or fearful of asserting your wants, thoughts and needs, then you will also suffer from low self esteem.

Therefore, to successfully build your self esteem you must adopt an attitude that you are capable of doing anything, and then recognising that you can do it because you are worthy and deserving of it.

Of course this certainly does not mean you will achieve everything you set out to do the very first time, but it does mean that if you adopt this attitude your chances of success will dramatically increase.

Averaging Self Esteem

When trying to improve your self esteem do not be discouraged by periods when you feel down, or sense that your self esteem is lower than usual.

This is entirely normal and self esteem will naturally fluctuate as you go from day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year.

So when assessing your self esteem it is best to view it in terms of its average level. Ask yourself questions such as how you felt today? Or how you felt this week?

This can prove to be an extremely beneficial way of looking at self esteem, as when people feel bad they tend to look at their whole life as being bad.

This only serves to make tomorrow look worse, and so sets up a self perpetuating cycle of low self esteem.

By recognising that your level of self esteem fluctuates, you will better prepare yourself for the bad times, and also reduce how bad they seem.

Why It Is Important To Define Self Esteem

Now that you have been introduced to the two components of self esteem, in the next article we are going to be taking a more detailed look at exactly what self efficacy and self respect means in your life.

This is an extremely important topic to cover because as I said previously, if you want to properly build up your self esteem you need to know exactly what it is.

If you only have a vague idea about what self esteem is, then ultimately the means you adopt to build your self esteem will also be vague.

The consequences of this will be both inefficient and ineffective action, resulting in wasted time and a lack of progress.