As I mentioned in an earlier episode of Evolutionary Sales, it is impossible to over-estimate the importance of Self-Esteem, or as I prefer to say: “esteem for the self”.

Why would I assert it is impossible to over-estimate the importance of Self-Esteem?

Its viability is your immune system for life–and the antidote to most of your day-to-day emotional and interpersonal struggles and challenges. Whether you take things too personally, fail to rebound from rejection quickly enough, have nagging self-doubts, seek validation, or question your ability to create the life you want…it could be considered a self-esteem issue. In fact, whether it is true or not, it would be useful to consider all upset as sourced in self-esteem or insufficient ego development.

Self-esteem is one of the most important, yet most overused and misunderstood concepts in popular psychology today.

What Self-Esteem Is and Is Not

Nathaniel Branden, PhD
Copyright © 1997, Nathaniel Branden, All Rights Reserved
This article is adapted from “The Art of Living Consciously” (Simon & Schuster, 1997).

Four decades ago, when I began lecturing on self-esteem, the challenge was to persuade people that the subject was worthy of study. Almost no one was talking or writing about self-esteem in those days. Today, almost everyone seems to be talking about self-esteem, and the danger is that the idea may become trivialized. And yet, of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.

Having written on this theme in a series of books, I want, in this short article, to address the issue of what self-esteem is, what it depends on, and what are some of the most prevalent misconceptions about it.

Self-esteem is an experience. It is a particular way of experiencing the self. It is a good deal more than a mere feeling—this must be stressed. It involves emotional, evaluative, and cognitive components. It also entails certain action dispositions: to move toward life rather than away from it; to move toward consciousness rather than away from it; to treat facts with respect rather than denial; to operate self-responsibly rather than the opposite.