Quotes About Self-esteem

What is needed and demanded today, in the age of the knowledge worker, is not robotic obedience but persons who can think; who can innovate, originate, and function self-responsibly; who are capable of self-management; who can remain individuals while working effectively as members of teams; who are confident of their powers and their ability to contribute. What the workplace needs today is self-esteem.

It is poor self-esteem that places us in an adversarial relationship to our well-being.

Sometimes people who feel fear in the human realm drop to a very low level of consciousness in their relationships and seek the safety and security of competence in the impersonal world of machines, mathematics, or abstract thought. No matter what heights they may attain professionally, their self esteem remains flawed. We cannot with impunity run from so important an aspect of life

To trust one's mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem.

The level of our self-esteem influences how we act, and how we act influences the level of our self-esteem.

In the world of the future, children will be taught the basic dynamics of self-esteem and the power of living consciously and self-responsibly.

When self-esteem is low, our resilience in the face of life's adversities is diminished.

High-self-esteem people can surely be knocked down by an excess of troubles, but they are quicker to pick themselves up again.

Freedom means change; the ability to manage change is at least in part a function of self-esteem.

Not fear of this responsibility but surrender to the fear is a chief contributor to the subversion of self-esteem.

Just as a healthy immune system does not guarantee that one will never become ill, but makes one less vulnerable to disease and better equipped to overcome it, so a healthy self-esteem does not guarantee that one will never suffer anxiety or depression in the face of life's difficulties, but makes one less susceptible and better equipped to cope, rebound, and transcend.

Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is in being who they are, not in being better than someone else.

If one partner in a marriage whose self-esteem is deteriorating sees that the partner's self-esteem is growing, the response is sometimes anxiety and an attempt to sabotage the growth process.

The higher our self-esteem, the stronger the drive to express ourselves, reflecting the sense of richness within.

Teachers with low self-esteem tend to be more punitive, impatient, and authoritarian. They tend to focus on the child's weaknesses rather than strengths. They inspire fearfulness and defensiveness. They encourage dependency.5

Further, low-self-esteem teachers are typically unhappy teachers, and unhappy teachers often favor demeaning and destructive tactics of classroom control.

Persons of low self-esteem tend to discount the productions of their mind. It is not that they never get worthwhile ideas. But they do not value them, do not treat them as potentially important, often do not even remember them very long—rarely follow through with them. In effect, their attitude is, "If the idea is mine, how good can it be?

So we can say that thinking independently—about our work, our relationships, the values that guide our life, the goals we set for ourselves—strengthens self-esteem. And healthy self-esteem results in a natural inclination to think independently.

Flexibility, in contrast, is the natural consequence of self-esteem. A mind that trusts itself is light on its feet, unemcumbered by irrelevant attachments, able to respond quickly to novelty because it is open to seeing.

Some people stand and move as if they have no right to the space they occupy.

Able to manage change. Self-esteem does not find change frightening, for the reasons stated in the preceding paragraph. Self-esteem flows with reality; self-doubt fights it. Self-esteem speeds up reaction time; self-doubt retards it.

research discloses that high self-esteem is one of the best predictors of personal happiness

The answer to this last is simple: In supporting and nurturing the self-esteem of our children, we support and nurture our own.

Healthy self-esteem is not ashamed to say, when the occasion warrants it, "I was wrong." Denial and defensiveness are characteristics of insecurity, guilt, feelings of inadequacy, and shame.