by David Thompson

Created on: April 24, 2008

The Secret Formula for Self-Esteem

The topic of self-esteem has become quite popular in recent years. It is now common to believe that happy, healthy individuals have high self-esteem and that those with psychological or interpersonal problems suffer from a lack of it. Due to this trend, when patients would seek out clinicians for help in dealing with their array of problems, they would be kindly informed they had little or no self-esteem and this was the cause of their problems. They would leave with something new to feel bad about, and be even worse off than when they came in. Go figure.

As a young man I attributed my collection of problems to the notorious lack of self-esteem. I set out to learn everything I could about it and read everything I could find on the subject. Needless to say, I didn't find any self-esteem at the library. I studied the works of all the "big names" in self-esteem and scoured lots of books full of big words and plenty of terms that seemed to be synonyms but were actually not, such as self-concept and self-image, just to make things confusing. All of the literature I found on self-esteem was full of nothing but vague abstractions, theories, and concepts. In all my research I did not find one source that provided anything concrete or useful. Authors write about it, but give no explanation of how to get it.
But vague abstractions and theories are no help if we want to increase our share of this precious commodity (or acquire our first sample if we have none at all). If self-esteem is so vital to happiness, well-being, healthy relationships and success in life, how on earth do we acquire it?
Self-esteem is a vague concept, but not self-image. One of the most important psychological discoveries of the last few decades is that the words we use to describe our experience are not merely metaphor, but are a literal reflection of our internal experience. When someone says they "see what you mean," it means they have formed a clear and complete image of what you have said. If someone says the future looks bleak, it means the images they are making of their future are dim and dull. But how does this relate to self-esteem? Your self-image is literally the way you see yourself and provides one of the keys to self-esteem.
Take a moment to examine the internal image of yourself that you are carrying around inside. What do you look like? Is the image accurate or distorted? When you look at it, does it make you feel good or bad? When you do this you may

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