by RhinoRalph

Created on: January 31, 2010

What came first the egg or the chicken? What came first achievement or self-esteem? Within the last decades we have been inundated at school with the belief that in order to achieve you need a good dose of self-esteem. Sociologists are now finding out that there has been an overdose of self-esteem in our children and are making them with a narcissist personality. We have been cultivating self-esteem in a vacuum. 

The idea that kids shouldn't been pushed to be successful at school is hopefully coming to an end together with the idea that kids shouldn't be hurt with bad grades. With many psychologists coming to schools with a lot of studies and theories but not well developed in common sense the self-esteem was placed above achievement and hard work. The started believing that in order to succeed you needed a good dose of positive self-esteem. 

We somehow forgot that a good self-esteem is a product of our achievements and not achievements a product of our good self-esteem. A negative self-esteem is also a product of our failure to achieve in life.  We have to admit that there are people that feel good about them even if they are not achieving but instead are involved in a lot of wrong doing. This is pure narcissism.

Feeling bad about ourselves is a message that we have not been receiving feedbacks from our actions. If we have been receiving them they are probably weak signals. But we have to admit also that there are kids who had been hurt by words and their self-esteem had suffered damage. In this case is necessary to help a kid to undo the damage by mainly pushing him to be an achiever so he or she can get a healing signal from what he or she can accomplish. 

But what we have seen in the school system and in our households is this belief that if the kid is feeling worthless that they can't achieve. Making them feel good about themselves without achieving is like giving them a trophy, which they haven't earned. The end result is that you won't achieve and you don't even care because you are already feeling good about yourself for nothing.

Many students are graduating from High Schools and even Universities without the ability to apply common sense in many important areas of life and without the ability of critical thinking that requires effort. They receive the information already packed and they think they are prepared until they face the real world.

 The best therapy for a positive self-esteem that is not being supported and grounded by achievements is letting it come down and allowing the patients to feel depressed and unworthy but helping them to focus on what is really valuable in life. By getting active and working on our gifts and talents we will start adding real value to our life, which will match our achievements. It will be by having a dollar in which the value is matched by the gold standard. It is having our both feet on the ground. If the patient won't pay much attention on how he or she feels but will focus on going after achieving something, it wont be long that good feelings will show up. However, feeling good shouldn't be our end goal in life.

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