Psychology Simplified: Improving Self-Esteem By Sir Gerry Neale

That anyone of us can think ourselves out of the game, unable toi accomplish something and therefore all in all to want low esteem, is not earth shattering. We all know people who have a lower self-esteem than us and ones with higher.

However many of us making any assessment of self-esteem, whether our own or someone else, can make a significant mis-judgment. If they assume that our calculation of our self-esteem level should be the sum total of all our abilities and disabilities and somehow averaged, they would be mistaken.

In fact, each of us is a walking bundle of self-esteem assessments, often arrived at very arbitrarily.

Let me explain. Ask a golfer what his or her handicap is and most will tell you quite authoritively what it is. They are aided of course by a well tried formula which enables them to assess their current performance level or effectiveness

Not many activities have this feature. Suppose we are given a list of activities and asked to assess our effectiveness. What do we do! Actually what we do is to call on our sub-conscious to give us the rating on each one!

Let me explain! If your good at golf your handicap might be 1 to 10, moderate 10 to 20, Ok 20 to 30, and glad to have someone to play with 31 to 36!

So imagine this. You are given a list of 10 activities and ask to give yourswelf a rating (1 being really good and 36 needing a lot of improvement. I would like you to do score yourself in your mind as you read and note what happens. Ready?

Ball room dancing - cooking Thai style – Tennis – Drawing - Writing short stories – Singing - Eating sensibly - Using the Internet - Remembering birthdays and anniversaries - Public Speaking.

Do you notice how some you score highly; others you are pretty down on yourself and the remainder you are damning of yourself. Why? Either because you are good or because you never done them or your parents or teachers told you were wasting your time even trying!

If when we think about it, we can’t do much well then we could assume we should have low esteem to match our assessment of our low overall level of effectiveness. Yet so often our lack of ability is not just because we haven’t done it before, but because frankly we don’t much want to!

But some fascinating scientifically proven facts about us and the psychology behind self-esteem have emerged in recent years.

First, look at something you are good at, and then recall what character traits we employed to get so good at acquiring that skill. Invariably we would find it was something we wanted to do and presented with tuition necessary, we applied ourselves and did it.

So we can rightly deduce that if we get good skill tutorials for another activity and apply our proven character traits, then hey presto we can excel in the new skill too. But it is so much easier if we actually want to. (See another article I have written called The Psychology of Have-to’s and Want to’s.)

The consequence is, just we have skills now, apply ourselves in the same way to new skills and up will go our self-esteem.

One final feature of this is worth mentioning on the psychology behind self-esteem. A scholarly book by Albert Bandura, an eminent Psychologist called “Self Efficacy” and published in 1997 (ISBN No 0 -7167 – 2850 – 8 ) would turn any reader into an expert on psychology of self-esteem and self-efficacy.

But interesting proof is recorded in the book. Whether or not we have the ability to carry out a certain task to a certain skill level, it seems that if our self esteem tell us that we can do it well and a prior test says we cannot, we still do it to our assessment. But the contrary is true too. Assess ourselves low when objective testing suggests we should success, then low self esteem wins again!


Sir Gerry Neale has lectured and trained under-graduates and graduates at the University of Westminster in cognitive thinking and has mentored courses for corporate strategic planning and how to position the organisation’s and the individual’s thinking in relation to them. He has conducted counselling and life coaching programmes with individuals in person and on-line.