I want to poke holes in the erroneous beliefs about what fame provides. It won't raise your self-esteem, it won't create profound connection, it's not going to heal your childhood traumas, it's only going to amplify them. You're going to be subject to a lot of criticism and praise, both of which are violent in their own ways.

The idea that positive illusions are in the service of sef-esteem virtually requires that they stay in check. If one develops substantially unrealistic expectations regarding the future that greatly exceed what one is actually able to accomplish, then one is set up for failure and disappointment, leading to lower self-esteem.

I once won a second prize in a history concert. My parents came to the ceremony. Somebody else had won the prize for best all-around student. Afterwards my father said to me, 'Never, ever disgrace me like that again.' When I tell my Western friends, they are aghast. But I adore my father. It didn't knock my self-esteem at all.

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

Self-esteem is made up primarily of two things: feeling lovable and feeling capable. Lovable means I feel people want to be with me. They invite me to parties; they affirm I have the qualities necessary to be included. Feeling capable is knowing that I can produce a result. It's knowing I can handle anything that life hands me.

Undoubtedly to some, the idea of giving so much love to self will seem very cold, hard and unmerciful. Still this matter may be seen in a different light, when we find that 'looking out for number one,' as directed by the infinite, is really looking out for number two and is indeed the only way to permanently benefit number two.

a mother's death also means the loss of the consistent, supportive family system that once supplied her with a secure home base, she then has to develop her self-confidence and self-esteem through alternate means. Without a mother or mother-figure to guide her, a daughter also has to piece together a female self-image of her own.

Start by writing down ten positive words to describe yourself. Write them on a card - the size of a business card will do - and bring it out whenever you feel insecure or your self-esteem is running low. Bring it out before you walk into a big party or go to an important meeting. It will help you, believe me. Carry it everywhere.

You know better than I that in a Republic talent is always suspect. A man attains an elevated position only when his mediocrity prevents him from being a threat to others. And for this reason a democracy is never governed by the most competent, but rather by those whose insignificance will not jeopardize anyone else's self-esteem.

Your identity, self-esteem, and awareness of your ego lay the groundwork for your life. How you conduct yourself with others, and whether you have the strength to make your way without needing to ask for another's permission, depends on how well you succeed at the many challenges that awaken your need to take charge of who you are.

From the very beginning you are being told to compare yourself with others. This is the greatest disease; it is like a cancer that goes on destroying your very soul because each individual is unique, and comparison is not possible. I am just myself and you are just yourself. There is nobody else in the world you can be compared with.

Self-esteem creates natural highs. Knowing that you're lovable helps you to love more. Knowing that you're important helps you to make a difference to to others. Knowing that you are capable empowers you to create more. Knowing that you're valuable and that you have a special place in the universe is a serene spiritual joy in itself.

I haven't always been confident. I actually suffered with low self-esteem growing up. Eventually, I got to a point where I was just like, 'OK, this is taking too much energy.' After that, I started accepting myself for who I was, and I was like, whoever is not going to accept it, they weren't really meant to be in my life in that way.

According to the spirit of this age, the ultimate sin is no longer the failure to honor and thank God but the failure to esteem oneself. Self-abasement, not God-abasement, is the evil. And the cry of deliverance is not "O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me?" but "O worthy man that I am, would that I could only see it better"!

Tell me how a person judges his or her self-esteem, and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence - and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with yourself - your self-esteem - is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life.

I always had a separate life than just my work. I built my own family. I have my own hobbies and interests. I have a ranch with livestock and horses. I didn't always get my self-esteem and identity from acting. I never worked unless I wanted to. I never did anything just to do it, just for the paycheck. I always did things that I liked.

I'm not sure if resilience is ever achieved alone. Experience allows us to learn from example. But if we have someone who loves us-I don't mean who indulges us, but who loves us enough to be on our side-then it's easier to grow resilience, to grow belief in self, to grow self-esteem. And it's self-esteem that allows a person to stand up.

My idea of elegance – and this refers to women as well as men – is that someone is elegant when he or she shows a good knowledge of what fits them, where you can find naturalness and self-esteem. Not showing off. Elegance is the idea of showing an optimistic depiction of oneself, and to lose oneself in the frivolity of style and fashion.

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.

I don't want Scotland to be more important than England. There's just a cancer of low self-esteem in Scotland and a general feeling that if we were to break away it would be game over and we would be bankrupt. If that is the case then that's exactly what we should do. Why are we, a country that would be bankrupt, leaching off another one?

Realize that the reason most people fail isn't because of the competition but because of the limits they place upon themselves, allowing defeat to take over. Take responsibility for your destiny. You can come up with a performance, if you can reach down and dig deep enough into your competitive soul. You can overcome tremendous obstacles.

As a father, I believe that involving children in sports at a young age is generally, a wise proposition. I believe that healthy competition is... well... healthy; that sporting events foster a spirit of teamwork that far surpasses the events themselves; and that active participation keeps children moving and is good for their self-esteem.

The greatest step toward success is self confidence. The greatest builder of self confidence is self esteem, and self esteem comes from doing the daily things you know you should do. Your self esteem will start to soar when you make some critical decisions - decisions to walk a new road, to start a new direction, to start a new discipline.

The more you learn about yourself and your family tree, your self-esteem goes up. They will learn archival skills, historical analysis and science skills. You learn all this in the most seductive way, and that is through learning about yourself. Who doesn't like talking about themselves? It doesn't seem like science or history, it's just fun.

Strong Women never put their safety or their self-esteem aside to please someone else or to keep a man. If someone acts inappropriately or abusively in any way (including becoming emotionally abusive), Strong Women stand up for themselves and make it abundantly clear that they will not tolerate the abuse. If this doesn't work, they walk away.

Parents still have primary responsibility for raising children, but they must have the power to do so in ways consistent with their children's needs and their own values.... We must address ourselves less to the criticism and reform of parents themselves than to the criticism and reform of the institutions that sap their self-esteem and power.

I approach the film business the way I feel about self-esteem. It's something that has to be maintained. That's kind of how I feel about positive roles in Hollywood. They have to be maintained. You have to purposefully, intentionally try to make the right type of films. And the more people that do that, the more things will continue to improve.

At age 14, you are just beginning to work out who you think you are, and being famous is a huge distortion of reality, and it's not healthy for a young person to be considered more special than their peers. So, I would say it hindered my self-esteem but in later years gave me a great perspective that I wouldn't have if I hadn't experienced that.

People who believe that they are going to be excommunicated and shamed, or whatever other dark things may happen to them, are much less likely to enter open, loving relationships. And they are also much less likely to have the self-esteem that is required to be monogamous and loving. And in consequence, they are much less likely to create families.

Friends broaden our horizons. They serve as new models with whom we can identify. They allow us to be ourselves-and accept us that way. They enhance our self-esteem because they think we're okay, because we matter to them. And because they matter to us-for various reasons, at various levels of intensity-they enrich the quality of our emotional life.

Toasted Heretic should have been cherished and helped, rather than ignored or sneered at, or put down as "quirky band with an arrogant singer". So I certainly didn't help the band, but the virtues I had meant that we recorded albums when everyone else just listened to them. But, yes, if you could suffer from high self-esteem, then I certainly suffered.

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.

All children want to do is play in worlds they create and project on their external world. If allowed to do that, they are constantly building new neural structures for creating internal worlds and projecting them on their external world. And they build up an enormous self-esteem and feeling of power over the external world through their own capacities.

I find that goal setting, when done this way, leads to goal achieving. The chronic failure to achieve goals lowers self-esteem. Show me a failure to achieve a goal, and usually I can show you the violation of one or more of the above criteria. Imposed goals, vague goals, and unrealistic goals tend to produce only partial successes and outright failures.

And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. ... When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

Motivation and inspiration energize people, not by pushing them in the right direction as control mechanisms do but by satisfying basic human needs for achievement, a sense of belonging, recognition, self-esteem, a feeling of control over one's life, and the ability to live up to one's ideals. Such feelings touch us deeply and elicit a powerful response.

I believe that a life of integrity I the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that says that self-esteem is primarily a matter of mind set, of attitude-that you can psych yourself into peace of mind. Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.

It is hard to feel bad about yourself when you are doing something good for someone else. There are a lot of ways to lift your self-esteem, but making a positive difference in another's life has got to be my best leadership guidance. Serving others and working to add value to them will lift your spirits in a way that nothing else will. Trust me on this one.

It is rewarding to find someone you like, but it is essential to like yourself. It is quickening to recognize that someone is a good and decent human being, but it is indispensable to view yourself as acceptable. It is a delight to discover people who are worthy of respect and admiration and love, but it is vital to believe yourself deserving of these things.

What may appear to be proud ungrateful and headstrong fron the outside may from the inside express an unshakable integrity of character. Pride, if it doesn't step over the line into arrogance, is simply an unprejudiced self-esteem. Ingratitude is the appropriate response to a kindness that has hooks on it. Headstrong is another word for trusting your own heart.

Surfing frees everything up, it's just the best soul fix. Life should be stress-free, and that's what surfing is all about. It's something you do in your sleep, with your eyes closed; it's something you'll constantly embrace and be passionate about, and whatever it takes, you're gonna do it, because nothing else in the world can give you that kind of self-esteem.

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

The meaning of self-esteem is to feel lovable and capable. As parents, we must love our children unconditionally and give them a sense of being nurtured. That's the lovable part. Then, we must provide structure - rules, boundaries, daily or weekly household tasks that give them a sense they are making a contribution. That's what helps kids grow up feeling capable.

We like to look for patterns and find connections in unrelated events. This way we can explain them to ourselves. Life seems neater, or at least less messy. We need to feel we are in control: it is integral to our self-esteem. We also know, though we deny it, that we are not in control. So we settle for the illusions of control. What if we stopped fooling ourselves?

Fear of success is far more dangerous than fear of failure, because the subconscious mind works to prevent that which it fears. People may fear success because of low self-esteem and feeling of not deserving it; because it will increase what others expect of them. Fear of success shows up as anxiety, indecision, avoidance, procrastination or acceptance of mediocrity.

I go - I trace depression back to things. So I go, ok, I look back and I say my self-esteem was affected because of my skin and because my family had no money and I was ashamed of how poor I was. And I look at all of that and I was trying to hide myself. And so I felt like I was less than I was. And so that then leads to you being depressed. And I work on these things.

The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential “you” which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your “feeling.”

... the core of sin is a lack of self-esteem. ... Sin is psychological self-abuse. ... the most serious sin is one that causes me to say, 'I am unworthy. I may have no claim to divine sonship if you examine me at my worst.' For once a person believes he is an 'unworthy sinner,' it is doubtful if he can really honestly accept the saving grace God offers in Jesus Christ.

Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

The earliest issue I can remember going through was body image issues. I was a chubby little kid and I got made fun of for it. I dealt with horrible, horrible self esteem issues, and I still struggle with that. I think it's what taught me a lot of empathy and compassion, though, but there are those days where I look in the mirror and I still see twelve year old fat Sara.

Share This Page