The Viable Alternative

I believe that many people confuse having confidence and having self-esteem as one in the same thing. I used to be one of those people. You can have confidence without having any self esteem and you can have self-esteem without having any confidence in a particular area. Obviously though, it’s good to have BOTH.

Self Esteem

From the website http://psychology.about.com/od/sindex/f/what-is-self-esteem.htm, self esteem is defined as:

a person’s overall sense of self-worth or personal value.

Wikipedia defines self-esteem as:

In sociology and psychology, self-esteem reflects a person’s overall subjective emotional evaluation of his or her own worth. It is a judgment of oneself as well as an attitude toward the self.

Confidence

As for confidence, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as:

a feeling or consciousness of one’s powers or of reliance on one’s circumstances

Confidence comes from demonstrative performance. You gain confidence in yourself in a certain area or with a certain ability by repeatedly seeing yourself do something competently and successfully over a period of time. For instance, when one first gets behind the wheel of a car, he doesn’t have any confidence in his driving skills because he’s never driven before, but over time, as he does it over and over again, and experiences himself driving safely without getting into any accidents, learning from his mistakes, and experiencing challenging situations, his confidence increases via demonstrative performance.

So What’s the Difference?

Self esteem as specified as someone’s sense of personal value or worth. So, a person may have a high sense of personal value in that he feels his existence means something to this planet, he has something valuable to contribute, and he only expects the best for himself in life, but at the same time be totally fearful and unconfident when stepping in a plane to fly it for the first time or like in the previous example, taking his first driving lesson.

In the same token, a person may be completely confident in certain area but have a pitifully low self esteem. For instance, if you take a look at all the celebrities out there past and present from Robin Williams, to Kurt Cobain, to Sammy Davis Jr, to Amy Winehouse. These stars were obviously very confident in their abilities to act, perform or play music, or else they wouldn’t have been able to perform as skillfully as they did. However, from the way they abused their bodies through drug abuse or eventually took their own lives, it was evident they didn’t value themselves i.e. low self-esteem.

We are mistaken to automatically assume that someone who is confident automatically has a high self-esteem. There are many fabulously wealthy Wall Street professionals, to high powered lawyers who charge thousands per hour, to top psychologists, to professional athletes at the upper echelon of their game who are extremely confident in their abilities to produce optimal results in their respective fields of expertise, but at the same time are on depression or anti-anxiety meds, or abusing drugs or alcohol to numb the feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness that are embedded deep within.

There are also many people who, due to their confidence, have a phenomenal ability to earn a lot of money, or attract a lot of women, but because they don’t think they’re worth having an abundance of money or worth having a healthy, loving relationship with someone who is emotionally stable and drama-free, they are not able to keep them for too long.

I personally think that acquiring confidence is a lot easier than acquiring a healthy, high self-esteem. Sure they both require that you step out of your comfort zone consistently, deal with failure or rejection on a repeated basis, and being persistent, but because having a healthy self-esteem requires you getting rid of the things within you that prevent you from having a sense of value and worth, it makes it a lot more confronting.

To get rid of the things within that are blocking your sense of self-worth, you have to deal with wounds from the past, which means uncovering and feeling emotions that you blocked out and buried long ago because you didn’t want to feel them. Many, if not all of our addictions come from us trying not to feel feelings of unworthiness that come from past wounds.

There are many people, who show high levels of confidence in specific areas including those that have been at war who can confidently maneuver their way around a battlefield who are terrified to face their personal demons that keep them from having a healthy self esteem. In fact, many times they use their confidence in such areas to mask their inner issues and gain from it a false sense of security and pride that causes them to avoid dealing with these deeper issues.

Confidence alone will bring you places in life, but self-esteem will bring you the happiness, fulfillment and peace required to enhance the quality of your life. While confidence doesn’t automatically assume self-esteem, self-esteem provides the right environment to foster self-confidence. For more on acquiring self esteem, you can read my article, “3 Ways To Improve Your Self Esteem and Take Back Your Power” Since it was written several years ago, it was light on the part of needing to heal from your emotional wounds, since I didn’t understand that back then, but it does point to the need of inner work needing to be done.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love