Team Wellness Advisory Board: Excessive Self-Esteem

Dr. Dennis O'Grady

Excessively confident people can tone down their act.

Don’t envy or get angry with those suffering from ESE. Fear and sadness have been out of their control for some time. ESE’s must learn they don’t have to deny tender feelings or be a pillar of strength for everyone.

Changing excessive self-esteem into high self-esteem is harder than raising low self-esteem, so don’t feel awful when your self-esteem is in the pits – the alternative is even worse!



Ways for ESE’s to grow and change:

Change before you lose out BIG time.

To Be Successful: Chances are you don’t know what people really think. You may not know someone as much as you’d like to think you do. Take interest in opinions other than your own.Ask for Negative Feedback: Begin to care how people think and feel.

Listen to negative feedback.
To Be Successful: Find out what grudges people are carrying toward you. Listen to even small gripes. Don’t isolate yourself from negative feedback through intimidation. Take Pride in Being Wrong: Care to know what people expect from you.

Embrace your own weaknesses.

To Be Successful: Stop defending your weaknesses. Your strengths have less to teach you than do your weaknesses. Make Your Relationships Really Matter: Weaknesses do not make a human being bad.

Stop living in a bubble.

To Be Successful: Stop protecting yourself with money, power, or status. Nurturing who you are is more important. Expose Yourself to Opinions Different from Your Own: Let yourself be stroked for your genuine self, not your status.

Stop pushing people away to prove a point.

To Be Successful: Is being right more important than being loved? Never. Pull people toward you.
Be Vulnerable: Winning isn’t anything compared to warm attachments.

Face your fears of intimacy.

To Be Successful: Intimacy means receiving a part of another human being and gifting that person, in turn, with a part of yourself. Face your fears of being hurt by intimacy. Be Interdependent: Stop being so high and mighty and start trusting and depending on others.

Let your sensitivity and caring show through.

To Be Successful: Sure, you’re tough, but softness will get you where you want to go. Balancing the two is best and will provide you with insight and intuition. Be Emotionally Balanced: Begin to express your sad feelings in small ways.

Face your underlying depression.

To Be Successful: Stop being a fanatic about work, fun, or success – lead a more balanced life. You are strong enough to stand up to depressive feelings. Be a Genuine Human Being: Focus on allowing yourself to experience a full range of feelings instead of just the good feelings.


Join a group where your status is unknown.

To Be Successful: Attend events where you are unknown and don’t say what you do for a living. Be a small fish in a big pond. Be Grateful: Enjoy finding out how you come across as a person.


Stop missing the glory of your past successes.

To Be Successful: Learn to be self-accepting when you aren’t a big star. Help support the successes of others more. Be a Team Player: Humility is superior to greatness.

Get therapy even when you don’t need to.

To Be Successful: Hire a therapist who is not intimated by you. Unblock yourself and become a caring human being. Be a Good Listener: Praise people. Take your future back into your own hands.

Being a superior human being means being open intellectually and emotionally. Learn to be genuine and vulnerable.

Team Wellness Advisory Committee: Self-Esteem Ups and Downs

Dr. Dennis O'Grady

Practical Ways to Raise Self-Esteem

Self-esteem permits you to interact in a world that basically welcomes the best of your ambitions and talents. In such a world, you can become a positive actor on the stage of life instead of a passive member of the audience. When your self-esteem comes under attack, refuse to think negatively or act irrationally against your own best interests. Accept that you are adequate and deserving of love and success.



Negative feelings often disguise the fact that you are changing successfully. Learn to reinforce small positive changes.

Do you panic when you are running dangerously low on self-esteem fuel, or do you take a deep breath, review your goals, and keep on changing? Low self-esteem is not a permanent state. Remember, being a winner means staying in a learning mode. Beware of pleasing others too much, beating yourself up with self-criticisms, or getting caught in power plays that use up your best energies.

Stay in the driver’s seat. Challenge any beliefs that do not allow you to change and feel happy.

MINDPLAY:

the three types of self-esteem

In which mindset do you find yourself most of the time? Do you have Excessive Self-Esteem (ESE), High Self-Esteem (HSE), or Low Self-Esteem (LSE)? Mark the descriptors below, in each column, that currently apply to you. The category with the most check marks will tell you a great deal about your present level of self-esteem.

Have some fun. Don’t be too serious about analyzing yourself. The same trait is used in numbered sequence across types so you can see how people change their personalities when self-esteem is added or subtracted.

Excessive Self-Esteem (ESE)

 Aggressive

 Hedonistic goals

 Arrogant

 Takes daring risks

 Intolerant

 Blaming

 I don’t care what you think

 Verbally abusive

 Too focused

 Feel superior

 Cocky

 Worth more

 Brutally blunt

 Priority: physically attractive

 High energy


High Self-Esteem (HSE)

 Assertive

 Goal seeking

 Confident

 Takes reasonable risks

 Tolerant to a point

 Self-encouraging

 What do you really think

 Verbally affirming

 Focuses as needed

 Feel adequate

 Courageous

 Worthwhile

 Direct and honest

 Priority: inner beauty

 Positive energy

Low Self-Esteem (LSE)

 Passive victim

 Goalless

 Self-doubting

 Afraid to risk

 Too tolerant

 Self-critical

 Nobody cares what I think

 Verbally demeaning

 Unfocused/scattered

 Feels inferior

 Ashamed

 Convinced of worthlessness

 Indirect and evasive

 Feels unattractive

 Low energy level

interPLAY:

Self-esteem can be excessively high or excessively low. Both ends of the self-esteem spectrum are exaggerations of high self-esteem.

Unmanaged strengths can be weaknesses. Different words have been used to describe the same trait across the three types of self-esteem: (1) aggressive (ESE), assertive (HSE), and passive victim (LSE). Each trait is part of the self-esteem spectrum. Refuse to let your strengths become weaknesses.

Displeasers have excessive self-esteem (ESE). As one ESE was fond of telling me, “It’s tough to soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by sparrows.” Intolerance, blaming, and despising weakness can make these people quite intimidating.

Pleasers have low self-esteem (LSE). Pleasers are trying to receive high self-esteem as if by magic. What they get instead is lowered self-esteem, and more-of-the-same frustrations.
Pleasing yourself leads to high self-esteem (HSE). Pleasing yourself forces you to raise your low self-esteem. High self-esteem reduces the need to please.

Self-esteem matches your inner beliefs to a tee. Learn to think of any belief as changeable. Changing self-critical beliefs always adds to the level of your self-esteem.

Due to the devilry of negative thinking, who you think you are isn’t necessarily who you really are. My clients hang on to their negative self-opinions with the power of a death grip. Learn to let go of your negative self-ideas more easily.

Team Wellness Advisory Committee: Self-Esteem

Self-Esteem is Loving to Learn and Learning to Love Yourself

Adopting a positive attitude toward change means you fall in love with learning new things instead of bemoaning the fact that you don’t know everything. Self-esteem is falling in love with learning and learning to be more loving toward yourself.

You can’t love life if you are busy resisting this changing world. Neither can you learn to love new aspects of your personality if you put your strengths into a tightly sealed little box. Changing means you feel free to open yourself up to being loved for who you are.

Don’t be fooled, though, because developing high self-esteem is hard work. Facing yourself in a mirror of self-reflection is the toughest work you will ever be called upon to do…but you’re up to the challenge. To be happy, learn to look long and hard at yourself in the revealing mirror of self-esteem.

Self-esteem is earned step-by-step, day-by-day in a myriad of little ways. It means taking great advice and running with it. It means squeezing positive strokes out of every stone thrown your way. It means refusing to stay down for long after you experience a failure.

How’s your self-esteem been lately? Self-esteem is your feeling of belonging to the world, including the essential right for good things to happen in your life.

The Self-Esteem Quiz

Take the following quiz to determine the level of your self-esteem at this moment.

True or False

	1. When people are successful, they become less stressed.
	2.0People enjoy being happy and satisfied.
	3. People who brag are really insecure.
	4. Parents are to blame for low self-esteem in their children.
	5. Women feel as successful as men these days.
	6. Men and women typically depend mostly on their spouses or significant others as their support systems and confidence-boosters.
	7. Good friendships are secondary for high self-esteem
	8. Tactful criticism usually motivates people.
	9. People with high self-esteem are more outgoing and extroverted.
	10. Studies show that 65% of Americans are completely satisfied with their self-esteem.

Answers and Discussions

1. False	Success adds many new life stressors to cope with, and stress weakens self-esteem.
2. False	Although many people enjoy being happy, anxiety may lead you to think, “Oh, this is just too good to be true,” or, “This is never going to last.”
3. False	Being honest about your strengths and your weaknesses is an assertive declaration of independence.
4. False	Many forces shape the child, and to blame low self-esteem on parents reduces parental pride.
5. False	Studies show that women are more apt to ascribe their work success to luck, while men view their work success as a result of hard work or talent.
6. False	Men typically receive support only from their wives, while women receive reassurance from several sources other than their husbands.
7. False	Good friendships are now considered on equal par to a good marriage in helping you feel worthwhile and whole.
8. False	Many of us experience criticism as outright ego-deflating, non-motivating, and as an unneeded roadblock to positive change.
9. False	People with high self-esteem report a greater need for privacy, reflection, and solitude.
10. False	Studies show the reverse. 65% of Americans are dissatisfied with their current level of self-esteem and wish they could feel better about themselves.

Use this quiz at the dinner table as a family discussion tool to raise self-esteem. Ask your children what goals they have set to increase their self-confidence. Ask your spouse what types of strokes make him or her feel good, and encourage your own talents to shine in the world.

Self-esteem is a learned skill that you must work for daily. Effort spent improving your self-esteem today will pay handsome dividends tomorrow as your sense of well-being increases.