Are you your own worst enemy? Are youd evastated by criticism? Do you have trouble your loved ones what you really need? If you said yes, you're a victim of low self-esteem. Learn to be your own best friend! This easy, step-by-step program can start changing that today! You can radically improve the way you feel about yourself and discover an attractive, confident, and happier you. Discover: simple exercises to focus on your good points how to combat your critical inner voice techniques to stop your" shoulds"--those damaging rules about how you "should" be effective ways to deal with criticism “A valueable storehouse of tactics and strategies for constructing (or renovating) the foundation of our self-estem” ― Phillip G. Zimbardo, author of Shyness Matthew McKay, PhD. is the co-author of Self-Esteem. Patrick Fanning is the co-author of Self-Esteem. 1The Nature of Self-Esteem Self-esteem is essential for psychological survival. It is an emotional sine qua non—without some measure of self-worth, life can be enormously painful, with many basic needs going unmet. One of the main factors differentiating humans from other animals is the awareness of self: the ability to form an identity and then attach a value to it. In other words, you have the capacity to define who you are and then decide if you like that identity or not. The problem of self-esteem is this human capacity for judgment. It’s one thing to dislike certain colors, noises, shapes, or sensations. But when you reject parts of yourself, you greatly damage the psychological structures that literally keep you alive. Judging and rejecting yourself causes enormous pain. And in the same way that you would favor and protect a physical wound, you find yourself avoiding anything that might aggravate the pain of self-rejection in any way. You take fewer social, academic, or career risks. You make it more difficult for yourself to meet people, interview for a job, or push hard for something where you might not succeed. You limit your ability to open yourself with others, express your sexuality, be the center of attention, hear criticism, ask for help, or solve problems. To avoid more judgments and self-rejection, you erect barriers of defense. Perhaps you blame and get angry, or bury yourself in perfectionistic work. Or you brag. Or you make excuses. Sometimes you turn to alcohol or drugs. This book is about stopping the judgments. It’s about healing the old wounds of hurt and self-rejection. How you perceive and feel about yourself can change. And when those perceptions and feelings change, the ripple effect will touch every part of your life with a gradually expanding sense of freedom. CAUSES AND EFFECTS Hundreds of researchers have quizzed thousands of people of various ages and situations, trying to see what causes self-esteem, who has the most of it, how important it is, how it can be increased, and so on. Studies of young children show clearly that parents’ style of child-rearing during the first three or four years determines the amount of self-esteem that a child starts with. After that, most studies of older children, adolescents, and adults share a common confusion: what is cause and what is effect? Does academic success foster self-esteem, or does self-esteem foster academic success? Does high social status cause high self-esteem, or does high self-esteem help you gain high social status? Do alcoholics drink because they hate themselves, or do they hate themselves because they drink? Do people like themselves because they do well in job interviews, or do they do better in interviews because they like themselves? These are classic chicken-and-egg questions. Just as eggs come from chickens and chickens come from eggs, it seems that self-esteem grows out of your circumstances in life, and your circumstances in life are influenced strongly by your self-esteem. Which came first? The question has serious implications for your success at raising your self-esteem. If external circumstances determine self-esteem, then all you have to do to improve your self-esteem is to improve your circumstances. Let’s say you have low self-esteem because you never graduated from high school, you’re short, your mom hated herself, you live in the slums, and you’re 100 pounds overweight. All you have to do is go to night school and get your degree, grow about six inches, have been raised by a different mother, move to Beverly Hills, and lose 100 pounds. It’s a cinch, right? But you know you’ll never make it. There’s nothing you can do about your parents or your height. Your only hope is that things are the other way around: that self-esteem determines circumstances. This means that if you improve your self-esteem, your circumstances will improve. So just stop hating yourself, and you’ll get taller, your mom will become somebody different, and those 100 pounds will evaporate like the morning dew. If you feel that this second scenario is also a little unlikely, you can be con