The socio-psychological concept of self-confidence relates to self-assuredness in one's personal judgment, ability, power, etc., sometimes manifested excessively.[1]Being confident in yourself is infectious if you present yourself well, others will want to follow in your foot steps towards success.[2]
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Professor Raj Persaud posits that true self confidence comes from an attitude where you:
| “ | Promise yourself, no matter how difficult the problem life throws at you, that you will try as hard as you can to help yourself. You acknowledge that sometimes your efforts to help yourself may not result in success, as often being properly rewarded is not in your control.[3] | ” |
Self-esteem has been directly connected to an individual's social network, the activities they participate in, and what they hear about themselves from others. Positive self-esteem has been linked to factors such as psychological health, mattering to others, and both body image and physical health. On the contrary, low self-esteem has been associated with the outcomes of depression, health problems, and antisocial behavior. Usually, adolescents of poor health will display low self-esteem. Globally, self-confidence in boys and girls will decline during adolescence, and in contrast to boys, girls' self-confidence won't shoot back up again until early adulthood. During adolescence, self-esteem is affected by age, race, ethnicity, puberty, body weight, involvement in physical activities, and gender. Self-confidence can vary and be observed in a variety of dimensions. Components of one's social and academic life affect self esteem. An individual's self-confidence can vary in different environments: such as at home or in school.[4]
The Wheel of Wellness was the first theoretical model of Wellness based in counseling theory. It is a model based on Adler's individual psychology and cross-disciplinary research on characteristics of healthy people who live longer and with a higher quality of life. The Wheel of Wellness includes five life tasks that relate to each other: spirituality, self-direction, work and leisure, friendship, and love. There are 12 subtasks of self-direction areas: sense of worth, sense of control, realistic beliefs, emotional awareness and coping, problem solving and creativity, sense of humor, nutrition, exercise, self-care, stress management, gender identity, and cultural identity. There are also five second-order factors, the Creative Self, Coping Self, Social Self, Essential Self, and Physical Self, which allow exploration of the meaning of wellness within the total self. In order to achieve a high self esteem, it is essential to focus on identifying strengths, positive assets, and resources related to each component of the Wellness model and using these strengths to cope with life challenges.[5]
Self-esteem has been linked not only to academic achievement but also to substance abuse, antisocial behaviors, teenage pregnancy, suicide and other self-destructive behaviors. The lack of self-esteem has given a standard explanation to the root of all problems American children face. In schools, children are being uncritically accepted and then provided with unlimited compliments and praise. Therefore, all criticism and difficult work are being avoided to make children feel good about themselves in today's American schools, causing what we call false self-confidence. Critics have told educators that the current approaches to building a child's self confidence can cause egocentric narcissism, hence, having a harmful effect on the child's learning. Because self-esteem comes from within, from genuinely feeling good about yourself, false self-esteem from outside sources will simply not provide the confidence necessary to achieve or take on a new skill.[6]
Implicit can be defined as something that is implied or understood though not directly expressed. Explicit is defined as something that is fully and clearly expressed; leaving nothing implied.[7] Implicitly measured self-esteem has been found to be weakly correlated with explicitly measured self-esteem. This leads some critics to assume that explicit and implicit self confidence are two completely different types of self-esteem. Therefore, this has drawn the conclusion that one will either have a distinct, unconscious self-esteem OR they will consciously misrepresent how they feel about themselves. Recent studies have shown that implicit self-esteem doesn't particuarly tap into your unconcious, rather that people consciously overreport their levels of self esteem. Another possibility is that implicit measurement may be assessing a different aspect of conscious self-esteem altogether.[8]Inaccurate self-evaluation is commonly observed in healthy populations. In the extreme, large differences between oneʼs self-perception and oneʼs actual behavior is a hallmark of a number of disorders that have important implications for understanding treatment seeking and compliance.[9]