Self Improvement...

What exactly is self-esteem and why have we never heard of it before? Actually we have. It began in the 19th century with Samuel Smiles's homilies for the self-improvement of the working classes, and was revived again in the 1920s through the writings of the Frenchman Emile Coue who had everyone saying ''Every day in every way I am getting better'' 10 times before breakfast.

From the 1950s on, the doyen of the self-esteem movement was Norman Vincent Peale, whose message contained in his first book, The Power of Positive Thinking, continues through a spate of titles by the now-nonagenarian author.

But whereas positive thinking was once an active verb, something you did as you went about your business, self-esteem, an abstract noun, has been transformed into a condition or syndrome. According to Gloria Steinem, in her 1992 book The Revolution Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, ''self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals''.

Study after study has shown a significant relationship between self-esteem and achievement. Numerous researchers have found that students with negative attitudes - were usually the low achievers. The current theory is that one of the reasons children fail is because they have a low opinion of their own abilities and the school has low expectations of them - a lethal combination, which, like the old secondary-moderns, is a self-fulfilling prophecy for low achievement. Giving children positive encouragement raises the threshold of their poor self-image and encourages them to try harder.

Many shy people make a sharp dichotomy between their public self and their private self. The public self is the "working self" that they let others see - as a business person, an actor, a journalist, for example - but the private self is something they keep hidden. They psychologically keep those two aspects of themselves separate rather than integrated. When the public self is praised, it does not carry over to one's private self. You can feel you're worthless even though everyone praises you, because you say: "That's not the real me; that's me the entertainer. That's only the role I play." It becomes very important to get people to work at integrating those two selves so they direct their own script as well as act it out.

People with low self esteem put themselves down and avoid challenges because they fear failure. They take the easy way out or resist change because they have little confidence in their abilities to do anything differently. It's easy to spot people whose low self esteem has affected their attitudes. Fortunately you can improve your self esteem by thinking more positively about yourself, spending time with others who feel good about themselves and realizing that everyone makes mistakes.

To teach self-esteem is to cure the cause of social ills rather than to repair the results," says Dr. Sioux Harlan, an Irvine psychologist. "Self-esteem is self-approval, self-appreciation. It's being able to look yourself in the eye and say 'I love you,' 24 hours of every day."

Self-esteem can be boosted by a very simple formula: You stop saying negative things about yourself, and you tell yourself more-positive things. People need to stop making self-statements which are chronic and irreversibly negative like "I'm dumb. I'm stupid. I'm ugly. I'm a failure. I'm no good." Instead we tell people to think in terms of correcting what they think is wrong. So they might say: "Next time, I think I should make introduction more gradual" or "I think my hair would look better if I did it this way rather than that way," instead of "I look ugly" or "I'm a failure as a salesman."