Personal Development
Definition: Self Confidence
By Wikipedia.org
Mar 27, 2008

Self Confidence
In psychology, self-esteem or self-confidence reflects a person's overall self-appraisal of their own worth.

Self-esteem encompasses beliefs and emotions, and behavior may reflect self-esteem. Psychologists usually regard self-esteem as an enduring personality characteristic, though normal, short-term variations occur. Self-esteem can apply specifically to a particular dimension or have global extent.

Synonyms or near-synonyms of self-esteem include:

* self-worth
* self-regard
* self-respect
* self-confidence
* self-love

Definitions of self-confidence

Given a long and varied history, the term has, unsurprisingly, no less than three major types of definitions in the field, each of which has generated its own tradition of research, findings, and practical applications:

1. The original definition presents self-esteem as a ratio found by dividing one’s successes in areas of life of importance to a given individual by the failures in them or one’s “success / pretensions”. Problems with this approach come from making self-esteem contingent upon success: this implies inherent instability because failure can occur at any moment.
2. In the mid 1960s Morris Rosenberg and social-learning theorists defined self-esteem in terms of a stable sense of personal worth or worthiness, measurable by self-report testing. This became the most frequently used definition for research, but involves problems of boundary-definition, making self-esteem indistinguishable from such things as narcissism or simple bragging.
3. Nathaniel Branden in 1969 briefly defined self-esteem as "…the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness". This two-factor approach, as some have also called it, provides a balanced definition that seems to be capable of dealing with limits of defining self-esteem primarily in terms of competence or worth alone.

Branden’s (1969) description of self-esteem includes the following primary properties:

1. self-esteem as a basic human need, i.e., "…it makes an essential contribution to the life process", "…is indispensable to normal and healthy self-development, and has a value for survival."
2. self-esteem as an automatic and inevitable consequence of the sum of individuals' choices in using their consciousness
3. something experienced as a part of, or background to, all of the individual's thoughts, feelings and actions.

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