How to preserve self-esteem and improve communication

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How do I recognize my own value?

If somebody would ask you what you are worth as a person, what would your answer be? I guess a lot of people would have to think a moment about it and may ask themselves “Worth compared to what?” and that’s the point.
You can only measure your worth when comparing with others. When creating or doing something we need somebody to give us a judgement if we have done it good.
This means we are dependent on other people’s judgement to find our own value. Receiving a positive judgement will then increase our self-esteem whereas a negative judgement will decrease our self-esteem.

When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"
Sydney J. Harris

We will receive these judgements by other people every time as part of communication. This means whenever you give a person a negative judgement, you will hurt this person’s self-esteem and communication will suffer from this.

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Why is that?

Think about the last situation where you heavily criticized a person. The most obvious reaction of this person would be defending himself and justifying why he or she behaved this specific way.
The chances are big that the conversation with this person will escalate and the actual topic that you wanted to talk about will end up in an argument with even more negative judgements from the one side and justification from the other side.

By the way: In most situations like this we lose the awareness being objective and start saying things like “You are never doing things right!” or “You are always late!”.

This surely doesn’t mean you should never criticize a person but you should always think about the consequences. You might hurt this person’s self-esteem.
Further you should ask yourself if it is necessary that you are the person criticizing somebody or if there may be another person who has a better connection to the one who you would like to criticize.

Self-esteem - A central part of our being

Whether you want to deliver good performance at work, being a specialist of your subject, having a good look or body shape or just be a good human. Everybody of us wants to be good at something. This means that everything we are doing only tends to preserve, defend or improve our self-esteem.
If you believe that you are the exception, well think about what drives you and why you exactly do the things that motivate you.

An interesting fact is that in general positive reactions from our environment aren’t attended and being accepted as completely normal. Whereas receiving negative reactions where we wouldn’t expect, it’s hard for us to even solve the easiest exercises.

There is an easy experiment that you can make with a friend of yours. Ask your friend to tell you animals and what they are doing, like for example “A dog is barking, a cat is meowing, and so on”.
The first two times you are showing him your confirmation when he is right, like for example pitching and “mhm” sound.
From the third example on you will show decline to every example although your partner is still right! It shouldn’t take long until your friend will ask you what’s wrong or where the problem is, although when thinking rational it should be absolutely clear for him that he isn’t saying anything wrong.
In this experiment, we can see how much we are addicted to the positive judgement of others.

How to preserve self-esteem

I guess after reading this post you may answer this question by yourself but I’ll go ahead and do it anyway as there are some points that I haven’t highlighted in this post closer.

1. Avoid doing something that is against your social conscience which also means you shouldn’t persuade others to do something that might be against their social consciences. We all live in different cultures with different religions and have been raised in different ways. The people who raised us built up our conscience and whenever we transgress against it we have a bad feeling and our self-esteem suffers from that.

2. Getting positive reactions from your environment on your self-perception. We all have an ideal impression of our self-perception. But this might differ dramatically from the impression that others have about us. This will inevitably lead to negative judgements or reactions. We can only minimize them when we learn to get the clearest self-perception of ourselves.

3. Appreciation of an individual and its efforts. Whenever you have the chance in a conversation to praise somebody for his work or make an honest compliment, do so. It will not only increase this person’s self-esteem but will also improve your communication.
   Besides people will recognize that you care about other’s feelings. This will sooner or later also lead to appreciation of your efforts as well.

So, this should be it for today. I hope you enjoyed this post. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvements, feel free to tell me about it. And as English is not my mother language I’m always willing to improve and would be happy if you could correct me if my grammar is wrong at some point.

Thanks for reading, have a nice day!

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References

BIRKENBIHL, Vera F.: Kommunikationstraining: Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen erfolgreich gestalten, 37. Auflage 2017