Your esteem can be low but your confidence is high. Your esteem can be high but your confidence is low. Maybe, maybe not.
These are kissing cousins. They are very much related and not far from each other.
Esteem comes with a feeling of worthiness and being in control of your life. Confidence is based on competency and thus it is hard to separate them.
I have had high esteem since childhood because people were speaking good things into my subconscious. My confidence on the other hand was a bit shaky but it got better with time, I started with a high confidence as a child but I lost it at some point in my teenage years. I later on regained it in my 20s.
I have had a healthy dose of esteem and confidence for a long time though, I can’t say I have been a low esteem guy or low confidence guy. When in doubt, I usually seek clarification. Doubt is what makes men unconfident.
Self-esteem on the other hand can be deteriorated by many things. If you allow negative people around you and they start speaking bad things to your subconscious and making you feel bad about yourself, your self-esteem can take a nose dive sooner or later. If you get into bad relationships, they can wear you down and make you feel worthless.
A highly-esteemed people won’t take abuse or insults lightly. Another thing with esteem is that it is all about how much control you have over your life if you know yourself well, and what value you bring to people’s lives and humanity. It will be hard for someone to put a dent in your esteem. If you don’t have control of your life, then your esteem can be destroyed on by ruthless people. People are always pushing you to see what they can get away with.
A low self-esteem can make you have a low confidence. If you don’t like how you look, for instance, you might not feel bold enough to approach a man or a woman for a date. However, let’s say you have always been able to get dates, and then one day you wake up with acne on your face or you slightly gain weight and you don’t like how you look at the moment. That will not affect your ability to get dates because you have been competent in that area of your life.
Your Ego Got to be Intact
If you have a big ego you probably have a good esteem. If you don’t have an ego, you probably feel worthless. Let’s say you are courting a chic and she starts hurling insults, if you are a low-esteem guy, you can bear with the insults and even lose the gal because you didn’t want to check her. On the other hand, if you have esteem, you might challenge some of the things she says. Let’s say she throws an indirect insult like “men have low standards or men are pigs” on a date. You are the only man on a date with her at the moment so you might want to handle that bad frame. You can instead say “Yeah, men have low standards because the standards for women are low, and yet most women still can’t meet them”. Or you might want to ask her “What makes you say that?”. You might have said something that made her feel like you have low standards.
You can fake confidence and esteem to an extent. for you to be confident you will start with a bit of arrogance, false confidence and then gain confidence as you achieve things and become more proven. It is hard faking esteem though, if you have low esteem it will ooze out in your vibe.
I once read somewhere that it is creepy to have low self-esteem so it is not something you want to have. It is very annoying when dealing with someone with low esteem, they tend to feel insecure around you and demand constant reassurance from you. I would also say it is off-putting dealing with a low-confident person. Life seems very confusing, unkind and unfair to the unconfident man.
At a young age, a man or a woman can be shy and have a pass, however, an unconfident 30-year-old man is just not a good look. At a certain age, people expect you to be unfazed in many social situations. You don’t want to be a 30-year-old guy suffering from low self-esteem.
If you have low esteem, start by checking your social circle. Your bosses, instructors, friends, and family might be whispering negative things to your ears and slowly getting into your subconscious. You can come to believe bad things that are untrue about yourself. Start to find a purpose or a mission to accomplish and do something that fulfills you and makes you feel good about yourself. Regain control over yourself.
If you have low confidence, on the other hand, find some success. Rock solid confidence comes from competence. There is no other way around it, that’s why you can be confident in cooking if you are good at it and not confident in public speaking because you have never done it. However, you can be confident that you can learn something such as public speaking and get good at it. The self-belief is the first step of confidence.
Having bad confidence and low esteem itself might not be a bad thing, it means you want to improve on some things. So, acknowledging that you need to work on yourself is a positive step towards attaining unshakeable esteem and confidence. If you are bad at martial arts and poor in conversation and you are still anxious, you can slowly start building your confidence by practicing these arts and activities you need to master to be confident in different situations.
The first time I wrote something as a writer, I wasn’t confident at all. I took an hour to type 200 words, that was 10 years ago, nowadays it is very different because I have written about almost every topic under the planet. I write with more confidence these days.
You can always be confident in whatever you want to be in if you practice it long enough, whether it playing chess or piano or guitar or dating.
Nice time ahead!
