Self-Esteem and Achievement

This month we examine some of the negative impact self-esteem can have on achievement.  You would think people with high self-esteem would be more confident and better at achieving their goals.  The reality is more complicated.  While feeling good about yourself can help with achievement, when self-esteem gets too closely linked with achievement it tends to have a negative impact. 

First of all, no one can be successful at everything and those who tie their positive regard for themselves to their own achievement tend to invest their energy in just a few things; those things they are already good at.  They also become more emotionally vulnerable to setbacks and having things go wrong.  When they don’t do as well as they wanted at something, or even have an outright failure, it has a bigger impact on their emotional well being because they have tied how they feel about themselves to how they do. It is also true that the negative impact of failure seems to have a more powerful emotional effect than the positive impact of success.  In effect, tying self-esteem too tightly to achievement just magnifies that negative effect.

One of the worst effects of people tying self-esteem to achievement is the tendency for such people to move from seeking success to avoiding failure. One of the worst effects of people tying self-esteem to achievement is the tendency for such people to move from seeking success to avoiding failure. We already talked about the restricted range of interest and energy such people have and the restricted range makes their world smaller.  Fear of failure shrinks their world even more.  These people start to avoid doing things they know they won’t be successful at, limiting their ability to stretch them-selves, grow, and develop new skills.  They are much less willing to try new things in general because their ability to predict success in new activities is very poor.  Basically, linking self-esteem too closely to achievement makes it very difficult to develop and grow. 

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