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"No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." - Eleanor Roosevelt
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Self-esteem is essential to a person's ability to function in a healthy way. Without the foundation of a solid sense of self, he or she is unable to take the risks and make the decisions necessary to lead a fulfilling, productive life. Research has shown that a low self-esteem can negatively impact numerous areas in a person's life.
Although a high self-esteem has long been touted as the key to psychological health, recent research by Jordan et al. (2003) has called attention to the concepts of secure vs. defensive self-esteem. They propose that while some people with high self-esteem hold positive self-views that are authentic, others possess views that tend to be rather fragile and easily threatened, often resulting in a strong desire to protect their sense of self-worth. In essence, while they may feel good about themselves on a conscious or explicit level, their self-views tend to be much more negative on a less conscious or implicit level. Overall, people with the latter form of self-esteem tended to display a higher degree of defensiveness, narcissism, and self-deception.
Many individuals carry around self-doubts that limit their potential. They can either let those self-doubts control their actions, or they can work through them by improving the things they can change and accepting those they can't. As deep as the layers of their self-image may be, everyone is capable of stripping away the negative layers and replacing them with positive ones.
The goal of the Self-esteem test is to determine how John views and feels about himself. It will assess the degree to which he experiences feelings of inadequacy and doubt, his sense of self-worth and social acceptance, the tendency to require approval from others, the tendency to set unrealistic expectations for himself, and whether he exhibits a predisposition towards narcissism, defensiveness and self-deception, which can all be signs of a fragile self-esteem, even if it is high.
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