Self-esteem is the relationship that you have with yourself, your sense of personal worth. Self-esteem might therefore seem like a totally private issue. However, your self-esteem affects not only your own life, but it affects the lives of everyone around you.

Your level of self-esteem affects how you treat others that you interact with or avoid interaction with. You have probably been the victim of someone with low self-esteem yourself. Maybe a colleague who was trying to impose his or her way on others, a teacher who did his or her best to make your life miserable, or maybe just a grumpy neighbour. The best (and worst) example of the negative impacts of other people's low self-esteem is perhaps when a parent with low self-esteem behaves in a non-loving manner towards his or her children who in turn will grow up with a low self-esteem and do the same to other people. Every word that you say to others, every gesture and every action is influenced by your self-esteem. If you have a low self-esteem you will generally have a more negative effect on other people.

Your level of self-esteem is thus obviously not just a personal matter. Compare in your mind a country where all the political leaders have high self-esteem with a country in which all the leaders have low self-esteem. If I lived in the country with low self-esteem politicians I would demonstrate for sending them all on a self-esteem course!

Your self-esteem has larger impact over other people's lives than your skills in mathematics, physics, music, history or any other school subject. Yet self-esteem is not officially taught in schools. When I was a child, we had a textbook called "I am good enough". Now as an adult I can guess that this book was supposed to teach us self-esteem, but all the students (including me) hated those classes because they were so boring. The teachers did not know how to teach self-esteem to young children. They probably didn't even understand why they were supposed to teach it. Fortunately or unfortunately, these classes were very few.

Teachers should be trained in how to help their students to gain higher self-esteem. There should also be self-esteem trainers in all big companies so that their employees can continue to develop their self-esteem. This would be a huge investment to both the schools and the companies because of the benefits that higher self-esteem among the students and employees would bring.

Leaving people to figure out how to raise their self-esteem by themselves is too risky. The whole world would benefit if more people learned how to develop a high self-esteem.

Liv Miyagawa - The Self-Esteem Coach

Liv Miyagawa, The Self-Esteem Coach, helps people all over the world to raise their self-esteem and to reach their personal goals. She opens people's eyes to their own strengths and helps them to figure out what it really is that they want to get out of life. Liv helps people to find out exactly what steps they need to take to reach their goals, and she supports them and motivates them on their journey towards a more fulfilling future. http://www.livmiyagawa.com.