Building self-esteem and restoring confidence to engender resilience, optimism, and strength

Self-esteem—what makes people think well of themselves—is at the core of an individual’s personality.

While the criteria of personal value may vary from culture to culture, how people feel about themselves affects almost everything they do, think, or feel. It influences their choices and decisions, who they have relationships with and how they respond to events in their lives. In our society, self-evaluation and judgment is a constant process for many, and it is impressed on us by the trends of the workplace and popular psychology, which heighten consciousness of capability and performance in myriad ways.
High or low self-esteem or self-confidence also tends to be self-perpetuating. People who believe in their self-worth tend to take more risks and expand their options, while people who experience a lot of self-doubt act to buffer themselves from failure and avoid situations that may risk self-criticism or judgment by others.

Many experiments in social psychology indicate that people who seem self-confident and happy with themselves attract positive attention, while people who seem uncertain and who doubt themselves tend to avoid social contact and come to expect, and receive, more negative attention.

Dr. Wu’s approach in helping people to improve self-confidence is to combine cognitive behavioral techniques to identify negative self-talk and self-criticism, and mindfulness skills to bring into finer focus the mental states that form ideas about the self. Psychodynamic psychotherapy can effect change and growth at the deepest level of psyche by tracking self-esteem in the context of relationship.

Low self-esteem and self-confidence can affect you in many ways: