How to achieve high goals while maintaining a positive attitude towards oneself?

If personality is like a building, then self-esteem is one of its load-bearing walls. A person adheres to a certain level of self-relationship, striving for self-respect. To maintain a certain level of positive self-relationship, a person does a lot: works on themselves, educates themselves, becomes wealthier, becomes useful, professional, famous, and unique.

Self-esteem can be private - an individual's evaluation of their specific abilities and achievements (today, I answered poorly in class - this is private self-esteem; I always perform poorly in class - this is a more general self-esteem of a specific ability; I am not smart or I am smart - this is general self-esteem).

Level of aspirations - this is the level of difficulty of tasks that a person claims to solve in order to maintain their overall self-esteem. When intending to successfully solve a difficult task or an easier task, a person takes into account their abilities (self-esteem). If the bar is high (aspirations are high), it can be quite risky for self-esteem. After all, if you experience failure, your self-esteem will suffer.

American psychologist James formulated the formula of self-esteem back in the 19th century. Self-esteem = success / level of aspirations.

The higher the success, the higher the self-esteem. The higher the aspirations with the same success, the lower the self-esteem.

In different activities, a person can have different levels of aspirations and different self-esteems (private self-esteem). For example, a person highly values their dancing skills and intends to win a difficult dance competition. Here, both self-esteem and aspirations are high. The same person may know for sure that they are not good at mathematics. Their aspirations in mathematics are low (they do not strive for success in it and do not achieve success in mathematics, so their failures in mathematics do not bother them much). So, does this person have low self-esteem? No, not like that. Private successes in uninteresting subjects are not necessary for overall high self-esteem.

However, if they are doing poorly in school, and everyone around them shows that they are not good enough, their overall self-esteem may be low. But if this child has another sphere of their true interests in which they are successful, that's enough to feel like a successful person in life as a whole.

Important! A person cannot do everything equally well and cannot be a champion in everything. For a good attitude towards oneself, for self-satisfaction in general, it is important for a person to have overall self-esteem at a level that is sufficient for them.

Let's say that a self-respecting engineer can quite accept that they do not know the Spanish language - provided that they did not set the goal of learning Spanish.

As soon as a goal enters one's life, self-esteem immediately comes into play as self-improvement.

Yes, self-esteem is the work of a person in assessing themselves, and it is also the result of this work.

It happens that low self-esteem is accurate.

It happens that high self-esteem is accurate.

It happens that external evaluation of a person (made by someone else) is high, but self-esteem is low. It can be said that the person evaluated themselves lower than the teacher or colleague evaluated them.

The reasons for such discrepancies can be various. However, it is important for us to understand how a person evaluates their specific abilities, knowledge, and achievements - objectively or based on their overall emotional and value-related attitude towards themselves.

For the sake of psychological stability and adequacy, it is necessary to strive for an objective assessment - by evaluating oneself in specific matters.

A collection of specific positive (negative) evaluations tends to generalize - that is, to turn into an overall positive (negative) self-esteem.