The etymology of the compound word self-esteem and in particular the second
part , esteem, comes from Latin verb aestimare which means to judge, to estimate or evaluate a situation.

An estimation /evaluation involves in almost
most of the cases an analysis based on which we can make a judgement and reach a conclusion in relation to our object of analysis.

Interestingly, the verb aestimare was later absorbed and translated into our
culture as esteem , meaning value and admiration and it’s nowadays widely
used in combination with the word self as in self-esteem.

We generally understand self-esteem as the value we place onto ourselves and if we ought
to look at it through the old Latin framework, we can even say that self-esteem
is the measurement , the assessment of one’s self, the assessment of our own
worth.

Self -esteem in itself is therefore neutral in imparting judgments of
one’s self, and it is merely a tool , an inner compass by which we can delve deeply into the human being and gauge a flavour of our own inner world!

Furthermore, an individual who has constantly made a habit of educating themselves and being on life’s journey , feeling the thorns of inner growth at every step of the way and not giving up in front of myriads of obstacles that the process of growing brings, will have a relatively easy task to talk about the self-esteem.

Such individual will almost instantly feel well grounded in life, and have the
confidence that he has the right to exist and be part of this mysterious
universe as much as the trees, the animals and the rest of his fellow humans!
For such individual will have taken the pains of facing their fears, their
deficiencies, and before turning to outer world for advice, they turned inside,
and they recognised the immense value of this process of growth as an
essential requirement to be able to become and develop a balanced, whole
personality.

This is probably the hardest task of the modern man and woman, a task that
requires enormous courage, to educate one’s self before educating others, to
constantly model what the nature does, growing , refreshing, letting go of the
old and nourishing the new.

Self-esteem, as mentioned above , is a tool of evaluation , an intrinsic tool that
nature has built in us. It’s our inner compass or thermometer that tells how we
see ourselves, how we estimate ourselves and the value we place onto
ourselves and each of us will do it differently.

Some people will use their thinking function to evaluate it, and others will use the feeling function
according to their personality type. Regardless of the function used, we will
always have a response from the inner self. It can be a feeling in the body, or
an overwhelming sensation, or a thought. It is important to pay attention to
that sign as usually it can start a dialogue that can lead to finding out more
about the origins of the sign and what it actually wants to tell us.

We usually hear phrases like ‘’ He might have great self-esteem ! He walked in
the room with a confident smile and gave an outstanding presentation !’’ Now
the reality is that that’s the scenario that we saw and how it looked like from
where we stood. It could have well been possible that the man simply worked
for a long time on his illusionary fear of speaking in public, and he finally
overcome it and he looked and felt triumphant !

Such victories are always the result of inner work , and of course we are not talking here about pathological tendencies of abnormal confidence that do not reflect reality but simply about
that sense of confidence that is critical for our wellbeing and constant
adaptation to life and our environments.

It is true that nature has inbuilt in us many of these wonderful tools that man still has to learn how to work with them and self-esteem is one of those. We speak about Man being the most unique and extraordinary creation of our species, and yet the irony is that we can suffer from low self-esteem and we seek validation in all the other places apart from our inner thermometer. We shut down that inner voice that wants to talk to us in the silence of an afternoon , we speak louder and louder so we don’t hear it , we  get busier and
busier so we can’t even see our faces looking back at us , and then when the inner tension becomes unbearable, we collapse and complain we don’t know who we are anymore or what our purpose is here.

To have self-esteem- it’s a given. It’s a gift of Nature. We all have a sense of self, of being in the world. It’s an organic, maternal, both subtle and strong sense of home, as being part of the earth and its life but part of our role here, as we grow and mature, is also to use these tools and gifts to carve in our uniqueness , our wholeness.

One never quite knows for sure what the spring has engendered until the autumn shows, but one has to work patiently and at the end of it we might exclaim like Michelangelo :

‘The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there , I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.’