First off I ought to define what I mean by ‘Self Empowerment’.
True Self Empowerment is a natural outcome of combining three different, closely-related elements: Self Confidence, Self Worth and Self Respect.
You may wonder, “Aren’t those all the same thing?”. This is part of the problem because many people use these terms as if they did mean the same thing. This confuses the issue and make true Self Empowerment harder to achieve.
Even professional psychologists sometimes use terms like ‘Self Confidence’ and ‘Self Worth’ as if they were interchangeable. In actual fact they are very different things – at least in the way I like to define them.
Self Confidence: this is about how your relate to the external world and your ability to set and achieve goals and the like. It is about knowing you have the required skills, or can learn those skills, to do a thing. It is about the thoughts, feelings and assumptions you have about what you are able to do.
Self Worth: This is about how you relate to your ‘inner world’. It is how you feel about you. As a particpant in one of my workshops once said ‘Its whether you like yourself or not’. In other words it is about the thoughts, feelings and assumptions you have about what you are worth.
Self Respect: This is about how you relate to God in whatever way that is real for you. This can include the principles or values you live by and so on. It is about the thoughts, feelings and assumptions you have about spirituality, or that which gives meaning to your life.
Self Empowerment is like a three-legged stool where each of the elements; Self Confidence, Self Worth and Self Respect are the legs of the stool. We need each of these aspects to be strong and healthy to lead a rich and full life.
If a person focusses too much on Self Confidence – which is the more obvious aspect and so tends to get the most attention – and completely neglects other aspects of themselves, this can lead to them getting out of balance. This is like making one leg of the stool longer and not adjusting the others – eventually the whole thing would tip over.
In practise this means that if a person who has a lot of Self Confidence, but who is a bit weak on Self Worth receives ‘damage’ to their Self Worth (more about that later) they will ‘collapse’ more readily than a person with strong Self Worth. They may give up on something sooner that a person with less Self Confidence but more Self Worth would do in the same circumstances.
As you can probably imagine, developing greater Self Confidence is a different process from developing Self Worth or Self Respect. More on how do develop these and to repair damage does to them in future articles….