School Counselling: Strategies to Enhance Self-Esteem

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1. "Can you provide me with an article dealing with this topic?"

I have located the following article (see attachment, but is also presented below):

Title: Counseling To Enhance Self-Esteem. ERIC Digest.
Document Type: Information Analyses---ERIC Information Analysis Products (IAPs) (071); Information Analyses---ERIC Digests (Selected) in Full Text (073);
Available From: ERIC/CAPS, 2108 School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1259.

THIS DIGEST WAS CREATED BY ERIC, THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT ERIC, CONTACT ACCESS ERIC 1-800-LET-ERIC

INTRODUCTION

Reading the newspapers, reviewing professional association conference programs or even watching TV sitcoms will quickly convey the impression that a person's self-esteem is a major determinant of what a person accomplishes and how fulfilled and rewarding a life he or she lives. As one teenager said, "You ain't nothin if you ain't got high self-esteem." This belief in the potency of self-esteem to affect how rewarding our life is, and how productive we are, has clearly been bought into by the public at large, and is a major target of new product development by commercial vendors. An educational publisher's recent catalogue offered twice the number of resources on self-esteem over any other topic. A recent ERIC database search identified over 5,000 journal articles where self-esteem was a major focus of the article.

A person motivated to reach a clear understanding of what self-esteem is and how it can be increased may be puzzled by various definitions and prescriptions for raising it. This digest, therefore, is written with the intention of helping counselors to be a force for positive change in the self-esteem of their clients.

WHAT IS SELF-ESTEEM?

Definitions of self-esteem vary considerably in both their breadth and psychological sophistication. From an intuitive sense we know that high self-esteem means that we appreciate ourselves and our inherent worth. More specifically, it means we have a positive attitude, we evaluate ourselves highly, we are convinced of our own abilities and we see ourselves as competent and powerful-in control of our own lives and able to do what we want. In addition, we compare ourselves favorably with others. We also know what it means to experience diminished self-esteem--self-depreciation, helplessness, powerlessness and depression (Mecca, Smelser & Vasconcellos, 1989).

It also may help us in better understanding self-esteem to differentiate self-concept from self-esteem. Self-concept is the totality of a complex, organized and dynamic system of learned beliefs, attitudes and opinions that each person holds to be true about his or her personal existence (Purkey, 1988). Self-esteem is focused upon feelings of personal worth and the level of satisfaction regarding one's self. Another approach to defining self-esteem is to identify the almost universally accepted components of self-esteem. They are: (1) a cognitive element, or the characterizing of self in descriptive terms, e.g., power, confidence; (2) an affective element or a degree of positiveness or negativeness, e.g., high or low self-esteem; and (3) an evaluative element related to some ideal standard, e.g., what a ...