What Self-Esteem Tells You
Self Esteem is the Measure of the Resourcefulness of one’s beliefs.
My father was a noteworthy engineer in Canadian history. He was intelligent enough to design hydro-electric dams. Several of them, in fact. I was a very fortunate child to have a father like him because when I was very young, he taught me about the scientific method for gaining knowledge. And I can’t even begin to tell you how often I’ve benefited from it in my life. He taught me a resourceful belief – one that has led me to generate desirable results.
To my constant surprise and amazement, there are people who believe that the scientific method is not a resourceful belief. Often, it is simply not something that they’ve ever considered or had presented to them. When demonstrated, it pretty much makes sense to almost everyone. And yet, there are still some people who reject it on theological grounds which, to me, appears to be an unresourceful belief.
Beliefs Set Your Path In Life.
Since I am disinclined to look at spirituality in the same way as the church, you are unlikely to find me attending one. By the same token, there are people who wouldn’t miss a day of church. They don’t just go to worship, they also go to be part of a community. To gain acceptance in that community, I might need to change my beliefs to be more in line with theirs. The same might be true if one of them chose to attend an academy of science.
Because my beliefs led me to finish University, they produced at least one desirable result that I wouldn’t trade for anything. They set me on that path, rather than a path that would have had me studying bibles instead of lecture notes. And they have led me here, writing these thoughts in the hopes of sharing them with you.
Change Your Beliefs to Change Your Results.
As I was developing the Mastermind Course web site, a good friend of mine made a suggestion that certainly garnered support from other things that I had learned. I was inclined to believe in his suggestion. What he was advocating would have lengthened the landing page dramatically, and I was interested to know what length would lead to the highest number of sign-ups. I decided to look for an example where someone had actually tested to see what works best. I found a study that used the scientific method, and got my answer: Shorter is better.
I built the first landing page short, then tried my friend’s suggestion and built the second one long. Sure enough, the shorter one resulted in slightly more sign-ups. So I changed my mind. I chose to believe in something different than my friend’s suggestion, and generated more desirable results because of it.
The key to power is to choose your beliefs wisely.
All your beliefs are true to you, because you believe them. So it’s a kind of trap to evaluate beliefs on their truthfulness, because you will always be right and everyone else will only be right insofar as they agree with you. The rest of the time, everyone else is wrong. But you are never wrong. And they don’t agree with you because their beliefs are always true to them, too. The trap comes when your beliefs lead you to disaster and you can’t change them because you require them to be true, rather than resourceful.
Since our beliefs lead to results that we can identify in our lives, it is resourceful to be able to change them so that they produce better results. If a person’s ego gets bruised, their self-esteem gets lowered. The ego holds in it a set of beliefs about the world and about the self, and when those beliefs are dis-proven the ego feels hurt. One of the results of holding those beliefs was pain, and another was lower self-esteem. Therefor, self-esteem reflects the resourcefulness of your beliefs in creating desirable results in your life.
…more to come.