When it comes to making an important life decision, one of the first things you must decide is how you are going to evaluate your own self-esteem vs. ego. In your mind you have to decide what will be important to you and what won’t. This sounds simple enough, however most people rarely sit down and actually take the time to consider their priorities objectively. You have to ask yourself how you define “important” and “not important.”
The reason why it is so difficult to evaluate yourself against your own self-esteem vs. ego is that you are forced to choose which is more important to you. To do this you have to make decisions regarding things that really don’t matter. For instance, if you think that a project you are working on is no longer important to you then you are making a choice based on what is important to you. If, however, you love your family and truly feel that you are the most important person in your world then you may be consumed with self-esteem vs. ego issues.
One of the first steps to solving any problem is to stop comparing yourself to others and to see that all of us are created equally. It’s true that we all have different characteristics but when we make comparisons we only focus on those things about ourselves that are of import to us. The truth is that the most important people in our lives are not the ones who make the bigger noise or are the ones with the hotter hair.
For instance, the waitress at the fast food place down the street is probably much more important than your neighbor down the street. Yet she doesn’t make the big deal out of her appearance. Does this mean that she lacks self-esteem? No it does not. What it does indicate is that she is a real person with a caring heart. The waitress on the other hand is a very focused, cold, calculating, critical thinker who has zero interest in creating lasting relationships and really doesn’t care about anyone else except herself.
Likewise, the repairmen aren’t any more important than the carpet cleaners. They might be in a really bad area but if you don’t value them they will leave. The important people in your life are the ones who treat you well. They are there for you, with you and offering help when you need it. They are important people who show you a genuine interest in you and who genuinely cares about you as a person.
Let’s face it; all of us possess self-esteem or ego depending on how we personally view ourselves. This is what leads to conflict between those who have high self-esteem vs. those who have low self-esteem. Those who have higher self-esteem always tend to look down on those who have lower than average self-esteem. This results in the belief that those people have low self-esteem and that they are less important than those with higher self-esteem. This is why some people make false accusations about the people who bring joy into their lives, even when the people have done nothing wrong.
As an example, if your family was having financial difficulties then it is almost impossible for you to have high self-esteem. It simply won’t matter how good of a job you do or how nice of a house you live in. All of these things are far less important than who you are as a person. If you were to place self-esteem and ego in the same scale then you would find that some people have high self-esteem and think nothing of harming those who they perceive to be weaker. This would not be an acceptable behavior because you would be destroying the foundation of your self-esteem.
It is possible to develop better self-esteem and to love yourself. However, this is easier said than done. In order to develop more significant relationships and become more valuable to yourself then you must first stop placing your self-esteem and ego above everyone else. The only way to get rid of the need for self-evaluation is to eliminate it from your life completely. When you stop trying to prove to yourself that you are superior to others then you will come to realize that it is actually the opposite. You will start to see that all the important people in your life are also important to others and that you really don’t have any need to prove anything to anyone.