Having a good level of self-esteem is a challenge that many people face during their teenage years, especially nowadays. Social media has helped us connect and share and it is attached to our daily routine, we see it everyday, everywhere.
It becomes our environment, but it also creates another world for us. A world where we are measured by our likes, followers, subscribers, re-tweets, and so on. Numbers measure our worth in the social media world and it makes us forget the real world. To an extreme extent, a teenager might start to think that academics don’t matter. Social status is what really matters.
Measuring yourself with number is something that is insatiable as you will always want more and because there is always someone who has more followers, more likes, then your self worth decreases. Social media has arguably made teenagers all around the world feel the need to fit in more than ever before. You just have to keep up with the latest trends or else people will call you lame. Your posts need to be popular and your followers needs to be plentiful. There are just so many demands just to be “cool” nowadays.
“Why do I only have ten likes?”
“Was the selfie that I posted ugly?”
“My nose is too big, may be that’s why.”
“Why can’t I be like her that has a thousand followers?”
Questions like these arise as you start measuring yourself in the world of social media that lead you to the road of insecurity, depression, and low self worth. As a teenage girl felt it too. For a short period of time I was trying to get more likes on Instagram and lose weight so that people would say I look good. Then I thought to myself, do I really want to let myself be defined by my looks, by the amount of hearts on my Instagram page? As I read books about inspirational people like Kartini, watched a inspirational speeches on Youtube, and was exposed to a supportive environment both in my family and my choice of media, that superficial mindset began to change.
As I watched Lizzie Velasquez’s TED talk on Youtube. A motivational speaker from Texas who has a rare disease which makes her unable to gain weight, that might seem like a dream for many of us but in her case, she is an adult that weighs only 60 pounds. She is also visually impaired and has only one functioning eye. As a child, she grew up happily and normally as her parents raised her very well, they loved her and she thought that she was normal.
All that changed when she started going to school. During her first day of school nobody wanted to play with her. This made her confused as she didn’t see anything wrong in herself but when other people looked at her, it seems like they have seen a monster. A video of her was posted on Youtube titled, ugliest woman in the world. She was devastated but luckily she had a great support system, her family. They taught her even though she has that syndrome, she could not let that define her. She once said in her TED talk that “Your life is in your hands, you are the person who is in the front seat of your car. You are the one that decides whether your car goes on a bad path or a good path. You are the one who defines you.”
Now let me ask you.
What defines you?
Are you going to let where you come from define you?
What you look like define you? How much money you have define you?
How much followers you have define you?
All of the above are insatiable. There is always a sky above the sky. If you let those things define you, everyday you are going to wake up in the morning and say to yourself “ I’m not pretty enough, my legs are too big.”
“ I’m a failure because I only have ten followers on my Instagram”
And even if you worked on it, more likely this is what’s going to happen.
“ I’m not pretty enough, I am a normal weight but my legs are full of fat, I need to get toned.”
“ I’m still a failure even though I have a hundred followers She has a thousand! How come I only have a hundred?”
Let people see how great you are by being grateful with what you have and defining who you are based on your actions instead of your appearance, both in real life or social media. Instead of saying those things above, say these.
“ My legs are not perfect but at least I’m healthy.
I can enter a 5K race and complete it successfully.
I know not many people can do that”
“ My Instagram only has ten likes but those likes are from people whom I know of and not just fake accounts.”
With this outlook, you won’t be disappointed every single day when you wake up. This will ultimately make you more positive and help you channel your energy to things that really matters; like your achievements in life. Getting a diploma, achieving your New Year’s resolution. Let what you have define you instead of what you don’t have.
Our environment affects us greatly and it is not only social media but also our family and friends. People you communicate with daily affects your behavior and mindset. If they always talk about positive things, you will be positive as well. On the other hand, if they frequently say negative things, you will more likely be negative as well.
From a survey (refer to…) I conducted with a hundred and twenty eight students most of them answered that their personality at school is ordinary. This shows that students don’t really know who they are and they are just going with the flow which could be bad as it means that they don’t have a clue about their identity so they are easily influenced. The danger is if the influence is negative they cannot filter it and will tend to follow that influence. The top two nastiest social experiences are being avoided by friends, and being bullied. These are both degraders of self esteem. The survey shows that this problem is common between students and so it is something important that we should address and help.
Low self esteem is a challenge that many students experience in their life at school as they are surrounded by so many different personalities and pressured by so many standards imposed by the school, or the family that occasionally cause them to crack.
This is when the child’s environment comes to the rescue. The support system that they have is what will stop the cracks from widening and eventually heal those cracks. A child’s self esteem is developed from a really young age. Research shows that we are not born with self esteem but it is developed through the interaction between our caregivers. From the moment we are born, according to Dr. Josephine Kim, children see their parents as a mirror. Children only know one thing about themselves and it is whatever that is reflected to them. If your parents look at you and say “Hello! We are so happy that you are here, we love you so much you are just the perfect baby and you bring joy in our lives.”
You would look at that reflection and define that as who you are. If they are happy you will think that you are the one that make other people happy which makes you feel content. If that reflection is what you see in the mirror all the time you will learn to internalise it and then it will become a part of your identity as a child. This identity is what you carry throughout your life and it is embedded from when you were born.
So with all that said, how can self esteem be applied to enhance your child/ student/ and your own learning capabilities? Let me tell you my story. During my primary and middle school years I hated Physics. To me it was one of the hardest lesson, during my national exams I could not answer Physics question about the charges, AC, DC currents, I just thought it was the hardest between chemistry and biology.
All that changed as I started tenth grade Physics, my expectation before the class commenced was merely to survive physics lesson and hopefully get good scores. The lesson started and it surprised me. All of a sudden, Physics seem interesting. Our new (not really but new to me) teacher began the class with stories about Einstein, videos on cosmology and what science is really all about. He showed us the cool stuff physics has to offer on day one. I asked a many questions to him and he answered enthusiastically and was making eye contact to me as he was explaining. I felt like my questions were appreciated and a bit more confident because he acknowledged me. Slowly I began to search more and more about the subject and this was because I felt confident from the first moment, I could do this physics problem and I am actually good at it. I began to know more about the branches of physics that I think are cool like theoretical physics and cosmology. This lesson that I despised grew to be my favorite and all just because of that one teacher who made me feel confident about physics.
The drive of a student will increase when have confidence. When you feel like you are confident you will face all of your problems head on with determination to succeed: Just because you can. This mentality is what makes a student really do his or her best and automatically increases their performance. This drive and motivation will automatically carry you to become one of the smartest in your class on that subject. Not because you are forced to study every night but because you want to be the best. You can be the best, so why waste that by not studying? Knowledge is an automatic response of good self esteem that results from motivation. When directed to the right thing it can prove amazing results.
Most of the problems with on learning can be traced to the lack of self esteem. For example, cheating is an action that is a result of insecurity of your own answers and desperation to make it to the top but you know that you cannot do it so you just cheat. Laziness is also derived from low self esteem. A student can be demotivated because they feel as if they repeatedly fail in that subject and this “failure” could be because of discouraging words from the teacher which makes the student feel incapable. At home, when your child is lazy to do chores it is maybe because every time they do it they are never appreciated and it is taken for granted, it makes no difference if the child sweeps the floor or not so the child just prefers not to. Bullying also occurs because of low self esteem, bullies desire to prove their worth to everyone and so they do so by degrading others.
Finally, self-esteem is more than just feeling good about yourself. It is feeling GREAT about yourself. Feeling positive that you can overcome those challenges and so with excellent self esteem all problems at school can be solved.