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On a recent joint stream with MTT coach Alexei Exan13, self-esteem issues were raised. We offer you to dive into this topic in more detail with the possibility of diagnosing your self-esteem. For a professional poker player, self-esteem and self-confidence are some of the important elements of a successful game.
There is a great video about the optimal level of self-confidence: "How self-confidence affects your earnings."
1. What is self-assessment
Simply put, self-esteem is a way of assessing yourself, your capabilities, skills and other qualities that can be assessed without assistance. In scientific language, self-esteem is the significance that a person gives to himself as a whole and to individual aspects of his personality, activity, and behavior.
Two Types of Self-Assessment
In general psychology, there are two types of self-esteem:
- General - reflects the level of self-esteem, acceptance or non-acceptance of oneself in general.
- Private - characterizes the attitude to various aspects of one's personality, actions, success in certain activities (for example, poker).
Self-esteem is formed and laid down in childhood. There is a high probability that if your parents have never appreciated your achievements, then you will have high demands on yourself and low self-esteem. Conversely, if your parents noticed your successes and supported you in times when nothing worked out – the assessment is adequate and you understand that without difficulties in life it is impossible. School, your closest society – family, friends, colleagues, etc. are also important in the formation of self-esteem.
Required knowledge of self-assessment
Any person consciously or unconsciously sometimes compares himself with others and gives himself some kind of assessment and this is normal within the social environment. However, when you fixate on comparing yourself and your results with others, are dissatisfied with yourself or think that you are better than others anyway. This indicates the instability and inadequacy of self-assessment. Ultimately, this level of self-esteem will lead to various types of tilt, about which the Exan13 poker school website has a whole series of lectures "The Psychology of Poker: 7 Reasons for Your Failures".
Inadequately underestimated or overestimated self-esteem does not allow you to personally develop the way you want it, but becomes an obstacle to achieving goals.
For example: a person understands that for a comfortable life he needs to earn about 2-3 thousand dollars a month. He begins to build his activities to achieve this goal, and perhaps he does not succeed until the end.
A person with low self-esteem believes that he/she is the reason why he/she failed to achieve the goal, gets upset, accumulates emotions inside himself/herself and over time moves this conditional amount further and further away from himself/herself, because internally he/she believes that he/she is not worthy of it.
A person with inadequately high self-esteem blames others for not being able to achieve this goal and spends their resources not on finding the optimal strategy for achieving the goal, but on finding the reasons in their environment. The focus goes away from his life, the factor that others are worse than him becomes important, and someone does not even have $1,000 a month.
2. Adequate and stable self-esteem
Adequate self-assessment is a set of observations and subsequent conclusions about one's personality, closest to the real state of affairs.
Characteristics of a person with adequate self-esteem:
- Adequate perception of criticism and reaction to it.
- Striving for self-development.
- A real assessment of their capabilities.
- Striving to increase the potential of their capabilities.
- Optimal distribution of forces and energy.
- Lack of strong outside influence.
- Lack of susceptibility to manipulation.
- Respecting the opinions of others.
- Ability to have deep emotional contact with people.
- Emotional stability.
Would you be interested in learning about how you can increase self-esteem and achieve its stability? If during the reading of the article you rated the level of your self-esteem as suboptimal and would like to work it out — sign up for a consultation with a professional poker psychologist.
