Customer Reviews

Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem

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This is a very comprehensive self-help book about the nature, cause und treatment of low self-esteem. It is ideal for everyone with low self-esteem and contains many exercises. The authors deal with the following aspects:
- The nature of self-esteem: here the basic concept of the whole book is being introduced: your thoughts determine your self-esteem
- The pathological critic: you explore your inner critic, explore the origin of this critic and get information how to catch your critic
- Disarming the critic: in order to combat your inner critic, you first have to understand its function, then talk back so to make him useless
- Accurate self-assessment: this is one of the highlights of this book. You'll learn the art of accurate self-assessment without using pejorative terms like useless, bad, or inferior
- Cognitive distortions: this chapter deals with the important concept of wrongly perceiving reality and how to combat this tendency
- Compassion: this is one of the most powerful techniques for dealing with low self-esteem. You'll learn ways to better understand, accept, and forgive yourself and others
- Handling mistakes and responding to criticisms: I greatly like the attitude of the authors towards mistakes. There are no mistakes in the world, because all the decisions you chose to make were based on your needs and assessment of the situation. A decision can only be labeled as a mistake with hindsight
- Asking for what you want: this chapter shows how to assert your right without being aggressive
- Visualization and hypnosis
- Building self-esteem in children: the last chapter shows ways how to raise children with high self-esteem by listening to them and validating their feelings. At the same time, it is important to set clear limits and be consistent.

Altogether, this book is full of useful information and exercises. It can be used both as a self-help book and a supplement to therapy.

Self Esteem is a practical book. It's about taking control of your thoughts to take control of your feelings. That's all there is to it.

With inspiring simplicity and logic, McKay and Fanning educate the reader about the causes and effects of strong self-esteem. It also introduces the Critic - the voice in your head that brings you down no matter what you do. Most importantly, it helps you to expose what psychological needs the Critic meets. Once this is figured, one can resolve to meet needs in a healthier manner.

Next, with the reader aware of the needs his or her critic meets, a chart is offered, guiding the reader towards the specific resources mentioned in the book. Some of the written exercises are designed to enhance your awareness. Others are day-to-day activities in which you keep track of your exact thoughts in order to replace them with more realistic ones. In addition, visualization is offered as well, a powerful and simple tool for creating a healthier self-image.

Yet, the authors wisely understand that rebutting old beliefs sometimes isn't enough. As a solution, they offer the technique of hypnosis. The logic behind this is that often the memories that rob us of our worth are not remembered consciously. As a result, many of the exercises in the book will not work, since no memory is there for one to work with. Hypnosis allows one to directly access the subconscious, allowing one to implant healthier ideas of who we are.

Self-Esteem's ultimate goal seems to be to get the reader to measure up against a new standard of worth. An inspiring passage sums it up:

"The truth is that your value is your consciousness, your ability to perceive and experience. The value of a human life is that it exists. You are a complex miracle of creation. You are a person who is trying to live, and that makes you as worthwhile as every other person who is doing the same thing. Achievement has nothing to do with it. Whatever you do, whatever you contribute should come not from the need to prove your value, but from the natural flow of your aliveness. What you do should come from the drive to fully live, rather than the fight to justify yourself."

Reading Self-Esteem, and implementing the solutions, will allow you to feel better about yourself no matter what life throws at you.

The first half of this book is excellent and goes very well into the details about building up a solid sense of selfworth. From the middle of the book, I thought it would go even further into details, but to my disappointment, from then on it begins to look more like the regular quick-fix selfhelp books. That is, a lot of talk about visualisation and meditation, and some fluffy tips on improving communication and setting up some goals in certain areas of life.

The book has some contradictions:

In one chapter it says that one should become independent of other people's opinion. In another chapter it says that one should use other people's approval as motivation for achieveing goals.

In one chapter it says that one should get rid of unrealistic fantasies. In another chapter it says that it is okay to do so for motivation.

It also says that one should not stand up for oneself if being criticised, but just say "You are right!". And then think "But I know that he/she is not right" - ??

It also advices to use profanity against one self and physical self-harm in order to stop the inner critic. I allow myself to question whether this could possibly be any good advice at all, thinking of the overall issue that this book is trying to cover.

The first eight chapters are great (with some exceptions), but the rest of the book is too vague. It simply slides off the track. It should have continued with more details, examples and more of the great thoughts on building self-esteem. Especially the chapters on visualisation and meditation should have been cut out, as it contradicts the theories presented in the beginning of the book.

Who's the book for? Anyone who wants to improve their self-esteem.

What's the goal of the book? To improve your self-esteem.

How does it do this? By showing you how to disarm your "inner critic", you know, that negative inner voice that attacks and judges you. Everyone has one, and people with low self-esteem tend to have a more vicious inner critic.

Is it easy to read? Yes, the book is laid out well and written in a very friendly tone. The first three chapters cover the most important and universally applicable information. After finishing them, there is a chart for you to look at. It will direct you to the appropriate chapter(s) that deal with your specific problems. Neat!

You don't have to read the book cover-to-cover unless you just need general info- but that's what's good about it; you can use the book to fit your individual needs. With over 600,000 copies sold, it must have helped a few people! Other self-help books I liked include "Finding Happiness in a Frustrating World". Good luck!

To say that this book is an excellent reference for understanding the nature of one's self-esteem would be an understatement. The authors take pluasible, objective step-by-step approaches for assessing, and maintaining one's self-esteem. If you're challenged by your self-esteem as I am, this book is the one to read.

This is a well-written and very organized book that explores self esteem and how to further develop it. It is based on the principles of cognitive therapy which have proven to be effective clinical tools over and over in many people's practices around the world.

The book is loaded with useful exercises that illustrate the concept and show you how to apply them to bring about change. However, you really need to do ALL of them faithfully to get results. Many people who approach this work don't want to make that kind of time investment. However, it's a book you must do and not just read to get the results required.

In short, the book looks at examining largely unconscious thoughts and unexamined assumptions about reality. It shows you how to challenge these dysfunctional beliefs and how to use compassion to look more deeply so your psychological defense mechanisms don't get in the way.

This book is for people who are really serious about seeking change. Some sections are dense with concepts and it's really a book you need to engage with in order to reap the benefits. There are lighter versions of this kind of content. However, in my experience it takes a hard push to overcome our past conditioning.

I cannot speak highly enough of this book. I found it to be absolutely invaluable in developing better self esteem. You do need to actually sit down with a pen and paper and do the exercises it suggests, but I found this process really helped me to understand myself and my thinking patterns better.

For me, what really opened my eyes was the way the authors explained how the inner critic is reinforced. I feel that this is crucial information which is missing from many other books on self esteem. The authors explain a number of different ways in which we reinforce our inner critic and more importantly, they explain why we continue to use these self-limiting behaviours and provide alternatives. A simple example of this is that your inner critic drives you to achieve goals. You may tell yourself that you will be stupid or worthless if you don't achieve a high exam mark, or a good performance review at work. The critic is reinforced because this fear and criticism motivates you to achieve - yet it also sacrifices your self esteem. A healthier alternative is to rebut the inner critic and practice visualization techniques to motive you to achieve success.

The chapters on Compassion and Handling Mistakes also really helped to alter my way of thinking. I, like many other people, had a tendency to continually beat myself up over past mistakes. The book helped me to reframe the way I think about mistakes. More importantly, it helped me to understand the limits of my awareness, at the time of the mistake we are usually attempting to get our needs met in what we deem to be the most effective way. The chapter on Compassion also provided a really simple and powerful exercise which helped me to move past mistakes made by myself and other people.

Another reason I highly recommend this book is the chapter on Core Beliefs. We are usually completely unaware of our negative core beliefs and therefore they continue to have a very profound negative effect on our self-esteem at a deep level. Identifying and testing my core beliefs has been an eye-opening and empowering experience. It does take time as there are no quick-fixes, but the process of building more positive core beliefs has fundamentally changed the way I view myself and the world around me.

Other parts of this book which I found to be helpful were the sections on responding to criticism, healthy and unhealthy values, asking for what you want and the accurate self assessments.

In summary, this book has been instrumental in building my self-esteem. It is written in an easy to understand and relatively entertaining manner. There are plenty of practical exercises to help you apply the information that is given. I strongly recommend it.

I have been turning this book inside out for the past few months now. And I am still almost without words. There are parts of this book that are more heart-wrenching, touching and beautiful than any literature. There is a feeling of genuine tenderness and concern. There is no attempt here to sell you any cheap feel-good plan, or set you up to buy something else. This is really pretty deep stuff, but absolutely down-to-earth and straightforward. Look at page 98. He is talking about the fact that life contains many problems, and that we must not allow those problems to defeat us, must continue to try to get our needs met, even though often we will fail, be embarrassed and saddened, be denied. We must not be led to deny that we need and want those things because of how difficult it may be in getting them:

"This last point is key: you carry on. In the face of all the pain, past and to come, you continue to struggle. You plan, you cope, you decide. You continue to live and to feel. If you let this awareness soak in, if you let yourself really feel the struggle, you may begin to get a glimmer of your real worth. It is the force, the life energy that keeps you trying. The degree of success is irrelevant. How good you look, how psychologically or physically nourished you are, is irrelevant. The only thing that counts is the effort. And the source of your worth is the effort."

So many books deny that there are real serious problems in life, that there is pain and trouble, much of it ongoing. So many books deny that we will experience embarrassment and humiliation and pain of all kinds for our efforts. So many books even deny that time and imminent death are significant factors. So many books deny that we have different abilities and capabilities, different emotional makeups and educational backgrounds, which determine our available choices. This book, however, faces those facts head on. Interestingly, while being incredibly useful and uplifting, there is something almost somber about this book. The tone is serious, but kind. There is no joking or light-heartedness. There is, seemingly, genuine caring and wisdom.

But that is only one part, and it may not even be the most important part for you. The underpinning of the entire book seems to be about defeating what is called "The Pathological Critic." The notion of self-criticism as an addiction similar to and almost as destructive as alcohol seems to be an established part of modern therapy. The author here says clearly that no real change is possible until one restrains and defeats this internal critic.

It seems that the moment you say to someone "You must read this!" some sort of emotional or psychological barrier goes up in the other person, making him or her less inclined to read or enjoy the thing. I can only say that this is one of the best books I have EVER read. There are many writers who scream that they are going to solve all of your problems for you. We know that they never do or can. But there are others who write with the attitude of "I know what you're going through. Maybe I can help a little." James Hollis is one. (An amazing one!) And Matthew McKay and Patrick Fanning are others.

I purchased this book after my therapist shared the chapter on the "Pathological Critic" with me. I have not yet finished the book, but it does recommend that you take it slowly, not rushing through. This book makes a lot of very logical and valid points. The introductory chapter does stress that it's important to actually get out your paper and pencil and DO the exercises. It's the thing we all hate to do the most, but I've pushed myself to do them and I'm definitely seeing a difference. It's amazing to realize how much I mentally berate myself. Once you find awareness of it, the next step is to stop that behavior and begin finding your positive points. Easier said than done, but this easy-to-read book is helping me along the way.

I will mention that I have been seeing a therapist for about a year and a half and I must credit that for a lot of my improvement, but I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is truly motivated to improve the way they feel about themselves. It's co-written by a Ph.D., but doesn't get bogged down with a lot of medical/mental health jargon that laypeople don't understand. Every point that the authors mention does not apply to me, but it is clearly impossible to tailor a book of this nature to any one person. I find, however, that I'm able to glean good points from nearly every example.

If you want to feel better, get the book, take your time reading it, doing the exercises AS YOU GO, and start taking the steps to being a better, mentally-healthier you!

This book contains the most wealth of information to change and improve one's Self-Esteem. Which leads to better awareness and more enjoyment of life through understanding ourselves and others. Has both great psychology and philosophy behind great tools to try. I want to thank both Matthew McKay and Patrick Fanning on putting this book out. Great book also to read to help on anger problems. ....