Self-Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice Toward a Positive ...

The Crucial Issue of Defining Self-Esteem 29are necessary in a particular culture. We also encounter much larger challengessuch as finding and maintaining meaningful relationships, earning aliving, raising a family, and so forth. In addition, at yet other times, lifepresents us with challenges that are especially powerful because they mobilizewho we are at the deepest or most authentic levels. In all three cases,the word “challenge” is appropriate. After all, by definition, a challengeinvolves facing a task that has an uncertain outcome, taxes us in terms ofour current abilities, and gives us the opportunity to reach higher levels orfall back to lower ones, but not without considerable cost.The concept of worthiness is important in describing the structure ofself-esteem because it expresses the fact that self-esteem does not occur ina vacuum. Rather, it is tied to the value or quality of our actions.Competent behavior tends to result in positive feelings, and poor performanceoften creates negative ones. But worthiness is far more than amere outcome because worthiness concerns the meaning of our actions.Instead, worthiness is the value dimension of self-esteem and ranges fromlow to high. More mature or “authentic” actions are superior to othersbecause they are less common, deserve more respect, and demonstratevirtue. The particularly intense self-esteem moments examined earlierdemonstrate that the feelings of worth that are associated with selfesteemreflect the quality or meaning of certain behaviors. For example,some types of actions, such as “doing the right thing,” generate positiveself-esteem because they have positive value or meaning. Other behaviorsresult in a loss of self-esteem because of the lack of such value or becausethey are of genuinely negative or dishonorable value.In relationship to self-esteem, then, competence is needed for worthinessbecause only certain types of actions have such a positive meaning.However, worthiness also balances competence because not all thingsthat one does effectively are necessarily meritorious. Talking about competenceor worthiness without stressing their relationship could meanthat we are not talking about genuine self-esteem at all. After all, competencewithout worthiness can result in negative acts of human behavior,such as injuring others for personal gain, and feelings of worthiness withoutdoing something to earn them is, at best, narcissistic. It is the relationshipbetween competence and worthiness that is at the heart ofself-esteem, as we saw in Tafarodi and Vu’s rectangle. I would add thatbecause they are equal, the only way to show the particular nature of therelationship between competence and worthiness using the metaphor oflines and figures is to point out that only one such form captures suchbalance: that of a square, which may express the lived character of selfesteema bit more completely.Time is the last term in the fundamental structure of self-esteem andit pertains to this phenomenon in several ways. First, it takes time to