Hello and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host Corey Muscarra and in today's episode we're going to talk about self-esteem, what is it, and how to develop it.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. Okay, so self-esteem, a big buzzword, and one that has come under some scrutiny in recent

years. All of my thoughts on this topic are influenced almost exclusively

by Scott Berry Kaufman's book Transcend, which I'm going to quote multiple times throughout this episode, as I think

it's really interesting research and his thoughts on self-esteem are the best I've seen. And he says that self-esteem is one of the strongest correlates of life satisfaction,

although this can differ based on culture,

and low self-esteem is one of the biggest risk factors for depression.

However, you may hear this and be a little confused, especially in the context of what we know as participation trophy culture

where kids are raised starting really around the 90s to always feel good about themselves.

Do not have to endure any failure because they're fragile.

And if they don't perceive themselves positively,

if they don't have high self-esteem

and then it's going to be hard for them to be successful in the world and we really

want to build them up in that way and the pushback on that has been well this has created a culture of kids who become

adults who expect everything to go well and they don't have any resilience they're

very fragile.

And so the pushback has been focusing on building self-esteem is a negative thing.

However, the research that Scott talks about shows that the problem isn't with self-esteem

itself, but it's the pursuit of self-esteem.

And so the latest research suggests that a healthy self-esteem

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