Character Promote : Self –respect / self esteem

Self-esteem reflects a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of her or his own worth.
Self-esteem encompasses beliefs (for example, "I am competent/incompetent") and emotions (for example, triumph/despair, pride/shame). Behavior may reflect self-esteem (for example, assertiveness/timorousness, confidence/caution).
We regard self-esteem as an enduring personality characteristic (trait self-esteem), though normal, short-term variations (state self-esteem) occur.

Self-esteem can apply specifically to a particular dimension (for example, "I believe I am a good writer, and feel proud of that in particular") or have global extent (for example, "I believe I am a good person, and feel proud of myself in general").

Synonyms or near-synonyms of self-esteem include: self-worth, self-regard, self-respect, self-love (which can express overtones of self-promotion), self-integrity. Self-esteem is different from self-confidence and self-efficacy, which involve beliefs about ability and future performance.

Level and quality of self-esteem, though correlated, remain distinct. Level-wise, one can exhibit high but fragile self-esteem (as in narcissism) or low but stable self-esteem (as in humility). However, investigators can indirectly assess the quality of self-esteem in several ways:

in terms of its constancy over time (stability)
in terms of its independence of meeting particular conditions (non-contingency)
in terms of its ingrained nature at a basic psychological level (implicitness or automatized).

Humans have portrayed the dangers of excessive self-esteem and the advantages of more humility throughout history

The presence of superiority-complexes can be seen both in individual cases, and in whole societies, such as Germany under the Nazi regime.

Contingencies of self-worth comprise those qualities a person believes he or she must have in order to class as a person of value; proponents claim the contingencies as the core of self-esteem.

In the field of social psychology, Jennifer Crocker says that her research "explores what it is that people believe they need to be or do to have value and worth as a person, and the consequences of those beliefs". She claims that people pursue self-esteem by trying to prove that they have worth and value, and this pursuit affects "the satisfaction of the fundamental human needs for learning, relationships, autonomy, self-regulation, and mental and physical health". Crocker argues that this pursuit of self-worth affects not only the individual, but everyone around the person as well.

According to the "Contingencies of Self-Worth model" people differ in their bases of self-esteem. Their beliefs — beliefs about what they think they need to do or who they need to "be" in order to class as a person of worth — form these bases. Crocker and her colleagues (2001) identified seven "domains" in which people frequently derive their self-worth:

Virtue
God's love
Support of family
Academic competence
Physical attractiveness
Gaining others' approval
Outdoing others in competition

Individuals who base their self-worth in a specific domain (such as, for example, academic success) leave themselves much more vulnerable to having their self-esteem threatened when negative events happen to them within that domain (such as when they fail a test at school). A 2003 study by Crocker found that students who based their contingency of self-worth on academic criteria had a greater likelihood of experiencing lower-state self-esteem, greater negative affect, and negative self-evaluative thoughts when they did not perform well on academic tasks, when they received poor grades, or when graduate schools rejected them
Crocker and her colleagues (2003) have constructed the "Contingencies of Self-Worth Scale", which measures the seven domains mentioned above that previous research had hypothesized as providing important internal and external sources of self-esteem. Crocker argues that the domains on which people base self-worth play a greater role than whether self-worth is actually contingent or not. Contingencies of self-worth can function internally, externally, or somewhere in between. Some research has shown that external contingencies of self-worth, such as physical appearance and academic success, correlate negatively to well-being, even promoting depression and eating-disorders. Other work has found internal contingencies, on the other hand, unrelated or even positively related to well-being.

Research by Crocker and her colleagues also suggests that contingencies of self-worth have self-regulatory properties they define successful self-regulation as “the willingness to exert effort toward one’s most important goals, while taking setbacks and failures as opportunities to learn, identify weaknesses and address them, and develop new strategies toward achieving those goals”. Since many individuals strive for a feeling of value, it makes sense that those people would experience special motivation to succeed and actively to avoid failure in the domains on which they base their own self-worth. Accordingly, successful self-regulation can prove difficult for people aiming to maintain and enhance their self-esteem, because they would have to actually embrace failure or criticism as a learning opportunity, rather than avoid it. Instead, when a task which individuals see as fundamental to their self-worth proves difficult and failure seems probable, contingencies of self-worth lead to stress, feelings of pressure, and a loss of intrinsic motivation. In these cases, highly contingent people may withdraw from the situation. On the other hand, the positive emotional affect following success in a domain of contingency may become addictive for the highly contingent individual. Over time, these people may require even greater successes to achieve the same satisfaction or emotional “high”. Therefore, the goal to succeed can become a relentless quest for these individuals

Researchers such as Crocker believe that people confuse the boosts to self-esteem resulting from successes with true human needs, such as learning, mutually supportive relationships, autonomy, and safety. Crocker claims that people do not seek "self-esteem", but basic human needs, and that the contingencies on which they base their self-esteem have more importance than the level of self-esteem itself.