Counselling and Personal Development
Student Life
Being at university offers you the chance to really challenge yourself in many ways. How you take on challenges you are faced with has a lot to do with how positive you feel about yourself. Learn more about what self esteem is and how to improve it.
What
is self-esteem?
Your self esteem is what you think your own worth is as a person, to yourself and others. Your self esteem is not fixed and can change over time and between situations. You may feel better about yourself as a student than as a friend, a sportsperson, or a partner.
Your self esteem is partly determined by how you compare yourself to others around you. When you perceive that you are as good as or better than your peers on a task, your self esteem may improve. Where you perceive that you are not as capable as others your self esteem may drop. It can be easy to think that other students know more than you, are smarter than you, or don’t have to try as hard as you do.
Self-esteem
and your study
It will be important for you that while you are at Deakin University that you don’t put all your self esteem “eggs” in the one basket . That means, don’t rely heavily on just one option for maintaining your self esteem. Make sure that you are doing things other than study that you feel good about, you are spending time with people who respect you and treat you well, and who appreciate what you do for them.
When you study, enjoy your successes, learn from failures, feel good about yourself for the effort you put in, the contribution you made to class, meeting the commitment of attending classes, balancing study and work, and understanding most of what you read. Feel good about every step you take, even if sometimes it goes in the wrong direction, and even if it takes you a while to get where you are going. That you are doing something positive for yourself is reason enough to feel good about yourself.
Quick
tips
Taking
it further
