SELF CONFIDENCE VS SELF ESTEEM

Self-confidence

Confidence is about knowing what we can and can’t do and trusting in our abilities. Children who are self-confident may be more willing to take on challenges as well as to take responsibility for their actions. They can experience failure and vow to try harder in future endeavors. Of course, the more learners are successful, the more confidence they gain.

For students with learning difficulties, consistently underperforming on tasks that involve literacy skills, earning poor marks on assignments, and receiving negative feedback from teachers can undermine self-confidence. In particular, dyslexic individuals often experience a degree of inconsistency in their performance, spelling a word correctly one day and incorrectly the next.

This heightens anxiety and makes them even less confident in their ability to perform. A University of Michigan article cites the tendency for children with learning difficulties to see their successes as luck and their failures as faults in their own abilities (1).

Self-esteem

If confidence is a matter of trust, esteem is an assessment of value. It is possible for an individual to be confident in certain areas of his or her life and still have low self-esteem. For example, an athlete who trusts him or herself on the playing field but isn’t confident in the classroom may secretly believe he or she is not intelligent.

A willingness to take on new challenges on the pitch might distract educators from avoidance of schoolwork and lead to continued poor performance on academic tasks.

Often children with learning differences struggle with both low self-esteem and a lack of self-confidence. When everyone else is doing well but you are not you may come to see yourself as “stupid” or somehow “less capable.” In worst-case scenarios, this can cause learners to drop out of school and struggle with depression well into adulthood.

The tragedy is that people with learning difficulties simply learn in a different way and adjusting classroom activities to fit their unique learning style can make all of the difference.