When I ran a how to raise self esteem seminar a few years ago I would recite Leon Festinger’s social comparisons theory which basically states (and this may be obvious to you) that people evaluate themselves and arrive at a level of self esteem based on how they believe they compare to others around them.

Kidding yourself with low self esteem

When it comes to low self esteem or even high self esteem we are notoriously subjective and biased in our self assessments because of lack of objectivity caused by high emotion. So we may over value other people’s attributes and undervalue our own-perhaps because life and other people has trained and conditioned us to automatically do so.

Some people are much more concerned with how they ’square up’ to others and therefore how they come across to other people in general. Psychologists call these people ‘high self monitors’ as compared to low self monitors who are less concerned with how they appear to the world (or how they imagine they might appear).

Self beauty in the eye of the beholder

We are, it seems, particularly bad at assessing our own physical attractiveness or lack of. Low self esteem tends to produce lower self-assessments of ones looks compared to the assessment of non-involved observers. People with low self esteem, not surprisingly, don’t like their photo being taken, don’t like looking in the mirror (or else check the mirror obsessively to confirm how bad they think they look) and tend to zone in on their own perceived imperfections and miss the bigger picture that may make them attractive to other people. Take a look at this article : The beguiling truth about beauty and, in the meantime, happy mirror gazing.
Mark