Opinion: Workplace esteem starts from within

People have grown wealthy in this country by posing as motivational speakers, but I don’t believe you can motivate anyone. Inspire, yes. But not motivate. Motivation must come from within, and the higher an individual’s self-image, the greater his or her motivation.

It has often been said that certain coaches are great motivators. What really is meant is that these coaches create an environment for their athletes to build their own self-images and then motivate themselves.

For example, if employees keep their feelings and personal issues bottled up inside themselves, they negatively affect their own self-images. As their self-esteem declines, they create psychological baggage impacting their ability to focus. Employees who are “stuffing” their feelings rather than acknowledging and resolving them, are more susceptible to making errors. If you are a supervisor, you can give pep talks and believe you are motivating workers, but unless they have a high sense of self-worth, unless they are open and honest with their feelings, they will not perform up to their skill levels.

So if you are an employer, manager or supervisor, and you have someone working for you who is highly motivated, you more than likely have an employee with high self-esteem.

Some consultants who work with corporate clients believe that one way to raise self-esteem is to “expect positive things to happen,” that keeping high self-confidence levels calls for steady doses of motivation. And some consultants even believe that raising self-esteem is closely linked to the way employees spend their time. All of these approaches to building self-esteem in the workplace are foolish.

Employers committed to creating a positive workplace attitude must create an environment where their employees are encouraged not to withhold. Two of the basic characteristics of employees who are withholding and have low self-images are: They are negative in their attitude, and they are not risk-takers.

—Marvin Fremerman, an excerpt from his book, “The Mental Edge in Business”