Self-esteem and The omnipotence paradox

Self-esteem, that is, the personal valuation that each one of us could draw about ourselves, is built up from a mixture of feelings. Some of them are: self-love, pride, omnipotence and humility.

About Self-love and Pride:
Let us imagine a tennis match, where Player A gets an important point against Player B. Then Player A celebrates this point by mocking Player B. Player B, whose pride and self-love have been hurt begins to play better and better and finally ends up winning the game against Player A.
This would be an example in which those feelings have a positive effect on the person who experiences them.

About feelings of omnipotence:
We all have feelings of omnipotence inside us, that is, moments when we feel we can achieve anything we want. These feelings are normal, but it is important for us to identify them and know that they are just illusions because nobody can have it all.
Back to tennis, if a player becomes, for example, the best one in a region, their feelings of omnipotence are likely to increase. This can be another omnipotence paradox: achieving the success we crave strengthens our illusion of omnipotence.

In that sense, a certain dose of feelings of humility will be also necessary to achieve good self-esteem, so the complementary concept could be: to accept our own failures and mistakes, as a way to understand our illusion of omnipotence and then reach those feelings of humility and good self-esteem.

In addition, it is important to also know that sometimes it is normal to see things in an all-or-nothing perspective: where at one moment we are immersed in illusions of omnipotence, and in the next we are stuck with feelings of impotence, thinking we could do nothing to improve anything.

In this sense, it is relevant to understand that not anything should be seen only in those terms; the so called intermediate areas also exist in our thoughts, feelings and lives.