When you feel that you can do something, this mean that you have self-confidence. Now does that mean that you have a high self-esteem too. What is the difference, and what are the similarities?

In psychology we refer to the belief that you can do a particular task as "self efficacy" (for that particular task). It's an important variable, one that goes a long way towards predicting one's persistence in trying to achieve the task. Albert Bandura is the champion of self efficacy – google on his name and that term and you'll get more reading than you could ask for.

Self confidence is a more general sense of one's abilities, not directed at any single task.

Self esteem refers to one's opinion of one's self. It's a terribly oversold notion, and in reality is simply not all that important. It's certainly silly to think that it's important to "promote a child's self esteem", and in fact we'd all be better off if people would just stop thinking about self esteem and get on with actually becoming able to do things.

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