Two forces that shape how you see yourself

1. Your sense of who you are, and how positively you judge yourself, is built by influences that come from inside you and influences that come from the world around you.
2. Internal influences start within the person, and the one you need here is temperament.
3. External influences are supplied by the environment, and the one you need here is experience.
4. Both act on your self-esteem, which is how much you value and like yourself.

Temperament as an internal influence

1. Temperament is the pattern of mood, activity and emotional reaction a person shows from their earliest months.
   1. Because it appears before anyone has taught the child anything, it is counted as internal rather than as something the environment put there.
2. Temperament shapes how strongly you react when something goes wrong, and therefore how heavily a setback lands on your view of yourself.
   1. Someone who settles quickly after an upset tends to recover their good opinion of themselves quickly too.
   2. Someone who reacts intensely and takes longer to settle may treat the same setback as heavier evidence against themselves.
3. Temperament also changes the reactions you draw out of other people, so an inborn style quietly feeds into the experiences you then have.
4. No temperament is a better temperament, and a cautious child and a bold child are simply meeting the world in different ways.

Experience as an external influence

1. Experience means everything that happens to you and, above all, how the people around you respond to you.
2. Experiences that raise self-esteem include being praised for effort, succeeding at something you worked at, and being accepted by family and friends.
3. Experiences that lower self-esteem include repeated criticism, repeated failure and being left out or rejected.
   1. Self-esteem that has been lowered this way is a response to what has happened to a person, not a flaw in them.
4. Because experience comes from the environment, it can change, so new relationships, new successes and new settings can rebuild self-esteem that earlier experiences knocked down.
5. Experience is the influence that explains why two people who started with similar temperaments can end up valuing themselves very differently.

Deciding which influence a scenario shows

1. Ask when the pattern first appeared, because a pattern that was there in infancy and turns up in every situation points to temperament.
2. Ask who supplied it, because if you can name a person, an event or a repeated response from others, the answer is experience.
3. Expect most scenarios to contain both, since the two influences act at the same time and often on the same person.

Turning this into marks

1. Name the influence as temperament or experience, then say what it does to self-esteem.
2. On a scenario, quote the detail that made you choose temperament or experience.
3. The mark most often lost is covering only one influence when the question names both.