Jack Canfield delivers a short spoken presentation advocating for self-esteem promotion. He opens with his credentials (co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, author, former teacher and trainer, founder of Self Esteem Seminars), cites broad research-backed benefits of high self-esteem across schools, prisons, and welfare programs, and finishes with a call to action to join and support national and international self-esteem associations and attend their conferences to learn and spread these practices.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Jack Canfield. You may know me as the co author of the chicken soup for the soul books, the author of the success how to get from where you are to where you want to be, and as a featured teacher in the movie the Secret. But long before all of that, I was a high school teacher. I was a trainer of teachers. I was a college instructor at the University of Massachusetts in the school of education. And I spent a lot of my time training teachers how to develop the self esteem of kids in classrooms. Over 20 years of my life was devoted to that. And I actually had a company called self esteem seminars. We did seminars all around the world teaching both teachers, people in the corporate world and the general public how to enhance and maintain high self esteem. You know, the research shows that when self esteem is high, all kinds of great things happen. When self esteem is high in the school systems, we know that teacher retention is higher, people have greater satisfaction in their jobs. When there's self esteem programs in the school, the kids don't drop out as fast. They maintain higher grade point averages, the graduation rates are higher. We see a reduction in sexual activity in terms of teen pregnancy, teen violence, teen suicide. Almost every positive indicator goes up when self esteem goes up. We've seen self esteem in the prison system. When we've had self esteem programs in the prison system, we know that recidivism goes down, violence in the prison goes down. We also know that in welfare programs, when there's a self esteem building component, we find that people get off of welfare and stay off of welfare at much higher rates. So I want to encourage you, if you're watching this, to become a member of the international association for self Esteem and your local national associations for self esteem and to get support from them and to offer support to the schools and the corporations and the general public. Self esteem is one of those elixirs that when you have it in your life, everything seems to go better. Relationships improve, health improves, productivity goes up, wealth goes up. So I want to strongly encourage you to become a member and if you are a member, stay a member. Keep supporting the organization and let the organization support you. Go to the national conferences and the international conferences and learn more about how to raise your self esteem, the self esteem of your children, the self esteem of your students, your employees, and let's all make the world a much happier, more effective, more profoundly fulfilling place.
