Our self-esteem encompasses our feelings, beliefs, and emotions about ourselves and our capabilities. Self-esteem can be a useful framework to understand our underlying motivations for decisions and behaviors, especially when we examine whether our self-esteem is secure (not needing external validation) or defensive (based on comparison with or reassurance by others). While our sense of self-esteem is largely formed early in our lives (mainly through our experiences, personality, and social messaging), self-esteem is by no means static. It can change over time, especially as we become more aware of our own ability to change how we think about and interpret our own sense of self.