Growth and Biblical Wisdom
Everybody has a self-theory, some hypothesis or doctrine about what/who they are. Some of these theories are simple sentences like, "I'm an athlete." Others are more fundamental, like, "I'm worthless." According to Carol Dweck and Daniel Molden, our self-theories lead directly to our self-esteem maintenance/repair strategies after we fail at a task or to reach a goal. (Dweck, 130-131). They have distilled the various self-theories into two helpful categories.