In fact, according to social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, unless you suffer from depression, it's highly likely that you have relatively high self-esteem.
In her book, "No One Understands You And What To Do About It," Halvorson defines self-esteem as the sum of all your positive and negative evaluations of yourself, where some evaluations are weighted heavier than others. (If you don't really care about being a tennis pro, you're not likely to place much emphasis on your evaluation of your tennis skills.)
Generally, Halvorson writes, your self-esteem "comes from a nearly continuous stream of conscious and unconscious comparisons - 'How am I doing compared with other people?'" And thanks to your brains' desire to protect and enhance your self-esteem, the answer almost always winds up being, "Better than average."
But sometimes real threats to your ego present themselves, perhaps in the form of a new colleague who's really good at their job or a friend in a similar line of work that just got a promotion.
High threats to your ego are the result of two factors: high relevance (Does the domain of the person's success matter to you? For example, are they doing similar work as you?) and high closeness (Is this person a major part of your life? Do you see them regularly?).
When you encounter a high ego threat - someone close and relevant to you who you can't deny is pretty great - your ego will work extra hard, often under the radar, to maintain the status quo and remove the threat. Here are four ways that could go: