The model of self-competence developed by Susanne and Arne Salig and Melanie Theissler consists of five main and five secondary elements.

If you imagine self-competence as a house, then the foundation of this house is self-awareness. It is the absolute basis for all self-competence. It is about knowing yourself and your needs, your dreams and your goals, but also your strengths and weaknesses. Knowing what is good for you and what is not.

One of the supporting walls of the house of self-competence is self-acceptance. In short, it is about accepting yourself and your past. The guiding principle of self-acceptance could therefore be: "I am good the way I am now". This also includes self-forgiveness. The aim is to make peace with your own past and forgive yourself for actual or perceived mistakes and wrong decisions.

The second load-bearing side wall, without which our house would collapse, is self-responsibility. When people fail in self-competence, it is usually due to this element. Ultimately, self-responsibility is just a decision, namely a decision to take responsibility for one's own life and not to make others responsible for one's own happiness (or unhappiness). A secondary element is self-efficacy, which describes the knowledge that you can actively shape your own life and bring about change.

Self-care is an important pillar of our home, as it ensures healthy stability in the long term. It's about treating yourself well and taking time for your own needs. Recharging your batteries for everyday life.

Finally, we come to the roof of the house: self-esteem. A good self-esteem actually protects against external influences - just like a roof. It is the value you place on yourself and requires good self-awareness as a basic prerequisite. To put it simply: you cannot assign a value to something if you have not perceived it beforehand (or have perceived it in a distorted way). This main element of self-competence has three associated secondary elements. We refer to the inward-looking self-esteem as self-love. We call the self-esteem that you radiate outwards self-assurance. Finally, there is another element of self-esteem that works both inwardly and outwardly: Self-confidence.

In our work with over 1,000 patients, we have been able to validate this model and understand the diverse interactions between the main and secondary elements. This model also makes it clear why self-competence is important as an overall concept and why working only on self-esteem, for example, is useless. When building a house, nobody would think of starting with the roof. The foundation is the basis that provides the necessary stability for the entire house and therefore also for the roof.