One question that came up repeatedly after posting The Joker’s Series was, “Where do these toxic people come from?”
From a deep sense of insecurity.
So in an attempt to reduce that sense of general insecurity among the public, today’s topic will be on self-esteem.
It is known that a high level of self-esteem is an important factor in living a fulfilling life – financially, emotionally, creatively, and spiritually.
But how do we build it up?
And before, we delve into that, what is self-esteem?
According to Nathaniel Branden, author of the book, How To Raise Your Self-Esteem, “Self-esteem has two main components: a feeling of personal competence and a feeling of personal worth. It reflects your implicit judgement of your ability to cope with the challenges of your life (to understand and master your problems) and of your right to be happy (to respect and stand up for your interests and needs).”
A lot of times, you get your “personal worth” defined by the adults around you growing up. Their opinions of you end up seeping into your core, so you end up internalizing them. They may appear in the sound of the teacher who calls you stupid, or the relative who tells you you’ll never succeed in life.
Such statements entwine to form the negative self-critical commentary you hear in your head all day long.
And it’s exhausting, because it actually gets in the way of you actually getting great things done. You find yourself continuously worried about failing, or about what people will think…so you stop yourself before you even take a single step, thus failing by default.
“Some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.” – J. K. Rowling
So how do you get rid of the running negative commentary in your mind?
You tape over it, and some practical tools you can use to help you with that.
Journaling
You can use journaling to uncover the origins of your inner critic. An interesting guide to help you with this process mentioned in the book revolved around the idea of reconnecting with the ‘child’ within you.
Take a few moments to be completely honest with yourself, and fill in the following blanks:
- If the child within me could speak, what would they say…
- One of the things I had to do to survive was…
- One of the things my child-self needs from me is…
- If I were to be more compassionate and loving towards my child-self, I would…
- I like myself most when I…
- I like myself least when I…
Crystallizing your thoughts into black words against white paper also gives you the advantage of looking at them from a different point of view and become more self-aware to how self-critical you are. You can review your written mental chatter and ask yourself, “Would I tell this to my friend?”
Yet, there you are, roasting yourself with a portion of your 60,000 thoughts everyday, and then you wonder why you’re stuck in life, and why nothing seems to go right?
So how do you rectify a negative self-esteem fueled by the incessantly loud negative critic?
Real or Not Real?
Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. – Michelle Obama, Becoming
I’ve been battling self-doubt recently, and a friend of mine asked, “Explain the origin of this doubt.”
There was none.
Which made me think how one of the problems with having an overactive imagination is how sometimes your negative self-esteem gets fueled by imaginary ideas that have zero basis in reality.
In other words, the person tripping you is you.
So the new test I filter my self-doubt through nowadays is the “Real or Not Real” test. I borrowed this from The Hunger Games, where Peeta’s grasp on reality was so weak that he had to continuously ask, “Real or not real?”
So if you find yourself thinking, “I’m so stupid,” stop and ask, “Real or not real?”
Negate that statement using facts from your real-life.
But what if your negative opinion of yourself has some basis in reality?
In that case, take the role of the soothing, compassionate friend who admits, “Maybe you messed up that time, but you did learn from your mistake…”
“Self Compassion is not a way of judging ourselves positively. Self Compassion is a way of relating to ourselves kindly… embracing ourselves, flaws and all.”- Kristin Neff
Remember, you’re not perfect. Nobody is. We are all a work in progress, and as long as you’re doing something to become better than the person that you were yesterday…
The operative phrase here is “as long as you’re doing something to become better…”
Which brings us to the second part of self-worth, and that is…
Personal Competence
This relates to the idea of building confidence by taking action, something I’ve mentioned before here, so I won’t delve too much into that. What I will mention though is the idea of Success Spirals, and the importance of tracking them, because I feel we get so lost in our daily work that we fail to pause and reflect on how far we’ve come, which was the whole point of starting the 100-Day Evaluation I’ve written about repeatedly.
Personally, the benefit of keeping a repository of your accomplishments around is it helps you adjust your datum line, or point of reference. It reminds you of the challenges you’ve already overcome so you know you can face whatever lies ahead.
One famous example of adjusting your point of reference comes from Elon Musk’s one dollar per day experiment. He ran an experiment on himself to see if a 30 $ food budget would be enough for the month. When he succeeded, it assured him that he didn’t need a huge salary to survive, thus giving him more freedom to lead an entrepreneurial life.
Which brings us to the concept of Success Spirals and the power of small wins.
Quoted in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, “Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage. Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”
Small wins drive transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages that convince people on the feasibility of bigger achievements.
If you want to see how small wins work within the Motivation Equation that I wrote about here, it plays with the Expectancy variable, where motivation gets a boost when you know you’re going to succeed and suffers when you think you might fail. Because it runs like a positive feedback loop where success begets confidence and motivation, which begets more success, pretty soon you become fearless.
Before I end this post, I guess the key reminder to myself, and by extension to others is, never underestimate the influence of people around you. The problem with the Jokers I mentioned in my series, especially the Toxic Manager, is they mess with your self-esteem from both angles – the self-worth and the self-competence.
That’s it for today….
Books I’ve Been Reading
1) The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
2) Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins
4) The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman
5) How To Raise Your Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden