The habit of self-esteem

In last week’s post, The process of getting happier, I mentioned the connection between building healthy habits – the process of working toward a health or fitness goal – and self-esteem.

I promised to tease out this connection in this post, and tease it out I will.

But first, a word on something I hear quite a lot from my clients, especially those who have read a lot of self-help books. They recite various versions of the following:

“I need to love myself more.”

I once spoke at a women’s conference, and found myself having to control my eye-rolling as one speaker after another decried the low self-esteem that many talented professional women (and women in general) exhibit, and exhorted the delegates to fix this problem by “loving themselves”.

Specific advice included taking more bubble baths and get regular manicures and massages.

Now, I’m all in favour of baths and massages (although I’m not so fussed about manicures, especially since taking up playing the guitar which requires ultra-short fingernails).

However, none of these activities have anything whatsoever to do with building self-esteem. They’re simply pleasurable. People feel temporarily better after engaging in them, but they don’t feel better about themselves.

Which brings me back to self-esteem. Self-esteem is defined as a person’s subjective evaluation of their own worth. But what is meant by ‘worth’, in this context?

The philosophy of humanism contends that all humans are inherently worthy. The historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari argues in Homo Deus that humanism in fact is a religion, because it proposes

“that Homo sapiens has some unique and sacred essence that is the source of all meaning and authority in the universe” (p. 114).

However, back in the everyday world, it’s abundantly clear that most people (except, hopefully, our parents) don’t see us as automatically worthy, just because we exist, and are human.

Other people are constantly evaluating our worth as potential or actual lovers, friends and trading partners (the 3 primary types of human relationship), and we have sensitive mechanisms hard-wired into our nervous systems for detecting their assessments. These evaluations of our worth are called esteem.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow considered esteem so critical to human development that he placed it on the 4th level of his famous ‘hierarchy of needs’:

A small minority of people are esteemed simply for their physical appearance, for example fashion models. However, the primary way in which the average human earns esteem from others is to do something esteemable.

Athletes are esteemed for their ability to run or swim faster, or to kick, hit or throw balls further or more accurately than their competitors. Musicians are esteemed for their ability to compose music, sing or play instruments. Entrepreneurs are esteemed for their ability to make a start-up profitable.

And on a more everyday level, partners esteem each other for their consideration, dedication to their children or contribution to the housework. Friends esteem each other for their loyalty and generosity. Bosses (again, hopefully!) esteem their employees for completing their work projects on time and on budget.

Humans evolved among many animals who were much bigger, stronger, faster and better-equipped for hunting than they were. Hence, their very survival, let alone flourishing, depended on building and maintaining a complex web of relationships with other humans. Solo humans would not have survived for long, in the dangerous and brutal world of our ancestors.

It’s this highly social nature, and its centrality in our species’ trajectory, that made our esteem-sensing mechanism so finely calibrated. We needed to know where we stood with others at any given moment.

Self-esteem may be thought of as knowing where we stand with ourselves at any given moment, given our guiding values. Just as esteem signals from others may fluctuate, self-esteem is dynamic, based on our perception of our current standing across all the domains of our lives that are important to us.

The father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, referenced this notion of self-esteem as a dynamic gauge of our current performance:

“I believe that self-esteem is just a meter that reads out the state of the system. It is not an end in itself. When you are doing well in school or work, when you are doing well with the people you love, when you are doing well in play, the meter will register high. When you are doing badly, it will register low.”

Think of self-esteem as an internal audience – an imaginary committee consisting of mental representations of the people you know, and people in general, and the ratings they’re currently giving you based on your performance in the various domains of life – romantic love, friendship and work (including education).

As you go about your daily activities, this internal audience is constantly giving you a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, depending on whether you’re engaged in productive activities that are moving you forward along the path to achieving goals that will win you esteem… or not.

The key difference between esteem and self-esteem is that we’re completely dependent on those around us for esteem signals, whereas since the internal audience that self-esteem rests upon is inside our own heads, we have far more control over the signals that it sends us.

People generally only gain esteem from others for achieving outcomes (e.g. winning a race, losing a large amount of weight, having their book make the best-seller list). These esteem signals contribute mightily to the intense (but short-lived), dopamine-fuelled experience of reward that we get when we achieve a goal.

But your internal audience – since it travels around with you, everywhere you go – doesn’t just see the outcome of your endeavours. It’s constantly aware of the process that you’re engaging in (e.g. showing up for every scheduled training session, making consistently good food choices, writing every day – even when the going gets tough) to achieve your goal, and will reward you for consistent effort, with the positive mood that we call happiness.

This meshes perfectly with the process orientation that I discussed in last week’s post. People who focus on process rather than outcome end up happier and more fulfilled than those who stake everything on achieving their goals; while they may miss out on esteem signals if they fall short of their goal, their self-esteem will remain relatively intact because the internal audience will still rate their performance favourably.

To summarise, if you want to build your self-esteem, forget the bubble baths, manicures and massages. None of these will change your internal audience’s opinion of you one whit.

Instead, invest your efforts in diligently working at impressing your internal audience. The best way to do that is, as is well-understood in 12 Step programs, to perform esteemable acts.

These esteemable acts are the daily small actions that, when consistently repeated, gradually mesh together into networks of good habits that become self-reinforcing. They incrementally transform you into the kind of person you want to be – that is, they raise your self-esteem.

It is highly likely that that these habits will facilitate your achievement of many important goals, and the soul-nurturing esteem signals that you’ll receive as a consequence.

But whether you do or you don’t achieve goals which impress the world at large, investing effort into building your self-esteem through consistent and diligent efforts to impress your internal audience, will create the foundations of a healthy, happy and fulfilled life.

Want to learn more about the link between process orientation and self-esteem? Watch my free webinar 2020 Vision: How to Craft the Life You Really Want… Even if you’ve never stuck to a New Year’s Resolution before!

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