E112 - The Hidden Cost of Low Self-Esteem

Today Alex discusses the concept of self-esteem; including core components of self-esteem, how poor self-esteem can affect your life and how people's self-esteem becomes disrupted through the lens of different psychological theories. We also discuss different interventions one could consider to improve their self-esteem, any why good self-esteem is essential for a successful life. 

Further reading:

The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden
Neurosis and Human Growth by Karen Horney
On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers
Gestalt therapy – excitement and growth of the human personality  by Perls
Hefferline, Goodman
Games people Play by Eric Berne
I’m OK - you’re OK by Thomas Harris

Audio-essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] I would argue that self esteem can manifest itself in almost every aspect of someone's life. It will influence what they focus on, what obstacles they perceive, what career they choose, what job they end up working. I think it can even influence someone's political opinion, their relationship. By disowning one's aggression, one can avoid the responsibility that it takes to live life on one's own terms. 

Welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about self esteem. One of the things that really bothers me is that self esteem is often talked about as though it's a kind of woolly self indulgence, a psychological luxury, something that isn't going to meaningfully help you make your life better, but something that can make you feel better in the moment. 

And on this podcast, I'd like to dive deeply in this [00:01:00] topic. And I'd like to make the argument that, in fact, surface steam is crucial to healthy psychological functioning. When someone has good surface steam, not only are they more successful, but you don't even have to have conversations about their surface steam because it's invisible, you don't even notice it. 

But, when someone's surface steam is disturbed, It can be absolutely crippling, and this can happen in more or less subtle ways. Just like if someone has healthy breathing, they don't even notice they're breathing most of the time. If they have severe asthma, actually their problems with breathing define their lives in many ways. 

This discussion about self esteem might be relevant for people who have, say, accomplished a lot, but who still feel a sense of emptiness or worthlessness. Or people who don't feel like they meaningfully contribute anything either for themselves or to other people's lives. People who aren't clear on which direction to go in in life. 

And that can be including career, but family, [00:02:00] lifestyle, etc. On the other hand, other people often seem to know what direction they're going in, even if they don't have everything worked out. Even if there are ups and downs or difficult times, they just seem to be able to handle it. and I would argue that is a feature of having good self esteem. 

So whether this is for you, a person in your life, a friend, a client you work with, I'm going to make the case today that self esteem is extremely important and can be an incredibly useful concept to work with. As I just mentioned, self esteem is a very popular concept. It's talked about a lot in social media, in pop psychology circles. 

Funnily enough, less so in psychiatric training, less so in psychotherapy training. I'm not entirely sure why that is. perhaps because it's seen as too pop psychological. It's often very polarizing. If you walk through the self help section of a bookstore and you look at books about self esteem, what you'll typically find is it's [00:03:00] divided into two. 

There are the books which describe how self esteem is all about loving yourself unconditionally. On the other hand, there are books describing that self esteem is entirely about challenging yourself to be better, to self improve, to contribute more. And I often find that books can often be a reflection of the personality of the person that wrote them. 

And while there's a lot of truth in those books, my problem with them is they often lack a comprehensive overview of a complicated topic like surface steam. They can miss important aspects of a concept. And crucially, they can ignore paradox, and I'll go into this a bit later, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in paradox in actually embracing conflicting ideas simultaneously. 

So I always thought when a concept is quite present in the culture and when the colloquial definition is quite shallow, it's always a good opportunity to do a podcast about it so we can explain things in a bit more detail and maybe come to some [00:04:00] interesting conclusions. So today we're going to talk about A better, richer, more sophisticated definition of self esteem. 

Examples of how self esteem problems can affect people in different ways, again, subtle, not so subtle ways. How you can understand self esteem from different points of view within psychology and psychotherapy. How self esteem issues might show up in someone's therapy or in their personal life. And some practical interventions someone could consider if they thought that they or a friend were having some difficulties with their self esteem. 

So the first question would be, how does one define self esteem? Now colloquially, self esteem pretty much means, how do you think about yourself? And most people would say, well they either love themselves or they hate themselves. Therefore they either have good self esteem or bad self esteem or maybe everywhere in between. 

but it's generally taken as a measure of how much good feelings do you have about yourself when you think about yourself. Having thought [00:05:00] about this and looking at my client work and trying to piece things together from different kinds of psychological theories I've read, I think there's at least three basic aspects to self esteem one could think about. 

I think the first one, and perhaps the foundational one, would be that one has a basic sense of unconditional self worth. A sense that no matter what results they receive from life, no matter where things go, whether they succeed or fail, that they feel they have a certain sense of value, of belonging, a place in the world, that they deserve relationships. 

And I think this basic sense of unconditional self worth comes from our primary caregivers, typically our parents, and hopefully continues to develop as we have good, satisfying relationships, hopefully across our lives. I think the second aspect to self esteem is that of competence. Can you solve problems? 

Can you overcome challenges? Can you provide value to people? Can you [00:06:00] contribute both to yourself and to your community? Can you grow in your capacities across time? And then the third aspect of self esteem I'd like to mention is values. In other words, what you care about. One issue being that most people have never really thought consciously about what they care about. 

So do you know what you value? And then this is the hard part. Do you act in accordance with your values? Do you act as though what you say is important is important? Do you in some way actualize your values in your real life? For example, if you value honesty, are you honest? Do you live in accordance with the things that you say are important? 

And another word for this, of course, is integrity. Now already having discussed these three aspects, one could very easily point out that there's some contradiction. So how can you have a sense of unconditional self worth, while at the [00:07:00] same time challenge yourself to be competent and to act in accordance with your values, to have integrity? 

And to this I would say that perhaps one of the more mysterious things about human beings and maybe one of the most mysterious things about life in general is the importance of embracing paradox. That sometimes the right thing to do is to hold conflicting viewpoints in your head at the same time. And I think this is what a lot of people get wrong with self esteem, they think it's either about loving yourself unconditionally or about challenging yourself to be competent or living in accordance with your values. 

and I actually think it's a strange mix of both. I think as human beings we generally receive a lot of maternal love, which tends to have a lot of unconditionality to it, and we hopefully also receive paternal love. which is more about encouragement to take risks, to challenge oneself, to go outside of one's comfort zone in some way. 

And I think if someone receives good quality maternal and paternal love, they tend to [00:08:00] internalize that. And even though it's strange and paradoxical, they can give those two forms of love to themselves ultimately. Now, how might self esteem manifest itself? I would argue that self esteem can manifest itself in almost every aspect of someone's life. 

It will influence what they focus on, what obstacles they perceive, to what extent they perceive opportunities lurking in the environment. I think it will influence what career they choose, what job they end up working. I think it can even influence someone's political opinion. their relationship and the dynamic of their relationship as we'll see later. 

I think self esteem influences how well you can handle an insult, but equally how well you can handle a compliment. How well you can deal with failure, but also how well you can deal with success, which, as I've talked about before, can be surprisingly stressful. Really, I think self esteem is a kind of harbor against the strange ups and downs of life.[00:09:00] 

Here are some examples. Imagine a lawyer who loves being a lawyer and is highly accomplished but never feels she quite measures up. She's very competent, she can do her job and she feels like she's more or less acting in accordance with her values but for whatever reason she lacks that sense of basic self worth. 

So here she has the competence and she has her values but it's the basic sense of self worth that's lacking. Or imagine a 30 year old man who still lives with his parents and has never sustained employment. And perhaps his parents are somewhat overprotective. He may have that sense of basic self worth, but he may have never developed any skills or competencies, so he has nothing to contribute. 

And he maybe doesn't have a clear idea of his values, let alone how he could actualize his values in his life, which is a whole other challenge in itself. Or alternatively, imagine a 45 year old accountant who is highly competent, but who hates being an accountant with every fiber of their being. [00:10:00] He doesn't have a lot of self hate as such, but he does feel that he never really considered what he really cares about, what career he might like to have. 

He has competence and basic self worth, but he's never really given any thought to his values, what he truly cares about, and how he could bring that into his life. So the next question might be, how have different schools of psychological thought describe this problem? How does it come about? I'm going to refer to a book I've referred to before on the podcast and that's Neurosis and Human Growth by Karen Hornai. 

If you are really interested in psychology and haven't read this book yet, I would highly recommend it. In this book, Hornai talks about how essentially people have a natural tendency to grow into their true selves, much like a plant might have a natural tendency to grow into whatever plant it's destined to be if it has the right conditions. 

But what often happens due to trauma. issues with primary caregivers, [00:11:00] parents, life circumstances, et cetera, is that that natural growth into that person's real self is disrupted in some way. And that causes the individual to have a basic sense of anxiety that they're not going to get what they need from the world, that they're not going to get what they need from other people, that they're not enough in some way. 

And to cope with this very traumatic experience. a person kind of disavows their real self and what they instead form is a kind of idealized self, a fantasy of what they could be. And Horneye talks about how this fantasy, this idealized self, normally forms one of three directions or perhaps a combination of them. 

And those are turning against other people. These would be more narcissistic, vindictive, angry, antisocial individuals. Turning towards other people. These are more hyper agreeable, people pleasing types who tend to submit themselves to the authority of other people. or turning [00:12:00] away from others and turning away from the world. 

So these are people who are a little bit more paranoid, a little more solitary, who tend to be a little bit more hermetic in how they treat the world. And then essentially there is this ongoing tension between the so called real self, the true self that the person is, and this idealized self that they've formed in their minds. 

And because the idealized self is a fantasy, they're never going to really be able to live up to that. So for example, someone who develops an idealized self about turning away from others might think, I have to be fully independent. I can't rely on anybody else. Relying on anybody else is actually a form of weakness. 

And then if that person gets into a relationship and starts to realize, hey actually I do feel a bit dependent on other people, I do feel a little bit vulnerable, the tension between that idealized self and the true self that they actually are becomes very visceral and then that generates a lot of self hate.[00:13:00] 

And then ironically, what the self hate does is it creates a further pull to kind of reach this further idealized self and move away from the real self that the person is. And that of course makes things worse and worse. So really Horneye's approach in her therapy would have been to help a person realize that this idealized self is a kind of fantasy that they're never really going to be able to live up to. 

And what a person needs to do is to get to know their real self, warts and all, flaws and all. So in the case of the example I just mentioned, the individual would need to realize that Hey, I actually do depend on other people when I form a relationship with them. I do become emotionally vulnerable, and that's very scary, but on some level, that's okay. 

And acceptance of that means that the person can actually form a sustainable relationship rather than having this strong urge to pull away, to maintain this fantasy of complete emotional independence. [00:14:00] Taking another viewpoint, in transactional analysis, a kind of therapy founded by a psychiatrist in the 50s named Eric Byrne, there is the theory that internally we have lots of different states of mind, and these are called ego states. 

So we have our inner parent ego state, our inner adult, our inner child, the job of the parent of course. is to supervise and to figure out what's right and help us move towards what's right and some sense of moral imperative. The job of the child is spontaneity, playfulness, creativity. The job of the inner adult is to be present, focused, problem solving, interacting well with others. 

And what Byrne thought was that when things go wrong in individuals, There's a lot of inner disharmony. So there might be a lot of self criticism from our parental ego state to our child ego state. [00:15:00] So for example, our child part may want something in particular. And then our parent part may react against that saying you should not want that, you should not want to play with that person, or you should not want to pursue that career. 

And of course, this can often happen because we've internalized certain dynamics from our parents. And so he felt the job of something like transactional analysis therapy is to create more inner harmony. Because the truth is we do need these different ego states, these different states of mind, these different parts of ourselves. 

But the key question is, are these different parts of ourselves helping us? Or are we, as Jung said, at war with ourselves? So in a state of psychological health, what you would have is different parts of yourself that can be deployed appropriately to different situations. So you could use your parent part to nurture yourself or challenge yourself if necessary, you could use your child part [00:16:00] to be more spontaneous, to play, to be creative, to be awake to what you desire and to pursue that, and to use your adult self to solve problems and to deal with the world and to deal with reality, as opposed to the traps. 

many people fall into, such as intense self criticism, as I just mentioned, or totally suppressing the child part of themselves, turning it more from a free child part to a more compliant, submissive child part, or continually trying to force themselves into the adult position, even when they're feeling very hurt. 

Byrne felt a good marker of psychological health. was the ability to engage in easy uncomplicated intimacy with other people. In other words, the ability to just authentically express yourself and how you feel with someone else. And I think often this is a reflection of our ability to express ourselves authentically to ourselves. 

Often being able to admit difficult or [00:17:00] dark truths to ourselves is the first step. in the path to be able to express them with other people. And then often when we can express dark truths to other people, that's when we can form really satisfying relationships. One of Byrne's defining concepts is the concept of games. 

So he felt when people were unable to engage in this free, easy, uncomplicated intimacy, what they would do instead is play games and games are a way of trying to avoid authentic expression. So imagine two moms dropping their kids off at school and they both feel a little bit insecure about themselves perhaps or about how well their children are doing at school. 

And instead of being able to just express that and talk about that, what they instead do is gossip about all the other mums and all the other children at the school and trying to name all the negative things they can about them. They're engaging in a game, they're engaging in gossiping as a way of shielding themselves from the darker truths which [00:18:00] they'd rather not talk about. 

In transactional analysis they also talk about the life script, something I've mentioned before in previous podcasts. which is the idea that whether we're conscious of it or not, we have a sense that our life is gonna follow a particular trajectory, a particular arc with particular themes. I would argue having good self esteem is the ability to have some authorship over your life script, to have some say in what direction your life is going to go, rather than feeling that your life has to go down some sort of predetermined path. 

And I think that's what you observe in a lot of people who have problems with their self esteem. As they'll say, my life is going in this direction, it's always gone in this direction, and it's always going to be going in this direction, and there's nothing I can do about it. It's a sense of helplessness. 

For example, I've always been abandoned, I'm being abandoned now, and I guess I'm always going to be abandoned in the future, and I'm going to be alone. [00:19:00] Conversely, having the ability to say, okay, I've had some difficult experiences here and there, but I have some ability to be proactive in my present about my future and therefore have some say as to how my life is going to unfold is a good sign that you have a solid sense of self esteem. 

In another form of psychotherapy, gestalt psychotherapy, there is often an emphasis on being present focused and the ability to appreciate what's in front of you without it being cluttered by thoughts of the past or the future. And there's also an emphasis on the ability to be spontaneous and I think spontaneity is very important and what I mean by spontaneity is the ability to react in the moment as necessary, as appropriate. 

For example, something makes you angry you're able to feel that anger, you're able to express that anger and have that anger accomplish what you need to accomplish. Or the ability to meet your [00:20:00] needs in a spontaneous way. You feel hungry, you find food, you eat food and it's satisfying. Or the ability to feel desire to connect with someone and to use that desire to allow you to connect with someone and to have a satisfying relationship of some kind. 

And these sound like trivial things on the surface I guess. but we all know people who have problems with anger, who have problems around food, who have problems around relationships. So these problems are far more common and pervasive than you might think. In short, gestalt helps people make what one would call satisfying contact with the world around them and also really emphasizes, as I said before, this ability to feel your bodily senses and to act on them. 

And the idea would be Often, people with self esteem problems have some sort of disruption in that cycle of experience. And Gestalt often looks different from other kinds of therapy in that it's so, so present focused and so [00:21:00] focused on the body and so focused on trying out new things in the moment without getting too stuck in intellectual ideas and abstractions and things like that. 

And the last kind of therapy I'll briefly discuss today is person centered therapy. And in person centered therapy, which was founded by a therapist named Carl Rogers, one of the basic ideas is that we have these conditions of worth. So we have conditions, normally unconscious, which we feel if they're satisfied, then we are worth something. 

And the problem is a lot of our conditions of worth tend to be externalized. In other words, I am worth something if people like me. Or I am worth something if I do a job my parents approve of. Or I am worth something if I make a lot of money. And one of the things Rogers proposed is we need to move from external conditions of worth to internal conditions of worth. 

So conditions that [00:22:00] we actually have some decision making over and this goes back to one of those components of self esteem I mentioned at the beginning, values. What do you care about? So I think it's really worth taking some time to think what are the things that you actually consider to be important and then starting to judge yourself by those metrics rather than by the metrics that you inherit from other people. 

The problem with external conditions of worth, of course, is that you're always going to be on some level chasing something you have limited control over, the approval of other people, which is often subject to their whims and their impulses and their various psychological dysfunctions. Person centered therapy also talks about having some kind of match up between your self image or your self concept and your actual life experiences. 

And this is pretty similar to that real self idealized self dichotomy I talked about when I discussed neurosis and human growth. [00:23:00] It's the idea that if there's a huge chasm between your experiences and how you view yourself, it's likely to cause a lot of psychological suffering. If you've convinced yourself that you're an expert chess player and then you sit down against someone and you lose brutally, there's going to be a lot of tension between what actually happened. 

and your self image, your self concept and that's going to cause a lot of psychological suffering. So part of psychological health in this context would be having a self image that's realistic and not making too many assumptions about what your experience is likely to be in a given situation and having the willingness to have your self image challenged when you have new experiences. 

And again, I would say, if you're someone that can accept yourself wherever you happen to be in any given moment, but can challenge yourself, you're likely to get that match up between your self concept and your experiences. If you don't challenge yourself, your self concept is [00:24:00] almost always going to be distorted because you're never really testing your self image against reality. 

Lastly, I would like to talk a bit about attachment theory, which of course We mentioned in detail in last week's podcast, and as we talked about, I think there is a relationship between someone's attachment style and their self esteem. So roughly, you can divide attachment styles into secure and insecure, and I don't necessarily think that a person can be definitively categorized as one or the other. 

but they might fall predominantly into one or the other. And I think having good surface steam, a side effect of having good surface steam, is that you tend to have a secure attachment style. Or you could say having a secure attachment style gives you good surface steam. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. 

But of course, conversely, if you have surface steam issues, that makes it much more likely that you're going to have an insecure attachment style, which is typically either avoidant, [00:25:00] so you tend to avoid closeness and intimacy, a bit like the hermetic individuals we talked about when we discussed neurosis and human growth, or you tend to be anxiously attached. 

In that case, you tend to be more worried about abandonment and therefore you behave in a way which other people feel is a bit too clingy and a bit too invasive. Or, and this is often the case with more severe relational trauma, you might have a more disorganized attachment style where you oscillate between anxiety and clinginess. 

avoidance and then sometimes outright anger and destruction. So generally speaking, having good self esteem is the ability to have a relationship where you can connect, have that free, easy intimacy we talked about when we discussed transaction analysis, but at the same time, you can also retain your individuality, your own sense of personal sovereignty. 

Whereas people who are anxiously attached, they tend to want to [00:26:00] give up their personal sovereignty and merge with another person. Avoidantly attached people want too much sovereignty and they kind of want to dissociate from other people. And people with a disorganized attachment style may oscillate between different styles, as we've mentioned. 

So let's dive into a few more examples you either might see clinically in the therapy room or perhaps in your personal life. Of course, no discussion of something like self esteem can take place without the mention of narcissism. A lot of people think having a narcissistic process is having too much self esteem, but I actually, I think the crucial thing to understand here is that narcissism is just another reaction to having poor self esteem. 

It's just not a typical reaction you might see, but actually what happens is in that individual, they lack that basic sense of self worth. to the extent that they feel that they have to compensate by this sense of grandiose [00:27:00] entitlement that is their way of coping with their anxiety. And so, as a result, they're often less focused on improving in reality, but they're a lot more focused on image, reputation, accolades. 

For example, if you are seeing a musician in therapy and they had a narcissistic process, They might be less focused on improving their craft as a musician, becoming better at writing and playing music and performing, and they might be much more focused on, when am I going to win the awards? How am I going to get album of the year? 

How am I going to get on the cover of the magazine? So it's really useful to watch out for narcissistic language. People with this kind of process will often describe people as being really, really good or really terrible. They tend to split the world into overvaluation and over denigration. They often see people as [00:28:00] tools to help them get what they want or obstacles in their way. 

I've talked about narcissism before, I did a whole essay on narcissism and I think one of the major problems with it is it can blind you to the reality of the things you really need to do to solve problems. So, for example, you take someone like Napoleon, he was a brilliant strategist who quickly rose to the ranks to become the leader of France. 

And somewhere along the way, he stopped relying on his good strategy to succeed. Somewhere along the way, he got that sense of grandiose entitlement and he felt like, I should win, not because I'm going to be the best strategist. But I should win because I'm Napoleon and therefore I should just succeed on that basis. 

And that is really the essence of what it is to become an egomaniac. And I don't know necessarily if Napoleon had poor self esteem, he wasn't one of my clients. but I think often this [00:29:00] kind of delusional self belief can arise as a response to this basic sense of not being enough, not having good self worth. 

Another example you might see quite commonly is the people pleaser and these are the individuals who have disowned their basic sense of aggression in some way to cope. So usually the strategy of the people pleaser is, I feel good about myself if I can get other people to like me. I don't feel good about myself if I'm angry or use my aggression. 

And there's also a sense that by disowning one's aggression, one can avoid the responsibility that it takes to live life on one's own terms. If you don't choose the direction of your life, then you don't have to suffer the consequences of having failed. Or you don't have to suffer the consequences of other people reacting to you or disagreeing with your goals or disagreeing [00:30:00] with the way that you go about things because you've outsourced that to someone else. 

And I think a really interesting subtype of the people pleaser is the insecure overachiever. I've written a whole essay about this as well. And the insecure overachiever is the very competent, very hardworking person who's usually very intelligent. But they hand over the orientation of their life to someone else and that could be their parent or a mentor and a boss. 

And so the insecure overachiever is very, very good at getting things done. They're kind of dooming themselves to unhappiness in a way because they're not really living in accordance with their own values and often they also lack that basic sense of self worth. It's like having a car which has a very, very effective engine but doesn't have its own steering wheel and instead it's being steered by something else or someone else. 

I think if you have problems with self [00:31:00] esteem, there's obviously many different things you could do about that and there are many books which have been written on this subject. I do think therapy can have a role and the role of therapy in helping someone with their self esteem is multifaceted. 

Obviously, it's helping them develop awareness, maybe even awareness that they have this problem. Some people aren't aware that they have this problem. Some awareness of how this problem may have arisen due to their childhood dynamics or social, cultural dynamics, other life circumstances, but also some awareness in how they're in some sense not giving themselves what they need, and that might be not enough self compassion, not enough challenge. 

Not enough awareness or actualization of their values. And so therapy could include working on one or a combination of these kinds of factors depending on the kind of therapy. Usually there's an emphasis on the client developing a kind of healing, uncomplicated, intimate [00:32:00] relationship with their therapist that has a nurturing element to it. 

The therapy can help them challenge themselves and get out of their comfort zone and can hopefully help them discover their values, what they care about, and how they might actualize what they care about into their lives. And I think when therapy works really well, it helps people generate these positive feedback loops where someone might discover that they care about something, for example, they care about helping people. 

And so that motivates them to, for example, volunteer at a local charity organization and they do that and then they have a really satisfying experience. And then that makes it more likely that they'll do the same thing again in the future. So this nice positive feedback loop, as opposed to the kinds of feedback loops people fall into when they don't have very good self esteem. 

And that feedback loop tends to look like, I don't really like myself. Therefore, I have to satisfy someone else's needs instead of my own or [00:33:00] some fantasy of what I want rather than what I really want. And then having done that, they feel unhappy, sad, angry, and then that leads to I don't like myself or all sorts of self destructive behaviors. 

And the cycle continues from there. I do think it's worth pointing out that Almost every therapy involves some degree of free association, although most therapies won't call it that, and by free association I mean just spontaneously expressing yourself. And I think, as I've said before on other podcasts, I think free association is kind of a meta skill, the ability to just authentically and spontaneously express yourself is really good for building self esteem. 

And often that's why therapy is so valuable. Before therapy, people might think, well, if I express myself just how I feel in the moment, people might not like me. But then when they do that in therapy and they feel that their therapist gets them, or understands them, or [00:34:00] even validates their experiences, that's a really powerful factor for helping someone to build a positive self regard, a positive sense of themselves. 

And then I think transferring out of therapy, the more people feel they can free associate just in their personal life, with friends, with family, just truly be themselves. then that can also be incredibly helpful for building a positive sense of self esteem. And then as a side note, I think free association is the basic skill required for all sorts of creative, artistic expression. 

And I think it's very hard to produce truly valuable creative or artistic work unless you have some kind of ability to free associate. And of course, that doesn't just mean with words, but words, ideas, images, etc. So aside from therapy, what are some practical interventions a person can consider when thinking about their self esteem? 

I think, firstly, it's important to have this mindset that [00:35:00] you are in a relationship with yourself. Again, that seems strange, but if you think about it, you're constantly in dialogue with yourself. You're constantly in conversation with yourself and the question is what kind of relationship do you want to have with yourself? 

So I think all of these interventions are about trying to figure out what relationship you have and trying to make it a higher quality relationship. I think one simple step that people can take is to simply imagine, if they were their own parent, or their own therapist, or their own coach, how would they treat themselves in any particular situation? 

And normally people will find there's a huge difference between how they might treat someone else, and how they versus how they tend to treat themselves. It's usually an easy way to expose when people are being too harshly self critical. There are some interesting free associative exercises a person can try. 

So these are called the writing stem exercises. This is where you might write the first half of a sentence and then complete it very quickly four or [00:36:00] five times. So you might write, when I think about myself, I feel, and then complete that very quickly with five different possible responses. So a person might write, when I think about myself, I feel difficult, or I feel angry, or I feel disappointed, say, if they have problems with their self esteem. 

And there's infinite variations of these exercises you can try, like, I consider myself a ______, or when someone compliments me, I ______, or when I get criticized, I ______, I'm trying these kinds of writing stem exercises. can be a very quick way of figuring out how do I actually feel about myself. And then having done that kind of self assessment, you can use the same kind of exercise to actually improve your relationship with yourself. 

So instead of writing, when I think about myself, I feel, you can write, When I think about myself, I would like to feel, when I get criticized, I would like to, I would [00:37:00] like to consider myself a, and in this situation you're filling in those blanks with what you think would be a more helpful manner of self relating. 

So you might write, when I think about myself, I would like to feel proud, I would like to feel supportive, I would like to feel Or when someone compliments me, I would like to let it land. I would like to reciprocate. I would like to believe it. So these exercises can be a really useful way of both assessing yourself and where you're at in your relationship with yourself, but also for starting to improve your relationship with yourself. 

and consciously implanting more helpful psychological messages for yourself. I think to help that general sense of basic unconditional self worth, I think something like a self compassion meditation can be really useful, taking a five or ten minute break from your day to again, relate to yourself in a positive, compassionate way. 

And I'll put a link to a useful self compassion meditation I [00:38:00] usually recommend to clients in the description. And again, if you're not in a, if you're not working with a therapist or a coach, I would encourage you to build a kind of positive feedback loop for yourself. Just to so think, what instincts do I have about how to act? 

What do those instincts say about my values? What behavior would be a way of actualizing that value? And what result could I get? And then restarting the cycle from there. So the instincts would be, I would like to spend more time with my friends. The underlying value might be, I think friendship is really important. 

That might lead you to the behavior of actually the nuts and bolts of Texting your friends, phoning them, making plans with them, hanging out with them. That will hopefully lead to the result of having that more enjoyable experience. And then can, and that can then inform your instincts. And the more you behave. 

in concert with your values rather than in opposition to your values, the better and stronger your sense of self [00:39:00] esteem will be. Of course, friendship is a good example because relationships are so important for self esteem, particularly relationships which are mutually beneficial, where it feels win win, where both parties feel like they're getting something rewarding from the relationship. 

and especially relationships that don't have a transactional quality like more business oriented relationships. The kinds of relationships that build self esteem are the ones where there's a sense of no judgment, of acceptance, where we want to spend time together just because we like each other rather than for some kind of ulterior motive. 

So to conclude here, hopefully I've convincingly made the argument that self esteem is not some kind of woolly self indulgence I do think if you're ambitious and really want to be successful, you can't really do without a good sense of self esteem because self esteem will allow you to see the world through your own eyes, think about what your goals are rather than the goals of [00:40:00] somebody else, will help you strategically move towards those goals without getting caught up in your insecurities or self sabotage. 

I think self esteem is about. appreciating yourself in a realistic way rather than an idealized way and that includes your strengths obviously but also your idiosyncrasies and your flaws. I think self esteem is the ability to challenge yourself without berating yourself, guilting yourself, shaming yourself, going out of your comfort zone without being a tyrant to yourself. 

And I think at the deepest level, self esteem is about cultivating your unique point of view and then bringing it into the world in some kind of concrete way, in a way that can contribute to other people and make their lives better as well. So I would ignore self esteem at your peril. I'm curious if you guys have any feedback about this, if you have any feedback about these ideas, if you particularly agree or disagree with anything I've talked about today of course, do [00:41:00] feel free to get in touch at ThinkingMindPodcast at gmail. 

com. Thank you very much for listening and I'll see you here next time.