The Problem With Building High Self Esteem

I was thinking – as I tend to do…
This time about self esteem.

Part of it is for me – wanting to feel better about myself.
Part of it is for my children – wanting them to grow up liking themselves, and frankly, not doubting themselves the way that I have!

Everywhere you look, the message is “we have to increase our children’s self esteem” or “we need to parent our children so that they have high self esteem.”  There are self esteem programs in schools.  Dove has their Self Esteem Fund (which has produced all of those fantastic videos!)

But what is “self esteem”?  And are we sure that “high self esteem” is really a good thing?

I looked up “esteem” on Dictionary.com and it came back with:
-noun
 1. favourable opinion or judgment; respect or regard: to hold a person in esteem.
 2. Archaic. opinion or judgment; estimation; valuation.

It is innately judgemental – we are constantly assessing ourselves.
Is that a bad thing?  Not by definition, perhaps – but it often becomes a bad thing in practice!

I had an interesting debate with Chris Flett a while ago, talking about how people sometimes hear a message and react – hearing it as “you’re telling me I’m not good enough.”  And other times, they’ll be able to connect with the message, saying “wow – that’s so true!!” and take it as an opportunity to learn instead of taking it personally.

As we debated back and forth about language and, in particular, how women tend to react and take things personally more often, we realized that we were working from different assumptions about “judgement”.

He responded to one of my rants by saying:
“I think you might be looking at judgmental as a negative where I see judgement or being judgmental as a positive. It gives one a chance to voice their opinion and approval or disapproval over things. I like to be judged for my actions good or bad. I want you to judge my interactions with you, the way I blog, write, and speak to crowds. I want you to have a ‘response’ and decide if it is good or bad. I also want to hear about it.”

That literally stopped me.  Before his comments, I hadn’t questioned my assumptions about “judgement” being a negative, destructive thing.
I hated feeling judged.
I hated the way I judged myself.

But Chris was right – it wasn’t the fact that I was judging myself that was the problem.  Judgement is just assessing whether you’re doing something well or not.

The emotions and bad feelings – and therefore the problem – come from judging yourself, seeing that you haven’t done something “right” and taking a leap to assuming that means that YOU are a bad person or not good enough or not worthy of love.

The problem with most self esteem programs or parenting techniques is that they end up linking high self esteem (our judgement or assessment of ourselves) with self worth (our value as a human being).

What I mean by that is that our self esteem becomes conditional – it’s closely linked to WHAT we’re doing, rather than WHO we are.  So, if I’ve succeeded on a project at work or I’ve lost five pounds – I interpret those as “good” actions and feel good about myself.  However, if I lost a big deal or ate that extra piece of cake – I feel like those are “bad” actions and therefore feel lousy about myself.

That’s what so many adults live with – so when we parent our children, we have a hard time removing that feeling of negativity around judgement and self assessment.

We want our children to feel good about themselves, so that they don’t suffer emotionally the way that we do.  So we praise them and spend significant time & energy pointing out the wonderful things they do.

And we try not to emphasize the negative too much – because that might make them feel bad.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my own journey to knowing and valuing myself:

Healthy self esteem isn’t linked to our worth.  In fact, it isn’t connected to strong emotions or reactions at all – because the assessment is only of our actions and I have a fundamental belief in my worth.  But the problem that we describe as “low self esteem” is actually a fear that we aren’t really worthy.  It’s about feelings of low self worth.  And that’s why we react so strongly and with such emotion.

Healthy self esteem is the ability to assess what you’re doing and judge it as either successful or failure.  And as a result, failure isn’t about what a bad, lacking person I am – it’s just a learning opportunity.  It’s a moment of “oh – that didn’t work out very well.  I’ll have to try something different.”

By avoiding discussion of the negative with our children, in order to keep them from feeling bad, we’re actually sending them the message that failure is BAD and embarrassing and something we have to hide.  In fact, there’s a hidden assumption that we’re  modelling for them that says failure SHOULD make you feel bad and should therefore be avoided at all costs.

But WE CAN’T LEARN if we’re not taking risks.  And we can’t take risks and protect ourselves from failure at the same time!

So we stop learning and evolving.  We stagnate.
And we feel bad about ourselves whenever we feel we haven’t measured up.

We need to stop trying to build high self esteem by focusing only on the positive and start giving our children a foundation of self worth and an understanding of their innate value.

How do we do that, you ask?  Tune in next time for some talk about loving our children unconditionally – so that they can learn to love themselves unconditionally.