The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
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People with troubled self-esteem are often uncomfortable in the presence of those with higher self-esteem and may feel resentful and declare, “They have too much self-esteem.” But what they are really making is a statement about themselves.
Insecure men, for instance, often feel more insecure in the presence of self-confident women. Low-self-esteem individuals often feel irritable in the presence of people who are enthusiastic about life. If one partner in a marriage whose self-esteem is deteriorating sees that the partner’s self-esteem is growing, the response is sometimes anxiety and an attempt to sabotage the growth process.
The sad truth is, whoever is successful in this world runs the risk of being a target. People of low achievement often envy and resent people of high achievement. Those who are unhappy often envy and resent those who are happy.
And those of low self-esteem sometimes like to talk about the danger of having “too much self-esteem.”
When Nothing Is “Enough”
As I observed above, a poor self-esteem does not mean that we will necessarily be incapable of achieving any real values. Some of us may have the talent, energy, and drive to achieve a great deal, in spite of feelings of inadequacy or unworthiness—like the highly productive workaholic who is driven to prove his worth to, say, a father who predicted he would always be a loser. But it does mean that we will be less effective and less creative than we have the power to be; and it means that we will be crippled in our ability to find joy in our achievements. Nothing we do will ever feel like “enough.”
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If my aim is to prove I am “enough,” the project goes on to infinity—because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable.
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While poor self-esteem often undercuts the capacity for real accomplishment, even among the most talented, it does not necessarily do so. What is far more certain is that it undercuts the capacity for satisfaction. This is a painful reality well known to many high achievers. “Why,” a brilliantly successful businessman said to me, “is the pain of my failures so much more intense and lasting than the pleasure of my successes, even though there have been so many more successes than failures? Why is happiness so fleeting and mortification so enduring?” A few minutes later he added, “In my mind I see the face of my father mocking me.” The subconscious mission of his life, he came to realize, was not to express who he was but to show his father (now deceased for over a decade) that he could amount to something.
When we have unconflicted self-esteem, joy is our motor, not fear. It is happiness that we wish to experience, not suffering that we wish to avoid. Our purpose is self-expression, not self-avoidance or self-justification. Our motive is not to “prove” our worth but to live our possibilities.
If my aim is to prove I am “enough,” the project goes on to infinity—because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable. So it is always “one more” victory—one more promotion, one more sexual conquest, one more company, one more piece of jewelry, a larger house, a more expensive car, another award—yet the void within remains unfilled.
In today’s culture some frustrated people who hit this impasse announce that they have decided to pursue a “spiritual” path and renounce their egos. This enterprise is doomed to failure. An ego, in the mature and healthy sense, is precisely what they have failed to attain. They dream of giving away what they do not possess. No one can successfully bypass the need for self-esteem.
A Word of Caution
If one error is to deny the importance of self-esteem, another is to claim too much for it. In their enthusiasm, some writers today seem to suggest that a healthy sense of self-value is all we need to assure happiness and success. The matter is more complex than that. Self-esteem is not an all-purpose panacea. Aside from the question of the external circumstances and opportunities that may exist for us, a number of internal factors clearly can have an impact—such as energy level, intelligence, and achievement drive. (Contrary to what we sometimes hear, this last is not correlated with self-esteem in any simple or direct way, in that such a drive can be powered by negative motivation as well as by positive, as, for example, when one is propelled by fear of losing love or status rather than by the joy of self-expression.) A well-developed sense of self is a necessary condition of our well-being but not a sufficient condition. Its presence does not guarantee fulfillment, but its lack guarantees some measure of anxiety, frustration, or despair.*
Self-esteem is not a substitute for a roof over one’s head or food in one’s stomach, but it increases the likelihood that one will find a way to meet such needs. Self-esteem is not a substitute for the knowledge and skills one needs to operate effectively in the world, but it increases the likelihood that one will acquire them.
In Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs,” he places self-esteem “above” (that is, as coming after) core survival needs such as for food and water, and there is one obvious sense in which this is valid. At the same time, it is a misleading oversimplification. People sometimes relinquish life itself in the name of issues crucial to their self-esteem. And surely his belief that being “accepted” is a more basic need than self-esteem must also be challenged.3
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Self-esteem is not a substitute for a roof over one’s head or food in one’s stomach, but it increases the likelihood that one will find a way to meet such needs.
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The basic fact remains that self-esteem is an urgent need. It proclaims itself as such by virtue of the fact that its (relative) absence impairs our ability to function. This is why we say it has survival value.
The Challenges of the Modern World
The survival value of self-esteem is especially evident today. We have reached a moment in history when self-esteem, which has always been a supremely important psychological need, has also become a supremely important economic need—the attribute imperative for adaptiveness to an increasingly complex, challenging, and competitive world.
In the past two or three decades, extraordinary developments have occurred in the American and global economies. The United States has shifted from a manufacturing society to an information society. We have witnessed the transition from physical labor to mind work as the dominant employee activity. We now live in a global economy characterized by rapid change, accelerating scientific and technological break-throughs, and an unprecedented level of competitiveness. These developments create demands for higher levels of education and training than were required of previous generations. Everyone acquainted with business culture knows this. What is not understood is that these developments also create new demands on our psychological resources. Specifically, these developments ask for a greater capacity for innovation, self-management, personal responsibility, and self-direction. This is not just asked at the top. It is asked at every level of a business enterprise, from senior management to first-line supervisors and even to entry-level personnel.
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We have reached a moment in history when self-esteem, which has always been a supremely important psychological need, has also become a supremely important economic need.
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As an example of how the world has changed, here is Fortune magazine’s description of the position of manufacturing production operator at Motorola, an entry-level job: “Analyze computer reports and identify problems through experiments and statistical process control. Communicate manufacturing performance metrics to management, and understand the company’s competitive position.”4
A modern business can no longer be run by a few people who think and many people who do what they are told (the traditional military, command-and-control model). Today, organizations need not only an unprecedentedly higher level of knowledge and skill among all those who participate but also a higher level of independence, self-reliance, self-trust, and the capacity to exercise initiative—in a word, self-esteem. This means that persons with a decent level of self-es
teem are now needed economically in large numbers. Historically, this is a new phenomenon.
The challenge extends further than the world of business. We are freer than any generation before us to choose our own religion, philosophy, or moral code; to adopt our own life-style; to select our own criteria for the good life. We no longer have unquestioning faith in “tradition.” We no longer believe that government will lead us to salvation—nor church, nor labor unions, nor big organizations of any kind. No one is coming to rescue us, not in any aspect of life. We are thrown on our own resources.
We have more choices and options than ever before in every area. Frontiers of limitless possibilities now face us in whatever direction we look. To be adaptive in such an environment, to cope appropriately, we have a greater need for personal autonomy—because there is no widely accepted code of rules and rituals to spare us the challenge of individual decision making. We need to know who we are and to be centered within ourselves. We need to know what matters to us; otherwise it is easy to be swept up and swept along by alien values, pursuing goals that do not nourish who we really are. We must learn to think for ourselves, to cultivate our own resources, and to take responsibility for the choices, values, and actions that shape our lives. We need reality-based self-trust and self-reliance.
The greater the number of choices and decisions we need to make at a conscious level, the more urgent our need for self-esteem.
In response to the economic and cultural developments of the past few decades, we are witnessing a reawakening of the American self-help tradition, a great proliferation of mutual-aid groups of every kind, private networks to serve any number of different needs and purposes, a growing emphasis on “learning as a way of life,” a new emphasis on self-reliance that expresses itself, for instance, in an attitude of greater personal responsibility for health care and an increasing tendency to question authority.
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If we lack adequate self-esteem, the amount of choice offered to us today can be frightening.
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The entrepreneurial spirit has been stimulated not only in business but also in our personal lives. Intellectually, we are all challenged to be “entrepreneurs”—to produce new meanings and values. We have been flung into what T. George Harris has called “the era of conscious choice.”5 The choice of this religion or that religion or none. The choice to marry or simply to live together. To have children or not to. To work for an organization or for oneself. To enter any one of a thousand new careers that did not even exist a few decades ago. To live in the city, the suburbs, or the country—or to move abroad. On a simpler level, there are unprecedented choices in clothing styles, foods, automobiles, new products of every kind—all demanding that we make a decision.
If we lack adequate self-esteem, the amount of choice offered to us today can be frightening, something like the anxiety of a Soviet citizen on first encountering an American supermarket. And just as some visitors elected to run back to the “security” of a dictatorship, some of us seek escape in the “security” of cults, or religious fundamentalism, or “correct” political, social, or cultural subgroups, or brain-destroying substances. Neither our upbringing nor our education may have adequately prepared us for a world with so many options and challenges. This is why the issue of self-esteem has become so urgent.
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The Meaning of Self-Esteem
Self-esteem has two interrelated components. One is a sense of basic confidence in the face of life’s challenges: self-efficacy. The other is a sense of being worthy of happiness: self-respect.
I do not mean to imply that a person of high or healthy self-esteem consciously thinks in terms of these components, but rather that if we look closely at the experience of self-esteem, we inescapably find them.
Self-efficacy means confidence in the functioning of my mind, in my ability to think, understand, learn, choose, and make decisions; confidence in my ability to understand the facts of reality that fall within the sphere of my interests and needs; self-trust; self-reliance.
Self-respect means assurance of my value; an affirmative attitude toward my right to live and to be happy; comfort in appropriately asserting my thoughts, wants, and needs; the feeling that joy and fulfillment are my natural birthright.
We will need to consider these two ideas in more detail, but for the moment consider the following: If an individual felt inadequate to face the challenges of life, if an individual lacked fundamental self-trust, confidence in his or her mind, we would recognize a self-esteem deficiency, no matter what other assets he or she possessed. Or, if an individual lacked a basic sense of self-respect, felt unworthy or undeserving of the love or respect of others, unentitled to happiness, fearful of asserting thoughts, wants, or needs—again we would recognize a self-esteem deficiency, no matter what other positive attributes he or she exhibited. Self-efficacy and self-respect are the dual pillars of healthy self-esteem; absent either one, self-esteem is impaired. They are the defining characteristics of the term because of their fundamentality. They represent not derivative or secondary meanings of self-esteem but its essence.
The experience of self-efficacy generates the sense of control over one’s life that we associate with psychological well-being, the sense of being at the vital center of one’s existence—as contrasted with being a passive spectator and a victim of events.
The experience of self-respect makes possible a benevolent, non-neurotic sense of community with other individuals, the fellowship of independence and mutual regard—as contrasted with either alienated estrangement from the human race, on the one hand, or mindless submergence into the tribe, on the other.
Within a given person, there will be inevitable fluctuations in self-esteem levels, much as there are fluctuations in all psychological states. We need to think in terms of a person’s average level of self-esteem. While we sometimes speak of self-esteem as a conviction about oneself, it is more accurate to speak of a disposition to experience oneself a particular way. What way?
To sum up in a formal definition: Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of happiness.
Note that this definition does not specify the childhood environmental influences that support healthy self-esteem (physical safety, nurturing, and so forth); nor the later internal generators (the practice of living consciously, self-acceptingly, self-responsibly, and so on); nor emotional or behavioral consequences (compassion, willingness to be accountable, openness to new experience, and the like). It merely identifies what the self-evaluation concerns and consists of.
In Part III, Chapter 17, we will examine the idea of self-esteem in the context of culture, but for the moment let me stress one point. The concept of “competence” as used in my definition is metaphysical, not “Western.” That is, it pertains to the very nature of things—to our fundamental relationship to reality. It is not the product of a particular cultural “value bias.” There is no society on earth, no society even conceivable, whose members do not face the challenges of fulfilling their needs—who do not face the challenges of appropriate adaptation to nature and to the world of human beings. The idea of efficacy in this fundamental sense is not, as I have heard suggested, a “Western artifact.” I believe this will become still clearer when we explore in depth what self-efficacy and self-respect mean and entail.
It would be unwise to dismiss definitions as “mere semantics” or a concern with exactitude as pedantry. The value of a precise definition is that it allows us to distinguish a particular aspect of reality from all others so that we can think about it and work with it with clarity and focus. If we wish to know what self-esteem depends on, how to nurture it in our children, support it in schools, encourage it in organizations, strengthen it in psychotherapy, or develop it in ourselves, we need to know what precisely we are aiming at. We are unlikely to hit a target we cannot see. If our idea of self-esteem is vague, the means we adopt will reflect th
is vagueness. If our enthusiasm for self-esteem is not matched by appropriate intellectual rigor, we run the risk not only of failing to produce worthwhile results but also of discrediting the field.
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To have high self-esteem is to feel confidently appropriate to life.
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Am I suggesting that the definition of self-esteem I offer is written in stone and can never be improved on? Not at all. Definitions are contextual; they relate to a given level of knowledge; as knowledge grows, definitions tend to become more precise. I may find a better, clearer, more exact way to capture the essence of the concept during my lifetime. Or someone else may. But within the context of the knowledge we now possess, I can think of no alternative formulation that identifies with more precision the unique aspect of human experience we are exploring in this book.