Self-Esteem — The Foundation of Your Life

How you relate to the world mirrors how you relate to your self. Your sense of self lays down the foundation for how you think, how you feel, and how you behave. And so, the quality of your life is disproportionately dependent on the health of this sense of self — in other words, the level of your self-esteem.

We try to get at the notion of self-esteem through various vague concepts — self-image, self-worth, self-talk, self-love, etc. Even when we talk about the ideas of “inner work” or “insecurities” or “seeking validation” or “ego”, we are indirectly talking about self-esteem.

Given how central it is to everything we do and experience in life, the idea of self-esteem deserves more nuance. There’s much more to it than just “loving yourself”.

What exactly is Self-Esteem?

Self-esteem has two defining characteristics — Self-Efficacy and Self-Respect.

Self-Efficacy means confidence in the functioning of your mind, in your ability to think, understand, learn and make decisions; trust in your ability to figure things out in the face of life’s challenges.

Self-Respect is the conviction that your life and well-being are worth acting to support, protect and nurture. Self-Respect entails the expectation of friendship, love and happiness as your natural birthright. It is reflected in a sense of comfort in asserting your thoughts, needs and wants.

To get a better sense of it, let’s take a look at the word “insecure“. Literally, it simply means unsafe. We feel physically unsafe when we’re facing a danger that we think we might not be able to overcome or when we’re anticipating an attack on something valuable to us (our job, body, kids, material possessions). An inability to stand for or protect ourselves makes us feel physically insecure.

The same phenomenon translates psychologically. When we lack self-esteem, we lack a sense of competence to cope with the basic challenges of life. And we lack the ability to stand for ourselves, to experience ourselves as worthy of happiness. So we feel psychologically vulnerable and insecure.

A healthy level of self-esteem enables us to be resilient in face of adversities. Think of it as the immune system of consciousness, giving us the courage and strength to fight back when our sense of self is attacked.

How Self-Esteem Develops

From the moment we are born, we feel an unquenchable need for attention. But the thing with attention is that there’s only so much of it to go around. As we grow and separate from our mother, we face the real world where our needs are not instantly gratified. We realize that we cannot be dependent on others for attention and validation.

So we construct a self, an image of ourselves that comforts us and makes us feel validated from within. If the process goes well, if we feel safe, appreciated, and loved in our childhood — we get a self that we can cherish and love. In moments of loneliness or self-doubt, we can retreat to this self and raise ourselves up. This lays the foundation of self-esteem, and we can slowly build upon it.

But more often than not, this process does not go smoothly. Our early experiences shape our sense of self. Stressful events in childhood — like punishments, isolation, poor grades, bullying, discrimination, parents getting divorced, sexual or verbal abuse — get internalized into the self. The earlier in life these wounds are inflicted, the more fractured our self becomes. But of course, traumatic events can happen at any age and damage our self-esteem.

In general, if you felt safe, appreciated, and loved in your childhood, your self becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation. On the other hand, if you felt frightened, ridiculed, or unwanted, your self specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.

Pseudo Self-Esteem

Having poor self-esteem is a psychologically painful experience. And so our mind unconsciously finds ways to cope, to evade the pain. A common defense against the painful experience of deflated value is inflated value — often referred to as “narcissistic defence “. This usually takes either of the two forms:

• Vulnerable Narcissism — The individual retreats to a fantasy life, imagining a superior self. Since this self-image does not get much external validation, they tend to have moments of great self-doubt and self-loathing. Their internal landscape is characterized by high neuroticism and hypersensitivity. And they often socially isolate themselves.
• Grandiose Narcissism — The individual develops a grandiose sense of self-importance to over-compensate for the lack of self-esteem. It is characterized by overt expressions of feelings of superiority and entitlement.

Both forms share the same core characteristics, like a sense of entitlement, high self-absorption, lack of empathy, arrogance, and attention-seeking behavior. Note that we are not talking about clinical narcissism here. Narcissism exists as a continuum and we all fall somewhere on the spectrum. And it’s ironic that self-love has come to be associated with narcissism when the source of the problem for narcissists is that they have no cohesive self to love.

Let me give you a personal example. I used to be a very skinny guy. And I was repeatedly mocked for it everywhere. It made me feel small, weak, and not good enough. So as a coping mechanism, my mind tried to protect my sense of self by making me internally believe that I am better than everyone else. My ego compensated by being overly assertive, defensive, and arrogant.

If you were to tell someone like that that they have poor self-esteem, they’d instantly get defensive about it. Because their mind has put in a lot of effort to build up that pseudo-self-esteem. They depend on it to get some sense of “security”.

Why Self-Esteem is Foundational to Everything

What self-esteem affects is our emotional incentives. Every attack on our sense of self generates intense emotions. These emotions generate unconscious predictive models of how the world works. The predictive models regulate our emotional incentives, which then form the foundation of much of our behavior. They set our basic understanding about what situations are safe or unsafe, desirable or undesirable. In a way, our self-esteem determines how we think.

Low self-esteem makes us vulnerable to be manipulated by fear. When we lack internal surety, we shy away from asking and going for what we want. We are moved more by the desire to avoid pain than to experience joy. And so we cling on to toxic relationships, exploitative jobs, and unhealthy environments. Because we seek the safety of the familiar and undemanding. Also, when you’re influenced by fear, your rationality takes a big hit.

We can easily get trapped by our negative self-image. Our self-image creates a set of implicit assumptions about who we are and what we are capable of. These assumptions then tend to generate unconscious behaviors that makes those assumptions real. And the realities then confirm and strengthen the self-image. Self-esteem — high or low — becomes a generator of self-fulfilling prophecies.

You see, what we make an effort to seek and achieve — professionally, emotionally, intellectually, creatively — is based on what we think is possible and appropriate to us. So ambition and motivation are also closely tied to self-esteem.

Let’s take something like creativity. People with high self-esteem value the productions of their minds. They spend time nurturing and cultivating ideas. They also think for themselves and are not easily influenced by what others think. And so, they tend to express themselves freely, allowing creativity to flourish. Contrast that with someone who constantly doubts themselves and needs external validation.

“Until you cross the bridge of your insecurities, you can’t begin to explore your possibilities.” — Tim Fargo

And if we do not believe in ourselves — in our efficacy and deservedness — the world is a frightening place. You can imagine how this gives birth to anxiety. We could go on and on and find that the roots of almost every psychological problem can be traced back, at least in part, to deficiencies in self-esteem. Similarly, healthy self-esteem is fundamental to everything you seek in life, especially happiness.

So there’s a disproportionate return on investing time in investigating your sense of self and identifying areas of improvement. It will produce a domino effect into every area of your life. Even if you are comfortable with where you are, remember that there are levels to everything. The ceiling for happiness is absurdly high. See if you can go from a 7 to a 10.

Closing Thoughts

Now all these words obviously beg the million-dollar question, how can one build up their self-esteem?

Well, there’s no easy answer or one-size-fits-all solution. We are complex beings in a complex world. We have all faced different traumas and challenges throughout our life that we need to process and integrate into our consciousness. But raising self-esteem is not just about eliminating negatives; it requires the attainment of positives.

Here’s a good place to start — Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden. The nuances of self-esteem are rarely discussed anywhere. Most of the related discussions in the mainstream discourse revolve around the idea of “loving yourself” — which is important and well-intended but very incomplete. This book dives deep into the psychological (and philosophical) aspects of self-esteem and lays down strategies to build self-esteem from the ground up. Fundamentals of perhaps the most fundamental thing in our lives.

And of course, self-esteem is not a panacea. The goal of this article was to give you a lens, a framework through which you can get more insight into your behavior and psychological problems.

Thank you for reading. Most of the content on this website has emerged from conversations with readers like you. Every Sunday, I send out an email dissecting some aspect of the human mind.

If you can take out a few minutes every week, I’ll help you develop a strong understanding of how your mind works. So that you can have more control over your thoughts, behavior, and life.

You can sign-up below.

Or you can sign-up after reading my story and the core idea behind this website:  We Should Be Getting More Out of Our Lives (would recommend)

Feedback and comments are very much appreciated.