These days, I am putting together a workshop for a weekend conference. The organizers asked me to look at the topic of self-esteem.
I started off intending to suggest several ways we might raise our level of self-esteem.
But in the process, I started encountering some unexpected insights.
For starters, even though there seems to be general agreement (with some questionable exceptions) that low self-esteem is not good for us humans, the opinions and evidence failed to demonstrate that its opposite, high self-esteem, was necessarily a positive thing.
In other words, if our self-esteem is at rock bottom, that’s not a healthy situation.
But if it’s sky high, that might be equally unhealthy.
The dilemma might be similar to having to choose between major depression on the one hand, and narcissistic personality disorder on the other.
With those complications, the project became a good bit more complicated, and ended up taking some unexpected turns.
One of those turns led to an article by Heidi Grant Halvorson, a psychologist who suggests that self-esteem might not be particularly useful in helping us to meet our goals.
In fact, it might not do much more than make us feel good.
Halvorson recommended we try an alternate approach, something she calls self-compassion.
Instead of expending the effort to talk ourselves into feeling good about ourselves, she says, why not focus on being more understanding of ourselves when we do not perform up to our own expectations?
Why not freely admit our weaknesses to ourselves and set about strengthening ourselves wherever we can, rather than just trying to talk ourselves into feeling good about ourselves?
In other words, stop being so mean to ourselves and start treating ourselves the way we would like for others to treat us.
She cited research that actually indicates that people end up performing better on tasks when they approach them from a position of self-compassion, when they take their mistakes, shortcomings and failures as opportunities to learn from, and improve, their performance.
When they face themselves honestly enough to understand why those mistakes, shortcomings and failures happened in the first place.
And maybe even to realize that those underlying reasons may not be anything they would want to change.
Sometimes when we try to make major self-improvements, we end up throwing the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater in our attempt to conform to other people’s expectations.
Or at least our take on what others are expecting of us.
That’s not all I’m planning on saying this weekend.
We’re also going to look at some of the reasons why it’s usually not easy to talk ourselves out of low self-esteem, or into having high self-esteem (and whether high self-esteem is really what we need to be aiming for).
And we’re going to touch on some of the similar ways that low self-esteem and prejudice develop in the human brain.
Come to think of it, low self-esteem does seem to be a kind of prejudice – a prejudice against yourself.
And when it comes to prejudice of any kind, a little compassion can go a long way.
Julia Cochran is a licensed professional counselor in Rincon and a psychology instructor at Armstrong State University. She can be reached at 912-772-3072 or by email at JCochranPhD@GileadCounseling.com. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Armstrong State University.