What things can you do confidently? I can touch type fairly well but not so accurately. I can speak Japanese but only to a limited capacity with confidence. I’m pretty confident I can spruce up a car to a point where it looks shiny and new.
I’m very confident I can help people teach themselves how to improve. Did that for years in Japan. However, I’m not so confident I can do that in Australian culture. I’m confident I have a few things to learn to be a good therapist.
I spent most of my effort in my business classes teaching people to have self-confidence, but that was just the first step. Knowing the value of their contributions to their company and country was a sticky web to unravel.
Self-esteem does not arise from one’s actions, but one’s beliefs about one’s actions.
I’ve noticed that my self-esteem is growing, slowly and incrementally, since I exited my family dynamic. Being dedicated to another’s needs allowed no room for me to get to know my own. The difference between knowing I’m good at teaching and understanding that I’m a valuable person are two very different things.
I was mapping recent conversations with three different people and was only able to grasp the disconnects this afternoon. In different ways, each of them not only lack self-esteem, but actively debase their self-worth.
Self-debasement may become part of someone’s psychology for any number of reasons but this is where someone has a vested interest in devaluing themselves. Perhaps their education was insufficient, or they lack the abilities they believe they need to be valued, or they developed self-debasement as a survival skill.
In Western culture, which has increasingly identified with the authority-victim personal interaction style, self-debasing is a great way to avoid being targeted as a ‘goody-goody’ or becoming the scapegoat. In families where abuse is normalised, self-debasement can also protect from attacks, demands, and being heavily relied upon. The worthless failure will never be the Tallest Poppy.
The consequence is that the self-debased person is free, freedom to do as and what they please with no accountability.
I have wondered for years how to define self-confidence with regards to self-esteem, and it was exploring the opposite of ‘self-esteem’ which brought the nugget to the top of the pan. A lack of self-confidence is easy to remedy: practice makes perfect.
A lack of self-esteem, however, is Pandora’s Box: a cornucopia of evils spewing forth from epigenetics, culture and tradition, family dynamic, and personality.
In our society where taking responsibility is anathema for success, how can we create a healthy psychology?
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