Untangle your self-esteem: It's not low vs. high but needy vs. stable
Introducing 4 steps to get from needy self-esteem to stable self-esteem
I have a friend who praises me every time we meet. He tells me how great I am at this and that and how grand some of my recent accomplishments are. While it is nice to hear nice things said about you, I don’t get much of an ego boost from such praise. I usually push such praise to the side, wanting to be done with the formalities to get into the actual conversation. At one point, however, I realized that he says these things because he would like to hear me say similar things about him. He needs such praise much more than I do and, in my inability to see the value of such praise, I have failed to deliver it to him. Nowadays, I make a point to try to return the favour with similar praise about his recent accomplishments. This difference is due to us having different types of self-esteem.
Did you think that self-esteem is a personal thing? While there is much talk about the benefits of strong self-esteem and how to build that, the conversation should start with understanding the concept right. Instead of self-esteem we should call it other-esteem because it is ultimately a monitoring tool to estimate whether others like you. In 2000, psychologists Mark Leary and Roy Baumeister made a convincing case that self-esteem is ultimately a ‘sociometer’ – an internal monitor of the degree to which you expect to be valued by others. As they put it, ‘the self-esteem system monitors one’s eligibility for lasting, desirable relationships’. We gain self-esteem when we observe that others notice, respect and value us. We lose self-esteem when we note how others ignore, discriminate, disrespect or hate us. From the chain of more subtle and more explicit everyday encounters, we slowly build a generalized sense of our own value in the eyes of others. And that is our self-esteem.
Too much discussion focuses on whether self-esteem is high or low. At one point, it was thought that high self-esteem causes various good things in life like success. Then research showed that the opposite was true. High self-esteem was the consequence of many good things in life, while artificially boosting self-esteem did not lead to anything good. It turned out that high self-esteem did not make you more successful. Rather, having success tended to increase your self-esteem. Similar to happiness, self-esteem turned out to be a thermometer you should not try to artificially inflate. ‘Self-esteem is optimal when we are not pursuing it,’ as researchers Jennifer Crocker and Noah Nuer aptly concluded. Like shoulder pads and mullet haircuts, high self-esteem was big in the 1980s, but all the hype about it feels a bit embarrassing nowadays.
To liberate ourselves from needing constant praise from others, we should focus on another distinction: that between needy and stable self-esteem – what researchers call contingent and non-contingent self-esteem.
Needy self-esteem is fragile and dependent on constant positive feedback from others. To maintain your sense of self-worth, you need continual validation from others that you are worthy. You need someone saying you are good, you need someone praising what you just did, you need people telling you they love you or that they like you. If your partner takes too long to respond to your ‘I love you’ text, you start to wonder whether something is wrong. Perhaps they don’t love you anymore. Your sense of self-worth is constantly on the line, waiting for validation from the people around you.
At worst, you start boosting your own ego by kicking everybody else down. You exaggerate your own skills and achievements, building a positive illusion and invalidating everyone else’s accomplishments. You react to negative feedback with anger, blaming everybody other than you – and thus fail to learn from your mistakes. Such bloated self-esteem built on lying to ourselves is extremely vulnerable, and borders on narcissism. This is not a path you want to go down, as it is harmful for both yourself and especially those around you.
As the name suggests, stable, or non-contingent, self-esteem is less dependent on any single interaction or achievement. Here, we have a deeper sense of being ‘worthy of esteem and love’ and thus can maintain a healthy sense of self-worth even when failing at a task or receiving negative feedback from others. When we learn to love and accept ourselves, our self-esteem is not dependent on others. Building such stable self-esteem is not easy. Some receive this gift from their parents, being unconditionally loved, and, through that, internalizing the sense that they are worthy. If the love we received from our parents was more conditional, repairing this in adult life typically requires considerable practice in aiming to learn to love ourselves unconditionally. Having someone validate you will greatly help, be that someone a partner, a good friend or a therapist.
Now we are better equipped to understand the difference between me and my friend. I have relatively stable self-esteem. And if you were to ask my brother and sister, I’ve always had a bit too much of it – although I am better now at hiding it and appearing humble. Thus, I am relatively immune to external praise. Of course, I like to hear positive things said about me, and some negative feedback might sting. But in most cases neither type of feedback ‘gets’ to me. I take it as information that can be used to improve my way of doing things. My friend, on the other hand, has more needy self-esteem. Thus, he constantly seeks positive feedback – and by recognizing this need, he is also much better at giving it to others.
‘Freedom is being disliked by other people.’ This is the controversial conclusion delivered in Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s book The Courage to be Disliked. Social comparison and needy self-esteem – these stand in the way of you being able to live the life you want. The less they dominate your life, the more room you have to make the choices that represent the better angles of your mind. Occasionally being disliked is proof that you are exercising your freedom to be you, instead of just being pushed by others. Kishimi and Koga ask, ‘if you are not living your life for yourself, then who is going to live it for you?’
How, then, to tackle the strong grip the opinions (or imagined opinions) of others have on you? Here’s four things you can do:
Awareness is the first step. The better you know what norms and biases guide your life, the better equipped you are to deal with them. All too often, various internalized norms have an influence on what options you see available in any situation. This is why expanding your world view by engaging with people with alternative views on life is so crucial, as I discussed earlier. Self-awareness can also be gained by stopping and reflecting. When you observe something holding you back or pushing you in a certain direction, stop and try to understand the hidden force behind it. What is the norm stopping you or pushing you? Where does it come from and is it worth being obeyed?
Next, choose carefully whose approval you seek. As social animals, we might not be able to completely detach our self-esteem from feedback from other people. In fact, a certain amount of healthy, constructive feedback is often necessary to help keep us on the right track. For example, a friend of mine is in national politics. Now, that is an occupation where, whatever you decide, you are going to receive harsh critique. And when I say ‘harsh critique’, I mean anything from well-argued op-eds to caricature memes and death threats. In politics, you have to have a thick skin to survive. However, completely ignoring all negative feedback leaves you in an echo chamber where you become enamoured with your in-group’s opinions and lose sight of how to actually serve the citizens. My advice to my politician friend: choose specific people from the opposing side of the political spectrum who you respect despite differences in opinion. Pay attention to their feedback – especially to what they say away from the media, when they can say what they really think. That helps you to see what the relevant counterarguments to your current position are. Then ignore all the other feedback. Same in your own life. Be picky about who’s opinion you care about.
Third, treat any feedback you receive as information. Personally, I aim to not attach my self-esteem to my current performance, but more to what I could become. This focus on the future helps me to take any feedback as more or less useful in my quest to become better in my trade. And focusing on improvement has been shown to eliminate the drops in self-esteem that failing at something usually incurs. Feedback for me is not relevant for my current self-esteem, but for my future abilities. Positive feedback is nice, but has low information value. Negative feedback often contains more information about how to improve my act in the future.
The fourth step is easiest to say, but may require years of hard work (or even professional counselling) to make into reality: learn to love yourself. The more you are able to see yourself as a worthy being, the less power any external feedback has to put you down. The more you value yourself, the less you need external validation. Of course, if you didn’t receive this gift from your parents, learning to love yourself might require years of work.
In summary: stop caring about what others think. Liberating yourself from the grip that others have on you will not be easy. The tendency to seek approval from others sits deep in human psychology. For exactly this reason, this is an area worth investing in. The work you put in and the progress you make will become visible in a more liberated way of being. You’ll have more room to be you and live the kind of life that suits you. That is worth the fight!
