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EARN A GOOD REPUTATION WITH YOURSELF |
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Written by Dr. Joel Wade
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Wednesday, 03 November 2004 |
Dr. Nathaniel Branden has written extensively on self-esteem (I recommend The Six Pillars of Self Esteem to start). But the way he talks about self-esteem is different from how most researchers, clinicians and educators talk about self-esteem. For most of these folks, self-esteem means simply “feeling good about yourself”. For Branden, self-esteem is a much more profound state of relationship with yourself.
Branden’s formulation of self-esteem has more to do with honor, integrity, consciousness, self-respect, self-responsibility, and self-efficacy. It has to do with how you live your life, not simply saying nice things or repeating affirmations to yourself. This is a very important distinction.
For Branden, “self-esteem is the reputation that you build with yourself”. Today I want to revisit an idea that may help you to improve your reputation with yourself.
I’ve talked before about Dr. Martin Seligman’s formulation of “Learned Optimism” (“Know Your ABC’s”). The main idea in a nutshell is that when good things happen, you want to think of them as permanent, pervasive, and personal (the three P’s): “I made this good thing happen, I often make good things like this happen, and I make good things like this happen in all areas of my life”.
When there is a negative event in your life, you want to think exactly the opposite: think of it as transitory (“this is only one mistake that happened”), impersonal (“I didn’t do a very good job leading that meeting; it’s not a character flaw of mine, I just didn’t prepare well enough and it was a very challenging group”), and isolated (“I gave a poor speech, so I need to work on that skill. I usually do things well otherwise”).
When you do this, you become more optimistic.
When you go in the opposite direction, you become more pessimistic.
Optimism is one of the psychological elements that is most available to change. If you set your mind to it, you can become more optimistic - which has more to do with your personal happiness and a life well-lived than I can list in this short space. Take my word for it: You want to be more optimistic.
But there is a deeper element to learning to think more optimistically.
Whatever choices you make, whatever actions you take, those choices and actions that you think of as permanent, pervasive, and personal, become central to the kind of person you think you are. These are the building blocks of your reputation with yourself.
Of course you want to actually choose well and do good things in the world, but if your assessment of the good things you do is impermanent, impersonal, and isolated, then you will not be able to take these in, you will not own them as a part of yourself.
If you ever make mistakes, poor judgments, or bad decisions - as we all do on occasion - and you think of them as permanent, pervasive, and personal, then your negative self-assessment can become deeply embedded in your sense of who you are. For example: “I always make mistakes like this one, I use poor judgment in everything I do, I am a person who cannot make a good decision”.
So it’s possible that you could be a person who does mostly good things but occasionally makes a mistake, and yet if you think about yourself pessimistically your reputation with yourself could be very poor.
I am absolutely not suggesting that you don’t need to take the actions that make for a good life. To the contrary, this column is dedicated to helping you take the actions necessary to create a genuinely good life for yourself in reality.
But you must also own your good actions, and distinguish these from the mistakes and missteps that are a normal human part of living and growing.
Focus over the next several weeks on watching how you think of positive and negative events. Begin to challenge the three P’s when you assess the negative events, and introduce the three P’s when you assess the positive events.
Earn your good reputation with yourself. Then own it.
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