Chapter 2 - The Meaning of Self-Esteem
Note to the reader: This is chapter 2 of an 11 part series of notes / important ideas gathered from my reading of The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden.
Self-Efficacy and Self-Respect
According to Branden, self-esteem is made up of two interrelated components. These are self-efficacy and self-respect.
Self-efficacy means confidence in the functioning of my mind, in my ability to think, understand, learn, choose and make decisions; confidence in my ability to understand the facts of reality that fall within the sphere of my interests and needs; self-trust; self-reliance.
Self-respect means assurance of my value; an affirmative attitude towards my right to live and to be happy; comfort in appropriately asserting my thoughts, wants, and needs; the feeling that joy and fulfillment are my natural birthright.
Self-efficacy is the feeling of being in control of one’s life. Having confidence in your thoughts, in your mind, and your ability to operate within your life. It is confidence that your mind can cope with the basic challenges of life.
Self-respect is what allows us to have positive relationships with others. To have self-respect means to be able to have healthy interactions with the world around us - interactions that serve both our community (or interested parties) and ourselves. Self-respect is what allows us to be happy. It seeks to have positive interactions with the world around us. It is the affirmation that personal fulfillment and joy are our natural birthright.
To sum up in a formal definition: Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of happiness.
By stating these definitions, we can then say that to have high self-esteem means to feel confidently appropriate to life and to face the challenges of life. To have low self-esteem is to feel inappropriate to life; wrong, not about this issue or that, but wrong as a person. Wrong for life. To have average self-esteem means to fluctuate between these two states - sometimes behaving appropriately, sometimes inappropriately, sometimes feeling right as a person and sometimes wrong, sometimes acting wisely, sometimes foolishly. Again, one’s actions and consequences reinforce internal beliefs, and the cycle continues.
It’s important to state that one’s self-esteem creates action tendencies. The health of your self-esteem will determine how you act, and the consequences of those actions will strengthen the beliefs that caused them.
Why We Need Self-Esteem
In chapter 1, Branden argued that self-esteem is a basic need. It is useful to understand why this is so. Human beings have a unique trait in that we have the ability to think or to not think. Thinking is a unique necessity required in our survival. Lower animals do not have the need to think, or to have conscious thoughts as mandated by their survival. The need to think - as a means of survival is a very human attribute.
To learn to grow food, to construct a bridge, to harness electricity, to grasp the healing possibilities of some substance, to allocate resources as to maximize productivity, to see wealth - producing possibilities where they had not been seen before, to conduct a scientific experiment, to create - all require a process of thought.
Our need for self-esteem is the result of two basic facts, both intrinsic to our species. The first is that we depend for our survival and our successful mastery of the environment on the appropriate use of our consciousness; our life and well-being depend on our ability to think. The second is that the right use of our consciousness is not automatic, is not “wired-in” by nature.
From this, one can argue that self-esteem is how confidently and successfully we respond to the challenges imposed on us by reality. Your ability to respond to challenges and to act appropriately in a given scenario is the act of self-efficacy. It is intrinsically necessary to your survival as a human being. Your ability to know your worth and to know that you are worthy of happiness is a prerequisite of happiness. Self-esteem is a need if we believe that the health of the mind is measured in our ability to navigate life’s challenges adequately, and to know that we are worthy of happiness.
Your actions in the world cannot be divorced from your self-esteem. If you respond to the challenges of reality in a way that leads to success, happiness and prosperity - your self-estimate goes up - your self-esteem goes up. If you respond in a way that leads you to ruin, unhappiness and misery - your self-esteem goes down.
The point is not that our self-esteem “should” be affected by the choices we make but rather that by our natures it must be affected. If we develop habit patterns that cripple or incapacitate us for effective functioning and that cause us to distrust ourselves, it would be irrational to suggest that we “should” go on feeling just as efficacious and worthy as we would feel if our choices had been better. This would imply that our actions have or should have nothing to do with how we feel about ourselves.
Any time we have to act, to face a challenge, to make a moral decision, we affect our feelings about ourselves for good or bad - depending on the nature of our response and the mental processes behind it. And if we avoid action and decisions in spite of their obvious necessity, that, too affects our sense of self. Our need for self-esteem is the need to know we are functioning as our life and well-being require.
What Is Meant By Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy is confidence in our ability to learn what we need to learn, and confidence in our ability to do what we need to do in order to deal with the challenges of life adequately. Self-efficacy goes beyond domain knowledge pertaining to a certain skill. Self-efficacy is confidence in the processes that led to said domain knowledge.
Self-efficacy is not the conviction that we will be able to master anything that we put our minds to. It is the conviction that we are capable in principle of learning what we need to learn and doing what we need to do to achieve our goals and to deal with the challenges of every day life.
Self-efficacy is deeper than confidence in our specific knowledge and skills, based on past successes and accomplishments, although it is clearly nurtured by them. It is confidence in what made it possible for us to acquire knowledge and skills and to achieve successes. It is confidence in our ability to think, in our consciousness and how we choose to use it. Again, trust in our processes - and as a consequence a disposition to expect success for our efforts.
To lack self-efficacy is to anticipate defeat rather than victory. It is to be paralyzed (to varying degrees) by the challenges of every day life. “Who am I to think? Who am I to master challenges? Who am I to choose - decide - leave the comfort of the familiar - persist in the face of obstacles - fight for my values?”
The roots of self-efficacy are found in homes and environments where an individual is led to believe that understanding is possible and that thinking is not futile. As far as our own actions are concerned, self-efficacy is created by not giving up, by choosing to fight for understanding, even in the face of difficulties.
Low self-efficacy tends to produce discomfort with the new and unfamiliar and over-attachment to yesterday’s skills. Higher self-efficacy makes it easier to move from an earlier level of knowledge and development and to master new knowledge, skills, and challenges.
The Basic Challenges Of Life
Confidence in being able to cope with the basic challenges of life is meant by confidence in one’s ability to support one’s own existence. To earn a living. To take independent care of oneself in the world - assuming that an opportunity to do so exists.
In the human realm, confidence in our ability to function effectively in interactions with other human beings. Being able to give and receive things like benevolence, cooperation, trust, friendship, respect, love; Being able to be responsibly self-assertive and being able to accept the self-assertiveness of others.
In the realm of life itself, being able to cope with misfortune and adversity - the opposite of passive surrender to pain; The ability to bounce back and continue to live. To be able to keep moving forward, despite misfortune and adversity.
No experience of efficacy can be complete if it does not include that of feeling competent in our human dealings. If I am unable to create personal and professional relationships that will be experienced as positive by both me and the other party (which is what “competence” in the human realm essentially means), then I am lacking at a very basic level; I am without efficacy in a vital sphere. And this reality is reflected in my self-esteem.
What Is Meant By Self-Respect
Self-respect entails the expectation of friendship, love, and happiness as natural, as a result of who we are and what we do. Self-respect is the conviction that our life and well-being are worth acting to support, protect and nurture. It is the conviction that we are good and worthwhile and deserving of the respect of others. It is the conviction that our happiness and personal fulfillment are important enough to work for.
As far as environment is concerned, self-respect is nurtured through being treated with respect by parents and other family members. As far as our actions are concerned, one of its roots is satisfaction with our own moral choices.
A simple and informal self-esteem “test”, though far from infallible, is to inquire of people whether they feel proud of and satisfied with their moral choices.
Examples of moral choices are: To tell the truth or not to tell the truth, to honor one’s promises and commitments or not to.
To understand the need for self-respect, consider this: We need to consider ourselves worthy of the rewards of our actions. If we do not have this conviction, how would we know how to take care of ourselves, protect our legitimate interests, satisfy our own needs, or enjoy our own achievements?
Three basic observations: (1) If we respect ourselves, we tend to act in ways that confirm and reinforce this respect, such as requiring others to deal with us appropriately. (2) If we do not respect ourselves, we tend to act in ways that lower our sense of our own value even further, such as accepting or sanctioning inappropriate behavior towards us by others, thereby confirming and reinforcing our negativity. (3) If we wish to raise the level of our self-respect, we need to act in ways that will cause it to rise - and this begins with a commitment to the value of our own person, which is then expressed through congruent behavior.
Pride
Branden describes pride as a unique kind of pleasure. If self-esteem contemplates what needs to be done and says I can, then pride contemplates what has been accomplished and says I did.
Pride comes from the achievement of our deepest values. It is the emotional reward of accomplishment. It is a value to be attained.
If self-esteem pertains to the experience of our fundamental competence and value, pride pertains to the more explicitly conscious pleasure we take in ourselves because of our actions and achievements.
A Personal Example.
I can remember feeling deeply proud of myself when I released EmotiveSpace - a website that I worked on for over a year, and put it on the internet. I had taken a few things that were deeply important to me - writing, emotional intelligence, mental health, self-awareness - and combined them into an app. I built the app and put it on the internet. I took what I deeply valued and actualized it into something real that exists in the world today.
The day I released EmotiveSpace and put it on the internet was one of the happiest days of my entire life. Shortly after launching the app, I remember being in a state of pure euphoria. The achievement of one’s deepest values is one of the greatest rewards life can offer.
Personal Thoughts
I feel like there is a relationship between self-efficacy and self-respect. I sometimes notice at work, when I’m struggling with a task or my level of efficacy doesn’t meet my own internal standards of what I am capable of and what is expected of me, my self-respect will go down. I start doing silly things like eating unhealthy food / sugary snacks, stress eating, and in general just choosing behaviors that diminish my self-respect. I notice that when things aren’t going my way, and I start to feel nervous or even insecure, I lose self-respect.
When I am feeling effective at work, and I am meeting my personal standards - I feel a lot better and as a result I treat myself better. I even think that there is a quote in this chapter about personal standards.
It seems like personal integrity has a lot to do with self-respect. A person who has a good relationship with truth and a good relationship with reality, will have more self-respect than someone who doesn’t. But why is that? Is self-respect the reward of having a good relationship with reality? I mean it makes sense. A person who has a good relationship with reality and a good relationship with truth would have higher self-respect than someone who doesn’t - simply because it’s an achievement to have a good relationship with truth and reality. That takes effort, thought, and conscious action, and reality is result oriented.
The quote on standards:
Whether the values by which we explicitly or implicitly judge ourselves are conscious or subconscious, rational or irrational, life serving or life threatening, everyone judges himself or herself by some standard. To the extend that we fail to satisfy that standard, to the extend there is a split between ideals and practice, self-respect suffers. Thus, personal integrity is intimately related to the moral aspect of self-esteem.
For the optimal realization of our possibilities, we need to trust ourselves and we need to admire ourselves, and the trust and admiration need to be grounded in reality, not generated out of fantasy and self delusion.