My current theory is that self-esteem isn’t about yourself at all!
Self-esteem is your estimate of how much help/support/contribution/love you can get from others.
This explains why a person needs to feel a certain amount of “confidence” before trying something that is obviously their best bet. By “confidence” we basically just mean “support from other people or the expectation of same.” The kinds of things that people usually need “confidence” to do are difficult and involve the risk of public failure and blame, even if they’re clearly the best option from an individual perspective.
This makes a lot of sense to me. It fits in with my sense that:
people with low self-esteem don’t expect others to help/support them long-term, as they feel they’ll be ‘found out’ as being worthless/terrible
whenever anyone is helpful to them they respond disproportionately effusively and say how kind the other person is.
In future I will model surprising low self-esteem as failing to accurately read signals about their level of respect/power. And that people with appropriately low levels of low self-esteem should focus on being useful to the people and communities around them.
My current theory is that self-esteem isn’t about yourself at all!
Self-esteem is your estimate of how much help/support/contribution/love you can get from others.
This explains why a person needs to feel a certain amount of “confidence” before trying something that is obviously their best bet. By “confidence” we basically just mean “support from other people or the expectation of same.” The kinds of things that people usually need “confidence” to do are difficult and involve the risk of public failure and blame, even if they’re clearly the best option from an individual perspective.
This makes a lot of sense to me. It fits in with my sense that:
people with low self-esteem don’t expect others to help/support them long-term, as they feel they’ll be ‘found out’ as being worthless/terrible
whenever anyone is helpful to them they respond disproportionately effusively and say how kind the other person is.
In future I will model surprising low self-esteem as failing to accurately read signals about their level of respect/power. And that people with appropriately low levels of low self-esteem should focus on being useful to the people and communities around them.