500 Words a Week - Does This Help Me?

I’ve been having some battles with self-esteem recently. Feelings of not being good enough. Feelings of never amounting to anything or never doing good work. The thing about some of these thoughts are that they tend to spiral into each other. Once one occurs the other isn’t far behind. Like surfing for the first time. A wave hits you and you fall off the board, as you begin to get up and settle yourself, you get hit with another wave.

One thing I’ve come across that has shed a little light into these feelings, is the question “does this help me?” The answer in always a resounding no, and it sometimes helps me let these thoughts drift out with the fading the tide.

I think many of us experience thoughts like this. Low self-esteem or self-worth. Due to this we may look to gain some form of self-esteem or self-worth from other areas. The main one for me is my job, for others in may be sport or hobbies. I have attached what and who I am to my job. Rather than my job just being a small part of me. I have attached my sense of self-worth to my job. The unfortunate part of this is when the job doesn’t go well, you feel worthless. When something is challenged, you feel challenged. There is a certain amount of dissonance that needs to be put in-between us and our work. We need to realise it’s not the only place we can derive a sense of meaning from, a sense of worth from.

A quote from Ed Catmull in “Creativity Inc” I continuously come back to is: “You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”

However, I think this can be extended to:

“You are not your job, and if you identify too closely with your job, you will take offense when you are challenged.”

In “The Confidence Gap” by Russ Harris, he talks about how self-esteem isn’t something we want. He discusses how high self-esteem has been shown to correlate with egotism, narcissism and arrogance. Russ says it’s not self-esteem we want, it’s self-acceptance. In moving towards self-acceptance, we move away from the constant judgement and trials we put ourself through. Of course, we can say this all we like. We know our mind will still come up with those judgements, will still comment about if we are doing a good job or not. We then come back to the question above: “Does this help me?”

I’ll conclude with something Russ wrote which I enjoyed:

“What matters most in life is what you do, what you stand for, the way you behave. This is far more important than the stories you believe about yourself.”