Chapter One: The Curse of Self-Esteem

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“The Curse of Self-Esteem or What’s wrong with the Feel Good Movement?”. . .
Cover of Newsweek Magazine

When the National Council for Self-esteem asked one hundred teachers to define self-esteem, they gave 27 distinctly different definitions. Imagine if you asked a thousand teachers! After weeks of careful deliberation, the Council defined self-esteem as: “The experience of feeling that you are worthy of happiness and capable of managing life’s challenges.”

A prominent self-esteem advocate, Nathaniel Branden explains:
“Self-esteem . . . is an intimate experience; it resides in the core of our being. It is what I think and feel about myself, not what someone else thinks or feels about me.”  

Self-esteem issues develop when children learn (incorrectly) that there is a direct cause-effect relationship between outside influences and their emotions. They make this assumption after hearing statements such as: “She/he makes me angry” or “That makes me sad.” Educators reinforce this false perception by teaching a distorted view of self-esteem. I suppose they feel that if they don’t do this our children won’t “get it.” Unhealthy comparisons such as: “Why can’t you sit quietly like other children?... You’re so clumsy ... Don’t be so emotional ... You shouldn’t feel that way ... You’re hyperactive ... You have a short attention span.” ... serve to reinforce a child’s insecurity.


Even positive reinforcement from a feel-good-about-yourself perspective leads young people astray. We have swung the pendulum too far, as illustrated by a public school principal in Ohio who said teaching children two plus two could equal five protects their precious self-esteem. (Give me a break!)


Bill Bennett, former United States Education Secretary, quotes an international study of 13 year olds given a standardized math test. Researchers asked each student to predict the results. On the test, Korean students did best, Japanese students second, and Americans last. However, the American students predicted they would be number one, while Korean and Japanese students placed themselves lower than their actual scores.
When feeling good about yourself (self-esteem) replaces striving to be the best you can be (competence), standards decline. In the past thirty years, SAT scores have dropped at least seventy-five points! What’s going on here? I thought feeling good about yourself improved performance? Apparently not.

The good news is that we can expose the damage done by the system of self-esteem and learn to defend ourselves against its dirty tricks.

In my early school days, I was doing a math problem on the blackboard when my teacher yelled out: “Mather, you’re better than that, now smarten up!” My throat went dry, my face got red—I couldn’t think. I stumbled through oral book reports feeling foolish as I felt my face turn bright red. My hands shook and a strange quiver appeared in the muscles of my right leg. I panicked. For years I mentally replayed these and similar experiences. My current behavior was based on mentally revisiting these old feelings thousands of times. I gave myself plenty of unnecessary grief. Who says getting an algebra question wrong or losing your place in a memorized speech is making a fool of yourself? (I did!) I made a giant leap of faith by attaching my panic to the act of speaking in public and from that decision on, I avoided public speaking like the plague. Those around me supported my fears by assuring me I was not alone.

Many people go through life creating similar, unnecessary panic. There are those who desperately look for painless ways to overcome similar fears by attending one-day public speaking seminars conducted by so-called experts. Participants know they won’t be asked to speak at these meetings, which pander to their fears. Organizers base these seminars on a flawed model of self-improvement contending: “Until you know why you are afraid, you cannot overcome your fears.”


Nathanial Branden suggests:
“... the therapist’s chief task is to make the patient aware of the psycho epistemological processes by which his values and goals were chosen... The patient has to be led to understand in what ways his initial default on the responsibility of independence generated the sense of insecurity ... Is the patient’s understanding of the nature and origins of his problems all that is required to produce a cure? The answer is: No, it is not all that is required; it is essential, but is only a first step.” 

Are you confused? So am I. Read that quote again, slowly this time … (Okay, if you’ve read it more than twice—move on.)
Sadly, uncovering the underlying cause of our distress still leaves us with the task of dealing with our panic and, worse still, deflects us from the responsibility of developing genuine competence.

Medical experts express concern over the administration of drugs to ostensibly deal with these psychological problems. Even more disturbing is the practice of subjecting young children to powerful drugs. Imagine a child, difficult to handle, drugged while sitting in a classroom. I know there are those who challenge this kind of talk, so here is the opinion of Dr. Richard Bromfield, Ph.D., of the Harvard Medical School. He calls the drug Ritalin “wildly over prescribed,” and suggests that drugs treat only symptoms, not underlying causes. He explains: “Medication becomes a badge of helplessness. How can a child develop the capacity to control himself while the prescription’s strong message is he can’t?” 

Responsibly prescribed drugs do seem to help some children, but doctors are concerned about their side effects. Labelling children as helpless or somehow backward is highly irresponsible. With confusing data on both sides of the issue—what are parents to do? There may be a reasonable alternative.

Suppose I am afraid of water and won’t learn to swim. I have all the symptoms —sweaty palms, queasiness, flushed face and the mere thought of swimming panics me. I rationalize that I really don’t want to learn how to swim. Secretly, I feel foolish. Is it necessary to understand why I am afraid? No! Even if I succeeded in enhancing my self-esteem, I’m still left with the issue of learning how to swim! What I need is a qualified swimming instructor. Does he\she need to know why I am afraid? No. Since I cannot effectively coach myself, it is important that my coach knows how to teach me to swim.

Unfortunately, self-esteem psychology permeates amateur sports coaching. Experienced coaches know better, but rookie coaches fall into the trap of wanting to protect a player’s fragile self-esteem. Don’t misunderstand; I’m not endorsing cruel, over-critical, or over-demanding coaching, but self-esteem’s feel-good-about-yourself philosophy stifles the development of high-level competency.

A Canadian Olympic gold medalist told me that expert coaching (including direct suggestions for improvement) was instrumental in his journey towards world-class performance. This swimmer disliked his coach’s demeanour but under his tutelage improved faster than ever, eventually winning a Gold Medal.

Think back to your favourite coach. Were they tough or easy? I had a football coach who, after telling us to do three laps, yelled: “One more lap.” We’d moan and groan, but we did the laps. He pushed us knowing we’d need reserve energy during the game. He pushed us farther than we believed we could go.


Recently I spotted this headline:
COACHES TEACH YOUNG BOYS TO PLAY BALL AND TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES.


Intrigued, I read further. One coach said: “We all have to do our best. It’s just fair and the way it should be. It doesn’t mean being better than anyone else. It just means doing your best...”
He told reporters that yelling parents aren’t tolerated and no one gets berated or humiliated for goofing up. No player is ever isolated because of what they’ve done on the field. Cheering is welcome, but no temper tantrums.. These coaches allocate playing-time by using the most competent players during crucial points in a game. Team members accept this—and there’s no whining! Contrast this with fairness doctrines insisting on equal playing time. Except with very young children who need playing time to develop basic skills, equal time robs players of the motivation to earn their place on the team. Effective coaches avoid unfair comparisons and motivate players to be the best they can be by building competence not self-esteem.
Sports is just one of self-esteem’s many victims. Some educators, apparently oblivious to their responsibility of preparing students for a competitive world, fall for its twisted logic. One school baseball league actually eliminated scoring altogether. (Do you think the players kept score anyway? You bet!)

So-called fairness doctrines stress equal outcome not equal opportunity. This is the promise of “outcome-based education” which sounds harmless, until you investigate its roots—self-esteem! You can’t guarantee equal outcome without significantly lowering standards. Lowering standards just to make things “fair” is a knee-jerk reaction. When choosing sides in school sports, I was always one of the last players chosen. Granted, I felt badly about it, but this only served to convince me that a professional sports career was probably not an option.
Ironically, flawed self-esteem logic sets up unrealistic and dangerous comparisons. If you think beating someone in a skills competition makes you a better person (self-esteem), you mislead yourself. If I’m better than you at math, I’m better at math—and that’s it! Comparing your peformance to someone else’s performance invites feelings of inadequacy. This phenomenon is the system of self-esteem at its worst. Your achievements do not make you a special or less than special person.

In the Broadway show A Chorus Line, dancers line up with their 8x10 glossies singing: “I am not my résumé!” You are not what you do. You are YOU. A hit song says it best “No one can compare to you!” As Wayne Dyer puts it: “If you are what you do, when you don’t—you aren’t!”
I was invited to speak to a local networking support group of a hundred or so unemployed executives. They found the I am not my résumé concept particularly enlightening. A government agency had provided them with self-esteem tapes ostensibly to help them better cope with being “downsized.” Most of these people didn’t know what hit them. For years they believed they were their résumés.

Our local paper published an article exposing this gross misuse of government funds. Unemployed people deserve better treatment, but so far nothing has changed. One city spent over three-quarters of a million dollars on this stuff. The scam continues!
It may feel good to allow emotions to run our lives but developing genuine self-direction means choosing constructive rather than destructive thought patterns. Genuine courage involves making choices most likely to attract the results you truly desire.

Here’s Dr. Albert Ellis’s advice*. “Imagine that you are performing something remarkably well . . . Let yourself feel very happy about this accomplishment. Now observe your happy feeling. Is it only a feeling of being happy about your performance? Or do you also—be honest now—feel great about you, about yourself, about your whole being? . . . If you do feel like a noble, superhuman, holier than thou person, you are then, according to RET, experiencing an inappropriate positive feeling. For you are then in a grandiose, egotistical state. You have jumped from the idea that “My behavior is outstanding” to “I am therefore an outstanding, great person.”


* Albert Ellis How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything
Carol Publishing Group 

Sidebar: The term patient bothers me. (Ellis and Schaef use client.) If a person acts the way others think they shouldn’t, does this make them sick? The power doctors have over their patients is awesome as illustrated by a disturbing experiment. In 1973 several mental health professionals presented themselves at various hospitals declaring that they “felt empty” or “hollow” (bad about themselves?) Hospitals admitted them for periods of seven to fifty-two days. All were diagnosed with various illnesses but acted normally once admitted. One of the participants, Dr. D.L. Rosenhan, professor of psychology and law at Stanford University said: “We continue to label patients schizophrenics, manic-depressives, and insane, as if those words had captured the essence of understanding... We have known for a long time that our diagnoses are not reliable or useful, but we nevertheless continue to use them.”

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