Comments

So nine place ribbons are good? And build genuine self-esteem?

Posted by Mike Smock at May 17, 2005 5:03 PM

oops... meant ninth

Posted by Mike Smock at May 17, 2005 5:06 PM

Thanks for this Tom and yes I have some thoughts about the topic

How anyone can cast doubt on the value of building self-esteem simply baffles me.

People who have low esteem need our help and support and encouragement.

Frankly, I don't see why we cannot teach self esteem and humility at the same time. The two are compatible bed fellows in my opinion.

Most people I know with high self esteem are comfortable with themselves - not to be confused with arrogance. Those same people are invariably also full of humility.

The article in The Times is probably shows cultural differences between Britain and America.

You guys tend to be very positive thinkers - see things with great optimism - we Brits tend to be more cautious and conservative and the article maybe reflects some of that.

I have always praised my three kids - I stress the positive aspects in them and try to build their self-esteem. I have always told them that they should respect people who do not have the advantages that we enjoy.

It is a great topic Tom and like you I resent people 'playing around' with fragile mental health issues like self-esteem.

Trevor

Posted by Trevor Gay at May 17, 2005 6:32 PM

i too am a Brit, now having lived in the US for 5 years. i definitely see this cultural divide first hand every day in my job at a college.
it amazes me how confident American young people are - i love the 'can do' attitude! it's so refreshing to hear and see the confidence, and completely different from my own upbringing, where i was encouraged to put myself down at any available opportunity.
not humility - 'worminess' as i like to call it. a false humility that is simply looking for compliments to bolster low self-esteem and therefore not appear...worst of all...arrogant.

i have been hugely empowered since moving here, and i am so thankful to my American friends who encourage me daily to embrace my gifts and strengths as opposed to down-play them. it's funny when, every now and then, i'll hear myself say "i'm really good at that" and totally cringe inside as the British in me says "shhh - that's not for you to say!"

Posted by kittymc at May 17, 2005 8:27 PM

Tom / Trevor,

Completely agree.

I don't see how anyone with much sense can't distinguish between confidence/self-esteem and arrogance. It's all in the person's attitude. One versus the other is: I'm smart and I do know what I'm talking about on subject X, but I'm not going to be rude about it. VERSUS I absolutely know what I'm talking about it and I'm going to make sure everyone knows it too and if you don't like it...too bad.

Messing with someone's self-esteem is shaky ground to be on. You never know what even a few kind (or harsh) words can do to a person.

Major case in point - Tim Sanders' Love Is The Killer App. There's an unbelievable story in there. Okay, now that I'm writing this, I don't recall if it was in the book or if it was a story he shared with me in September. Pretty sure it was in the book - about a boss who praised an employee who was very quiet. The next day (or so) the employee came in with an XBOX system or game for his boss. The employee sold his gun and bought it for his boss because he remembered hearing that he was interested in it. The employee felt valued enough to not kill himself only from a few kind words from his boss.

Posted by Tony May / Mayday Media at May 17, 2005 11:26 PM

Self esteem, a very interesting issue, as a trainer of unemployed through to business exec's If over the length of a course, I have not raised the self esteem and confidence of most of the individuals then I have failed (my own measure).

I like to recall what Brian Tracy (USA) says about parents "The one thing parents must do above all else is to build the self esteem of their children".

I for one cannot think of any other thing a parent can do that can have such a positive influence.

Posted by Steve Gray at May 18, 2005 1:14 AM

Man, sounds like someone is getting defensive! Also, profanity is very unprofessional.

Posted by The Dude at May 18, 2005 1:23 AM

I'm OK - You're OK

Posted by davidcoe... at May 18, 2005 4:43 AM

I think we ought to be talking about more words than "respect" and "humility", important as they are. How about "honesty" and "respect" as well? (Trevor mentioned this above.) Most of the good leaders I've known have a basic respect for people and their ability / motivation to do a good job. They're also honest enough to praise them when they do well and correct them when things go wrong. I think true self-esteem comes from feedback both given and taken in a frank, honest and constructive manner.

Posted by Mark JF at May 18, 2005 4:53 AM

Excellent observation Mark and I agree with you totally my friend.

I have worked for a small number of leaders who have mastered the art - many have not.

My gretest guru in HONESTY and RESPECT - I love both of those words - is 75 year old Professor George Giarchi from Plymouth University, England.

I am 52 years old but George is still my academic and life supervisor.

He has the most fantastic stlye based on honesty and respect. Geroge always states explicitly he learns more from his students than anywhere else. He has that ability posessed by few to always make me feel better - even on those occasions I felt my world was falling down around my ears!

An hour with George is more effective than a month with some teachers/leaders I have expereinced.

He has also mastered the art of feedback that is always constructive and never ever negative! - a rare talent.

Interesting also that George was given a new contract by his University that takes him to age 76 and he plans on getting another contract when he reaches 76. Being comfortable with himself has stood George in good stead - I would guess George's parents gave him positive feedback and encouraged him to develop self esteem!

I rest my case.

Posted by Trevor Gay at May 18, 2005 5:19 AM

I’m with Kitty here. My experience mirrors yours. I love America. Most of all, I love her ideals. That she doesn’t always live up to them or goes about them in ways we question is no reason to thrash her. At least she tries, and tolerates our questions - openly. Not everyone in the world has the freedoms and opportunities Americans enjoy and though there are aspects of American culture I do not like, I can’t think of a better founding principle for any country to have than freedom written into its constitution.

I hope the true spirit of America lasts forever.

Posted by Noel Guinane at May 18, 2005 5:35 AM

Here here Noel - good luck to all Americans - keep up your wonderful opitimism.

I too am ultra proud and protective of my own nation (Britain) and its heritage.

Although I just love cultural diversity I sometimes just wish more Brits had the American view of seeing life as full of opportunities!!

Fabulous discussion

Posted by Trevor Gay at May 18, 2005 6:29 AM

I love the debate around the cultural US/UK question (I work with a lot of US and Canadian people - it's always fascinating)

Interesting counterpoint. In adversity it often the non positive people who carry on the longest. This is a common thread in much change management research. The people with a realistic (perhaps slightly cynical?) outlook actually have a healthier state of mind. Studies done on POWs i.e. a nasty situation with no known end point show that the upbeats fared less well (too many false hope "it'll all be over by xmas") than the realists "I sure I get out sometime I just don't know when"

Cynacism is a very power defence mechanism and is appropriate in SOME circumstances

Posted by PaulH at May 18, 2005 7:20 AM

Good point Paul - I hear what you are saying.

I am an optimist and I am sometimes accused of 'seeing the world through rose tinted glasses' 'a blue sky thinker' - all the usual stereotypical taunts that I have to take on the chin. Despite the knocks I remain optimistic most of the time!

I guess my simple philosophy is that I would rather be looking forward with realism and hope than looking forward with negativity and cynicism. Otherwise why bother to look forward at all?

I do not feel in any way qualified to comment on POW's - that must be an awful situation

I guess however - even in that situation - to be optimistic was one reason to simply stay alive!

Some of my best friends are cynics and I like an element of cynicism in a group of people - too many optimistic people together would probably drive me mad too!!

I do a lot of work with teams and cynics always have a role. The problem comes when there are more cynics than non cynics!

This is a fabulous discussion folks - I hope we can keep it going.

Posted by Trevor Gay at May 18, 2005 8:18 AM

Trevor - I find that cynicism can be witty and amusing at first glance but it usually starts to become negative quite quickly. However, a team member who can dish out a healthy dose of scepticism very often provides a useful reality check. Mind you, it's a tricky balance to pull off...

Posted by Mark JF at May 18, 2005 10:27 AM

I agree that self confidence is very important to build in children. The best way I have found to accomplish this is by being absolutely honest with them, with the result that they have decently thick skins and are perfectly capable of taking a joke in good spirits and even feel confident enough to tease me about my weight! (Is that confidence or cockiness, I'm not sure!) I recognize that they have sense and strength. Their confidence grows not because we walk on eggshells around each other, but because we truly give credit where credit is due.

I wish sometimes for less vocal children with lower self esteem, but it looks like I'm out of luck for this lifetime!

Posted by Cassandra Helm at May 18, 2005 11:13 AM

Try Feeling Good by David Burns. Bottom line. among others, one of the few the shrinks agree on, is that if you can't love yourself you can't truly love others. This is very personal to me, a psych problem I've wrestled with for years. I have a fairly decent-size ego, but self esteem in the tank ... and it ain't funny. I'm sure this "true confession" will surprise a lot of you. Any long-term depressives among you ...

Posted by tom peters at May 18, 2005 2:48 PM

The greatest freedom in life is not caring what people think. I admire your courage in admitting that.

Posted by Noel Guinane at May 18, 2005 3:41 PM

"The Gift of Being Yourself" by David Benner is another good read on the subject.

I'd wager that many people have poor self esteem because they believe a lie about who they are. We believe we have to please other people in order to have value, our significance is found in what we do, that others dictate our value. When we understand who we are and the redemptive qualities within us, then we can go about living an authentic life from the core of our being.

Noel's right. Other people (and their thoughts or criticisms) don't change who I am.

Posted by Dustin at May 18, 2005 3:58 PM

Dustin, brilliant ... per the above, David Burns' point exactly!

Posted by tom peters at May 18, 2005 4:16 PM

Cassandra commented on self "confidence," and therein lies the distinction. Self confidence is about "faith" in oneself and ones abilities. Self-esteem, on the other hand, is about "pride" in oneself. See the difference. Great people are both confident AND humble. Please teach your kids. They'll be caring for me one day soon. :)

Posted by Tom Asacker at May 18, 2005 4:21 PM

Tom,

Not to belabor the point, but this is incredibly freeing stuff and I'd hate to see people relegate it to just being an interesting discussion on a blog. This is something worthy of every person's pursuit, yet we continue the rat race falsely believing we're really just a rat. It has taken me two years just to get a glimpse of the person I truly am. How liberating! More important than the liberation of people held captive by dicators is the personal liberation of those held captive by their own false beliefs.

Posted by Dustin at May 18, 2005 4:27 PM

Re: Tom A.'s comment, no, that's not quite it.

Self-confidence implies a "can do" attitude, i.e., you believe that you can handle whatever challenges life throws at you. Self-esteem is believing in your essential worth -- independent of what you do or what others think of you. The first is often confused with the second. But, believe me (and I think Tom P. knows what I'm talking about), it's possible to be outwardly "successful" while still, deep down, believing that you're a fraud.

Posted by Paula at May 18, 2005 5:10 PM

I am not tolerant when my children seek attention for something insignificant, but when they are genuinely upset about something they will not find a more sympathetic ear. Learning to be as self-reliant as possible builds great strength of character and confidence, but it does not breed arrogance. Self confidence is the same thing as self esteem, but arrogance is something different from confidence. These things are unrelated to emotional distress. Emotional distress is separate. It is a common misconception in my opinion that depression is directly linked to one’s self image. In my experience, one is a deeply emotional state and not necessarily related to one’s perception of oneself. True emotional distress is tricky and children know instinctively that the people who care about them most are the ones to turn to. I strongly advise anyone who is for whatever reason unhappy to seek out a friend or hell even a bartender and speak to them. Talking through whatever the trouble is makes it easier to see it objectively and very often the people who are in need of a friendly ear end up solving the situation for themselves.

Posted by Cassandra Helm at May 18, 2005 5:26 PM

Long-timer, but I've learned a new way and I've changed my approach. It used to be that I would put on a "suit" to go out into the world, but that "suit" wasn't really my true suit; it was the suit I thought everyone wanted me to wear. That suit was heavy and uncomfortable, but I could wear it well, and I was successful, but no one could see "me" - my identity. I've been slipping out of that suit and putting on my own sexy little number, my own identity; forget the boardroom, I want to be President of the United States! You know what else I learned? It is all in our neuropathways and all changeable. There are no "bad" people, no "bad" deeds - only neuropathways that need to be re-programed. Hmm...sounds like a corporate philosophy too. It starts with knowing your identity. Start from the inside out....

Posted by Wendy at May 18, 2005 11:36 PM

Went through clinical depression one time and you are right--it ain't funny. For whatever reason, it ended and never came back--lucky me.

Self esteem and self confidence are valued less by different cultures. If you were to study the Japanese business culture or even the family/personal culture, you would find that a sense of self worth is almost always equalled to "self importance," and that is always bad because it means you place your "self" ahead of the "group." That being said, many Japanese have come to realize that for all the groupism and sacrifice they have endured, they haven't received any return. Many are now changing that dynamic and trying to follow the American model. It makes for some truly amazing, although typically low-key, cultural confrontations.

That being said, it is amazing that the company I work for--a Japanese corporation in the US--has sort of successfully blended the Japanese "groupism" and American "individualism" into a very successful and dynamic (always changing) business model. It sometimes appears that we are a company staffed by thwarted idealists, rebels, non-conformists, ultra-conservatives, and other freaks. Thank God!

Posted by Mike at May 19, 2005 4:51 PM

Wendy's comment is pertinent. But for those of us who suffer from low self-esteem, the problem is that we're afraid to take off that "suit" because we believe that no one could possibly respect/care about/take seriously the true identity that it hides. Not that it isn't difficult enough to learn to be yourself, rather than the person that you think others want you to be! But overcoming the conviction that you're fundamentally flawed takes a whole different level of reprogramming. (And none of this has to do with clinical depression, which is biochemical rather than cognitive.)

Posted by Paula at May 19, 2005 5:04 PM

Possibly more in common between the two dysfunctions than you may think. One feeds the other. The cognitive feeds the bio-chemical, which warps the cognitive, and so on.

Posted by Mike at May 20, 2005 10:31 PM

1.-Self-esteem leads to WIN-WIN experiences, and these are the only true successes in life. Don't need to mention these are ruled from the heart.

2.- Parents can build up your self-esteem or not, but they are not the single influence we receive in life, in fact many times they are wrong and it is necessary to question their points now, with care on how doing it. They looked like gods to us when were children, fine, but afterwards they become to our eyes the humans they are: what counts are the deposits of love they placed on us. Stick to it!

3.-Regarding an above comment that reads: "profanity is very unprofessional" I am urgued to say the I'd rather prefer the amateur approach.

4.- Re. negative criticism, apart of being a pain in the a..., defines more the sender than the receiver and it's stupid anyway: all silly people know how to make negative criticism, the challenge is managing the art of positive-brilliant-valuable feedback and making the game fun.

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I am supposed to be an "Art critic" that means to me finding the sublime (painful?...)/ beautiful/ graceful or higher valuable lesson beneath an Art creation and commenting on it. Of course I love myself and I love Art (!)

Posted by Omara at May 21, 2005 1:55 PM

hahaha, a little further up was a topic, that motivates me to post something here with some delay now.

who - in our turbulent times - would not know about depression?

but hey, ever been to AFRICA?
(some will remember my post here on this site and what the continent had done for my father...)

well, here is some more.
from last weekend's ft suplement on world travel (no link, i had to scan it, sorry)....

i am posting this here for three reasons:
1. it is also about depression and what africa can do for you
2. then of course it is about what you could do for africa
3. it is about the buzz-word storytelling a little bit... but really back to the roots...

enjoy:

"...
It is increasingly difficult for people to find untouched, pristine wilderness.
As Kuki puts it, "Places like Oí Ari Nyiro (in Kenya) are among the few remaining untouched spots on the planet. They are the real monuments of the world because what is manmade can be reconstructed – witness the Phoenicia theatre in Venice – but once the forests go and the elephants go and the savannahs go, that is the end of it. They cannot be remade."

Kuki links this deep need of mankind to return from time to time to wild places with her own experience of what África did for her.

When she first arrived there,… she felt as if she was coming home.
When she talks about it now she is not surprised, for she sees it as a profound inner compulsion, a "yearning to return, a nostalgic inherited need to migrate back to where our ancestors carne from... a memory carried in the genes. The urge to fly home, like the swallows." It may sound fanciful but she's not alone in thinking this.

Dr lan McCallum, a South African doctor who is a specialist psychiatrist, has found from long experience with many patients that wilderness is the finest antidepressant he knows.

It's the best cure, he says, for some forms of chronic low-grade depressions. He believes a sense of who we are is linked with an inner historical memory of landscape and that some mild depression can be attributed to a "homesickness” for these landscapes.

These landscapes África has in abundance, but if they are to survive, then new action has to be taken. Such landscapes are disappearing daily. Which is why Kuki has put immense thought into the future and how to preserve what she has up in the Great Rift Valley…

…
She (Kuki’s daughter Sveva) has a grant from the Ford Foundation and the Nando Peretti Foundation to try to work with the tribal communities - the Pokot, the Samburu and the Turkana whose ancestral lands are all around the ranch - to help them preserve their tribal stories, their creation myths, their rituals and their oral history. This knowledge is hugely precious because it is vanishing at an alarming rate.
It was never written down and contact between children, who are busy at school, and the elders who pass on the knowledge is often scant. Sveva tracks down elders and persuades them to tell their stories and pass on their lore to the new generation. "When one of these old men speaks, time goes still," says Sveva. These elders are now national treasures for, as Kuki puts it, "Unpolluted humanity is today an endangered species. One of the things I love about the Great Rift Valley is that we have humanity that hasn't been infected by western ideas. We are surrounded by tribal communities that are still relatively intact."

check
www.gallmannkenya.org
and plan your next time-out in kenya.

Posted by jens at May 25, 2005 11:35 AM

here is the link again.

http://www.gallmannkenya.org/index.php

Posted by jens at May 25, 2005 11:38 AM