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Chef AJ: Esteem vs Self-Esteem Why It's Important | Chef AJ LIVE! with Dr Doug Lisle
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all right hello everybody I know you're there but I always wait a second just to oh I see people I see Adria and Simone so I'm gonna get started hey everybody and welcome to healthy living live my guest today is my favorite person dr. Doug Lyall he is the co-author of this amazing book called a pleasure track he's the founder of the website esteem dynamics calm he is the psychologist at both the True North health center and MacDougal program both located in Santa Rosa California and he is the star of the weekly podcast beat your jeans now over 100 episodes on iTunes you can also listen to it live every Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. Pacific time on black hawk radio you can even call in so please welcome dr. Doug Lyall hey how you doing AJ good the smartest person I know so doctor wanted if you think he's smart share this broadcast right now with all your people dr. Lisle wanted to talk about esteem today and his website no coincidence is esteem dynamics org so since that's one of your favorite subjects why don't you start out dr. Lisle by telling us what exactly is self-esteem and why is it so important yes I'm actually I keep grinding through this because I think I'm still trying to come up with terminology this is I've come across things in the world where you know somebody somebody knows how something really is and what it's supposed to be called but everybody else calls it something else like like people will call people or realtor there is no such thing as a realtor realtor it's a real tour all right so but if you're in that business it'll drive you crazy because everybody just gets sloppy and says realtor and that's just how it is it's a disaster and so the same thing is true for me in the realm of self-esteem or esteem the because people will will call things self-esteem which I actually do not call self-esteem so self-esteem to me is a very specific experience and it has very important roots and yet there are several different concepts that are actually distinct and there are distinct psychological processes one of them is going to be what I call esteem another one's going to be what I call self-confidence and another one is going to be what I call self-esteem and these are all different and so I might as well as long as we're talking about this I might as well just try to explain it okay beyond so I want you to to imagine the the process that goes on when other people when you do something and other people respond very positively to this so you put out your resume for a job and five five different companies call you up and say they want to hire you now well a lot of times this will make us feel really good and we will say this is self-esteem okay so we'll say role that was really good for my self-esteem we will also use another word very that really that is very close to being a an identical twin to this which is ego so if we put out five resumes and five companies said that they want to hire us we tell our friends boy that was sure good for my ego and so or that was really good for my self-esteem but really I will argue that that that that that process has absolutely nothing to do with your self-esteem it has to do with your esteem and so you have actually received real live evidence that you are valuable to other people and that real live evidence is actually an esteem signal that you get from other people so that's that's fundamentally different than then self-esteem which we're going to talk about in a second now the the other issue here is a concept that we're going to call self confidence so self confidence if you get very good feedback from the world that that also it isn't just a steam that you are receiving it is also increasing your confidence because if those five companies all wanted to hire you then probably a sixth and a seventh company would want to hire you so therefore it is actually increased your belief that you have options okay so this is why for example if you put on put on a new shirt and then your new blouse someone says wow that really looks good that can increase your confidence it's not only a positive esteem signal that the other person thinks that you're more attractive but it is also a increase in your self-confidence so those those two things though are not exactly the same thing you can you can be you can be not very self-confident but still have received a positive esteem cue and it can feel really good that you can still not be confident like someone can say well listen I really love your resume you know we don't have room for you but we really think that your resume is great and that that can that can feel good that you've got some positive esteem but really not necessarily influence your self-confidence that much so self-confidence is a is your perceived probability of success the so this is what this is it is obviously it's going to be very much interrelated to what your esteem signals have been from other people so your self-confidence and your esteem history are very close together but they are not the same thing and the reason is is that two people for example can have a very similar esteem history but they are genetically different and so one of them is just naturally much more optimistic and they might be quite a bit more confident than the other person who quite frankly house just as good a feedback and it has been signals as just as valuable but they just don't feel it there they're naturally more tentative and their assessments of their own abilities so you can see this for example I guess an example that comes from sports there are there are basketball players that are extremely confident that they can hit the next shot but they just give them the ball they don't have any problem that they miss six in a row doesn't make any difference they've got confidence that the seventh one is going to go in and they want the shot whereas you have other players that are much more tentative and that until they hit a couple of shots they don't feel confident or deserving the bishop take another shot so this this is when you are coaching basketball this is a very important thing to be understanding that the personalities of these people are different even though their abilities may be very similar okay so the so this is a difference between esteem history the actual esteem that we get from other people and how much confidence we have those two things can be very different depending upon the personality individual now neither of these things also has anything to do with self-esteem so now we're going to be talking about a different a different experience that seems like it's extremely related to both of these things and there is some relationship that we're going to observe but it's actually a different phenomenon and self-esteem is actually the most important personal investigation of my career is the understanding of self-esteem why it even exists because it's a very the in the animal kingdom the animal kingdom has confidence so animals differ and how confident they are and they differ genetically and how bold they are and also their feedback from experience influences their likelihood to put out energy to try to attack a problem ie their confidence okay we can see this all the way down to crickets so we can we can actually make experiments where we set it up that a cricket wins a couple of fights with another cricket and then we can set it up with another cricket that is say a little bit bigger or stronger and if you have won a couple of fights you are willing to fight longer with a cricket that's going to beat you then you did if you just lost two fights so their words even at the level of a cricket you're history in that area has an influence on your confidence okay so the so these things are are natural processes that take place in animals and also animals have individual variation in how much natural confidence they have now incidentally my good good friend Alan Goldhammer has a great deal of natural confidence it's been really entertaining since or annoying since the time we were eight years old watching the humans so and it's one of the one of the most entertaining things I've ever seen as to what was to watch his son gar grow up Lugar also has a lot of natural confidence and so to watch gar be very confident about things that he had no business being confident about was just an uproar ously joyous thing for me to watch and the sort of launch alex gene to operate in a new body and you know it'll you understand any of a 40 year old psychologist looking at this young kid watching an envelop sort of almost watching my own childhood observations replay 40 years later so I always thought analyst in the little too confident and that's also on the other side of this is that I'm naturally or attended lieutenant so I naturally have less confidence it doesn't mean I'm depressed or anything it just means that we naturally have a somewhat different view even based on very similar feedback histories okay so that that is just genetic variation now each of us can become more confident depending upon what the string of success is you know and what the esteem cues are of course that that will change your confidence levels but your confidence level is an interaction between what your what the feedback is and also your natural psychology now neither of these neither the esteem feedback and the feelings that you get from that or the confidence level that you feel these things are not related to self-esteem which is going to be a different phenomenon so let's look at what self esteem is and and let me explain why I believe that it's that it's a core issue to be absolutely cognizant of and a process to understand very very carefully particularly when we're talking about weight loss I don't know that there's a more important thing to understand in the game of weight loss today than self esteem so let me let me map this out what you have you have you have a feeling that you get you get positive feedback from other people that feedback when they when they say hey I think that they think you look attractive or they think you're smart or they would like to hire you or they want to be your friend these are what I'm gonna call esteem signals and inside your mind what you have is a device that we're going to call an esteem meter and that meter is designed by nature to be sensitive to this particular type of cue and to give you feet of feeling a feedback to you that tells you what the nature of those signals are saying so that when people give you positive signals you're esteem meter will signal to you a positive feeling okay feeling it's just it's happiness it's a mood of happiness and it's associated with confidence but it's not the same thing it's just wow I'm being accepted this by the way if anybody has any interest at all in the details of this in psychology this is very much akin to the the social psychologist mark Larry Duke University it's what he calls a socio meter so if you look it up on Wikipedia you're gonna you're gonna see a thing called Sochi Amador theory it's a major theory in social psychology and it has superb data that supports it so I actually call it an esteem meter for reasons that we're gonna get to in a minute I distinguish this I'm basically renaming marklar is so C ometer with a with a very important purpose in mind why I'm renaming it so Larry is basically saying uh how you feel is very much dependent upon the feedback you get from other people you get positive feedback and you're so C ometer causes you to feel happy if you get negative feedback you're Sochi ometer causes you to feel depressed ie you've been rejected and so he basically leaves it there and I'm I'm gonna now argue that there's a very different component to the way the Sochi ometer works that he had overlooked and no problem I mean he's thought a lot about this and we've all got sort of different angles on this but I actually believed that that this was a segment of sociopathy are' that was neglected and I think it's important so I will argue that human beings have another device in their head and that device is going to be what I call an internal audience and so the internal audience is actually watching you just like other people would be watching you so it's a virtual audience and it's actually neural tissue that exists inside the human mind that develops a model of the world that has other people in it that effectively are observing you so you you know what this looks like if you've got people coming over for Thanksgiving and you're shining up your house and you're putting flowers out and you're looking at your apartment or your house and you are looking at it through the eyes of other people so you are imagining what they are seeing when you are seeing it and when it looks good to you you are imagining that they are looking at it and that they are giving you positive feedback and they're saying WOW AJ this looks beautiful okay and so you have a dispositive feeling but the positive feeling is coming from your esteem meter and yet there aren't any other people around so how could this be possible that we could be feeling esteem when there's nobody around and the answer is is because we've got mythical people in our head that are giving us a positive feedback okay now I will submit that I don't believe there's any other creature on earth that has this device I believe that this is a totally unique device of human beings and what this device is is an internal audience and so this internal audience is gone by many names throughout history it's called been called consciousness and self-consciousness and in cognitive therapy they call it the internal critic which is very interesting that they call it this and I think that they have I think that's technically accurate in other words critics are not necessarily critical they are an audience so a critic could have a very positive review of the movie the bet I don't believe that that's what the cognitive therapists are actually thinking I think they're thinking that this pesky thing inside of us is a critic and I believe that the reason why they turned at the internal critic is because when you're a cognitive therapist and you were talking to depressed people the internal audience happens to be giving a lot of negative feedback to the individual okay so cognitive therapy and its derivatives have actually had the the notion that the internal critic is actually a pest that it's actually something to somehow it some mythical thing inside the head that's a pain in the neck and it's nag and it lowers our self-esteem and that it's just a problem and it's self-defeating and a mess and I will argue that it's nothing of those things I will argue that what's actually transpiring there is that the internal audience is giving the esteem meter signals that are it's honest assessment of what the person's efforts are have been and so in the same way that you actually have a performance with real-life people at Thanksgiving when they actually come and they give you feedback if they give you very positive feedback then your esteem meter feels good okay and that will influence your confidence for next Thanksgiving or the next get-together so we've got your self-confidence over there that some somewhat a result of the feedback we have a feeling that goes on in the moment about how good it feels to get either positive feedback or bad it feels to get negative feedback that's our esteem meter and then we have something else and that something else is an internal audience who is observing our efforts and giving us feedback as if real people are watching and the reason why human beings have an internal audiences they rehearse their performances so before you ever invite people over for Thanksgiving you rehearse your performance in advance you get the whole place set up you might even try cooking some dishes ahead of time if you're really conscientious about it and it's a really big deal and you're some young lady and you're trying to impress your would-be in-laws and your boyfriend or your fiance is coming over you might actually cook the whole dinner you know three days in advance just to check and make sure that you've got it right okay so your internal audience will watch your performance as you are making efforts and it will give you feedback as to what it thinks to that performance that is what I call self-esteem that is the only thing that I call self-esteem you have a feeling that comes about or when you are making efforts or you're putting effort into performances that you your internal audience watches your efforts and it gives you feedback on those efforts and then that the de feedback it gives you is to the esteem meter because it says if it's real people watching a real performance as opposed to an internal audience watching a rehearsal okay so the internal audience gives you feedback and you get the same type of feelings that you get and when real people watch your real performance and now why would we have this because it's important to make great performances we're competing for mates we're competing for friends we're competing in business you don't think that Steve Jobs rehearsed his performances before he came out there and showed a new product of course he reversed his performances okay AJ's been in show business she knows the phrase will a play in Peoria before they take a new show to Broadway they would take it to Peoria Illinois which they consider the heartland of America and they would play it in Peoria to see what down-home folks in the United States would think of a show and if they didn't like it in Peoria they knew the show was in trouble and they needed to go back to the drawing board and some change defects that's how they did it okay your brain has a Peoria in it it's called your internal audience and that audience is watching your performances and it's giving you feedback on your performances before you take it out on the road in front of real live people human beings that don't have an internal audience that can do this make horrendous mistakes we're gonna call that as burgers so if you don't if you don't know that other people are watching and that they're reacting to you then you're gonna make mistakes all over the place as burgers kids don't rehearse whether or not you know how to ask out a girl to the prom probably they just blurt it out in the middle of history class and it doesn't go very well the rest of us plot for weeks and weeks that's what we do we plot every little word try to get it just right and just for the right moment you know this is and that that's happening because there's a tremendous amount of rehearsals that are going on now so now we see a lot now we're getting a little closer to understanding how your mind actually works the real show is when we're in front of real eyed people and realized people give us real-life feedback because those are people that are either gonna date us or be our friends or hire us so that's where the real rubber is hitting the road in terms of the real action in life that's taking place right there at the level of real live performances it doesn't really count how many three-pointers you make in practice the count what counts is how did you do in the NBA Finals that's what really counts that's where everybody's really watching and that's where they either give you a trophy or they call you a goat and they trade you to the Clippers okay so this is how this works now the so as a result the most intense feelings that human beings ever have are in front of real audiences those are the most intense moments because that's where the real this is what I'm gonna call evolutionary currency Nate's friends and trading partners that's where the real currency in life is traded okay it's not traded in the virtual world of imagining whether Betty Sue is going to go out with you the real issue is will she really go out with you when you ask so you would expect that the most intense feelings are actually when the real live action takes place and so you would expect that when people set their goals when they're trying to actually a call things in life their imaginations are always centered on the events that will actually take place with real live people they're not saying gee I hope I land a triple axel in practice they're saying I hope I land a triple axel in the Olympic final day that's what they're dreaming about they're dreaming and thinking and scheming and hoping for it to go well in the Olympic final they are not thinking about doing it in practice now when people think about weight loss they are absolutely imagining what it's going to be like when they get esteem signals from other people about that how much better they look and how much better shape them in that's what their goal is set for their goal is always aiming for esteem signals because esteem signals is where what we're human beings live now this is why I call my website in my new book and everything else so I'm going to do probably for the rest of my life is what I call esteem dynamics what I'm interested in is esteem signals and I'm interested in the feelings that result from esteem processes and I'm particularly interested in how they change or the dynamics of esteem I'm very interested when things change for the worse that's when you're depressed demoralized lose your self-confidence and are in misery that's bad okay what we're trying to do is we're trying to look at that and say why does that happen okay and how can we change it now I like to I can't help myself just because I'm obsessive but I have to criticize so so much of my field my field doesn't tend to think that esteem processes are dynamic they have a very strong tendency to think that they are fixed okay so they believe that your self-confidence your self-esteem essentially they actually kind of believe that this all takes place in childhood and that your self-esteem is pretty fixed in childhood dependent upon the reinforcement or punishment or feedback that you got from other people who your parents or from your uncle or your aunt or from Betty Sue or whatever that was all fixed then and what I'm going to submit to you is that that doesn't make any sense at all biologically and it doesn't make any sense clinically and it's actually fundamentally wrong okay but esteem processes by their very nature are dynamic hey they have to be just as all feelings are dynamic so you may be very hungry right now but if you eat for the next 45 minutes then you're full so that feeling is dynamic you may be freezing cold because you're out watching this thing from your cell phone got a locked out of your house and Anchorage right now but then your your girlfriend comes home it opens up the door and you go in and that you're now by the fireplace and watching this and now your feelings about being cold have changed their dynamic okay your feelings of confidence can change very quickly that's why the coach has to be careful and understand his people because the truth is if one of them loses you know you know misses two or three shots in a row then his confidence goes down his confidence is dynamic and then when he makes a couple he's feeling more confident in other words these processes are highly dynamic now they they actually can have arcs where your amount of confidence in a given domain can be pretty can be very similar from day to day for good reasons and a lot of these feelings can be highly repetitive so what we want to do is we want to take a situation where things are in a negative state and we need to try to figure out how to shift them into a positive state so that's what I'm really interested in and the thing that I see most is in this arena and incidentally the weight and weight loss arena you might think well gee what a pesky little part of life the truth is this is an enormous ly big part of life this is a this winds up being the number one go love people in the United States so this is no joke I mean people got a lot of goals they want to do better financially they want to fall in love and they they want to look better and feel better about themselves but the truth is is that weight and weight loss and fitness these are essentially how it is that you look with respect to your body form this is the number one personal obsession in the United States okay why well because people who have in trouble with it it didn't used to be the number one personal obsession of people in the world but it is now because of the pleasure trap and the ubiquitous nature of the rich foods in the environment and the instincts that draw people to eat those foods inexorable instincts that are constantly pushing us as well as a toxic food environment that puts this stuff all around you and it takes remarkable self-discipline and commitment not to fall into that trap almost everybody is in that trap and then depending upon your genetics you either what you either wear an extra ten pounds on you or you've way enough wear an extra two hundred pounds on you and if you happen to be unlucky enough to wear an extra 50 or 100 pounds on you the pounding that this does to your esteem processes is brutal okay you get a lot of negative esteem signals from other people and your esteem meter puts up with a lot of negative feedback and it's basically like being rejected for jobs over and over again those jobs being either friends or promotions or romance processes in other words little kids don't even think that you're as valuable as the lady who's thinner okay so they don't even know you they just sort of think that way and so the bottom line is is that this is actually a very very big deal so even though I'm using it as an example of how self-esteem processes work the truth is is that this example by itself is one of the major issues with respect to esteem process that have to do with the nature of life okay now so let's look at this you are designed by nature to see esteem we're not designed to sell seek self-esteem you are designed to seek esteem and if we look inside of you you are not out to impress your internal audience you are out to impress real live audiences so when you start thinking about what your goals are for weight loss you are thinking about the time when you are going to be 40 pounds lighter and you're gonna fit into a really cool pant pant suit and what other people are going to think of you when that happens and then you're going to feel good and you're gonna say well that'll be good for my self-esteem and I'll tell you self-esteem has got nothing to do with it you are wanting esteem to increase not self-esteem I'm like a a realtor here now I got to get the language running its realtor not realtor and it's esteem not self-esteem okay people are focused on esteem as they should be but they are missing an unbelievably important lesson and an important step in the chain here that is actually the most critical step in this entire process and that is self esteem right so let's look at what self esteem is and why I am that obsessed with self esteem self esteem hats to do with your internal audience and your internal audience is watching your rehearsals they're not even hardly aware of your performances because we don't give a damn about what our internal audience is thinking about our performances when we're in front of a bunch of people to count we care about what those people think we're designed by nature to care about what those people think we don't we don't really care we're not paying attention toward this little bit of neural tissue in there that is our internal audience we don't care less okay it is being overwhelmed by the most important audience which is Peggy Sue do we really care about how we're choking out the offer for the prom day or do we care about whether Peggy Sue says yes or no the answer is we care about what Peggy Sue says yes or no if we did a lousy job at spitting it out and she said yes I'd love to go we are elated okay if we did a magnificent job of spitting it out and she says no we're depressed so the real live action from other people is what dominates your feeling we are not focused on self-esteem when a steam feedback is front and center but folks most of the battles of life and how well we do out there on the steam processes are determined by how well we did our homework okay what counts is did we do the homework well what we are elated when we take the history final and we get we get the feedback that we got an edit that's great that's really important but the truth is is that the only way we got there was by doing our homework that's that's what happened now you can imagine that if someone think about this sort of interesting situation where someone doesn't study and they just do a cursory job for this very important test and then they go take the test and they manage to get an A it's like what a break it was lucky it's cool are we happy yes we got good esteemed feedback but that whole thing was skating on ice and it was dangerous if we instead had studied very very diligently and we've gone in and taken that test and done poorly we are depressed about the fact that we did not get good feedback but our self-esteem says you did everything you could our self-esteem is watching this whole process and it's saying you did well you did what you could it's a bummer that we got that feedback and it's not pleasant okay and it may lower our confidence because we may say wow we tried really hard and we we really you know we worked as well as we could but we didn't do very well in this domain we may not be able to hack this class we may not be able to hack this University it's maybe too hard for us so it can be depressing and it could be demoralizing to get to work very hard and not get good feedback but your self-esteem strangely enough is intact as long as you've worked hard and diligently now of course I'm using extreme examples because as most of the time if we work hard and diligently what happens we get better we get better okay we can see that our performances are getting better we can see that our three-point shooting is getting better we can see that we've lost seven pounds in the last month we can see it in fact you can see it before anybody else can see it the whole point of rehearsals is the fact that nobody else is watching and we can improve when nobody's scrutinizing us that we're actually working on our performances to be displayed later not now human beings in order to develop a psychology that would have them actually working diligently at complex goals long-term goals they needed a incentive device to get them to do it and the incentive device was the self-esteem mechanism self-esteem is the process of your internal audience giving feedback to your esteem meter on your rehearsals when you steam up your vegetables and eat a salad and eat a baked potato when you do that and then you go to the gym and you workout for 20 minutes or half an hour and then you come home and then you get back to the work at your desk for whatever it is or feed the kids etc when you do your job your internal audience is watching you and when you do the job well the internal audience says well done that was a good practice today you did a good practice okay and you know what we're getting ready for the summer performance so you get ready some person said you know beach beach bodies are made in the winter that's when they're made his summer bodies are made in the winter that's when it's taking place and so when you are doing your job in the winter unless you are a kind of creature that had some way to incentivize that situation a dream won't do it like she I one day I'd I'd like to make a movie like Sylvester Stallone well that isn't gonna do it you have to actually find satisfaction in the micro processes of the efforts that you put in every day if you don't if you don't find satisfaction in those processes you will never make a movie like that it's never gonna happen okay if you don't find satisfaction in doing your diet well and exercising routinely if you don't find satisfaction in it you're not going to get there okay you need to actually watch for something very very important the the self esteems of people that are struggling with their weight and doing a mediocre job are terrible and if they go to their cognitive therapists and they say what can I do about this the therapist will say we'll talk back to your internal critic what's your internal critic telling you well my internal critic says that I'm fat and I'm lazy and I'm undisciplined and I'm a flake and I'm never gonna do this and I just can't get it together and I listen it out and I say listen to what it's telling you okay listen to what it's telling you it's telling you it's giving you criticism it's telling you you know what I'm not impressed by your efforts now that person also imagines what it would be like if they had it all together and they imagines what it would be like to get the esteem from other people to having achieve the straight A's or having achieved the triple axel or having achieved the 50-pound weight loss they can imagine this and they feel momentary inspiration because they would love to have it but the truth of the matter is they also have a lot of this negative talk that's going on and they think the negative talk is the cause of them not doing it and they're wrong the negative talk will change very quickly self-esteem is dynamic it doesn't matter how many people gave you negative feedback throughout the course of your life it makes no difference the truth of the matter is if you chop the vegetables steamed the vegetables cut up the apples eat the baked potato go and exercise if you do that today what will happen is your internal audience will say hmm interesting ok I'm not impressed but you did a little something if you do it the next day and you do it the next day and you do it the next day and you do it the next day and you do it the next day by the time you do this 10 or 12 days in a row the internal audience is going to start saying hi I'm starting to be impressed start to be impressed if you announce to the public that you're gonna go on a diet and you in front of them sat down and ate a salad and a baked potato the first day you know what they would think not impressed you're 50 pounds overweight I've heard this before I've heard about every diet you've gone on I am not impressed so yourself and your internal audience is not impressed either and it will not give you positive feedback to your esteem later because it's not impressed yet but what if every single meal for the next two weeks you sat down in front of your village and you did a perfect job and they knew that you weren't sneaking out and getting any crackers or cookies on the side they knew it for a fact because there weren't any your internal audience knows whether or not you've got any crackers or cookies on the side because it's watching you it's watching you 24/7 so if you do that you will have the same reaction to what the group would have that the group watched you for two weeks to everything perfect and at the group watch you do everything perfect for two weeks the group would say wow you're taking this seriously aren't you ha what do you know I am curiously optimistic this is definitely a change and that is precisely what the internal audience will signal to your esteem meter it will say hey I've started to get impressed with your diligence okay now you can imagine what's going to happen in six weeks what's going to happen in six weeks is the internal audience is going to say holy smokes are you disciplined and how impressed I am with you at the end of six weeks you may have lost 12 or 13 pounds and you may still be 48 pounds overweight instead of 60 and nobody can notice not a single soul out there gives you any positive feedback because they can't see any difference but your internal audience will be giving you tremendously different feedback than it's given you in the last ten years and that's because the esteem signals have to be dynamic just like everything else in nature and so they will be giving you very positive feedback they will be roaring on all eight cylinders every day saying well done well done well done well done okay that is a very significant component of human happiness now it is quiet compared to what happens with esteem so someone who goes and gets lap band surgery and then they drop 40 pounds and you know nine weeks because they can't eat anything and they're sick but everybody says wow Jody you look so much better they are basking in the esteem and they have great positive feelings of tremendous relief and now they're happy and they can think that they can maybe date Rodney now because now they look so much better and they always thought Rodney was cute and the whole world are so excited about the esteem that they're getting but folks they skipped the most important step in the game they didn't do anything for their self-esteem but if you ask them how do you feel about yourself oh boy I feel better about myself my self-esteem is so much higher no their self-esteem is not any higher if anything it's lower their internal audience knows they cheated okay did they get an A in the history final yes but they cheated to get the end so as a result there they are it's so loud the positive feelings are so loud coming in from the real Live Marketplace but it's drowning out the internal audience that is quietly saying I'm not impressed at all I'm not impressed at all well you're a fraud okay you cheated at this I wonder if it's gonna work it's probably not gonna work what are you gonna do when this starts to fall apart in a year or two the internal audience isn't even remotely impressed that you went in and had some surgical procedure to fix this problem okay it's not a good solution I have compassion for the fact that people reach for that solution because they are so desperate to get a sting they're designed to get esteem they're designed to scheme for a scheme they want esteem they want to be loved and accepted and valued I have tremendous compassion for that and I understand that human beings feel a competitive pressure to take every short shortcut that they can do to get there every what I call get-rich-quick scheme that's what those things are 75,000 diet books have published a get-rich-quick scheme for esteem now what we do here what AJ coaches people to do what we do a true Northcliffe john mcdougall does this is a whole different game this is the seeking of self esteem this is the fact that there is something to be done which is not easy to do in the face of the modern environment it's very difficult to do okay guess what if you method there's no shortage of time to redo it because you got your whole life to do it so if you screw it up no no worries okay it's basically how long is it gonna take you get to learn how to walk if you keep at it you know you may never learn how to walk and you may be it in a psychological wheelchair like everybody else is you know in this mess always just looking for an easy ramp survive if instead you struggle and you learn how to walk if you do this then once you get on a roll here and your self-esteem mechanism will encourage you because it will be impressed with your diligence the the spectacular or excitement that I have about this is that I want people to learn to look for the changes in their self-esteem this is what is missed actually in a fantastic movie like rocky or any any hero story where someone makes it makes a phenomenal change in their in their life this is the story of you know Oliver Twist this is you know the Fagin in other words when people make a change yeah yeah we look at this and we recognize that it's possible we know people can make major changes in their existence and even people that have made major changes in their existence one of the problems is is that they forget that process that it took to get there and once they achieve a new level of esteem in the marketplace they are so excited about the esteem but they forget that actually the esteem is simply the result of doing a very good job at your rehearsal getting more competitive getting in a better position and then earning the esteem by having done the hard work and the problem is if you forget about that because you weren't paying attention to how incredible that process was to earn your own self-esteem first then what happens is is that now pretty soon life becomes about defending your esteem rather than defending your self-esteem okay and we get right back to the same shortcutting that got us into trouble in the first place this is a very easy mistake for people to get into so sometimes people get in an incredible role and the self-esteem mechanism aids and encourages them to do a beautiful job and they get into a beautiful groove for a while but then when they get the applause and they get good feedback and then they can get lazy and then they start shortcutting and then they just try to hold on to the esteem which is what they were out there in the first place and they forget but the foundation of the joy that they get from earning esteem is actually begins with self-esteem okay now so what I want this is why I invented my little thing called starch target sheet this is why it is that that that a self-esteem isn't one in the day and it's not one with a single trophy or event it's one with a track record of yourself watching you as you work at a problem okay whatever that problem is so essentially a Nathaniel Branden who was an early and and wise thinker and self-esteem theory with obviously by pioneers make a lot of mistakes so he he had many mistakes so I don't want to give you his thinking as a gospel but he was a very thoughtful man and he had a lot of good ideas and one of his quotes is that self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself that is a beautiful quote okay self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself self-esteem is the reputation that you that you feel from your internal audience as it watches you diligently take action the self-esteem mechanism does not require you to be milind and it does not require you to be beautiful and sexy and super successful it actually doesn't require that you may need those things to get positive feedback from people that you're excited about being positive feedback for you may want to be a world champion ice skater and that's really what you want and you feel like you might be able to do it and you are hoping that that's true but your self-esteem mechanism does not require that you do that and in fact the self-esteem mechanism doesn't even care the self-esteem mechanism cares about digs you work diligently at the problem that's what it's looking for and if it turns out that you cannot be the world champion because there's somebody better the self-esteem mechanism will not care the esteem meter will care because the esteem meter will wants to get the adulation flowers thrown at you but the Asafa steam mechanism simply cares about did you do an excellent job of actualizing your potential did you put in the work okay if you put in the work and you do it diligently and you work hard and steadily but not perfectly just excellent if you do that your self-esteem will rise and it will maintain high throughout the length of your life okay when you when you get indulgent now you take a break from all this and you start to be turned into a flake it can be enjoyable to be a flake for a while but it turns out that your self-esteem mechanism will start to signal to you and it will start to say I'm not very impressed with you you're starting to be a flake okay and it won't give you a good positive feedback in that arena I mean you may you may like it to sit down with a box of tofutti cuties you know I'm saying in a smoothie and be like okay well I'm just enjoying myself now in the hell with it but your self-esteem mechanism will notice and it will say this is mediocre okay and that's what I'm gonna give you and in this quiet voice will give you mediocre feedback and that's how it works and if you want the feeling of the self-esteem mechanism saying well done then you have to do it well okay you don't have to be brilliant you don't have to be beautiful you don't have to be super successful you don't have to be rich you don't have to be anything to get self-esteem what you have to do is you have to have reasonable goals that you're aiming for to get to earn esteem from other people you know to be looking better to be healthier to be more competent at your work to be a better human being in some way whatever it is okay you are seeking esteem to be valuable to the village and valuable to others but the process that we do to get there is all about whether or not our internal audience observes our efforts and believes that our efforts are appropriate and reasonable and good okay once you find out that that this is the self esteem is essentially the wind at our back with respect to every goal process in your life and once you find out that the self-esteem mechanism yields no matter how awful you feel about yourself now in any dumb in doesn't matter how big or gaping the hole is that your self-esteem mechanism will start to change in a matter of hours as you start to put in the right efforts okay once you discover that that that is the magic key to changing people from being depressed and miserable and hopeless to being optimistic and excited and looking forward to the next step okay understanding that that self-esteem mechanism will change and you do not have to win you don't have to be a star nobody has to think that you're great nothing has to happen the only thing that has to happen is your internal audience has to see that you put in a hell of a good effort that's the only thing that has to happen so you don't have to be a superstar in any way you just have to have actualized your own potential this was suspected by the way 50 years ago by a pie and humanistic psychology by the name of Abraham Maslow and so some of you are aware of Maslow's work you've heard about Maslow's hierarchy of needs you've heard about self-actualization these are all terms that Abe Maslow made famous and once again as a pioneer he was confused in a number of areas about his thinking but he suspected he saw something in some people that he was very curious about and now I'm putting my finger and describing exactly what it is he saw that there were people that they didn't have to be beautiful and that they weren't rich or they weren't fancy or anything else he called them self actualized and he wasn't sure even what he meant by that but what it was was that he was watching people that were relatively impervious to the feedback they got from others not completely but relatively impervious because they were marching to the beat of their own internal drummer but essentially like they were people that they thought no this is the right way to do things and this is the way I'm going to do them and if other people rejecting of them or thinking that they were silly they're like that's okay I can live with that I can't live with my internal audience thinking that I'm not don't have the guts to do the right thing that's what Maslow was observing and he observed that these people had a stability to their happiness that was remarkable because it wasn't dependent on feedback from other people and the extent of their victories or losses it was dependent upon what their own internal audience thought of their reference any so this is you know obviously part of this is natural personality did some people are like Alan Goldhamer by the way I'll just bring him up as an examples very much the sweat he's very I mean he cares about what other people think that he doesn't care that much and he cares more about what he thinks about whether he's doing a good job and and so this is no act I mean he is not these people don't live on a higher plane where they don't care what other people think we all care about what other people think unless we've got a mental disorder okay we all do of course that's where the rubber hits the road but there are some people that by some method they wind up being more sensitive and it's more important to them about what their internal audience thinks of them okay you will see this in holy people okay and you will see this in in in people both humble and sweet and and morally beautiful and you will see this all suing greatness okay you'll see it all over the board so it doesn't it's not related to achievement it's related to an internal integrity that says you know what I need to do a good job because when I do a good job I feel good about myself that's self esteem and the the pleasure trap is probably the most devastating attack on self-esteem that I can imagine that the that a person wants to have a scheme they want to look better they want to be more competitive in all these domains of life they want to be more attractive as a friend because they're not fifty pounds overweight they want to be more attractive as a mate because they're not fifty pounds overweight they want to be more attractive in business because they're not fifty pounds overweight there's a heck of a lot of reasons to want to try to be fit having everything to do with feedback from other people okay so of course that's a huge goal for people but what we want to do is is get ourselves push ourselves away from the fact that that goal is important and worthy and instead focus on okay we've got this monster called the pleasure trap and it is the reason why I'm 50 pounds overweight okay it is not my conflicts with my mother because if we put animals and we put them in tremendous conflict with each other or we look at human beings around the world that have great conflicts with their parents not overweight the reason why people are overweight is an interaction of the genetics that they have and the pleasure trap that is everywhere amen and the pleasure trap is not supposed to be something that you could solve easily that you're just supposed to learn about it and solve it it turns out it's a problem of extraordinary challenge that it requires diligence and planning and execution and and relentless monk-like focus okay and this is what it takes to move our way out of the trap and then it gets easier and easier and easier and easier okay but we have to put in the work and and what we're trying to do then when we do this is watch for this magic process where the self-esteem starts to rise and then put up a little red flag in your head and say dare there it is okay there it is that's the closest thing there is to a magic key in psychology okay it's a quiet key it's a quiet voice you need to pay attention to it and when you see that that's how it works when you lose your way we know we have to return again and again to earning the self esteem and it does not take a miracle to do it what it takes is a week or two of diligent effort all right oh my that was brilliant dr. Niall what comes up what comes up for you AJ when you listen to this it E is this mimic your own process yeah I what comes up is that I need to listen to it again and like everybody else is saying it's brilliant I think I think you're right the pride the pride that comes from the effort is more than the shortcuts that people get from doing gastric bypass er coz because I did short because I took fen phen once and it worked but it didn't last so that was my type of gastric bypass but you're right it's the pride you feel from consistent diligent effort that means more as much or more than when people give you compliments yes super important to learn how that works and once we learn how that works we can repeat it doesn't matter how many times we we get into trouble when we fall off and we get seduced by the pleasure trap it's like hey we know we're square one is and the beauty is is that your self-esteem can rise in a matter of days okay it does not require you to get to the end to take a bow in front of the crowd literally your self-esteem mechanism will start to give you cues that you're on the right track there will be strong and beautiful kids that will happen in a matter of hours okay and that that's what I want people to be aware of and I want them to watch for that when they earn it okay all right all right well we hope you'll come back because lots of I didn't want to interrupt you because you are on a roll lots of questions came through and I'm gonna I'm gonna write them down so that maybe you'll come back another time and answer them and thank you so much dr. Lyle everyone's just saying they love you you're brilliant they could listen to you all day and how you listen to it again guys is I'm going to be posting this on YouTube within 24 hours or you can listen right here right now so thanks all of you for watching thank you dr. Lyle for sharing your wisdom with us I'm chef AJ and I make healthy tastes delicious and dr. Lyle makes it absolutely brilliant thank you thank you pleasure
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