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Episode 2: Stepping stones to Self-Esteem
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So last week, we actually we talked to dr. Lisle, we had a great show That we talked to Dr. Lisle, a psychologist, about some of the underlying principles of human behavior that can influence our long-term happiness And today we're actually going to get a little bit more specific About a pretty large topic and that topic is self esteem More specifically as Dr. Lisle calls it the stepping stones to self esteem But before we get to that a number of you emailed me Actually, they want you guys wanted to know a little bit more about our guest. Dr. Lisle and his educational background in psychology Like I mentioned last show. Dr. Lisle has been a psychologist for about 30 years he graduated from UC San Diego in California, which is actually a couple of hours away from where I'm Broadcasting right now. So but after he graduated he received a fellowship and to the University of Virginia where he completed his PhD And after he was appointed lecturer in psychology at Stanford University And he also went on to be on staff for the National Center for post-traumatic stress disorder at the VA hospital in Palo Alto He's worked as a forensic psychologist in Dallas, Texas And as a consultant for the National Institute of Health clinical trials on cognitive therapy So let's listen in as dr. Lisle talks to us about self-esteem. Yes, okay Yeah, I'm trying to describe Self-esteem a little bit of the history of it and also kind of what it really is psychologists have generally been pretty puzzled about self-esteem They don't They've almost had two ways of thinking about it and we're gonna find out that those two ways that it makes sense is they think about it in two separate ways, but if you think about how Some of the things that you have heard about self-esteem You've heard sort of two very different concepts one is that, you know, self-esteem is just something that you can give to yourself and That that we don't you know It's not about what other people think and that it's just something it's inside you and you're the one that has to fix it On the other hand. We also hear that you get your self esteem from parent-child interactions So we see a contradiction Immediately in the way psychologists mostly think about self-esteem Is that on the one hand they're saying that it's an independent thing That it doesn't have anything else to do with other people think and secondly it seems to have everything to do with what your parents thought of you and those interactions so we see right away that there's a Confusion among psychologists about how this would work the Now the what you won't see in psychology is you're not going to see any theory About why there is such a thing as self-esteem. That has been sort of something That's not typically addressed or even really thought about. It's just some some writers have thought that self-esteem is a need Kind of like a vitamin and as you don't have enough of it bad things happen So this was the this was actually the the center of the self-esteem movement in the 1960's and 1970's and one of the chief architects of that discussion was a man by the name of Nathaniel Brandon and Brandon along with people like Abraham Maslow and the humanists basically had this idea that people had a need for a esteem and if that need Was was frustrated then people would suffer as a result. And so and the suffering that they would do would they would essentially decompensate in some important ways, they like might get into drugs or Do do criminal behavior and so on and so forth, so it was essentially seen as a a something Essentially a judgment the one makes it themselves and that that that judgment were not sure what comes from But that if it's a negative judgment, then this has terrible consequences. Got it alright. What what time were all these, Uh, these ideas that self-esteem was a vitamin around. What timeframe was that? 1960s 1970s even 1980s even later So it wasn't actually until the 1990s that we got our first clarity On the topic of self-esteem and it came through the laboratory of the social psychologist mark Leary, who was at, Uh, Well, I forget where he was. I think he was at I'm forgetting where he was, but now he's at Duke. Anyway, the I think he's at Wake Forest when he ran these this research Yeah, what Leary did was he almost accidentally tripped over very important truths What he did was he had college kids interact with each other and they got then at the end of the interaction He would give people individually he'd give them feedback he said, "hey people in the group really enjoyed the conversation and the discussion that was going on and They're actually thinking about getting together on Next week to sort of have more discussions." And then he would say the following or they would give us all feedback. I don't know how he did it, but you The subject was either invited over you weren't invited so in other words, you're either included or you were being rejected by the group and In this study they had various measurements of different things But one of the measurements was on what we what they thought was self-esteem and what they discovered was that the self esteem of people that had been rejected plummeted as a result of this failure feedback and Leary looked at this didn't expect it because the concept of self esteem has been almost like it's something That's a little bit. It's like your internal sculpture of you it's kind of like, you know, it starts out in ivory and it's carved a little bit at a time by your parents and Then if you have a lot if you have a really beautiful self-esteem Then you've got a really beautiful self-esteem If you've got a hacked up self-esteem, you've got a hack depth self esteem But what I'm individual group of peep you just interacted with for 20 minutes whether they reject you or accept you Shouldn't be having any appreciable impact on your self-esteem at all. According to traditional self-esteem theory However, turns out to not be true. Turns out that Mark Leary's research shows that self-esteem is actually highly dynamic can change very very quickly and And so after he published this research He actually analyzed this and he said listen "We haven't been looking at self-esteem from an evolutionary perspective. But if we did we start to under that human beings Evolved in small packs or small groups and whether or not you were included in the pack was an unbelievably important in terms of your Statistical likelihood of survival reproduction, but if you were rejected out of the pack, then you were very likely facing death. So as a result, you should have a mechanism or a meter device like a thermometer inside your head for tracking whether or not you are accepted or rejected by members of the group." and So he called it. He said listen, this is what we're going to call a sociometer and This is what the self-esteem mechanism is is it's actually a sociometer. And so this was actually a profound critique on previous thinking on self esteem because self esteem thinking was that in fact this is all an internal quiet personal judgment of yourself, and and Leary was saying, "no, that's not true actually it's a very social psychological mechanism having to do with what other people think of you and The advice that psychologists have generally had it which is and your parents your parents will basically say things like, "well who cares What other people think you can't be paying attention to what other people think." But in fact Mark Leary is saying well actually the self-esteem Mechanism is designed by nature to be sensitive to what other people think and in fact, it's absolutely essential for your survival and reproductive success in order to be paying very close attention to what other people think and you need a mechanism for doing that to give you feedback on a feeling level That tells you just like you have a hunger Drive and just like thirst mechanism and temperature detection mechanism so much you also Have a sociometer Aa method that your nervous system can pick up cues from other people to find out whether you're being accepted or rejected This would be essential for a social animal to know when their moves that they were making in the village were Gaining them points or losing them points So if you're cracking jokes and people like them great and if you are cracking jokes And they're not liking and you better be able to pick that cue up If you you dye your hair purple and everybody shuns you then you better not do that again. So Or do you have to find a new village Or you got to find a new village and in the Stone Age there wasn't a new village so, I mean I think in a lot of people's lives were interacting with so many different people if we were to pay attention to What every single person said it would be Exhausting and there would be I mean what I'm thinking is it be exhausting that you'd never be able to get anything done Dr. Lisle, "right. Yes, and so but the point is is that nowadays what you have is you have Your own little village that you are thinking about in your own head. And so there's some X number of people and X characteristics of other people that that you are tracking what you think that they would do thinking of you and and so you're actually So so I don't, you know, no offense to the Hells Angels But I really don't care what they think of me. Now as we broadcast this they'll probably track me down and burn down my house. Okay now I hope they don't. They're nice guys. Okay, but the point is is that What we are trying to acutally understand here in the same way that we're trying to understand if you're a biologist, and you're physiologists are trying to understand how how knuckles work and how, you Know, how toenails work how the knee joint works and how kidneys work. We're trying to understand how the mind works And so the mind has parts to it it has Knuckles and joints and kidneys, etc. It has all kinds of specialized capabilities and the mind is not just an amorphous mass of learning mechanisms like the behaviorists thought it was the mind is in fact a an incredibly diversified a nuanced set of tissue and With thousands and thousands of different Specialized capabilities just the way the body is built in the same way And it's going to turn out that one of those pieces of tissue inside your brain is going to be the Sociometer that Leary is talking about and so the sociometer is clearly extremely sensitive to social feedback this is not going to be true if there's something wrong with you like you're autistic and You are not paying attention to those cues doesn't make any difference much to the chagrin of your parents and everybody else Because you've got your elbow in your soup and you're Going up to the woman with the big breasts and putting your hands on them Like you're just doing all kinds of stuff, but you're not supposed to be doing because you are not sensitive to those cues yeah, right, but normal human beings with a normally healthy functioning brain are very sensitive to to both acceptance and rejection cues from other people and What they generate is feelings, by the way when Leary published, he was roundly criticized in social psychological circles because he had, you know, ie used used Young college students who would be hypersensitive to their peers bla bla bla This will not you know, if you use grown-up people with very high senses of self, they wouldn't have been so sensitive. So he knew that they were wrong. This was just completely unprincipled unbiologically informed criticism of him and Leary had clearly identified a universal mechanism in human nature and what he did then was he went and Hand-picked a whole slew of people that had been judged by both their peers and themselves As highly independent that don't give a damn what anybody thinks So he got a group those people and he put them in those same kind of groups and he gave them the same failure feedback and they had exactly the same response on their self-esteem scales as everybody else had had so this is in fact a universal characteristic of human nature and If anybody ever says well I don't care what people think they you just cared about what somebody thought or you wouldn't have uttered that sentence now the So the point is is that we are designed to be very aware Sensitive to what other people think that doesn't mean we twist ourselves in a pretzel for their approval You know, we run we run cost-benefit analysis on who they are how much approval we want what it's going to cost us However, we are very sensitive to this now the so Leary's work was a was a revolution in the field of self-esteem theory and But there would be more so if we if we actually move on a little bit we're gonna circle back around To this ancient dilemma that psychologists have had about self-esteem. First of all, we have to let let's For the moment. Let's also break down what self-esteem Largely is or the experience of it? What it is is feeling it's it's a feeling that people have and that feeling is very much akin to confidence and so the what this is is a It's a device just like all feelings or devices Feelings are signaling devices that the nervous system has to tell you Whether circumstances are beneficial or harmful for your survival reproductive prospects So when you're too cold when you have a feeling of being cold, that's to motivate you to get warmer when you're hungry It's a feeling that motivates you to eat when you're lonely It's a feeling to motivate you to associate with other people and when you're scared you are motivated to try to remove threats So every feeling that you have is a device to tell you to do something. If you're bored It's a feeling to tell you to seek something that is more profitable for survival and reproductive prospects And engage in some some process that's more interesting so your your feelings are a guidance system an extremely elaborate and subtle guidance system that is trying to orient you towards threats and opportunities in your environment and to create Impulses in you that are directed towards optimizing your life experience in a way that optimizes survive and reproductive success One of the most important of those orienting mechanisms is being sensitive to what other people think So how it is that you feel, This self-esteem mechanism is largely a result of you Tracking the cues that you are getting from other people about what they think of you So And incidentally when your self-esteem is "low" we call, we have a word for that. It's called being depressed so psychiatrist and psychologists sometimes think the depression is some kind of a disease some kind of malaise that just sort of Lands on people for no apparent reason. This is utter nonsense depression is a feeling and just like every other feeling it has a Biological purpose and its purpose is to signal that you are not getting good feedback cues from your social environment That's what causes people to be depressed. They could also be depressed about their own personal survival You know They just got news that they've got terminal cancer that will also make people depressed but most depression Most of the time is caused by social cues that tell people that they are struggling in one of the three major domains in human life and the three major demands of human life are number one mating number two Friendship and number three trade These are the three ways that human beings solve the problems of survival and reproduction they solve survival problems by making friends and trading they solve reproduction problems by selling mates on the idea of mating with them as well as mating behavior would also be for example Raising your children is in fact mating behavior. So these are so family processes are also under reproduction So as a result you are designed by nature to track Cues from your social environment that tell you whether or not you are getting successful feedback That others want to engage in trades with you So for example as I as I explained many times I have never seen the following client. The client is healthy. It is in no pain they are there the work that they do is Ethical and understood in the marketplace to be excellent work and they are they are Engaged in a great deal of profitable trade and they are their well respected and well compensated they have warm friendships with people that they admire and respect that admire and respect them and they have a romantic sexual exciting relationship with a mate that they consider very attractive who also Considers them very attractive and both of them feel lucky to have found that mate I have never seen an individual that walked through my door with all three of those situations Firing on all cylinders and telling me I don't know what's wrong Dr. Lisle I'm depressed Never happened. Okay. Now it might happen. I've only been doing this kind of work for 35 years So you never know but when people walk through that door and they're depressed It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that their depression is centered in one of these three domains Okay, and so and we find out that their depression when we start talking about what domain it is It is not mysterious as to what's happening. They are receiving failure feedback in the domain I have never had anybody come in and say I'm so depressed. I don't know what's going on I keep winning the Super Bowl every year Nobody says that Okay, the so it's always as the result of following issue human beings calibrate their expectations for themselves Relative to what they see other people of similar abilities accomplish. So this is how we set goals So if you're a pretty good little tennis player, you don't set the goal to be the next Andre Agassi that's not what you do, but you might want to make the varsity at your high school and So as a result What happens is is that We set goals for what we think we can achieve in terms of impressing people in the social environment by our achievements and then we seek to do the things necessary to try to Display those characteristics to the marketplace. When we fall short of our expectations, it's disappointing and if we continue to fall short repeatedly, we get frustrated and eventually depressed and depression is a mechanism of lowered esteem signaling, in other words We are getting signals from the environment that they do not esteem us as much as we would hope and we expected and therefore depression is a necessary signal that encourages us to quit doing what we've been doing and quit putting energies into a losing cause okay. This is a part of a more Universal principle in animal motivation which is to depress or reduce the amount of energy output on a target goal if it's unlikely to be productive and so if you have You know if you were told that, you know put the Wall Street Journal under your arm and start door-knocking to look for a job and you did that and 67 doors later and three weeks later. Nobody had was interested in hiring you you should be depressed And would be a biological catastrophe if you were not depressed. You should be depressed because the depression is a signal to you that you are getting Consistent failure feedback with this strategy and you should in fact try to not continue that strategy the so the so feelings of quote "low self-esteem" are feelings that result from feedback from the social environment that indicates that our our efforts at displaying our or Essentially what would people do is they advertise a value proposition of the marketplace either in mating or in friendships or in trade What you have something what you're trying to do is you're trying to establish a relationship of exchange with one of those three classes of individuals so to to make this very untechnical if Bob wants to date Sue he is essentially Displaying for her or advertising a value proposition and If she does not want to buy Then that is failure feedback and he's going to be disappointed if he then goes to Mary Which he may go to Mary because Mary is the second most desirable person for him Then and she rejects him then he's going to be disappointed again if he then goes to Karen who is one notch down Further and he fails again pretty soon our boy is starting to be depressed Okay, and the depression is a signal that says, you know don't walk around Chewing tobacco and spitting on her shoes before you ask her out for the movies on Saturday night in other words he's going to start to try to figure out what he's doing wrong and Stop the action as to what he's doing now because it's because he's receiving failure feedback. Nate: This is very good Nate: This is very good. It's on my to-do list stop chewing tobacco and spitting on my date's shoes. Nate: That explains Sunday night. I'm they dad that explains it so Dr. Lisle: So what what we do as people is we advertise Because all three of these domains of life are actually under what we're going to call competitive pressure so you can't just mate with who you want and you can't just be friends with who you want and you can't just do the things that you want in trade. Doesn't work that way. There are More there are people with desirable characteristics that will not want to trade with you because they want to trade with somebody else And so I don't care if you're Michael Jordon eventually they got rid of Michael Jordan out of Chicago He got too old and they didn't think they could win with him and he wasn't worth the money and they let him go Okay, so the doesn't matter who you are you are your you are always under competitive pressure From other people and you are trying to advertise your wares as to what you can trade in competition with other people. I must say, you know, I don't mind taking potshots at fellow psychologists without naming them maybe specifically of course, but psychology is notorious for Particularly clinical psychology that people try to actually help people. They are notorious for putting their heads in the sand about the concept of competition For example, I mean even Nathaniel Branden as fine a thinker as he was in many ways in the self-esteem arena He thought of self-esteem is something that had nothing to do with competition with other people that he likened it to physical health and that physical health was Not competitive with other people and and he said psychological health Would mean high self esteem and therefore that's not have anything to do with other people Well, he was just flat-out totally wrong. It has everything to do with other people the Psychological health does not have to do with self-esteem and that was a big misunderstanding the psychological health might have to do with tremendous disease processes like schizophrenia or possibly somebody has I Don't know terrible seizure disorders that cause all kinds of problems I mean we're talking about structural architectural problems with a brain that that is a whole different issue that is psychological health at that level the or you could also argue that people who have genetically mediated bizarre anomalies that are very problematic obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc, etc that People can be highly functional, but they can do an awful lot of suffering and you could in principle call that psychological and healthy but It's a little strange way to put it But low self-esteem is not a sign of bad psychological health. It's a sign of failure feedback and This was a big misunderstanding on Brandon's part and it is highly interdependent with signalling from other people and it's all about competition and It's all about the signaling that we get or what we're going to call esteem cues from other people that tell us about how valuable we are Nate: Thanks. This is very interesting because kind of contrary this is kind of contrary to what we hear on dr Phil and Oprah and all the other shows And so if we can talk a little bit about like what are some of the key ingredients? Can you well before actually we get to that if anybody wants to call in for any questions, The number is six five seven three eight three Zero seven five one. Feel free to call in and we'll get to you when we can again The number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one If you're listening on the website You can go in the chat room and just go under a guest and just you can type some questions in as well I'm reading those as well But yeah So it seems a little contrary to what we've been hearing with with all the the pop Psychology and the reality shows and things like that Can you I guess a good question I have is can you give someone good self-esteem? Dr. Lisle: No, you can't. The truth is is that that self-esteem just just like No, as I said, there's these two mystical parts of self-esteem that have not been understood but by the time we're done here in a little while people will have an understanding of this that so first of all, the number one ingredient of the self esteem mechanism is Is this tracking mechanism of the cues that we have from other people. And so self-esteem also as we can see is not global. It isn't universal across three three domains actually highly domain-specific So someone could have for example Very be very highly esteemed at their work Being well paid well-regarded highly respected Okay they could actually even have very good friends who think that they're terrific and conscientious and flying person and they could be getting Bad feedback in the mating arena and be really frustrated possibly that they've got their set sight Sight set maybe there are five on one to ten scale for sexual attractiveness and they really think because they are such a fine person and well compensated and outstanding individual but they deserve a seven or eight in the looks arena and they can't get it and And as a result they they are they may be very frustrated with that situation and quite depressed about it when they when they are in those arenas or in those situations and so as a result it can and feel and feel the low self-esteem as the self-esteem goes off as the esteem meter fires off and Tells them once again that they were rejected by a seven that they thought that they should qualify for and didn't The that they are that they are unhappy and they're spending hours and minutes You know minutes and hours in a depressed state as a result of the failure feedback and so this is how it is that now we're clarifying a What has been an essentially preliminary and sloppy Understanding of what self esteem is and we start cleaning it up and realizing oh, no, it's much more specific than this you can absolutely feel very confident and valued and and appropriately treated in the marketplace in one domain and not feel that in another domain and So we see now that self-esteem is not carved in stone inside of you as a general Overall feeling about what you think about yourself, but it's in fact highly domain-specific particularly to these three domains And in people is someone who has great friends at a great mate But is unemployed and getting a bunch of negative feedback in the marketplace can be very depressed and frustrated about that situation. So The so now what we're going to do is we're going to move through into into another place here, which is Let's think about what people do is they advertise What they have to display and trade with other people so they display in the mating arena its standard operating procedure throughout the animal kingdom to make Displays such as singing, dancing, athletics, beauty, and houses those those five are Very universal throughout the animal kingdom. You will see a beautiful plumage, you will see beautiful sculpted bodies, you'll see athletic competitions. You will see housing in other words the best houses and nests and in a particular habitat for a particular species are under high competitive pressure and Therefore only the most fit animals can get those things. That would be the equivalent of you know, the fancy house at the top of Hill in Beverly Hills you Better be a pretty fit organism to get the resources to be able to get that house And if you did get it, you know what I mean, that it's a signal of something important that is also true in the animal kingdom. So those are some very prominent things in the mating arena, but not so much in For example trade or friendship so in trade and friendship people are more Signaling things like personality characteristics. How conscientious how kind how intelligent how social things of this nature these are these basic personality characteristics that people Signal and they'll do that on job interviews and they'll say well what's your weakness and you'll say well sometimes I'm just you know I get so lost and doing things perfectly that that you know, I lose a little time perspective Yeah, the only thing that you can afford to admit is being a perfectionist for god sakes Nate: So almost like you were there with me at the job interview Dr. Lisle: There you go, so This is what people do and they're making displays with Everything. With their haircuts with their clothes with their cars with their careers with the country clubs How many karats they have on their hand everything that you see People are trying to display these characteristics in order to be competitive With respect to trades and potential trades in the marketplace for mates, friends and trading partners. Now But now where it is does so essentially what I'm going to argue Is that a very important feeling in life is the sensitivity that we have to esteem cues from other people? So I'm going to call this esteem as opposed to self esteem Now people will interchange two very different concepts that we're going to be discussing the first is the one thing that I'm going to call esteem and Mark Leary, when he Examined us when people asked about how they felt about their self-esteem after they got rejected from other people They said all of my self-esteem is low. But in fact I will argue that that is not the self esteem mechanism I will argue that that is an esteem mechanism and we we Interchangeably use two different concepts and we're going to see the second concept in a minute and this has been part of the confusion Throughout the history of psychology has been about that There are actually two very different mechanisms, esteem mechanisms, but they feel the same. So one of them is going to be In fact, for example if let's say some attractive woman You know flirts with you, you are going to walk away and tell your friend. Wow, that was good for my ego Okay now so the ego quote that word is the word we use for Mark Leary's sociometer or what i'm going to call an esteem meter Okay, so if you get rejected for three job interviews, you say wow, that's tough on my ego So we actually have a word in our language For this mechanism because the process is that it accomplishes are so important and the word is ego. Okay now However, what we're going to do is we're going to look slightly differently at this process We're going to say okay, but there seems to be something else besides What other people think of me that seems to be acting Inside of me and that is sometimes other people don't have to be even around and I have feelings So for example, if I put on a suit in the mirror at Macy's and nobody else is around I say, whoa That looks pretty good on me. I Might say oh I feel my self-esteem rising. Okay, and you do and now we're going to look at what this is. So human beings in order to have advertised Their their wares to the marketplace they were better off if they rehearsed So for example, let's suppose it's an ancient environment right at the dawn of language you know some guy that said, you know to some girl with a Ancient dance, you know, oh stars me you you know that guy got laid because he was the first guy at that point of the stars and you Know tried to bring that into the conversation But a few hundred thousand years later You better be better than that So you better be thinking before you go up to the girl what you're gonna say to her, you know I still walk up there and say where'd you get that bone in your hair? You don't say that? Okay, you try to say something clever. You know, what's your sign, something. Try to say something that's going to be interesting and the way that you're going to figure out that what's going to be interesting is you're going to have a little facsimile of her brain sitting inside your head you're gonna have a little let's suppose her name's Guba, okay. So you've got a little Guba in your head and you're thinking, hmm if I see this, what do I think? No, I think she'll frown. What about this? No, that's all what about though thats funny. That'll be good okay, so you Essentially replay you play the situation in your mind's eye before it ever happens. You rehearse it. So human beings turn out to be great rehearsers. They rehearse and they rehearse and they rehearse and they rehearse and rehearse So they rehearse before they go out on a date they put on different clothes. They look at the situation in the mirror They look at incontestable differences in their from different angles in the mirror. They changed their hair a little bit They put on a different color color-coordinated this or that etc, etc, etc They're rehearsing. In order to rehearse You have to have a mechanism inside your head that's Anticipating what other people think and this is going to be what I call the internal audience So the internal audience is a mechanism that it's a specialized set of neural tissue that effectively acts as if other people are watching you and that mechanism what it does is just as if other people were watching you and giving you esteemed signals as to whether they liked your Advertisement or not? The internal audience will do the same thing. It will give you positive feedback and will give you negative feedback. Now this has been noticed in the history of psychology So cognitive therapy Which is the most researched most respected therapeutic process on the planet for psychology they actually call it the internal critic and Here they make a mistake The internal audience is not a critic. You could say that it's a critic in the most in the most Precise Use of the term ie a critic can either be positive or negative in its feedback But the cognitive therapists are not thinking of it in that way They think of that the human beings have a pesky Critical internal voice and that you have to figure out how to talk back to it and to challenge it etc. Hmm Here they make a mistake It is not a critic the internal audience is an audience and it will applaud you if you do a good job in your rehearsal and it will Criticize you if you do a lousy job in your rehearsal This is what I'm going to call the self-esteem mechanism. The self-esteem. Mechanism is the social psychological process that takes place inside of your own mind and If the reason why we evolve such a mechanism is to give us feedback during rehearsal, so you can imagine if you could think of a Clever thing to say to the pretty girl then how much more confidence you would feel walking up there and motivated to do it Whereas if you could not think of anything really clever to say you might just keep your mouth shut Because your internal audience says you don't have anything intelligent to say okay, so Through this method through an internal audience the internal audience signals the esteem Mechanism or the ego in the same way that realized social feedback from real live people will signal it Now this is self-esteem and this is this is what people were trying to say and the Nathaniel Brandon was trying to say When he said look only you can give it to yourself, okay. So and he is correct, but people misunderstand That you should just say positive things to yourself about yourself. This is absurd the self-esteem Mechanism is a very sophisticated audience. If you just try to say positive things about yourself, it couldn't care less okay, the self-esteem mechanism is sensitive to observing your rehearsals and how well you do at rehearsal if You work really hard and are diligent and you do a good job Even if nobody else has seen it your internal audience says good job You worked really hard If you do a half-baked job and cheat on your diet And no and then you tried to stand in front of the mirror and try to give yourself positive self affirmations totally worthless process the Self-esteem mechanism is not fooled the internal audience couldn't care less and it will give you the same mediocre feedback that it gave you yesterday so it turns out that you actually have indirect control Over an enormously important component of your happiness, which is your self-esteem mechanism You have no control Really, over whether other people will ever accept you, ever value what it is that you do, ever want to mate with you, ever want to Be your friend or ever hire you. Of course You've got some indirect control over it You can you can hustle and try to figure out what other people do that works and success leaves clues So it turns you can get coaching and advice and liposuction and whatever okay, here are ways to battle the competitive problems that people have however, We do not have very much control Over whether or not we will ever be able to achieve the positive feedback that we think we might deserve from the marketplace. So our esteem meter may not fire Over lifetime in the way that we would hope on the other hand It may fire completely adequately as we reach goals that we think we deserve and we do reach them So but what we do have control over is the self-esteem mechanism, which is about 50% of your happiness You have the ability to actually earn on a daily basis the internal audiences regard from diligent excellent effort and That thing I have to tell you is merciless This is where people that are very talented and attractive They get a tremendous amount of positive feedback from the world for who it is that they are and what they look like These people can actually have low self-esteem which seems incredible that that would be true But it can and they can have very high esteem They can enjoy enjoy the fact that their adored by other people and that can feel very good when that is happening but in their quiet moments when they are when they are really Not proud of who it is that they are and they have not done a good job of actualizing more potential And they have they haven't been a very good person then they then they rightly and appropriately may have very low self-esteem Experiences and can only be corrected by excellent diligent effort. That is the only way that is corrected. And And so but it is beautiful to know that we actually have a pitiless democratic and very durable mechanism inside of us that is largely responsible for how does that we feel for most of the hours of our life Nate: That is that's very interesting so Basically, if someone compliments you over and over and over again and gives you all this positive feedback But you internally know that you really didn't deserve it that will not result in self esteem. Is that my understanding? Dr. Lisle: Not at all. In fact, it's worse than that. We can talk another time Nate if you have me back on on traps that are set up for the self esteem mechanism when that happens, so Actually people if people are can sense this in their children if they're encouraging their children about how great their children are and their children are in fact Self-destructing right in front of them, are highly demotivated and are playing video games and not doing their math homework go to my website at a scheme dynamics org and There is material on there about that that I will explain that process The the self-esteem mechanism can be put under bizarre pressure when expectations are put that are too high and As a result, all the positive feedback in the world is actually usually a disaster for the self-esteem process the feedback to your children should be You know what I would call, you know, a hundred ten percent of the truth. In other words, the truth plus a little extra Nice gentle frosting. Not two hundred percent of the truth or four hundred percent of the truth Which is what is a standard operating procedure these days. Not telling little kids that they can be great and that they can reach these high Heights. This does not motivate them. It demotivates them. Instead what we want to do is we want to be really quite honest and pretty accurate but gentle about that accuracy and if we do that and And we keep it right there. That's the best results for for us and anybody else. Nate: So what what advice would you give someone Who either wanted to boost or develop their own self-esteem or wanted to develop self-esteem with someone else? Dr. Lisle: Yes the What we would want to do is we would want a number one figure out which domain of life whether it's mating friendship or trade that you feel like you are not achieving as much as you would expect that you should be able to. So the domain of life which is most frustrating for you and Then what we're going to do is we're going to make a study of that domain and try to assess Why it is that the market is not biting as far Don what we have to offer as we think they should and we're going to try to figure what out what that is. And a lot of times what that is is that there's some work and some hustle and some effort that is associated with What our competitors are doing who are maybe no more genetically endowed than us in some domain. What they are doing versus what we are doing that we may be Just as talented and beautiful as people that are doing better than we are but we are only putting out 70% of the effort where we are not being as effective and So we need to then essentially analyze that problem and then realize that we may have some things to learn and Some things that we may need to develop and some conditions that we made to improve We may need to be in better financial condition better physical condition We may be had to be a better intellectual condition we need to be you know, essentially be more knowledgeable about something or more skillful in order to be more competitive and So so it is usually breaks down to what we're going to call what I call the fundamentals that If you're a basketball team It just is got just got beat up by another basketball team and you desperately would like to be competitive with them, You don't just hope and pray and swear up and down and jump up and down. There are Fundamental actions that that team did and they did them better than you did them and the reason they did them better than you did them is that they practiced more than you did and they practiced more effectively and they spent more time and energy in Learning the requisite skills needed to do that job well. That is true whether or not you are a basketball player piano player math teacher Cutting hair or you are a business man trying to sell tacos. There are fundamentals to what it is that you are trying to do and if you are not doing well in the marketplace and your feelings of esteem is suffering behind this, Then your job is to figure out what those fundamentals are and put time and energy and resources into trying to improve your competitive standing, that is what you do. And when you do that process your self-esteem mechanism rises as Appreciates the effort that you put in You will then get an enormous boost if you actually get a esteem signals from the marketplace where that improves, okay? But but the first thing that we care about is self-esteem self-esteem is is immediately Dynamic in that as you break the problems down and address them and face What it is that you can do about them and you start to do whatever that is about them You will start to feel better about yourself almost immediately I had a woman I'll tell you a story before we close. I had a woman that that Texted me about five years ago One of my good clients who Good-humoured bright pretty lady Midlife and she struggles with being self indulgent and gaining weight eating And she goes up and down and I've seen her go up and down, you know over 20 years when she loses weight She's very attractive and and very self-confident and then she gains 30 pounds and then she feels bad about herself disgusted and back and forth it goes and and she texted me and she said Dr. Doug, I need some a quick fix. I feel down disgusted and with myself and I'm fat again and I just need you to say something and I just don't feel like You know eating a bunch of vegetables today. I just don't feel like that's gonna do it for me if I do that And what I said to her is I texted her back. I said the fastest way to improve your self-esteem is to exercise vigorously You go to the gym and you work out and I want you to work out really really hard until your muscles are tired And sore and you're exhausted Because if you do that When it's midnight You cannot give it back whereas if you ate Well for the next two meals And ate a bunch of rice and vegetables and thought you'd been a good girl You could blow the whole thing by eating a bunch of ice cream at midnight so your Internal audience does not believe that you deserve any pat on the back just because you did a good job by eating a couple of healthy meals, but your internal audience will Respect you if you go into the gym and workout really hard because if you do that, you know You did it your internal audience knows you did it and no matter what you eat after that It knows that you made a tremendous effort Okay? She texted me back. I wrote this all up and you know a couple of paragraphs and she said fantastic I feel so much better. I don't even have to go to the gym Nate: Mission accomplished Dr. Lisle: It was a thing of beauty. Okay, but the fun thing about it for me was it was clearly hitting what I call her source code It was right down inside of her neural circuits It was accurate and that is correct that she could actually imagine doing the exercise and imagine what her internal audience would feel and It was correct. It would you would have felt she would have felt really good about herself. Nate: So she solved the problem for her. It seems like the the main motivation was just to find a solution to the problem. And once the solution exists, then there is no need to. Dr. Lisle: No need to put out in the effort, right Nate: It reminds me of a joke where You know a mathematician is in a hotel room with a with an engineer and the hotel lobby is on fire and the engineer comes out and he says I'm going to go get the Get to get the fire extinguisher the math the mathematician looks outside. He says, oh I see where the fire started Okay, I can go back to bed now So, you know for his for him the solution exists those where it came from now, he doesn't have to stress as much Dr. Lisle: That's right. There you go Nate:So so in general for the fundamentals for mates Friends or trading partners or business, one of the fundamentals I just heard you say was basically go to the gym or go exercise vigorously are there any Other fundamentals that are specific to either of these three process? Are there these three relationships? Dr. Lisle: well, certainly the There are all three of them have their own have their own fundamentals so in the case of of Attractiveness going to the gym is a fundamental It's the better physical condition that you are in the more attractive that you are and so if you do the hard work associated with that you will feel better about Yourself even before anybody ever says anything So long before you get any esteem from other people, you will get self esteem from the internal audience who Recognizes that you are doing an effective rehearsal. Okay. The same thing is true if you are If you are for example struggling professionally, so let's suppose you're a financial guy and you you know You went to school and you majored in finance from you know I don't know Arizona State and you're kind of having a hard time getting a job and you're kind of depressed about it And you're you're feeling the competitive pressure, but now you find out that oh If you do this exam called system seven or what the heck it is. No, it's gonna be a whole bunch of work Well if you sit down and realize okay well I got five months work to do here and the first night you sit down and you work for four hours on that and you test yourself and you see that you learned a Lot, your internal audience says well done Joe Okay, and your self-esteem starts to rise immediately So and you do it two or three or four or five six nights in a row within two weeks Your self-esteem can be much higher Even though we're a long ways away from passing our system seven exam We can see that what that we have What it takes to do it because we've done little bits of it and there's nothing about the later bits That is any different or more complicated than the early bits. And so essentially the process it's a universal process of Understanding that all nature achievements is all big achievements are nothing other than small achievements Accumulated that's all they are. There is no one giant achievement. There is no such thing human achievements are always the result of Little achievements and little achievements happen, literally one second at a time as we Put our effort in trying to figure out the math problem or we put our effort on trying to figure out how we hold the snow ski pull every little bit of human achievement is literally done one second at a time and if we make those efforts Diligently to try to improve our competitive standing in any arena, our self-esteem will rise Automatically. We litterally have an indirect level over how it is that we feel about ourselves Nate: Fantastic, I'm actually very curious to hear more about these traps that you talked about a little bit earlier And so we'd love to have you come back on And and talk about that when you have a chance Thank you again for coming on Dr. Lisle Dr. Lisle: My pleasure. Thanks for having me Nate: It's it's a pleasure. And again if you have any questions comments concerns go on the website and We'll be back we will be back next week at 7:30 p.m. On Wednesday and Also visit. Dr. Lisle's website esteem dynamics org. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful night. Thank you
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