Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Gustavo Tolosa: Dr Doug Lisle, PhD Is it Self-Esteem or Self-Confidence Why it matters
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


hello and welcome everyone [Music] this is a wonderful wonderful time to see everybody coming in please let us know where you're logging in from i'm gustavo tolosa your host for today's webinar with one of the most beloved figures in the world of whole food plant-based diet dr doug lyle and i have to agree with dr mcdougall when he says that dr lyle is simply the best psychologist in the world so if you have not heard him speak before in person or in a broadcast like this or if you have not had the chance to have a session with him either in person or in the phone you know that i am not exaggerating in the least so before we get started today and as we wait for everybody to log in i just want to say a few announcements and many of you have wondered if i still do webinars and the answer is yes you might not be in my email list so if you want to be my email list you can send me an email at info plantemis.com or this visit my website plantemis.com and sign up there and if you're watching this on youtube you can help me out by subscribing to my channel so um we have a wonderful presentation today and i want to bring in dr lyle and welcome you how are you doing today dr lyle great gustavo great to see you always okay me too we always have fun doing our webinar so you know a few days ago or a few weeks ago i asked you about doing a talk on self-esteem and self-confidence and you thought that was a good topic so i am excited because um there's always something to learn from your presentations so i'll pass it on to you and we will all enjoy what you have to say oh good all right gustavo thank you what we'll do is we're going to i'm going to do a little slideshow about self-esteem and then after that we can take q a about this so let's go ahead and get to the slideshow i'm a psychologist uh most of you know that that i have i'm an immensely talented artist and um but but that my parents particularly my father uh wouldn't uh wouldn't support me in the way that i needed all right here we go stepping stones to self-esteem complete with some of my rare art all right so the uh this is me coming home from school at some point and and uh there's my parents and i'm wanting more art supplies for my artistic career i just asked for a little bit more money and and they said maybe i needed a little more of a job so that isn't what i uh was counting on and uh so at psychology school uh the grand professor there uh said that my father had damaged my self-esteem with the with the negative feedback about my heart and so i came home and shared the news from school and i learned that they damaged my self-esteem and they thought about that for about five seconds and my dad said maybe my self-esteem needed some damaging so so we're gonna learn about about these words and what they mean and how to make some sense of it and uh what my parents were kind of inherently rejecting there in that little skit is what i call the banana theory and banana theory which is also goes by very many fancy names uh socket psychodynamic and learning theory both subscribe to the notion that that human life is very much like a banana and that if you're it's in the store and you pick it up and you you you squeeze it just a little bit you know what's going to happen is if people keep squeezing it that's doing damage and uh and then when you peel back the banana at home later it's got all these bruises on it it's not very appealing to eat so essentially uh the notion is that unpleasant little bumps and bruises are dinging your self-esteem your self-confidence uh whatever it is that you want to call it they are limiting how magnificent your life can be and and setting the stage for the problems in your adult future by little dings that you're having in childhood uh that is essentially the breeze what i call the bruised banana theory um there are many people that subscribe to this in in various ways uh in in one one of the sort of intellectual fathers of self-esteem as a concept it's nathaniel brandon i noticed that i unconsciously left off the l at the end of this name sorry about that the uh you have this notion that that self-esteem uh it's like a vitamin it's a need um and so that when we didn't have enough of it that somehow that this caused damage caused people to be drug addicts caused them to do self-destructive things etc and uh and so that more self-esteem was better and less self-esteem was worse and it's a little confusing about how you got it uh he considered early childhood to be an absolutely critical uh component positive solid feedback from parents was a thing that would build self-esteem and negative feedback and confusing feedback would damage self-esteem damage the banana and then set the stage for you know i don't know teen prostitution drug addiction failing out of school criminal behavior or just plain depression anxiety and lack of general self-confidence in life poor romantic choices instability and jobs and career whatever in other words everything was seen that there was this thing called self-esteem uh that was this this positive sort of life force and that if you didn't have enough of it that your life would suffer and you've got damage to the self-esteem uh like the banana getting dinged okay so that's the notion dr lyle yeah let me let me interrupt because the slides are not advancing i think you need to click for this system to work you need to click on the actual slide to the left uh where you saw oh okay okay so let's see let me uh see what happens if i do that did that help no it didn't help i did i clicked on clicking over there on the left okay it's yes okay so i'm not sure what's happening there and maybe i need to i have no idea what to do i'm going to go i'm going to click back to what is my beginning uh nothing is happening there gusavo no i think you need to be in the actual in your not in this screen but in the actual presentation yeah let's see here now what about now right oh yes now we're gonna see if uh let me go back does that take me back to the beginning right yes okay so what about now can you now see yes no okay good all right here we go so here's my parents uh where i'm saying i need money and then they think i need a job and then i go to psychology school and this guy tells me that it damaged my self-esteem and then i informed them of that and then they think that maybe it needed some damaging and then we go to the banana theory or the bruce banana theory the notion that early childhood uh issues ding you and little uh disappointments along the way are sort of damaging you and that we get to the concept that self-esteems need and uh that you need to have it sort of filled up and if you have a deficiency then it causes all kinds of trouble uh can can everybody see now gustavo yes yes yeah we see this yeah we can see it okay so then we get to ernst becker who's an anthropologist who sort of has this idea that we have this terrible feeling that we're all going to die and anyway we're going to move on from that so my pet theory is is that previous thinking in psychology has i've understood where they have come up to their ideas but essentially that they're little nuts so we're going to look back and try to figure out where they went wrong and actually why and uh we're going to find out that previous thinking in the notion of self-esteem and human development and personality development has wandered into the weeds and has not sort of known where to go and we're going to look at a crossroads here of understanding self-esteem from a new perspective versus going into the banana theory where the weeds are so um here's a history of self-esteem thinking uh there's a greek philosopher in a toga i learned later that togas were in rome so well made a mistake so the uh undoubtedly the greeks had something to say about self-esteem i don't know what it was but in america a couple thousand years later william james was sort of our first great american psychologist he starts giving us a little clue that we need to pay attention to call that self-esteem is a feeling you notice that it changes and that it's related to competence so this is interesting these are the uh some of the things that he notices so we're going to then try to figure out um a few things we're going to figure out what kind of a feeling it is or why feelings exist and also why feelings would change uh and then also how they would might be related to our abilities so we're going to look at these it's going to turn out that the answer to a good uh comprehensive understanding of the nature of self-esteem will come from the concept will derive it from a concept that we're going to call consilience everybody knows that i'm sure i'm sure everybody's leaping you know uh with their notes because you know of course who this is this is the the great harvard aunt ant-man everyone wilson so uh ed roy wilson is the author of sociobiology uh in 1975 and then many important works since that time and what he introduces he is not the only one to introduce this but it's the concept uh that that human beings have sort of for their own convenience they have hacked up the different domains of of investigation into uh nice little units uh so they could study them and have their own departments but actually knowledge and the nature of reality is unitary so the the uh the principles of physics um will give rise to and not be contradicted by anything that is learned in chemistry so if you have something that you observe in chemistry that appears to contradict the laws of physics something is badly haywire or incredibly fascinating and something important is about to be known so uh the laws of chemistry uh are essentially a higher level they're looking down on bigger sort of bigger more complicated systems uh than than physics physics is obviously exceedingly complex however it organizes itself into units that then makes sense in chemistry but the laws of chemistry cannot violate the laws of physics then you could in principle and people have even we saw classes that we call biochemistry that's the chemistry of living things well the principle of that particular subset of chemistry in no way there's nothing there that could violate the laws of chemistry we just happen to be talking about chemicals associated with living things but there's nothing about their their behavior or the way they work that violates the laws of chemistry which cannot violate the laws of physics now it's going to turn out that biochemistry is going to be the building blocks of biology which is going to be living things so biological systems are going to have all kinds of things going on the more complicated they get so a plant for example is a lot more complicated than for example just a biochemical molecule that you might be looking at so the whole plant is going to be studied by biology but everything about what's happening with that plant can be understood in terms of biochemistry and therefore chemistry and that ultimately physics the um and there's nothing about what goes on in biology that can contradict the laws of biochemistry chemistry or physics and now of course there are certain kinds of organisms uh that have brains and therefore if they have brains they have a decision-making apparatus and they have what we're going to call a psyche or psychology and the the principles of psychology cannot violate the laws of biology now this is where things get very interesting because it's going to turn out that the social sciences uh for the last hundred years uh since their inception uh in the early 1900s and late 1800s did not believe that psychology was built on biology so the psychologists basically made their theories independent of any thinking in biology and so it's going to turn out that the other social sciences political science economics sociology and anthropology they also have behaved as if they are not in any way related to biology turns out that these are catastrophic mistakes uh that are of course tremendously embarrassing as they slowly learn the facts of life that in fact all you're watching when you watch political science economics anthropology and sociology or any psychological event all you're watching is you're watching the working of a biological system or systems are actually independent biological systems that may be influenced by other biological systems i.e people interacting with each other and what's going on is nothing other than the action of biochemistry i.e neurotransmitters and neurons firing and behavior which is of course predicated on the nature of chemistry which is of course based on the principles of physics and so ultimately this is all consilient and if your theories are not consistent with this your theories are doomed and so uh much about modern psychology and its theories uh when i say modern in the last hundred years are doomed to fail and they are basically built on quicksand now the um so they're lost in space and what we're going to do is we're going to try to rescue previous thinking uh in psychology bruce banana theory self-esteem need etc uh because if we don't this is all from lost in space you're in danger of crashing your spaceship because you have no idea where you're going so what will save us is biology as we step one step back we don't need to learn particle physics to know why people do what they do but we do need to know some things about biology that will help us a great deal in understanding why people do what they do what the nature of self-esteem is what the nature of self-confidence is what the nature of motivation is what goals are what the nature of achievement is and what are the things that can get in the way we're going to go back to william james and to the notion that self-esteem is a feeling that was his observation he couldn't quite pinpoint where it came from he knew that it was associated with confidence but he couldn't quite get it uh we're going to look now look and figure out that what feelings are is there actually biological signals and they are designed for a specific purpose and now we know what that purpose is that purpose is to increase the statistical likelihood of the genes of that organism being on the planet in the future and that is the only reason why any animal ever felt anything they felt it because there's a system that is built into its uh brain and its nervous system that will cause feelings to happen under certain conditions and those feelings are motivating devices in order to help the organism execute behavior that will increase their likelihood of either survival or reproduction either way whether it increases survival or reproduction it will have statistically increased the likelihood of its gene surviving so you might say well now that's ridiculous i'm a 103 year old grandmother are you telling me that whether i feel cold in my feet or not has a difference make a difference in whether or not my genes survive on the planet and the answer is yes they do in other words that feeling of cold will make it more likely that you will do something so that the feet don't remain cold uh that coldness is a warning device to tell you that the temperature situation is actually a threat to your survival so if you take care of it and you feel warm and therefore better you will then have a statistically likelihood increase if you haven't survived that can make a difference in whether or not one of your offspring then comes to you for advice you know you do your best to try to point them in the right direction or you sound the alarm that a kid is heading down to the river and it may trip in there and fall and it's unsupervised and they die in other words your presence on the planet increases the statistical likelihood that your genes will survive and that's why you have signals inside of you that are constantly operating to try to tell you what to do hungry tired cold sore uh whatever it is so uh human beings now we had no idea why human beings liked certain landscapes uh before we integrated biology into our thinking now we know so human beings like looking at things like this they're like looking at that because those are the kinds of features like intermittent trees a river running through possibly looking down on a scene uh so basically having a little rolling hill we don't want super thick jungle because you can't see predators in there we want an intermittent tree scene and we want to look out at grasslands for example and we want to look at flowers trees etc turns out that if you do stylize very careful realistic sketches and you show them to people and in some of those sketches the trees are a little thick around the middle so that it doesn't look like they can climb them but in other trees it looks like they could climb them it turns out people like the looks of the ones that it looks like they can climb even though if you ask them why they like that sketches to the other sketch they cannot tell you it's an unconscious computational mechanism that for preferences that would increase the statistical likelihood of survival of one scene versus another scene so they uh we like the the look of water because water is critical for our survival you're not a you're not an animal that can live you know indefinitely without water it's a critical resource we also we don't just like to look at but we like the sound of it uh if water is moving whether it's crashing waves on a shore or it's a babbling brook you actually like the sound because the sound indicates that the water is moving and therefore it is less likely to be subject to bacterial contamination so you uh are spectacular in your ability to analyze the scene and tell whether or not this scene as opposed to some other scene that when you look to the right or look to the left which place looks like it's more uh beautiful and what beautiful means is uh if we go and interact in that environment that environment is more valuable statistically for our survival and here's a guy looking at a girl and he's having the same kind of reaction uh same thing in other words he's looking at features of her that indicate that she's fertile and so that's what lights up the dopamine centers of his brain in the same way as if he's chewing on a bright peach um slightly different feelings but those feelings have a similar underlying biological purpose which is to statistically increase the likelihood of survival by signaling the organism that it's that it's got something valuable there or dangerous there's dangers so there's my cat taking a dump on the carpet all happy about it i'm not why because the smell of poop is uh disgusting and what that disgust reaction is is it's uh something that will cause your face to scrunch up and turn your head away from such a smell which will reduce the likelihood of bacterial contamination getting into you and challenging your immune system so that's why you don't like excrement you don't like it because you can't make use of those calories uh the way a dung beetle is when that dumb deal smells that nothing could be better okay so now we're going to go back to now we understand a little bit about feelings so we see that all of your little feelings for sounds or vision uh how something might feel how it might taste how it might smell in other words we realize okay every feeling that you have is just a signaling mechanism to tell you whether you've increased or decreased your likelihood of genetic survival uh as a result of that sensory input uh your sensory system is there to tell you about your relationship between self and environment and inform you what you should be doing if something is unpleasant you try to move away from it and mitigate the threat if something feels good you try to move closer and interact with it that's the nature of signaling systems in biology but now self-esteem is some kind of a feeling we want to try to figure out what it is now we know because it's a feeling it's a signal process so it's designed to signal to the organism something that's important for its gene survival let's try to figure out what that is we will now quit the doug theorizing and we'll hop over to mark professor mark larry at duke university who did experiments on what he called self-esteem i will actually i would take a little bit of issue i got my own way to parse some of these concepts but we're going to look at what dr larry thought about self-esteem and some experiments that he ran he looked at it instead of like a banana that can get bruised and therefore then get damaged in your development um and you have to make the best of it he sees it as a social acceptance feedback meter and we're going to look at this so essentially if you get a low self-esteem is not it's not a self-esteem is not a vitamin the way nathaniel brandon talked about it it's not something that can be taken away from you in your early childhood it's a current state of affairs with respect to whether or not you're being accepted by uh a group that's invaluable for your survival reproductive success or whether you're being rejected and so when you're being accepted your quote what he calls self-esteem uh is that's what people report the word to mean we're going to look at that we'll talk about a little bit about that later that as far as the research literature goes this is what is uh has been found so the um so this is now we're going to look at fred here and i'm going to argue that there's three major classes of relationships that fred seeks he seeks mates he seeks friends and he seeks trading partners i need people to give him a job or people that he does things for and then they buy his wares in other words he exchanges with others in order for his for his uh material survival human beings do that naturally even in the wild they form small trading communities and they take advantage of the fact that some people are much better at making moccasins and fish hooks than they are at catching fish and as a result the exchanges that go on benefit both parties friends the exchanges benefit both parties because friends are essentially insurance schemes uh where if i'm in trouble my friends will help me but if they're in trouble i'll help them that is an enormously valuable concept that is almost unknown in the animal kingdom not totally but almost in other words human beings make better use and more use of friends than any other creature uh then there's mating and so uh as a result so these are three separate types of relationships that human beings seek dr larry argues that self-esteem is a feedback system for social behavior and he calls it a sociometer now in a laboratory he actually did research on this so unlike freud or jung or carr rogers or bf skinner or frederick pearls or anybody else that ever talked about this mark larry actually is a modern scientist and used laboratory techniques and experiments with physical analysis to actually take a look at the concepts of self-esteem and what he found is is that in groups he very carefully engineered people to get either positive feedback or negative feedback and when they got negative feedback they would their self-esteem would drop when they got positive feedback their reported their quote self-esteem would rise when he published this all kinds of objections came out from the peanut gallery all over social science and they said no you just you just did this with a bunch of you know basically lilly livered scared little undergraduates at duke or wherever he did this and so therefore you know if you actually add real people with a backbone you wouldn't get that so dr larry then went and found people who had an attitude big time confidence in themselves that said i don't care what anybody thinks so he grabbed a group of those people he ran exactly the same kind of study and so first he of course the idea is that there's something wrong with you if you don't care about what other people think but it turns out oops by the way um the the results of his study um uh look like this exactly the same there's no difference so people that consider themselves totally independent they don't care what anybody else thinks etc etc they have exactly the same results towards positive and negative social feedback as everybody else and if you truly don't care what anybody else thinks you're not even saying that but it means that you are actually extremely unusual and there's actually some you're uh you're an outlier in human beings with a bizarre social psychology that's actually very dysfunctional okay so uh that is the story on how that works now we're going to look at our little gal here named joanie and she's got three groups of people that she's seeking to either obtain relationships with or to continue having relationship with them so nate's friends and trading partners so she's got friends she may have a job she may have a boyfriend this is what her life is about and what we're going to see is that she's actually these processes are inherently competitive so the uh this is a this is a place where dr larry's work starts to signal to us that something has been badly missed in previous theorizing about self-esteem and that is that there's an unconsciousness of the notion that number one that our our quote feelings of self-esteem are highly dynamic depending upon the feedback as we saw in dr larry's work and um those of you that that may know a little bit about me and my website there's a reason why it's called esteem dynamics it's because it's uh is triangulating and trying to communicate the notion that esteem processes are inherently dynamic they are not a slow inexorable process of chiseling damage from childhood they are in fact very different than that and they are highly reactive they are reacted similar to how it is that our uh hunger drive changes in sleep and et cetera et cetera our optimism with respect to some goal can change dramatically depending upon what the feedback system is so these relationships that we seek with other people are always subject to competitive processes so by competition it means that people are running a cost benefit analysis on that relationship whether or not they're running a cost-benefit analysis on hiring you uh you're running a cost-benefit analysis on taking the job or waiting for something better you're running a cost benefit on your friends and you're running a cost benefit on your husband or wife or whoever it is you are running cost-benefit analysis you can't help it okay you are designed by nature to run a cost-benefit analysis your feelings are the result of those cost-benefit analysis so here's somebody that's saying want to be friends what's happening then is a cost-benefit analytic process goes on so in order to resolve competitive processes what human beings do is they advertise okay so advertising winds up being a key feature of human nature uh here's a particular kind of tortoise and apparently the male sticks his head out and then wiggles it side to side and if he does a really good job uh doing that then the females may like him he doesn't do such a good job they don't like it um here's a bird up in a tree if you hear some bird chirping away you can count on the fact that it's a male it's basically saying chirp chirp chirp i've got really good jeans i'm a good mate chirp chirp chirp nate with me when you go into the woods and you hear all that that's what you're hearing the uh chimpanzees the male chimpanzee will uh if it sees a female he likes to grab a tree and he'll shake it really hard showing how strong he is i tried to do this try to get dates since this never worked for me the uh now so what we're going to see is that human nature is an animal nature is going to very much be about making displays in order to uh these are advertisements in order to gain the regard or esteem in other words to alter the cost-benefit analysis of observers and and to get them to decide to either mate with us be our friend or trade with us and the animal kingdom uh the thing that they do the they don't they don't have friends particularly in the animal kingdom and they don't trade so we see this characteristic taking place in the mating arena they do a number of things they sing they dance they they demonstrate athleticism they display beauty these are classic displays in the animal kingdom you'll see all of these in humans this is basically what all pop culture is it's the resolution of competitive processes you can see that i don't know how to spell i left a couple of things out of there but you get the idea all right and this is what human beings find is fun so human beings like to fix up their houses they're fixing up their houses in order to make it look like they are essentially better specimens uh and all of these things whether it's singing dancing uh curling your hair wearing fancy outfits showing your how nice your yard is showing how uh pretty your house is uh showing how well you can sing all these things are actually mechanisms for animals including in this case humans to display what we call their mutation load in other words somebody did handsome and dashing and can fight with swordplay and he can swing you know from a rope on a ship when it's drowning and save the maiden and everybody else that guy's showing he's got really good genes okay so these are genetic displays which statistically increase the likelihood of gene survival that's why people find them fun and they're all also inherently interested in watching listening and learning about them alright so james displays our mates her beauty her style her dancing her singing and her smarts her friends that she's showing that she's reliable healthy fair smart she's not going to be a problem for the coalition and for trade she's so unreliable smart hard working honest capable these are the ways that people are you don't you don't try to tell an employer that you're trying to get a job as a junior accountant how well you can sing and dance so people are trying to figure out to run a cost benefit analysis on you for the total trade package that you're doing and these are the kinds of things that people display so in order to display well what people are going to do they have a device that we might call the sociometer but we're going to call it an esteem meter and that when we get positive feedback from other people it's going to cause us to feel happy and confident okay when we get negative feedback we're going to have doubt we're going to have a lower confidence and we're going to have anxiety and depression embarrassment so positive steam signals show that we're valued and accepted negative esteemed signals think about a dynamic so in a boyfriend girlfriend situation in the early going everybody's really excited and then you go a few hours and you don't get positive feedback you start to feel anxiety you start to feel doubt you start to feel depressed then you get a text that says everything's cool ah then you're relieved you can see the dynamics of steam signaling and how it impacts people's feelings from moment to moment now competitive displays turns out will improve with rehearsals this winds up being a critical issue so joanie here is getting ready for a date and she looks in the mirror and comes her hair and puts on an outfit she can feel more confident as she looks uh at herself she is rehearsing her display if she does a good job at rehearsal she has an internal esteem mechanism that gives her positive feedback so this is um this is going to be what we call self-esteem so the self-esteem mechanism is actually independent of the esteem signals that we get from other people steam signals that we get from other people are very powerful they're actually louder biologically than self-esteem mechanism the reason is is that real life esteem is where the rubber really hits the road in evolution they either want to hire us or they don't they either want to date us or they don't they either want to be our friend or they don't and they're saying it in their actions so their positive feedback should be very valuable the negative feedback is very can be very hurtful and shake our confidence so our feelings are highly dependent on our feedback from other people but not entirely and that's because our self-esteem mechanism is is looking at us through the eyes of other people as we do our rehearsals and decides whether or not we are working well at our rehearsal if we are doing a good job at our rehearsal we can feel quote good about ourselves even in the face of negative feedback that's a very important issue that distinguishes the self-esteem that i describe from the self-esteem that is often described in the literature including larry's sociometer so he's not he's not parsing this down where i think it's actually a very important distinction and it is so as i look at this guy's looking at his house he is looking at his house and it's displayed through the eyes of other people who aren't even there he's the only one out there on some saturday morning looking at it that feeling is self-esteem that's the self-esteem mechanism there's no esteem there nobody's saying wow ralph you got a really cool house so it isn't actually an esteem system it is actually internal it's an anticipation of what other people would think all right so here we're going to look at this so here's the esteem meter and we have our three domains mates friends and trade to be competitive joanie's rehearsing her displays in order to rehearse very well you need a feedback system while you're rehearsing that's why things like playing the piano uh or people can get so good at this because it's feedback rich you can actually hear a bad sound okay certain things aren't so good so when people for example they write a poem sometimes they can't tell that well how good the poem is not like you can hear on a piano what it sounds like so of course the the joke is the kids learning to play with violin it can sound terrible the kid thinks it sounds good so what you have is you've got an imaginary audience watching your efforts and if you do a good job at your effort it will give you positive feedback even though nobody else is around that's self-esteem it's also highly dynamic if you do a good job today your self-esteem mechanism will feel bolstered and you'll feel a sense of pride if you do a lousy job today it will feel disgusted so it's a highly dynamic process and it isn't damaged in early childhood in or anything like that so this is how it works that our feelings about life is pretty much about our esteemed meter it's about the feedback that we get from other people and it's about the self-esteem that we earn we are not in charge of the feedback from other people we cannot control this all we can do is to rehearse to do a good job to be ready for our displays and as we rehearse we will find that we will improve and that improvement is an increase will increase our confidence because our internal audience will see and notice that there has been improvements okay and that's why william james noted that the feeling that he called self-esteem which in fact was a a combination of self-esteem and what i call esteem or uh interpersonal esteem that feeling uh involves self-confidence it's not just entirely self-confidence it's a feeling of moral victory over the fact that you have done well that you planned well worked hard done an excellent job and now you look at your garden and your self-esteem mechanism says joanne well done that's a beautiful garden when your guests see that garden they're going to be impressed with the work that you did okay so this is the nature of self-esteem and esteem and the nature of confidence comes with evidence that we are improving our displays um a long time ago mid-century there was a an old guard classic professor of psychology at harvard named robert white and he actually saw it this way he saw that self-esteem had something was impacted from the outside and from the inside he didn't have this delineated down into an esteem mechanism and he didn't understand that it was integrated with survival reproductive signaling and uh but he's he called the whole thing self-esteem i understand why because it's a little complicated talking about self-esteem versus interpersonal esteem but i do think that that's a valuable and important distinction so this is human beings human beings work at displaying their beauty their intelligence their personality in terms of openness conscientiousness introversion extroversion agreeableness emotional stability uh all of these things that they do they're doing in order to try to secure and or obtain relationships with other people their internal audience as they work at their efforts will either be disgusted and irritated and embarrassed by them or there will be positive feedback that will have pride in increasing confidence so uh here's a gal saying you know what i think if i were to lose 40 pounds i'd be more accepted um slim sue has uh has heard joanie say you know i'm going to lose a bunch of weight and slim sue doesn't believe it so therefore if she doesn't believe it neither will the internal audience tell you that if you tell the internal audience we're going to lose a bunch of weight it's it's not going to improve your self-esteem because it's not going to believe it the internal audience acts as if it's real people watching you now if you do a bunch of hard work if you want went out to breakfast lunch and dinner with slim sue and a very healthy food then buy the at the end of a week or two slim sue would say wow i'm you're starting to make a believer out of me okay and even if you lose a little bit of weight and some things start looking a little bit sharper slim sue's gonna start to change her tune about what she thinks and that's exactly what the self-esteem mechanism will do if you earn its regard it will give it to you it actually doesn't have a choice so in this case if we just try to preach to it the way it's very common in in pop psychology say affirmations say positive things you know fake it till you make it this is bogus okay what you want to do is roll up your shirt sleeves no nonsense and your job is to attack the problem of improvement by working at whatever the fundamentals of the problem are and if you do it you can't help but observe it from the inside your internal audience will notice if you did a half big job if you go to the gym and fiddle around there and you know goof off for 40 minutes and chit chat with your friend or whatever and then you come home your self-esteem mechanism knows that that was mediocre performance if you go and work hard when you come home it knows that it was an excellent performance okay so it it's like santa claus it knows when you're sleeping and knows when you're awake okay it knows that's what the self-esteem mechanism is the fact that it's seen as a negative thing in so much cognitive psychology is seen as the internal critic in cognitive therapy it's considered pesky it's considered an annoyance actually um mark leary himself wrote a book called the the curse of the self in other words they're frustrated about it because they don't understand it uh negative internal feedback is earned from mediocre efforts if we change the efforts and we dig in we will improve performances is she does this girl have motivational checkmate if nobody gives her positive feedback the answer is no if she does a good job then and consistently over a couple of weeks slim sue if she sees it will start to believe in her and she'll also start to believe in herself whether anybody watches us so the solution to the problem of self-esteem and self-confidence comes can be partially unwrapped by an understanding of what self-esteem is self-esteem is a feeling that feeling is part of a guidance system to try to encourage you to do things in such a way that will increase your competence and therefore increase your ability to advertise your wares to the world in all important domains for you the um we are seeking ultimately esteem or interpersonal esteem we are not seeking self-esteem okay self-esteem isn't something that you were designed to seek but you can you can if you know that it's there it's a quiet background music in your life and it's one that you can earn literally you can earn a great deal of self-esteem in 60 minutes that's how dynamic it is um it reminds me a great deal of a story that my mom told me when i was a kid and that is that uh she grew up in an abandoned gold mining town called placerville outside of boise idaho by 60 miles which might as well been 6 000 miles back in the 1930s and apparently her grandfather had owned a claim in a place called gold hill and he had mined it for quite a while and and for many many years he earned a dollar a day you know sort of mining this little thing and he finally gave up and he sold it and uh uh whoever bought it came in and sunk a shaft about 10 or 20 feet deep through the rock and took out six million dollars worth of gold wasn't that hard you just had to get through some wrong this is to me very much the way self-esteem works you've got to dig for it but it's closer to the surface than people think people think that and they're told by uninformed psychologists that you have to dig through years of hurts and bumps and bruises and tragedies of childhood and disappointments in life etc you do not your self-esteem you just have to crack through the rock and there it is okay and it can be found repeatedly by efforts uh that you make and you will have to give it back when you don't deserve it it's a very dynamic system that's the beauty of it uh and it can't be the mechanism cannot be destroyed or wrecked no matter how rough you've had it in this arena if you roll up your shirt sleeves and dig you're going to find that self-esteem there before you know it that is a reasonable price of self-esteem uh nature is designed by nature uh we're designed to be treated quite fairly by our psychology as you would expect we have a magnificent design if we behave in consistent uh fashion with that design things will go well and that folks is how you get the life you deserve thank you dr lyle for such an enlightening enlightening uh lecture if you want to go ahead and quit the presentation then we can get why do that without getting kicked off let's see i'm gonna do dad am i saying my back now uh let's see no i think that let's see oh i know stop sharing hold on yeah you've got to stop there we go all right very good thank you that was i just i was glued to the screen even though i've heard you several times that i always learn some new insights so dr lyle um there are some questions here that people have if you don't mind taking a few absolutely okay before i ask you the questions i do want to mention that you and jen hogg are writing a new book and um you said that that's probably the last one yeah i think so i don't think i'll do this again though i'll get it this is uh this is sort of 40 years in the making and so uh this will this is the big book and uh and so jen hawk and i have spent a lot of time on this and and we're attempting to integrate in a way that's really interesting to read a lot of these very uh unique concepts in in understanding human nature and understanding the nature of our own happiness how it works right well i know people cannot wait for that but it'll it will be done when it's done you're gonna understand got it you're not in a rush right but maybe in a few by the end of the year every year i think uh we'll be making an announcement at the end of the year i think yes all right very good and everybody you uh you can visit their website steamdynamics.com and look at all the information there and also schedule a session with either dr lyon or dr hogg so very good dr lyle so someone was saying here what about um these let's see here what about those people whose internal audiences aren't realistic uh the tons of people with high self-esteem and self-confidence that is truly unearned yeah um so the uh just sort of like everybody's uh everybody's heart is built extremely similarly uh but they but there's every single heart is also unique so they're same thing with your kidneys and the same thing with your eyes so the same thing is true of your self-esteem mechanism so the self-esteem mechanism is sensitive to your efforts and therefore it will it always is and so it you will feel better about yourself when you do a good diligent job and you will feel worse when you do a lousy job that's how it's built now you're actually referring to something i think a little bit different than self-esteem and that's going to be what i call self-confidence so self-confidence and self-esteem are not the same thing so let me tell you uh it's so confusing for people it's almost unfortunate that we have a thing called self we we've used to term self-esteem because it people uh absolutely consider that to be equal to the concept of self-confidence uh and it is not the same let me explain the difference so let's suppose that you have a young man who has spent the last 20 years of his life from the time he is four years old trying to be a great skier loves skiing and he uh grew up in aspen and he uh now 24 years old he's the olympic uh representative for the united states in the giant slalom and so the um now some jock on espn says so you're gonna go for the gold and what the kid may say is no not really um i don't i don't expect a medal but i i'm hoping to you know crack the top ten the jock may be upset by this because that's negative thinking okay so aren't you don't you have to have you know this bravado that is uh considered to be the key to success in the modern world is basically to stick your chest out brag announce grandstand guarantee whatever i mean this all started with muhammad ali and fair enough you know i guess if you're a young muhammad ali and nobody's taking you seriously then maybe make some sense and maybe it makes some sense in prize fighting in order to get people all upset and buying tickets to shut you up or watch you get defeated but in life it's an absurdity but it has taken on that same notion manifestation affirmation etc right this young man says no actually i don't have any confidence at all that i'm going to to uh it's unrealistic for me to assume that i'm going to meddle there's too many people in the world that are too much better than i am uh however i'm hoping and it's not unrealistic that i might break the top ten okay and now the next thing that we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about his self-esteem if he has worked very hard and diligently and done everything the coach has said when he goes down there down that hill skis the best of his ability and comes in 14th he may be disappointed but his self-esteem is entirely intact there has been nothing about this that is going to result in anything but a quiet pride he may even feel embarrassment that other people are disappointed that he didn't win and so that may be a complicated feeling that he has to experience on top of the fact that other people's expectations were unrealistic that's its own problem and i've explored that elsewhere where in what i call the ego trap and you can get a discussion about that you know in several of my webinars but also in the living wisdom library that we have on our website i explore that in considerable detail so that's a problem with parents and coaches and friends and counselors guaranteeing and prophesizing great success for you thinking that they're doing a good thing when in fact they're not doing a good thing they're basically putting an additional obstacle in price in front of you as you pursue goals to the best of your ability so self-esteem and self-confidence are not the same okay a young man you know who works hard at school does well knows that he's a fine person has good friends treats them well is respected goes up to some pretty girl in his history class at the university and is is nervous as a cat asking her out and does not have any self-confidence at all okay does this mean he has low self-esteem no it's not at low self-esteem his self-esteem is solid as a rock his self-confidence is low in this domain the notion that um where this gets confusing is that there are tremendous genetic individual differences in human self-confidence okay so self-esteem is going to be somewhat different self-esteem is going to be highly dynamic depending upon what your internal audience thinks of your performance there's going to be some genetic issues there too certainly but self-confidence is a very big deal uh some people are naturally a tremendous amount more confident they can be vastly miscalibrated about what it is that they're capable of accomplishing and so therefore their lives for example they may go around feeling supremely superior and then wind up all confused and irritated and angry about how many times the world doesn't treat them the way that they think they got comments on that's known as a narcissist okay so um most people don't have that problem uh a lot of people in my arena are actually extremely conscientious people uh that don't naturally aren't brimming with a lot of confidence but confidence is dynamic in the way that esteem is dynamic and self-esteem is fun so if you work hard and diligently at whatever it is you will improve if you don't improve then you can tell that by your efforts aren't actually gaining anything that's useful to know it may be that you are reaching your genetic limit of your abilities or it may be that there are fundamentals to the problem that you don't understand precisely and you need some expert help guidance or you need to do some experimenting okay so normally extra efforts lead to improvements those improvements then naturally increase your self-confidence because you can tell in watching your rehearsal performances they are better than they used to be so let's use this as a let's get out of our heads talking theory let's talk about this gal who works hard at her diet and exercise and now goes from 40 pounds overweight to 20. okay let's suppose she does this in isolation you know in a coveted isolation chamber you know somewhere up in the mountains where nobody knows that she's there she just talks on the phone with her friends and does her work online but she knows as she looks in the mirror that she's losing weight and looking better there's no esteem there's no nobody's giving her any positive feedback does she feel an increase in self-confidence absolutely she does because she can tell that her display or her advertisement is better she also feels self-esteem in knowing how she got there she would not feel the same self-esteem if she did this by for example using fenfan amphetamines you know did some bizarre uh mechanism uh in order to try to drop that weight she would might feel the increased self-confidence that other people were going to see her as more attractive but she wouldn't have the self-esteem that would be a different feeling self-esteem folks is a moral guidance system it's a system that judges your effort it doesn't care that much about the results of those efforts it cares about the efforts your self-confidence is a different mechanism they are highly interrelated and their differences and distinctions are not well understood uh they are typically not these discussions aren't taking place between psychologists and their clients the uh but this difference is essential for us to understand your job is to learn about the nature of your self-esteem mechanism if you work diligently at anything for three four five six seven eight days if you do that your self-esteem mechanism will will give you very positive feedback okay your self-confidence mechanism may not because you may not have seen that much improvement you may actually feel some degree of demoralization but you will not feel disgusted with yourself you will just feel frustrated it's different okay if you then get the expert guidance that you need in order to understand and and and rehearse the fundamentals that are necessary for you to improve in whatever this display issue is then you will feel more confident so this is a one-size-fits-all model for the nature of the seeking of human happiness human happiness is almost entirely dependent on two things number one is going to be your self-esteem and number two is going to be the esteemed signals that you get back from other people in between those two events is the feeling of self-confidence okay so self-confidence is going to come as a result of the efforts you make to improve your situation okay so that is uh that is three different feelings in the world and some nature about their interrelationship self-esteem self-confidence and ultimately interpersonal esteem where the rubber actually hits the road between us and other people that's the end that we seek but seeking it in the best way is to seek it through excellence and diligence at working the fundamentals once you see that your self-esteem is your self-esteem folks is entirely under your control it is not under control by fiat you cannot tell yourself to think more positively of yourself but you can cause yourself to feel positively about yourself through diligent effort if you do so it can't not do so okay it has to it doesn't have choice that's the nature of its design it will not give you self-confidence until it sees evidence of improvement but then it will so if you put intelligent efforts and you see evidence that you are improving that is the royal road to self-confidence and then ultimately better feedback and display competitions with other people uh in between other people and between us and our inherent competitors that is the the nature of human happiness human happiness is ultimately derived from earning esteem in the right way from the people that matter the first person that you want to earn esteem from is you and if you're not that happy and you're a little frustrated this is the this is stop number one fundamental number one for improving your existence is putting forth the effort to earn self-esteem as we start to attack the obstacles that stand between us and the esteem that we want to earn from other people that matter thank you yes that's exactly what i uh that was a good question because that's a question that i had the difference because we confuse these two concepts um all the time and it's like because we don't have someone like you explain it so maybe that's even another webinar to do because there's so much it's such an interesting topic so somebody says here if you would please relate the self-esteem mechanism to successful weight loss how to find the sweet spot stick with it and get it done after numerous failures yes i want to send you to a webinar that i believe i did with gustavo uh and it's on my website and it's probably somewhere in gestavo's library it's called the slow fast way and it is exactly aimed at uh at the self-esteem mechanism with respect to weight loss so we we do a whole hour on that and that's one of my favorite webinars we ever did and more outstanding art yeah that was uh that i i agree with you so that's uh that's in your website as well so someone says is it possible to find to buy self-esteem like when we go and get a hair our hair done and nails and i can hire someone to do my my landscaping and i haven't really done it but i bought it so am i buying self-esteem or confidence you're actually not buying self-esteem you're buying self-confidence okay in other words you you are recognizing that you're improving your display and you know that that other people are going to think more highly of you uh in doing that in effect uh so this is but that's not the same thing as you actually having gone to the efforts if those displays um uh are or the effort for example the self-esteem comes let's suppose a guy has an old run run down car and he knows that if he's gonna go out on a decent date but this is a big embarrassment so his internal audience is aware that his display is not very good now the um and so his self-confidence is similarly low so he's uh so he's anticipating that this is an obstacle towards positive feedback so the self-esteem mechanism uh isn't particularly involved in going down and buying the car okay so it didn't require any diligence and effort all it took was this this market process you would probably feel a little weird if you got the car by stealing out of your mom's bank account or or you know turning in extra hours at your work that you didn't do so you got a paycheck so that you could go put a down payment down you would feel disgusted with yourself about that process even though you would still feel a little bit of relief and increase self-confidence in your display okay so in other words the uh so those are actually somewhat different but that's a very very great question it shows uh how tricky this is now let's suppose that we honestly earned the money and the credit and we just hadn't done anything about it okay but but notice what happens it it's not that our self-esteem rises when we go down to purchase the car it's it it's actually our self-confidence we we we don't feel great about ourselves because some great thing that we did or that we improved our capabilities through our efforts but we did actually improve our display through through a uh and notice what that is uh what that actually is is it's a particularly something like that it's because there are things out there that are actually proxies for gene excellence which actually aren't so somebody could be you know a terrible genetic specimen but they could you know in so many different ways but they could have a really cool car and we might look at it and say wow that's really cool i think that means that that person is probably cool but actually he's a hitman for the mom okay actually he's a he's a he's a below room temperature iq thug okay is actually what he is he's not actually deserving of any esteem from you at all but his his fancy porsche looks like he's the kind of a person who's had a lot of achievements which would result in success in the trade processes which would then mean that it's an honest ad for real life esteem you see so notice how different we would feel about the individual's display if we found out he was a hitman for the mob versus he's a neurosurgeon same car okay same amazement at this extraordinary wealth display indicating extraordinarily high competence but once we find out what was really at the root of it we have an entirely different reaction to the human okay so this is what i call pseudo esteem pseudo esteem isn't fake it's just a process of esteem uh that we will we will react to people based on what it is that we think they have actually achieved versus our actually intimate knowledge of what it is they have achieved so that we can we can gain a bunch of pseudoesteem which can feel very exciting by doing things like buying buying stuff and doing fancy displays i think one of the most incredible things that i could imagine is people buying super bowl rings and and oscars trophies [Laughter] you know what if that was if that was worth anything i just go down down to the trophy star and i and i just spent five thousand dollars just but big old trophies all over my house and uh yeah and therefore i'm not sure what what good that that's supposed to do you know somebody uh in a way i.e deceive them into thinking that i have achieved more and i might actually feel kind of a greater confidence that it was going to work because if in other words uh this is a whole different arena of essentially deceptive processes of gaining esteem okay so uh what we want to do the in the in one of the words of our decade is we want to do things in a sustainable way we want to actually earn the esteem you know in the right way for the people to matter if we if we link those chains together that we are going to earn it we're not going to try to get it we're not going to try to trick for it we're not going to try to buy it we're going to try to earn it i'm going to try to earn the esteem in the right way uh by doing things well and doing things diligently working to try to to display our awares to mates friends and trading partners uh in the best way that we can and we're going to try to earn that esteem in the right way from our market okay so i'm not trying to for example earn a scheme with three-year-old children uh teaching them tic-tac-toe that's not what i do okay so that's somebody else's job i'm not trying to earn a steam from all kinds of people in all kinds of ways i'm not trying to earn a scheme from race car driving fans with uh posting you know uh youtube about my driving okay so in other words uh what we try to do is we try to earn a scheme in the right way from the people that matter to us and the people that matter to us are always a subset of the population that happens where we have mutual interests of some kind and that's how it happens right well that explains it what you said at the beginning how you name the website you know steam dynamics because this whole thing it's so dynamic and there's so many um ways and to see it and to arrive it's wonderful yes all right well i want to mention that the link to that webinar that you mentioned earlier uh i will post it in the description area later on and it will go out with a replay of this of this webinar so uh dr lyon thank you so much again and it's been a pleasure um is there anything else that you would like to say no no excellent questions those are very thoughtful questions and uh if i come back and we do another one we can continue on with some more all right okay sounds good thank you everyone thank you yes and um have a good rest of the weekend whatever's left well thank you gustavo thanks for having me okay thanks everyone see you soon you
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist