Actually, it turns out you are amazing (or, It’s time to re-rethink confidence and self-esteem)
Everyone wants to have the right amount of confidence. Not enough confidence and you’re meek (or aggressive — we’ll get into that in a minute); too much confidence and you’re a narcissist. And I’ve never met a single person who wants to be a narcissist.
Confidence comes from self-esteem, and for years we’ve made all sorts of efforts to improve people’s self-esteem. But in recent years there’s been a backlash against both self-esteem and confidence. The knock against promoting self-esteem is that it leads to narcissism, and the knock against confidence is that it leads to embarrassing overconfidence.
Back in 2009, psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell released an influential book titled, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, which argued that narcissism had been increasing among US college students since the 1980s. This assertion, which seemed self-evident to older generations, made its way into the conventional wisdom, where the blame was placed on the coddling and indulging of schoolchildren by an educational system obsessed with increasing students’ self-esteem. The kids are spoiled and soft, we gave them all participation trophies, and now they’re turning into narcissists, went the popular narrative.
More recently, we’ve seen countless examples where politicians, business leaders, celebrities and others have made absolute fools of themselves because their self-regard dwarfed their true ability. This created an explosion of discussion about the Dunning-Kruger effect: a cognitive bias that says that people with low ability (at a specific skill) tend to overestimate their abilities (at that same skill). Somehow, in the popular imagination this morphed into the notion that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are.
Soon, the press was awash in articles like “The Dunning-Kruger effect, and how to fight it” and “The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Why Incompetence Begets Confidence”. The message seemed clear: don’t try to become more confident because you’ll wind up making a fool of yourself, and don’t try to build more self-esteem because you’ll wind up a narcissist. And in the context of the previous American administration, it’s not hard to believe that a whole lot of people have heeded that message and decided to keep their heads down and not dare to dare.
Enter self-compassion
In 2003, University of Texas professor Kristin Neff developed the concept of self-compassion and introduced it as an alternative to self-esteem. In self-compassion, she argued, “we give ourselves the same kindness and care we’d give a good friend.” She continued, “Because self-compassion transforms negative self-affect (i.e., feeling bad about one’s inadequacies or failures) into positive self-affect (i.e., feeling kindness and understanding toward oneself), self-compassion may entail many of the psychological benefits that have been associated with high self-esteem, but with fewer of its negative corollaries.”
The three elements of self-compassion are mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness. Mindfulness means observing yourself in a non-judgmental way; common humanity means recognizing that all humans share a “mortal, vulnerable, and imperfect” experience; and self-kindness means being warm and understanding towards ourselves when we inevitably fail or come up short of our ideals.
The benefits of self-compassion have been widely documented: it makes you more productive, it decreases your stress, and it makes you more resilient in the face of failure, among other benefits. And one big point in favor of self-compassion is that it has no correlation with narcissism, while self-esteem does. This is all great stuff, but is self-esteem really something we need to avoid promoting directly?
Maybe we’re not overconfident narcissists after all
From the beginning, there was a fierce academic debate about whether narcissism was becoming more widespread. It turns out that not only do measures of narcissism vary across ethnicities (and campus diversity has been increasing), but students’ understanding of the questions used to measure narcissism has shifted over time. In 2017 a new study found that students had actually become less narcissistic since the 1990s. In light of this new scholarship, Campbell, the co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic, speculated that the Great Recession of 2008 was a turning point in student narcissism.
As for the Dunning-Kruger effect, let’s first recall that the original finding — that the least competent people at a skill tend to overestimate their own abilities the most — has been distorted to mean that more incompetent someone is, the better they think they are. But now there’s a large doubt as to whether the original finding was even valid. A paper from last year argued that the famous “effect” was really just a statistical anomaly, and that, for competent people, underestimation of ability is more of a risk than overestimation.
If anything, it seems that most of us should worry about not being confident enough. Just the other week, a friend who is an enormously talented and successful professional musician told me that he felt like a fraud before a recent performance. This was hard for me to comprehend, because he is quite obviously not a fraud — but this is what imposter syndrome is. You’ve probably suffered from it at least once, the idea that you don’t belong here, and that any moment you could be exposed. I know this is cold comfort, but it’s really mind-blowing just how common this feeling is even among the most talented people.
It is estimated that 70 percent of adults will experience imposter syndrome at least once in their lives, and women and especially women of color tend to experience it more often. The truth is, across the Western world, our society is becoming more diverse and integrated. For everybody, that means new situations for which we maybe don’t feel prepared and tried-and-true approaches that no longer work. According to a recent survey, 71% of Americans think interpersonal confidence has worsened in the past 20 years.
The consequence of low confidence is a lack of assertiveness, which is the skill of clearly and respectfully communicating your needs, positions, and boundaries to others. The alternatives to assertiveness are aggression, passivity, and passive-aggression — all three of these come from a place of low self-esteem. The passive person feels unworthy of asserting themselves to others, while the aggressive person sees others as competition and so feels a need to tear them down. When you think about how often people are aggressive or passive instead of assertive, it seems obvious that we could use a little more confidence.
Pairing your self-compassion with a healthy dose of healthy self-esteem.
Many proponents of self-esteem have always recognized that it had some pitfalls. Edward Deci, one of the founders of self-determination theory (SDT) (which I wrote about here), distinguished “contingent self-esteem” from “true self-esteem”. Contingent self-esteem is based on three extrinsic aspirations: money, fame, and beauty. True self-esteem is based on three intrinsic aspirations: meaningful relationships, personal growth, and contributions to the community. That is, if you esteem yourself because of your career or your looks or the number of friends or followers you have, you do not really have self-esteem. When you think about the images and messages propagated on social media, you can see how they foster extrinsic aspirations as opposed to intrinsic ones.
When you lay it all out, it seems that we have let the blustering hubris of a few narcissists, along with some now-dubious studies, scare us from being as confident as we could be. Imposter syndrome is a bigger deal than the Dunning-Kruger effect. Teaching kids self-esteem actually hasn’t unleashed a wild horde of narcissists.
My purely subjective take is that we are in fact reaping the benefits of decades of efforts to improve self-esteem. Systematic oppression — whether it’s racism, patriarchy, classism, heteronormativity, neuronormativity, or whatever — is simply less bearable if you believe you’re a great, special person. The equality and liberation movements we’re seeing across the globe are a good thing that promises to give many people material and spiritual relief. Combined with the rising self-compassion movement, I see a glimmer of hope for our future.
Most of the people I work with, coaching and consulting clients alike, don’t esteem themselves nearly as much as I think they should, and my guess is that the vast majority of us would be better off if we paired self-compassion with a healthy dose of “true” self-esteem. Just as you can feel that your parent, your child, your friend, your colleague, or even your pet is the best, without actually believing that they are superior to every other parent, child, friend, colleague, or pet in the world, you can believe that you are amazing without thinking you are better than anyone else.
As with anything, though, this is easier said than done. So, recognizing that as human beings we are also animals with physiological connections between our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions, here are four tips to be an amazing friend to yourself, an amazing person:
- Touch yourself (har har): but seriously, when you’re feeling down, place your hand on your chest, over your heart. Relax your muscles and draw in a deep breath until you can feel your body fill up with air to your stomach and your back. Exhale slowly. Feel the love. Physiologically, it works!
- Forgive: remember that other people suffer, they err, they carry the burden of their ancestors and their history and their society. So do you. It’s not their fault, and it’s not yours. Learning to forgive others will help you to forgive yourself.
- Serve: In an ideal world, our society would encourage us to be kinder to others and to ourselves. Instead, we’re pitted against each other, in our jobs, in our neighborhoods, across the globe. As you forgive individual people for their shortcomings, try doing your part to change our society to bring out the best in us instead of the worst.
- Love people: If you are a misanthrope, it’s really hard to love yourself. This is a belief, and it requires a leap of faith, but take a step back and recognize what a miracle our existence is. I’m not saying everything about us is good, but we humans are infinitely fascinating and surprising and amazing. And as a fellow human being, so are you.
