Dr. Abraham Twerski, M.D. Self Esteem for Success. Five Part Series at www.yisroelroll.com

welcome to the first in a series of self-esteem for success let me start by telling it a little bit about why I think self-esteem is important and then we'll define it incidentally I've been asked whether it's true that I've written over 50 books I said yes well where did you find time to find write 50 books and I survived never written 50 books I've written one book in 50 different ways because everything that I've written is related to self-esteem and some people say I'm obsessed with the topic of self-esteem and that's a legitimate criticism but I think I have a right to that position because self-esteem for success and self-esteem for happiness self-esteem is probably the single most important factor in our lives and the reason for that is this when we see something we assume that it is there we don't feel that we are hallucinating now if I have a vision a perspective of something so that is its reality and if I have a perspective of myself and a concept of myself well that is my reality and it's a very important part of my reality and if my perception of myself is that I am in some way inferior inadequate incompetent anything anything negative if that's my perception of myself then that's my reality and I believe that anyone who looks at me is going to see what I believe is there so if I think about myself as being inadequate inferior incompetent I am certain that everyone who looks at me is going to see me that way and I am going to relate to the world that way and I think you can see from there on the appropriateness of the title self-esteem for success because if you have a negative opinion of yourself and you think that everybody sees you as negative you're certainly gonna have many barriers to a successful development now the word esteem is of course related to the word estimate right how do you estimate something well depending on what it is and how you're going to appraise its value but if something if you have a home that's worth a million dollars and you estimate it at $100,000 well you certainly start changing it's your home your start changing yourself similarly if we are an talented well-endowed bright attractive with all positive kinds of features and we don't see that then we are miss under estimating ourselves right and that is low self-esteem okay no self-esteem what is the self well this is the self I am myself and wait a minute this is a body right and is that all we are is the body if all we are is the body then we're no different than any other animals and of course science makes the mistake of saying that we are Homo sapiens now Homo sapiens in plain English means that you're a gorilla or a baboon with some intellect and were whereas sapiens our intelligence is certainly important that isn't everything that constitutes a human being there are many other features that a human being has that makes him a human being and separates them so separation from being animals right such as we have the ability to make improvements in ourselves to become better people animals cannot improve themselves I don't believe that any cow is I thought what do I have to do to become a better Calvin I yet we have the ability to think about a goal and purpose in life we have the ability to make moral and ethical judgments very often in defiance of what our body would want so we are not slaves to our body the way animals are we have the ability to sacrifice ourselves sacrifice our efforts our comfort our belongings for the welfare of someone else we have the ability to forgive we have the ability to search for truth but we can go down the list and think of maybe 10 15 unique abilities that comprise the essence of a human being in addition to his body alright so what is the self the self then is the body of course which is a significant part of ourselves plus all of the unique features that make us human and for the sake of simplicity I combine all of these unique features and I call them the sum total of them the human spirit right so what is the human spirit it's not a religious term the human spirit is everything about a human being that separates him or her from other forms of life now how do we get an image of ourselves let me ask another question that my practice has shown that low self-esteem is a significant contributor to every kind of psychological problem that a person can happen it is present in most people in one way or another sometimes it can be global that a person feels themself to be inadequate or inferior and everything and sometimes it can be partial a person may feel himself to be very competent in one area but may feel himself to be inadequate incompetent in other areas the point is these are unwarranted feelings of negativity right I mean if a person is limited and has limitations that's understandable and that doesn't cause their self-esteem problem the self-esteem problem is when a person does not recognize the skills and the talents and the abilities that one does have now why does this happen there may be several reasons first of all I think it may be partially due to civilization no what I mean by that number of years ago there were a group of psychologists who did an interesting experiment they built an experimental house now what was experimental about the house well they built the house for adults in the same proportion as a regular houses for children in other words the ceilings instead of being nine feet high yeah the ceilings were thirty feet high and the chairs instead of being down here the seat of the chair was up there and the table instead of being over here the table was up there and the doorknob instead of being over here the doorknob way is over there and then they took some perfectly normal people and have them live in that house within several days they began showing neurotic symptoms now think about that our children live in a world that was designed for adults it's a struggle to reach the chair and the struggle to reach the table it's a struggle to reach a doorknob and all the kinds of things that are natural for us are a struggle for a child so the child is living in a world of giants and this may very well cause the child at the childhood age you know 2/3 to feel tiny impotent powerless insignificant and it's sometimes I wonder whether primitive peoples who did not have doors and furniture whoever and they sat on the floor and they slept on the floor and there were no doorknob still open maybe their children grew up with a better self-esteem then we have in our culture so I think that the self-esteem problem may possibly be a part of civilization there are other causes for that can contribute for self-esteem very obviously if someone has parents who do not give a child adequate love parents who are neglectful parents who are abusive which is even worse parents who thoughtlessly will say to a child you're stupid no you're clumsy or you're insulting terms obviously that can seriously contribute to a person developing a low self-esteem and these kinds of things these kinds of impressions that a person has at age 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 in childhood are very very deep and even though the person may later recognize that they they were wrong and recognized that their parent was thoughtless and that their parent was neglectful and abusive that's not going to take the feeling away that feeling can be very profound and may remain there and we'll come back to that a little bit later as to why that feeling may be resurrected in different ways years later and how important that is to understanding the role of self-esteem however I can't thoroughly blame inadequate parenting or circumstances that may not be the parents fault I mean a child may he may have lost a parent father died or mother died Chung may have been raised in a foster home that was not a natural loving home there are many things that can happen to children and there's so many circumstances maybe just rambling a little bit but you know years ago when the same family when a family lived in the same house for three generations there was stability and there was identity and person knew where he or she belonged and they had neighbors and friends today's world is a mobile world the average family may be displaced several times moving from one place for another because person has to follow where her job is right and so the person that has to be uprooted from here and go to another city and a child is six years old and the child loses all his friends and now becomes the new kid on the block and has to break into a new social culture these kinds of things are traumatic for kids and they did not happen in the same frequency many years ago so cultural things do have a significant effect the social things do have significant effect on how well our self-esteem is but I was about to say before I really can't hold all those things responsible for self-esteem you see one of the reasons that I am a champion of self-esteem is because I suffer so much from it and it wasn't until I was 38 that I came to a realization that my self perception is wrong and that I am a matter a much better person than I have ever given myself credit for and so I had negative feelings about myself and there's no way that I can blame this on my childhood or parenting I had a wonderful childhood loving parents they were doting in fact I had a nanny who the Sun rose to set on me so I was not deprived of love or care in childhood and yet I developed a low self-esteem and perhaps loved a chance to talk about that so there are other factors now it's interesting that in his later life Freud made a proposition that in addition to the human being having a survivalist instinct the desire for life that there is also a death instinct that within each individual there is a force that tries to destroy him that's a tough thing to grasp I mean why why would that happen there really is no good reason for it in general philosophy the Talmud does have a reason for that the Talmud says that within each individual there is a it's a ha ha a evil instinct that wishes to destroy him and that is perhaps the Freud was referring to and that is a instinct that wants to crush him and the way to crush the person is to tell them you're no good and you can't achieve anything and convince one that one is one is inadequate so it may well be that if Freud was right that there is this fan Atos concept that is the internal destructive force which does not have to be rational no instincts are not rational and if Freud was right that could help us explain why there are so many people who grew up in good circumstances and yet find themselves feeling very negative about themselves is this internal force that makes one feel negative so there may be a variety of reasons for the problem of a person having low self esteem and I think we've defined the self as being a sum total of the body plus all of the unique features that make a human being that which he or she is now I think it should be evident that if a person has a physical deficiency that the body's not gonna function well for example if a person is deficient in iron she has an iron deficiency syndrome in which case they'll feel sluggish you'll feel tired feel depressed and if he goes to the doctor the doctor does some blood tests and comes up with the finding you know you blow an iron so he's made a diagnosis and in order to help the person feel better he will prescribe iron now if he does not prescribe iron he can prescribe every vitamin on earth and the person will not feel better because the deficient substance think the missing substance is not being provided so there are a number of deficiency diseases iron deficiency vitamin C deficiency vitamin D deficiency and in each case the treatment is to provide the missing substance now we talk about a human being as being a body and if we have all our proper nutrients and very good good then the body is complete but that doesn't mean that the self is complete because there's something else except our body and there's all these unique features that we talked about now if those are deficient if the person does not implement those features then a person can have a spirituality deficiency because he is not fulfilling that part of himself right so that if a person does not have a goal and purpose in life and we said look one of the things that separates a human being from animals and that people can have a goal and purpose what am i living for what I want to do with my life now no giraffe or gorilla orangutan everything's about what's my purpose in the jungle but if we lack the concept of a goal in life and I just you know first 70 or 80 or 90 years are floating around the universe that doesn't give a person much of a sense of self-esteem I might tell you at this point then one of the things that makes me a little uncomfortable is when I go into an office and I see a fish tank so what's wrong with that well it's fish just swimming back and forth 24 hours a day right and they're not doing anything and I stand there and watch them and then I wonder is anybody up there watching me going back and forth here and there and here and there and here I'm not doing anything so it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable for all I know the first thing that they're doing that they're doing the most important thing in the world's coming around but I think that we have to think about what is my life for because if I don't have a purpose in life that doesn't give me too good of a sense of self-worth so if we don't fulfill that aspect of oneself then we're deficient in itself were deficient and self-esteem if I don't try to do something to better myself whatever way I think is better but if I don't do anything to better myself I'm missing that aspect of humanity and I'm missing an important part of myself if I am totally selfish what a strange term we mean by selfish self-centered I'm only interested in self gratification strangely enough that's a contradiction in terms I am NOT being selfish why because my self requires that I do things for others and that I be considerate of others and if I don't do that that I am not selfish in order to really be selfish and take care of oneself and one has to do other thing that that are part of the self and I don't do that then I am deficient in something of the south and if my self is deficient that is a part of low self-esteem I have a lot of desires well of course they have a lot of desires if I am essentially an animal Bobby and I have every desire than an animal hat but if I don't do something to control those desires and I just act out in an animalistic weight well I can't feel too good about myself if I don't restrain myself and I just get free rein to everything that I do in fact a human being is the only living creature that can consider oneself as being free because you see an animal sign free cuz animals can't make choices an animal must do what it's about he wants if an animal is hungry it must go look for food there's no way that an animal king you get up in the morning and Sam's on a fast today right no I may be hungry and for various reasons I can decide I'm not going to eat whether it's for diet reasons or for fasting whatever I can control myself but if a person doesn't have self-control and is driven by impulse or compulsive such as it's in addiction well that is a loss of self and if you lose that part of self you lose self-esteem so what self esteem depends on is a true awareness of oneself what are the problems what are the reasons that one may not have a true awareness of oneself well it's obvious if looking at myself is going to lead me to discover some defects in my personality you know I don't want to do that so there's this denial defense that we have that I don't want to recognize certain faults in myself oh I can easily recognize false and other people but I'm not quick to recognize false in myself and if I do find something that might be falling myself I use my intelligence to rationalize it yeah and to justify it and we are graded rationalizations right so one of the things that stand in the way of self-esteem is the fact that we don't want to recognize our personality defects and if we don't recognize them we can't do anything about them to correct them now some people may say well I'm always that way that's the way I am it's not the way I am that's what you've chosen to be and some people will say well you don't understand my father my mother about for you that's it well maybe you are what your father or mother made you but if you stay that way it's your own damn fault we do have the capacity to change ourselves we don't have to be prisoners of our past now I know that in psychotherapy there's a great deal of emphasis on the past and if you go see us the consciousness the character is going to want to know your past history and I don't think I'm that that's important but I do think that we ought to get off of the track of blaming our parents for what we are because the psychology of blame is that if I can find someone to blend and I don't have to do anything about it it's his fault it's her fault right and that's why I think there's a mistake they're looking for blame another thing is I can't do anything about the past why focus on it I have a beautiful little cartoon with the Kami character Ziggy Ziggy goes up to see his guru in the Himalayas and the girl says to him now because your future is determined by your past you must be very careful about what you do in the past so I recognize there's some importance about the past but I think we should pay much more attention to what kind of things can I do to make myself into a better person to get a better understanding of myself a better feeling of myself a sure more cheerful and positive feeling that's going to enable me to be successful and to be successful in many ways now self-esteem knowing oneself means that I have to recognize my defect so that I can be able to correct them I have to recognize my talents I have to recognize my abilities so that I can capitalize them and use them well well you might say well obviously every person is going to want to know what his strength and his abilities are that's what makes the person to feel good well I wish it were as simple as all of that but there's a complication there and the complication I think can be best understood with an example of a case that I had of a young woman who was 24 years old and she was admitted to the hospital for a detoxification from alcohol although she had first denied us he drunk that much well the first day that she was in the hospital she asked whether she might have psychological tests that's the wall anyone psychological test says I'm afraid I might have gotten brain damage from drinking I said look my dear don't worry about it you don't have brain damage well the next day she came up to me and she said could I have an electroencephalogram the brainwave test I said what do you want to thank so much for well I my friend I might have had brain damage and drinking I said I thought I told you yesterday not to worry about you don't have brain damage well the next said she came up to me when she can have a cat scan of the brain so what do you want to put Casca on the brain for well I thought I'm gonna bring damage from drinking well I began to be curious as why is she so concerned about brain damage when it's obvious that she doesn't have it so I sat down and talked with her a little bit and then it became very evident she's looking for out of responsibilities and if she could get a diagnosis of brain damage although it's a devastating diagnosis she would now be able to sell her family don't pressure me about getting sober I don't have the ability to do it don't you understand that brain damage yeah what you want me to go to college I can't learn it yeah my magic couple don't understand that brain damage you expect me to hold a responsible job I can't hold the job I'm brain damaged so the diagnosis of rare diamonds again as devastating as it would have been a perfect out to her for her to he left the responsibilities that you wanted to avoid now that may sound look like an extreme case but in more subtle ways it can happen to many people who couldn't recognize if they recognize the talents they have they would feel an obligation to live up to them and it's so much easier to ignore them and to just float alone and be content now contentment the pleasant feeling but it's not a feeling that is compatible with self-esteem well why do I say that well once in the supermarket I saw on the shelf that's where they sell evaporated milk that there was a can of milk that said milk from contented cows and I thought why should I care whether cows are contingent or not well obviously this producer wants to impress me that his product is superior to others his milk is better than other men why is his milk better than other milk because his cows are contented and that makes them excellent cows oh so the degree of excellence in a cow depends on how content the cow is and if what I'm looking for in life is to be content then I share a goal in life a standard of life of excellence with cows and I'm too proud for that nothing wrong with being content there's nothing wrong with having pleasure nothing wrong with enjoying life but come on as human beings we have a greater ability we have a greater responsibility to make something of ourselves and if we were able to do those two things to first of all identify what our character defects and then work upon them to eliminate them and to identify what our character strengths and abilities that we can use to advance ourselves then I think we'd be well on the road to a good self-esteem and have the proper attitude to be successful so we've seen some of the ways in which a person may have low self-esteem and do want to get into a few minutes about how self-esteem can man if itself manifest itself in our day laughs but I did make a statement earlier that self-esteem may be global meaning a person may have feelings of inadequacy in every way or it may be parcel or compound to mentalize who ever give you an example of that I chose as my personal physician the physician who would the doctor who I recognized was the best doctor in the hospital staff with a wonderful person and a very very competent doctor he would come to the hospital at 6:30 in the morning and he had many patients so he took care of and he would spend time to see all his patients and then he would go into the electrocardiogram room and do all the interpretation of the electrocardiogram and then he would go into the medical record room into whatever he had to the medical record room and then he would teach some student nurses and then he would teach some medical students and then somewhere on one o'clock he would take off to his private office and he was late his private office until about six o'clock come back from the hospital again make the round see his patients etc etc and hang around the hospital until around 11:30 12:00 o'clock at night the one that I was under the end here dr. J was walking down the hall it was close to midnight and one of the nurses said to the other that man never wants to be home he's always here at the hospital okay I I suppose that his wife is a very terrible person well uh sometime later dr. J came over to me and he said hey mommy wonder if you would see my wife she's gone into a depression and I gave an antidepressant I really shouldn't be taking care of her for so would you see her I said of course well I was anticipating this terrible woman no and the person who came in was the most gentle lovely person that you can and she said to me she said that Sikorski you know how devoted John is to his medical practice but she says I'm a very meaty person and I needed a shoulder to put my head on he was never home for that our children grew up without a father if they were sick he treated him but to give them guidance or advice he was never there for that well then I got to know my doctor a little bit better and I realized what the problem was you see he knew that as a doctor he was excellent he was competent he knew his medicine in his laboratory News electric monogram scene whose Lexus the radiology he knew he knew everything that he was supposed to know about medicine and so being in a hospital where he felt competent right that was comfortable but now he's gonna go home and at home they don't need anybody to do physical diagnosis start to read laboratory studies electrocardiograms or x-rays they need a person to whom to relate he did not feel about himself that as a person that he had any merit that there was anything that he could contribute to anyone as a person and consequently he ended up depriving his family of a wonderful father and of a devoted husband so you see in his situation his selfish self esteem was not global because there was part of his life that he knew he was very competent so just in other parts that he did not feel competent and in those parts he avoided now there may be times when it's necessary to stay late in the office that that happens no matter what your practice is whatever your work is there may be times like that but I think that many people who spend extraordinarily late hours of the office maybe doing what dr. J is doing they are staying where they are comfortable because home is uncomfortable not because there's anybody at home that is irritating or bad or whatever but because they don't feel about themselves that they have anything to offer as a human being and that is a unfortunately a serious mistake and you can easily see why that is going to interfere with a person's success a person who feels inadequate about myself is not going to make good human relations a person who has a low self-esteem may have a horrible fear of failure not failure is unpleasant nobody likes failures right however you don't succeed in everything that you do and if you try and do something and you don't succeed at it well yeah you swallow that and you take a look as can I see what I learned from it what was my mistake and you go out to do something else you're doing the next thing and as unpleasant as failures may be they are not devastating however if your self-esteem is low and you already believe negativity about yourself you can't handle a failure because a failure is going to confirm the worst feelings you have about yourself and make you feel worse about yourself so if you have low self-esteem you're going to try to avoid failure at all possible costs now how can you avoid failures well there's two ways the most simple way is don't try and do anything right if you stay in bed until 4 o'clock every day you can't make any mistakes all right you can't have any failures you're not doing anything but of course that's the worst failure at all right because you're doing nothing with your life so avoiding things is a way to protect yourself against failure it's a very destructive way certainly stands in the way of any success you have to be able to accept adversity in order to succeed JC Penney said the thing that made my success was adversity and we'll get to that perhaps a little bit later but we have to learn to overcome overcome struggles so one way that person with a low self-esteem is going to protect his fragile self-esteem is we're not trying okay there's another way and that is me perfect and then you can't fail so can become a perfectionist one problem with that and I didn't know no human being can be perfect yeah and if you're going to try to be perfect you're gonna get so wrapped up in meaningless details that you'll never get the first base and then we were able to do anything and I've seen people who were perfectionist no wait a second there has to be a little perfectionism and everything that you do you want to do something you want to do it right of course but there is a normal degree of attention and detail that you pay that you deal with right no look if I can on airplane I want the pilot to be a little bit perfectionistic I want him to look at all those dials right I want to see that they're all in place right I don't want thing I found to get him to seat and say okay let's get this thing off the ground no I want him to make sure that everything is okay but if he is going to check each dial 1,800 times and he's not sure them so maybe I'd better go and instead of taking off at 1:30 the plane is gonna take off five-fifty that's not what I want so there's a normal degree of perfectionism but a person who has low fat self esteem and is terrified of a failure may try to be so perfect that he ends up doing nothing and that's the worst the worst mistake of all so self-esteem for success you can see why that's so if you believe in yourself and you trust yourself then you'll take reasonable measures to try and do things right but you won't be terrified you won't be anxious because being terrified and anxious is going to stand in the way of a successful performance now let me just mention quickly some manifestations of low self-esteem we've already pointed out perfectionism or the fear of trying anything right there's other kinds of things am I gonna go back into my own history because of the way I felt about myself I had thought about myself that people would like me but I'm not really a likable person but I wanted everybody to like me so what I did was I became a people pleaser I tried to do things for people not because it's a good thing to be considerate for others now that would have been a good motivation I tried to do things for people too in order to buy their approval my life was dependent on other people approving of me and that can be a a major drawback to to success you can't please the whole world you've got to be truthful with yourself know what it is that you want to do do it as the best you can all right and you're not gonna succeed all the time but you can't go through life expecting a universal abreu the other thing was because I have this negative feeling about myself I was exquisitely sensitive to criticism right and if you looked at me the wrong way I was devastated so let me give an example I was asked to give several Xers to a group of therapists who were going for their continuous certification in treatment of addiction 110 therapists have signed up for the course at the University of Southern Cal Southern journalist South Carolina I gave the course and when you think courses for credit at the end of the course you have to fill out an evaluation form what about a month later I got a packet with 110 evaluation forms 110 evaluations my performance and as I went through them Wow my ego went right through the ceiling he says see the wonderful things that people were saying about my my lectures 109 glowing evaluations there 110 there was one that was critical and I was devastated I went around depressed for 3 weeks and it was only after 3 weeks that I recognized wait a minute 191 is not a bad score furthermore one of nine people wouldn't warn Jerome this one person probably happened to be in a very depressed mood that day and just saw everything in life is negative and so he saw my performance is negative but for three weeks I was crushed by the fact that one person had been critical now you see if you want success in life keep your ears open for criticism and don't expect to get it from your friends because they might not want to tell you anything critical about yourself so keep your ears open especially from people you think don't like you because they're likely to point out some of your shortcomings and it's from those that we can learn and it's from those that we can learn to become more efficient better people and it's criticism that will give us the key to success so you can see why self-esteem for success is such an appropriate term lack of self-esteem can be a barrier to success now let me point out something else about growth personal growth right along the line of criticism that you may have to expect some discomfort in growing and becoming better so I'll tell you my story about lobsters came across an article in magazine that said well how can lobsters grow after all a lobster is a soft animal that lives inside a hard unyielding shell and the shell is not going to expand well if the shell is not going to expand how can the lobster grow and the article went on to say that when the lobster feels very crushed because it has grown and now the cell has become very impressive and it lobster feels very uncomfortable so it hides under an underwater rock formation to protect itself from predatory fish and it says its shell and it grows a new space this one well I think continues growing this new shell now becomes oppressive back under the rocks so the shell grows anew later and repeats the process a number of times until it reaches its maximum growth know what it is important to realize is that the stimulus for the lobster to be able to continue to grow is it feels discomfort and if lobster had to a physician right lobsters would never grow they would die being a bit in sand I have big because the moment elapsed I felt it anyway uncomfortable he'd go to the doctor and say hey doctor I don't feel good oh no and the doctor would say well here's a valium here's a percocet and take something to to eliminate that feeling yeah I'm still would never go under the rock I've never said in the channel never grow right and would I being an instant happy so you see we can't avoid painful experiences in growth and our grandmothers were not wrong when they said that we have growing pains so in order to develop self-esteem we have to be able to accept some discomfort the discomfort of looking for our character defects and maybe if we can't see myself maybe we can have somebody point them out to us maybe we have a good friend who we say look I won't break my friendship with you but please I need you to tell me what you see about me that I could be doing better there may be the discomfort of discovering the positive talents in yourself why is that discomfort because that means that we have to do something with might not want to do something with ourselves we might rather want to coast along and be content like house so there's the discomfort in feeling I have to do more about myself because I've got the abilities and this is the discomfort of growth and I think that nature has taught us that when it tells us about lobsters that in order to grow your stimulus is going to be you're going to feel uncomfortable and when you feel uncomfortable don't immediately look for some pill to make you feel better yes there are times women occasion is necessary but so many times in life the situations that we find ourselves in may be difficult but they may be signs nature signs of telling us it's time to advance beyond where you are but learn more do more make yourself into a better person make yourself a more efficient person take the necessary reasonable risks and necessary to try new things in life these are the kinds of things that are a key to success so self-esteem and success self-esteem for success you can see why the two go together and hopefully if you will work on your self-esteem and improve it hopefully you will become a better person a more efficient person and more successful person and perhaps most of all a happier person

Channel: Yisroel Roll

Views: 124,948

Rating: 4.9057026 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Gt4AOoWcZlI

Length: 48min 11sec (2891 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019