There is no such thing as self esteem and How to negotiate from a position of strength

good evening dr. Petersen good evening everybody I also want to thank you first for your lectures that I've been following on YouTube mainly and to say that they have been well life-changing wouldn't be an overstatement great and I'm one of the crazy people increasing your reviews on YouTube because they flew in from Belgium last night to be here and it's like 3 a.m. for me right now and English is not my first language so bear with me I I would have many burning questions to ask you but I thought it was fair and necessary to pick one and it would be this one there are concepts that recur in your lectures but this one you only mentioned once in your early videos on Bill c16 about self-esteem you said you don't believe in the existence of self-esteem the way to teach children they're all special you think you boost their confidence but the only result is that some get narcissistic the reason why I'm interested in that is about standing up for yourself and it is and when I try to you know do it yeah I see that rational arguments faith in rationality doesn't get the best result in negotiations that's why you learn how to be socialized by playing rough-and-tumble it's not a intellectual conversation that gets you socialized so I'm also reading that book suggested about by Stephen Hicks explaining post-modernism because I wasn't really familiar and I've been listening to a lot of and I'm trying to read with fresh eyes because I've been indoctrinated by you of course very critical and there's one more point that I have to agree with the post modernists and that is the world seems to me as I observe it a place where powers are at it's not rationality delete that so when I'm in a weak position and I want to fight back not to get resentful I find that it's not a rational argument that will get me there there's something else that I don't do and that I should be doing and I don't know what it is so you see the relation with self-esteem seems to me that people who think of themselves start in a better position in in this game okay okay okay great yeah all right so there's a lot in that question so the first thing is is there's a problem with the measurement of self-esteem and that actually matters because self-esteem is a psychological concept a scientific concept if you like and you have to get the measurement right and you can predict self-esteem almost perfectly by measuring someone's extraversion and subtracting from that their negative emotionality or neuroticism so it's actually just a combination of big five traits and so people who are extroverted who feel a lot of positive emotion and who are and who don't feel a lot of negative emotion score high on scales of self-esteem okay so conceptually it's a non-starter because you're not going to move people's levels of neuroticism let's say by trying to get them to feel good about themselves okay now having said that that doesn't mean that you shouldn't encourage people right now there's this psychologist named Jerome Kagan who's quite a great psychologist developmental psychologist I think he's an emeritus at Harvard at the at the mall at the moment he studied temper mentally inhibited children you can so they're basically kids who are high in neuroticism probably low in extraversion and he found that if those chilled and you can identify them as early as six months right it's very very inculcated in their temperament he found that if you encouraged them in the world you could shift them into a more stable personality configuration and what you basically did was when they were manifesting signs of distress instead of encouraging them to withdraw and retreat which is what they might be attempting to do you encourage them to go out and explore so for example if you have a temper mentally inhibited child and you go to a playground and there's kids out there like if you have an extroverted emotionally stable kid three years old as you put them on the ground their feet are already moving right like a puppy over water and you let them go and they just run to the to the kids and they're there and then you have to drag them away but if you have a temper mentally inhibited child the child will sort of stand around your legs and sort of peek out you know and then what you do is wait it out let them watch encourage them to move a little bit forward encourage them to take their steps out into the unknown and the strange land and don't let them withdraw like you can do it yeah they're slower to warm up they'll warm up they'll habituate and if you continually expose your inhibited child to the things that make them anxious in measured doses then you can transform their psychophysiological temperament now you're probably not going to shift them way the hell out onto the extroverted emotionally stable end but you can make a big difference that's very different than making them feel good about themselves which is such a you need to curse you need to curse when you discuss that concept right so it isn't improved their self-esteem it isn't how you feel about yourself right it's how you act effectively in the world and how you're trained to do that so okay now then you were talking about negotiation right and you said well don't you said something like don't people who feel good about themselves aren't they able to negotiate better and it's it's I know that's a poor paraphrase excuse me but negotiation is actually a practical issue to some degree like the first thing is that you have to figure out what you want because you were saying well it's not merely rational it's like yeah yeah that's for sure you have to bargain from a position of authority let's say not power authorities a better word but you don't have authority unless you know what you're talking about and unless you can bring some unless you can bring some let's say force it's not that's not the right word you can negotiate without with anyone unless you can say no and you can't say no unless you've set yourself up with alternatives so when you go to your boss and you negotiate for a raise you need to have the sort of CV that enables you to go find another job and you have to have your CV prepared and you have to have looked for another job and you have to be able to get one because then you can go in there and say I'm not as productive as I could be at my current level of remuneration it's not reflective of what I'm able to do and I want this and this is what will happen if you give me this this will be the good things that'll happen and what do you think of that and the person is going to know even by the way that you hold yourself while you're having a discussion whether or not you're someone with options and you can't fake that while you can but it's not helpful like it just doesn't work for very many iterations you have to it's it's it's not rational you're preparing yourself for battle that's what you're doing and you can't be weak when you prefer to prepare yourself for battle because if the person says no I'm not giving you a raise which is exactly what they should say because what are they gonna do just like sprinkle the money around you need to be able to say okay then there will be consequences that you don't like and that's what it means to say no to someone no means if you continue to push this things will happen that you don't like now in that case it'll be all depart and take my talents with me and if they don't care well then you're in the wrong business or you don't have any talents to begin with right which is so in order to negotiate properly and this is more difficult for people who are agreeable for example and because there tend to be more conflict averse you have to put yourself in a position where you can you can push back as hard as you're going to be pushed on and that means you have to open your you have to open up your space of available options because otherwise the person says no and that's it you're done well you lose then it's it's as straightforward as that now with regards to the self-esteem part is practice on small things because you build the skills forget about the self-esteem it isn't about being confident or feeling confident or any of that it's about knowing bloody well how to negotiate start with small things you know so you'll notice that there are things in your relationships in particular that aren't the way you want them to be and that you could see how could be improved it's like figure out how they can be improved you ago she ate with your partner make the incremental improvement keep doing that you'll get better and better at it and then you'll be able to go out and have a harder negotiation in the world so it's a set of skills there's an attitude behind it you know and it's easier for some people than others but fundamentally it's a set of skills no problem [Applause]

Channel: Pragmatic Entertainment

Views: 896,611

Rating: 4.9257727 out of 5

Keywords: how to negotiate, How to negotiate from a position of strength, how to have more self esteem, how to raise my self esteem, Jordan Peterson

Id: -TpKzjO_GY0

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 23 2018