”The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem” - Part One

Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem

“We’re driven. Whether that’s for our good or our ill, we’re driven. That drivenness may be born of a free spirit bent on living with unimpeded freedom, or it might be a drivenness used to hold ourselves captive. It might be a drivenness to face ourselves, or a drivenness to run from ourselves. We can be driven to do great things, or to hide from great things. Being driven grants us the ability to fly, but we can use it just as readily to die.

If we are bent under the weight of a low self-esteem, our drivenness is often exercised to our own demise. It’s used to create places to hide, excuses to run, rationalizations to justify the awful person that we are not, and the freedom to embrace beliefs about ourselves that have no basis in reality other than the reality we’ve crafted from the skewed messages of others. On the other hand, we might become driven to prove ourselves as worthy through various accomplishments and achievements. We work, we strive, we reach, and we relentlessly press on to show that we are more than what we’ve come to believe ourselves to be. If we fail in such an endeavor, we’re driven to convince ourselves that we are nothing of the sort so that we don’t ever take on such a preposterous task ever again. Either way, we possess a drivenness even if it isn’t used in our best interest.

Driven to Prove Our Worth

Maybe this whole mentality of drivenness has been a product of our life story; having to do it all ourselves because no one was there to help us. Maybe this left us with the need to prove ourselves and to establish our worth by whatever means we chose to prove that. Often we have the need to display our intellectual prowess, to exercise the muscle of our skill-set, or flaunt our expertise in order to secure our place in some sort of ill-defined and vague pecking order that defines our sense of worth and value. Our identity then becomes entirely defined by all of the things that we do to prove our worth and the efforts that we put forth in doing them.

In some instances this happens because we’ve lived in someone’s shadow and we need to show ourselves as bigger than the shadow that was cast upon us, or at least prove that we’re as big as whosever’s shadow that was. At other times we’re out to prove people wrong, to conclusively show beyond any shadow of a doubt that we’re competent even though people repeatedly said we were entirely incompetent. It can be the product of a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern where we grew up being affirmed when we performed, with such affirmation being clearly withheld when we didn’t. In the end, it’s typically ourselves that we’re really trying to convince simply because the toughest audience that we play to is ‘us.’

Driven to Prove Our Lack of Worth

Or we’ve done the opposite of all of this by being driven to surrender to minimums. We’ve decided to withdraw from it all and just do what we need to do to get to the next day. It’s about being driven to draw away and hide so that others won’t see us for who we are and thereby judge us, or we won’t see them and subsequently judge ourselves by comparison. We’re driven not to be driven so that we avoid failure, or anything might even remotely resemble failure. Or, we’re often driven to surrender before the battle ever shows up so that surrender was a choice and not a pathetic manifestation of our inabilities to fight the battle.

In embracing this mentality, we’re not driven to disprove this sense of worthlessness. Rather, we’re driven to prove it by not disproving it. It’s a battle of a different sort. It’s not a surrendering to any battle that we’ve fought. To the contrary, it’s a surrendering to the need to fight for something that doesn’t exist to be fought for. Surrender then indisputably evidences our worthlessness while simultaneously granting us full license to walk away without guilt or remorse. And while such a package seems marvelously relieving, it is in fact horribly life-killing.

The Failure of Trying to Proving Ourselves

Proving Our Worthlessness

The drivenness to prove ourselves is wildly relentless. But what are we trying to prove and in what way are we trying to prove it? If we wish to prove ourselves as inadequate or inferior, we do so by acting in ways that substantiate those things. Our lives become a reflexive response to the preconceived notion that we are worthless. Therefore, our actions reinforce what we have come to believe ourselves to be.

We can sabotage our own good fortune. We can take opportunity and destroy it, thereby declaring that it was never really opportunity in the first place. We can shrug off compliments, offset every positive with a blistering array of negatives, or endlessly compare ourselves to others by dramatically inflating them to be far more than what they really are so that we look far less than what we really are.

Proving Our Value

Or, we try to work against this despairingly negative sense of self by expending all of our energies to prove it wrong. Our lives devolve into these incessant tasks that never achieve their stated goal, leaving us convinced that despite our best efforts we are not worthy of our best efforts. Fundamentally, at the core of the desire to prove ourselves through achievement there lies two fundamental needs. First is the need for identity. And second, is the need for worth and value. If the basis of our identity and our sense of worth and value is rooted in achievement, (which is the stuff that we do), then we’ve always got to be doing. We’ve got no alternative except to always be on the run, always planning the next thing, always tediously mapping out the next endeavor to insure that it’s better than the last one, and always taking everything that we lay our hands on to the next level to the point that we eventually end up putting the next level entirely out of reach anyway.

Part of the perpetual frustration lays in the fact that the point at which we hope to gain this cherished sense of accomplishment to build ourselves or diminish ourselves is ill-defined. We have some vague and often wandering sense of it, or we’ve determined a general proximity of sorts. If it has sufficient clarity, we can be fairly certain that we’ve arrived. However, we’re often doomed to realize that what we wanted this to do for us upon our arrival did not happen. Therefore, there’s a sense that we failed on our way here, thereby robbing our arrival of what we hoped to gain from it. If our sense of it was unclear, we typically determine that we really have not arrived or we’ve arrived at the wrong place. Whether we are driven to prove ourselves worthy or unworthy, either way failure is certain.

Who or What’s Driving Us?

William Frederick Book wrote that “A man must drive his energy, not be driven by it.” We know that we expend energy, and typically we expend a lot of it. But we rarely question if we’re driving our energy or if our energy is driving us. Who’s in control here? We pound and we push and we perseverate and we plod along and when we get pummeled we pick ourselves up and press on. The relentless nature of it all rarely if ever gives us the time or the resolve to pull back, pause and ask who or what’s controlling the energy that we’re expending? And if we were to define success either in proving our worth or showing ourselves as worthless, defining what we’re doing and why we’re doing it would be a vitally important part of that process.

It would be reasonable to say that if we’re not controlling the expenditure of our energy, if we’re simply responding or reacting or being driven by something that we can’t in reality achieve through whatever our efforts are, then the energy spent is wasted. The deceptive nature of it all is that just because we’re expending energy we assume that something’s being accomplished. The fact that we’re doing so much could only result in some sort of goal attainment. Something good and successful (in whatever way we’ve defined success) must be coming out of this simply because the energy we’re putting out has to be resulting in something . . . doesn’t it?

Productivity as Value

Productivity is often defined by expenditure, even though the two may not correlate at all. We’re busy about being busy, and somehow being busy suggests purpose. We’re pounding out this thing that we call life, as if the pounding has a purpose other than the pounding. We’re fighting the battles, climbing the mountains, forging though whatever wilderness we think we’re in, and charting out journeys of glorious adventure. We’re pressing through the obligations of the day and the challenges of the week. Or, we’re working hard to believe that we’re not worth believing in so that we can finally lay ourselves to rest because we have no value to lay our lives upon. Either way, we’re busy and we believe that our busyness evidences our value.

Our value however, is not believed to be a constant. Therefore, to maintain our value we have to remain busy. Yet beyond that, there is some glitch in the human psyche that says that to have consistent value, we have to be consistently busier. That what worked today, will be inadequate tomorrow. That what was sufficient this week, will be woefully insufficient next week. That proving one’s worth through busyness requires a perpetual escalation of busyness to the point that there are simply not enough hours in a single day, or a collection of days to be that busy. We will fail. But we will view ourselves as the failure rather than understanding the sheer impossibility of the dynamic.

The Privilege of a Place

However, the things that we do, despite the positive or negative nature of them, illustrate the fact that life has crafted a place for us and therefore we have a purpose. Life has deemed us of sufficient value to carve out a spot that is uniquely ours. We have the privilege of having been gifted with this life and having been handed the authority to live it in out in whatever way we choose to live it out. In fact, we have been tasked with living it in a way that is entirely unique to us. We have been granted a privilege unlike anyone we will ever meet.

We might be using that privilege negatively. We might be using it to our own demise. We might be turning it against ourselves. But we have the privilege of having a place that is uniquely ours, regardless of what we choose to do with it. And because we have all of these things that life has granted us and subsequently called us to do, we obviously must have value. We have been granted the privilege of both life and choice because we have sufficient value to have been granted those privileges in the first place. We might misuse them, but we have them to misuse. And that means that we were good enough to be granted them in the first place.

What Drives Us Drives Our Energy

It’s the fact that we’ve been called. We have a purpose that is uniquely ours. We’ve been granted a niche. We have a place at the table. We have a place that has been specifically reserved in this eons long thing that we call life. Yes, deep down we want to be successful. As we have said, the reality that we have been granted this place is life evidences the fact that we are of sufficient worth to be there regardless of success or lack thereof.

However, having been granted this place does not appear sufficient for us to feel that we have real worth and substantive value. Our low self-esteem lulls us into believing that we don’t actually belong here…at all. It speaks to us in tones either loud and deafening or quiet and bedeviling that this is not our place. Therefore, we have to prove that we are worthy to be here. We have to show that this calling or these privileges weren’t a fluke, or something that we fabricated out of our desperation to feel that we have value. We have to make this real. We can’t simply bow in grateful appreciation for what life has bestowed upon us. Rather, we have to prove that we are worth the bestowing.

Because we have embraced this line of thinking, our energies are expended on our attempts at achieving something in order to prove our worth in the place that we’ve been granted. We’ve got to achieve, for if we don’t maybe we weren’t good enough for this place in the first place. We’ve got to earn our place. But while we’re expending energy holding our place through the earning of that place, we have to earn our way to the next place at the very same time. We have this sense that the place we’re at has limited value. That in the ever-incessant flow of life, wherever we’re at has a really short shelf-life. We know that soon it will become the place that we should have left in pursuit of the place that we should be going. The accolades of today’s achievement can quickly become the murmuring of tomorrow’s questions as people begin to wonder why we’re still sitting in yesterday.

Therefore, we fight to stay where we’re at while simultaneously fighting to move into tomorrow. We desperately want to solidify our current position, but not so much that we inadvertently lock ourselves into it. We must lay rigorous claim to the moment in order to preserve it as the step to the next moment, for if the former fails that latter will never exist to be given a chance to fail.

It Doesn’t Work – Wasted Energy

With that all said, whether we actually achieve what we’re out to achieve or not (whether that be good or bad), in reality it neither defines us nor establishes our worth. Whether we rise to some position of prominence, or achieve some step, or have a litany of letters stacked up behind our name, or cross some ill-defined finish line; none of these have any bearing on our worth or value. Our energies have all been about the achievement of whatever goals we’ve set for ourselves as a means of evidencing the fact that we are worth a place at the table. And while all of the trappings of doing all of this stuff appears to build us up, the trappings are in fact the very trap that will leave us living out our lives surrounded by successes, but engulfed in the forever question of “Am I good enough?”

The need to achieve these goals controls our energy, not us. We have this terribly rampant fear of not knowing who we are and subsequently having absolutely no grounding at all to effectively engage life as it roars at us, spins around us, and challenges us to do something with it and about it. Or, we have this terribly desperate feeling that our worthlessness has become completely exposed due to the fact that we stand here with nothing to hold up to show that we have value, and that based on our inability to evidence our value we have no inherent right to the place we’ve been granted. Therefore, we stand shamed before the whole world. Or, we do the opposite and we sabotage our situation to prove that we don’t belong here rather than working to prove that we do (which isn’t any more helpful).

And then we start asking ourselves a host of terrifying questions. What if none of this works? What if we don’t measure up? What if we fail life? What if we look the part but are nothing of the part? What if it was all energy spent and wasted in the spending? What if we were the fool and we just postponed the reveal? Living with ourselves in a manner such as this is dying dressed in the façade of living.

Easing the Panic

And so we default to achievement to rectify it all and get rid of the questions. If we achieve, it all goes away. If we achieve we can hold up the mirror of whatever we’ve achieved, point to it and say, “See, that’s me, that’s who I am, and therefore I do belong in the place life afforded me.” We can grab that mirror and gaze into it every time our self-esteem wanes or teeters on some precarious edge. We can carry it around with us and peer into it when this perpetually flagging sense of self starts to flag. We can do this until the mirror doesn’t work anymore and we begin to fall into the trap of believing that maybe we don’t belong here.

Achievement says we have value because we can point to the validation of the achievement; that we took nothing and made something from it which says that we do have a place and a purpose. That we stood in the face of both searing criticism and daunting obstacles, and in the standing we bested them both. That we overcame. We won.

And in reality, these things neither define who we are or substantiate our value. Our energies are horribly misdirected and tragically wasted because those precious energies are entirely controlled and completely disseminated by these convincing illusions that are destined to fade and die. We can’t prove our worth and value through achievement of any sort. And until we recognize this, we will live our lives very much ‘out-of-sorts.’

However, rather than understanding that these never work despite the best of our energies, we fall into the trap and we assume that ‘we’ didn’t make them work. We presume that we just weren’t good enough. We determined that we didn’t have the wherewithal and that we lacked enough of everything that was need to become something. It just wasn’t in us. Subsequently, we mentally and emotionally bury ourselves in a place that we never should have been in in the first place.

Our Value as Internal, Not External

Despite the screaming message of the culture and the declarations of those on lesser ventures, our value rests in who we are, not in what we do with who we are. Without a doubt, what we do with who we are has value, but it does not grant us value because that value already existed prior to any achievement. Our existence alone is the greatest statement of our worth and the clearest evidence as to our value. What we do with that existence is up to us. But the sheer reality of that existence evidences value. The fact I am writing this and you are reading this attests to the fact that we both have immense value because we both exist to do both of those things.

Have you considered the fact that without who we are, what we do would not exist? Every victory, every achievement, every accomplishment hinges on the fact that we were there to do it. Therefore, what we do is entirely dependent upon our existence. All that we do emerges from everything that we are; our gifts, our talents, our abilities, our qualities, our characteristics, our attributes and so on. What we do is simply a manifestation of all of those things expressing themselves in whatever we’ve put our mind to expressing them.

Deserving Our Place at the Table

That is why we were granted the place of privilege that we were granted. That is why we have a seat at the table. What we do is simply a manifestation of who we are working itself out in who and what God already knows us to be. We would be much better served to use our energies to bring growth and maturation to who we are, not to squander those energies in our attempts to prove who we are or establish who we are not. This is not to say that achievement is bad. In reality, achievement is very good and we are privileged to do it. Rather, it’s to say that achievement for the wrong reasons or misplaced motivations is damaging.

We don’t have to prove that we are worthy of the places that life has granted us. Yes, we need to be thankful for them. We need to cherish them. We need to hold them in high regard and never minimize them. But we’ve been given them because we’ve been deemed equipped for them. There’s nothing to prove. What’s the sense in attempting to prove what’s already been proven? There’s just the work that we’ve been blessed to do and the positions we’ve been blessed to have. And those are not granted to us to prove anything to anybody. Rather they are given to us to bless and maximize everything.

Mentally that’s a tough shift to make. It’s a reversal of epic proportions and the fact that it is evidences the depth of the lie that we’ve been living. Each of us needs to embrace the fact that our value is in who we are. And we need to widen that thought by understanding that this value that we carry within us exceeds our greatest estimation of it. It will readily eclipse anything that we do. That value is already there within us, even if we don’t see the far-reaching nature of it. Seeing something is not necessary to evidence its existence. It rests in exercising the faith that to be human is to possess potential. To be a child of God is to possess the infinite. And to possess infinite potential means that there’s a grand mission for the manifestation of it. Therefore we don’t need to create something or prove that potential. We only need to rest in it and let everything flow from it.”