Article 4 of a five-part series exploring whole person self-esteem.
You worry. You question yourself. You feel unprepared for an upcoming task. You wonder if you are good enough, skilled enough, prepared enough to do your best and successfully meet the challenge and show the world how amazing you can be. Your thoughts and feelings are overwhelming you with doubt as you begin to believe the unfair inner critic’s self evaluation and judgment of your skills and abilities. Unfair due to the belief that no matter how hard you try, you will never be good enough.
In whole person self-esteem, skill-worth dominates your life from the energy, focus and passion of striving to prove yourself. Everybody’s lives are dominated by skill-worth by either 1) striving to improve their skills, abilities, and performances, or 2) giving up and berating themselves in having no worthwhile skills or abilities. Striving to prove you are good enough can be a brutal endeavour, especially when listening to the harsh inner voice of your pathological critic. Or even the harsh criticism from others real or imagined. But giving up is even worse as you start to distort and disconnect from reality and listen to the vulnerability guardian shielding you from the consequences of your actions.
But here’s the thing – you can only do your best, and nothing more. Ever. I would even say that the most famous people took significant moments in their life to stop trying to do better. The martial artist Bruce Lee took time everyday to do nothing. He would just sit and actively do nothing, but embrace the Chinese philosophy of Wu Wei, the concept of non-doing. Albert Einstein incorporated daydreaming into his daily routines, calling them “thought experiments.” Many famous people, John Lennon, Steve Jobs, Maya Angelou, Ernest Hemmingway, Alan Watts, and so many more didn’t strive to do better all the time. They took significant breaks to do nothing. As Alan Watt’s said, “Nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness.” And Albert Einstein added this insight, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world and beyond.”
Looking past non-doing, life can put huge obstacles that seem to thwart you from doing your best. Many famous people faced challenges that significantly impacted their sense of skill-worth. Beethoven was deaf for the last 20 years of his life. He never heard his 9th Symphony. Evelyn Glennie is a deaf percussionist that has become the first full-time solo percussionist in the world, and has performed with major orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles were blind and brilliant musicians. Jennifer Bricker-Bauer was born without legs, abandoned by her parents, and yet happily competed in high school gymnastics and beyond, becoming a professional aerialist and acrobat. Even Leonardo Di Vinci suffered from right-hand paralysis in his later years, but still continued painting.
The point I am trying to make here is that skill-worth is a trap. A domineering trap that can be awesome or horrible depending upon context, expectations, and reality. If you believe that what you do defines who you are, you will never be good enough because you can always imagine doing better. And ironically, the trap gets worse the more talented, unskillful, and famous you are because you get so close to actually achieving the imagined perfection. My favourite example of this conundrum is the great Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. He did the impossible in 2008 by winning 8 gold medals and setting 7 world records and 1 Olympic record. And it still wasn’t good enough because in one event he “only” set an Olympic record. Because of his “failure,” he started really struggling with his overall self-esteem and began behaviourally acting out in self-destructive ways. He suffered from low self-esteem. The horrible trap of skill-worth only looks at results through the lenses of unrealistic expectations. You are never good enough, because you can always imagine doing better.
But with a different approach and perspective, you can flip this failure into revealing something awesome – Michael Phelps loved swimming so much that it propelled him to do the impossible. His performance was incredible and inspiring. Like so many wonderful and famous people throughout history that have inspired us, they did what they did because of their love and passion, desire, persistence, ability and skills. Striving to do your absolute best, and even exceed beyond what has ever been done before, is a noble and divine pursuit that is a trademark of humanity. We want to excel.
Your approach to skill-worth impacts which self-esteem trap you enter. Do you focus extensively on the process of skill-worth, or the end result of skill-worth. Do you forget your self-worth? The awesome trap of skill-worth reveals how passions can propel you into doing the impossible, not because you have to, but because you want to with each step of the way. You want to do your best. To see how far you can go in creating your best life imaginable and even beyond. And if you fail, you are still loved just for being you.
A great example of the skill-worth as a inspirational yet horrible trap’s from a singular focus on doing is reflected in President Teddy Roosevelt’s saying, “The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends themselves in a worthy cause; who at best knows the triumph of high achievement, and if they fail, at least fails while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
This quote inspires you to try harder and do better. Yet, it seems to imply that if you aren’t striving for success in the arena, well then you are a cold and timid soul. Skill-worth is glorified, while self-worth is ignored. In contrast, this quote expressed by comedian Stephen Colbert during the last performance of the now cancelled The Late Show embraces skill-worth and self-worth by including the value of you. Colbert said, “We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you.” There is a huge difference in how you are approached and valued between “doing for you” versus “doing with you.”
Another way that skill-worth can become a domineering horrible trap is that skills are just about everything that you can do. If you can do something and can learn to make it better or worse, then that is a skill. Breathing can be a skill. So is talking, writing, singing, making faces, farting, folding paper, socializing, making pizzas, being someone’s friend, and so much more. Skills are just about everywhere.
That is why skill-worth can become so dominate in your life that you forget just existing and being yourself has intrinsic value. However, emotions and feelings are not a skill because you can not learn to have better or worse emotions. You just feel what you feel. But what is a skill is your learned ability to recognize and manage emotions. You might also forget that other people connect to you just as you can connect to them. You don’t have to know or do anything for someone to reach out to you. Often others can see your value and abilities even if you struggle to do so. Self-worth and social-worth are distinct and different from the skills that you can do.
Skill-worth is about you and what you can do. While self-worth is intrinsic as you always have value being yourself and social-worth involves others, skill-worth is completely under your control. You alone set the focus, boundaries, effort and goals that you want to accomplish. You can be influenced by others, but you have to decide for yourself how you will spend your time and energy on what you do.
But while you can control your time and energy, you don’t control the outcome or how your skills, abilities, and accomplishments will be judged or evaluated. And that is why low self-esteem often stems from the struggles with to much focus on skill-worth. It’s not that you can’t do great things with low self-esteem, but rather that you don’t get a sense of satisfaction or worth from the great things you do. You don’t feel like you’ve done enough. This struggle from low self-esteem is beautifully summed up in the book, Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, where Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider become friends. She saves his life by writing about him in her web, starting with “Some Pig.” Near the end of the book, they have this conversation: “Why did you do all this for me?” Wilbur asked. “I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.” “You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
Charlotte’s comment reveal that life is not just about who you are (self-worth), or what you can do (skill-worth), but also incorporates sharing (social-worth). Sharing connects us all, so next we will take a deep dive into understanding the role and impact of social-worth.
Dane Jorento, MSW, LICSW is a speaker offering keynotes, seminars, and workshops on mental health, trauma, ADHD, and relationships. He specialises in BCA Holistic Therapy, EMDR, and DBT approaches.
