If you don’t think highly of yourself, why would anyone else?
Some people think their self-esteem and self-confidence are trash because others don’t treat them well, but consider the problem with this thinking.
First, it’s called self-esteem. It comes from you! It’s in the name. If you let how the world treats you dictate how you should feel about yourself, you’re in for a rough ride in this thing called life. People are mean, nasty, and ruthless, and often, it has nothing to do with you or anything you did.
The person who treats you poorly is probably having a bad day. Sometimes, you’re just in the way of what they’re trying to accomplish, either as a passive obstacle or an active opponent. But most of the time, they’re not even thinking about you, but you perceive their lack of acknowledgment as an indicator of your self-worth.
Of course, that’s the wrong way to look at the world, and it’s a terrible operating system for maneuvering within it.
One of my favorite sayings is that you should never blame malice for what can be attributed to apathy. In other words, just because people don’t care and have their own problems and concerns doesn’t mean they think less of you. They aren’t thinking about you at all, and that’s important to remember.
The second problem with basing your self-esteem on the outside world, perhaps even more significant than the first, is that you can’t control the world outside of you. Nothing you can do or say will make someone change how those people feel about you.
You can’t make someone give you a job, a date, be your friend, or treat you with respect.
Even in terms of your environment, you don’t even get control over that until you are an adult—and by that time, you’ve got to deal with the mental and emotional conditions from your upbringing that conditioned you to think and behave in a certain way. Some of the actions you took due to that initial environment—the one you had no control over—will affect your life and may take decades to undo. Anyone with a criminal record knows precisely what I’m talking about.
I grew up with an abusive mother in a violent public housing project and went to school with other violent kids. I learned early on that if I let my surroundings dictate my behavior, I’d either sink to their level or lower. I never let myself be taken advantage of, but I refused to become like the people around me.
This meant doing the opposite of everyone around me, including my family.
My initial motivations were working out, staying off the streets, reading books, and having good manners. My initial motivation was to avoid a horrible fate, but as I got older, I realized I was setting an example for myself. By setting this standard and example for myself, I forced people to respond to me in a way that I thought would lead to respect.
Now, just because I carried myself this way doesn’t mean that everyone treated me this way—and herein lies a valuable lesson that harkens back to what I said earlier about having no control over others. However, imagine letting their non-positive response dictate how I felt about myself. In that case, my self-image would fall under the control of other people. I would effectively become someone’s slave.
I wanted to like the guy I saw in the mirror and to achieve that, I had to carry myself in a way that made me feel like I was a little better than everyone else. Vanity and arrogance are terrible fuels, but they can be great sparks—and those sparks lit the fire of self-discipline.
Even when my life was a mess, I always tried to carry myself with poise and dignity. The goal is never to look like you’re struggling, even when you are. Don’t take this to mean that you always have to have a smile on your face and pretend that everything is ok. Taking that approach is disingenuous and dangerous.
Instead, it means remembering that your internal struggles are never alleviated by letting your external circumstances fall apart. It also means recognizing that people have their own problems in life and having enough self-respect not to try to extract pity from someone already fighting a battle.
I don’t want you to interpret this to mean that you never ask for help if you need it—but if you need help, never do it in a way that makes people feel sorry for you. You never want to make someone feel bad for not being able to help you, and that’s what you risk if you try to elicit pity.
Think of asking for help the same way you get a loan from the bank. The bank will only give you a loan if you can pay back the loan. If you’re dead broke, desperately in need of the money, you don’t get the money. You are far more likely to get help when you look like you can survive without it.
People want to help you. Not rescue you.
Even when I fumbled in life with financial and alcohol problems, I still stayed focused on my boxing training. This focus showed people I was still serious about making something with my life. It also gave me more of a reason to respect myself, and eventually, that self-respect gave me the power to do what I needed to manage my addiction.
Ultimately, getting sober was another act of self-discipline. You can’t make someone stop a bad habit if they don’t want to, and I wanted to because I started to hate the guy I saw in the mirror. Low self-discipline equals low self-esteem because you’ll carry yourself in a way that makes it easy to look at the person in the mirror.
