Just as a healthy immune system does not guarantee that one will never become ill, but makes one less vulnerable to disease and better equipped to overcome it, so a healthy self-esteem does not guarantee that one will never suffer anxiety or depression in the face of life’s difficulties, but makes one less susceptible and better equipped to cope, rebound, and transcend. – Nathanial Branden
I’ll be honest with you:
The book I’m writing right now is one of the hardest projects I’ve ever started. For the last 10 years I have been a student of psychology and achievement because it was required of me.
Like most things, when you begin getting good at something, mastery becomes intoxicating. I never finished college because I didn’t see the point. I wasn't excited about what it could do for me, but I developed a voracious appetite for learning. Fast forward over a decade and now my business curriculum is starting to get into colleges as licensed educational material.
I am not a psychologist, but people come to my events and pay me millions of dollars to fix their minds. How does this happen? It happens because mastery will carry you to places no one else can go.
There is obviously mastery here, so I thought, “Maybe I should write a book about the mind, about setback, and how to overcome obstacles with less effort.” And I’ve written this book 4 times, started over 4 times — 700+ pages of notes and I just can’t get it organized the right way.
It’s not that I don’t know how to organize it properly, it’s that there is so much that I can’t include in the book… so I may have to turn it into a several-part series. That said, I have a lot of material that will not make it into the book so I will write about it here.
HUMAN NEEDS
This is not Maslow’s heirachy of needs but rather an intermingling of evolutionary biology & psychology — if you deduce the pursuits of the human race you eventualy find three tiers of importance:
- Stay alive (correlated with the fear of death)
- Perpetuate the species & procreate (correlated with the fear of being alone)
- Meet life’s requirements well & exert control over circumstances (correlated to fear of being poor)
Interwoven through all three is this golden key of “self-esteem.”
Three years ago I got on a call with a mentor in Texas. I was having a difficult season (by difficult, I mean existential crisis every couple of weeks; it was quite awful). I was hunting for attribution, trying to figure out what was going wrong and why…
He is a clinically trained psychotherapist and works in education, and he asked me a question that changed my trajectory: “Would you rather have confidence in your ability to make a right decision, or confidence in your ability to correct a wrong decision quickly?”
This ties to a concept called self-efficacy, which is the conviction that we can think, judge, and know how to correct our errors. Self-efficacy does not prevent all errors, it fixes them. One of the greatest predictive drivers of a person’s self-esteem is their level of self-efficacy.
When we have self-efficacy, we usually have self-respect, self-esteem, and confidence in spades. It allows us to take risks and reduce our fear of loss.
Self-efficacy improves our enthusiasm for the future.
The #1 predictor of your future
If I had to predict how successful a person is going to be, I would reduce my analysis to one simple state and that state is enthusiasm. Educational psychologist E. Paul Torrance writes, “A person’s image of the future may be a better predictor of future attainment than his past performance.”
There is an enormous amount of scientific evidence that substantiates this. When you are excited, you are effective. It is very difficult to work hard, work long, and overcome setback if you are bitter, disgruntled, and worried.
Even our biology improves when we are enthusaiastic. In a book published in 1920, Bates writes: “Eyesight improves immediately when the individual is thinking pleasant thoughts, or visualizing pleasant scenes.” (Bates, W.H. 1920. The Cure of Imperfect Site by Treatment Without Glasses. New York: Central Fixation Publishing Co.)
How, then, can we create enthusiasm?
Now we are getting into material that I will be including in the book.
So I will leave it here for now. In the meantime, here's a long form discussion about happiness. It's controversial because I believe God is interested in your happiness more than most religious academics would have you believe.
One Response
Hi Taylor
I have been watching you and your podcast. The people you interview have really helped me in my spiritual growth. I am also in network business seeking a breakthrough to reduce my time doing 9-5 and do ministry.