“While a quiet ego was positively related to having a higher self-esteem, it was also related to various indicators of self-transcendence, including prosocial attitudes and behaviors.” Scott Barry Kaufman
“The absence of self-acceptance in my life brought me the darkest pain I’ve ever been in.” Elizabeth Gilbert
“The research shows that healthy self-compassion increases our inner drive, our resilience, and our ability to excel.” Kristin Neff
“I’ve been hearing a lot of HSPs be held back from the worry of judgment from others or being different or listening to others’ expectations of you, or even self-judgment and fear of failure.” Therapist Julie Bjelland
“If you are a highly creative person…an injured self-esteem will show up in your journey over and over again.” Therapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz
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Do you have a healthy level of self-esteem and self confidence? Or not so much?
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Elizabeth Gilbert on Self Acceptance
Author Elizabeth Gilbert (“Eat, Pray, Love” and “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear”) is one of the speakers at the Self-Acceptance Summit produced by Sounds True.
Host Tami Simon: Let’s start right with self-acceptance as a topic that you care about – why is this an important topic to you personally
Elizabeth Gilbert: Well, I mean I’ve kind of been a student of it my whole life because I’ve had to be, because its absence – it’s moments of absence – in my life have brought me the darkest pain I’ve ever been in.
And the only way out of that pain of the absence of self-acceptance was to claw, study, fight, beg and inch my way toward it.
And it’s been what I’ve been up to for a long time, and it’s something that I still have to work on.
And there are times where I lose it. I’d have to find my way back to it again and again and again – which of course always means finding your way back to your heart – it’s the only place you’re ever gonna find it.
…
Listen to more episodes of the Creative Mind Audio podcast.
Hear the full length video interview with Gilbert and many others: Self-Acceptance Summit recordings
Also see article The Self-Acceptance Summit
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Researcher, teacher and author Kristin Neff specializes in how self-compassion benefits us.
Here is a short video related to one of her courses:
Related audio program:
Self-Compassion author and researcher Kristin Neff says:
“We often become our own worst critic because we believe it’s necessary to keep ourselves motivated.
“Self-criticism does not build self-esteem by constantly measuring ourselves against everyone else.
“A strong sense of self-compassion is an essential ingredient for success.”
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“One of the biggest and most common issues people face is the belief that they are not enough.”
Therapist, author and speaker Marisa Peer adds:
“From bulimics, to alcoholics, to chronic gamblers – one of the most common things I hear from my patients and clients is that “I don’t think I’m enough.”
“And it’s this thought that pushes them to self sabotage and put challenges, obstacles, and roadblocks in their own way to live their best life.”
Self Esteem and Creative People with Marisa Peer
This episode of my podcast features audio clips from videos of Marisa Peer talking about what kinds of experiences and thinking impact our self esteem. our sense of being worthy and lovable.
Read the transcript (and also listen to the episode) at the main episode page.
(See more podcast episodes listed at The Creative Mind Audio.)
Marisa Peer’s comments about some people including Diana (a nurse), Marilyn Monroe, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and others, come from the video Know You Can Have It All. Below are other videos.
Marisa Peer was “named ‘Britain’s Best Therapist’ by Men’s Health magazine, and has spent over three decades treating a client list that includes international superstars, CEOs, Royalty, and Olympic athletes.”
Marisa Peer is speaking on the topic “Release Your Fears & Negative Programming” at the free ongoing NeuroGym Brain-A-Thon event hosted by John Assaraf.
book: Tell Yourself a Better Lie: Use the power of Rapid Transformational Therapy to edit your story and rewrite your life by Marisa Peer.
In another video of hers, Marisa Peer asks
“How can you create a healthy relationship with yourself so that you can have a healthy relationship with other people? Well, the first step sounds kind of obvious, which is you have to love yourself, respect yourself, like yourself, believe that you are a person that someone finds worth being with.
“And that’s such a platitude, isn’t it? But how do you love yourself? Well, it’s quite easy.”
Learn more about her books and programs at marisapeer.com
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Many, if not most, artists and creators are highly sensitive people, and can be more vulnerable to self-criticism and other experiences that impact self-esteem, confidence and more.
Julie Bjelland, LMFT is a psychotherapist, author and empowerment coach specializing in the trait of high sensitivity, and is a highly sensitive person herself.
One of her podcasts is “Confidence: Let’s Explore Where it Comes From and How to Get it.”
She writes in the show notes:
“I’ve noticed that so often something gets in the way of HSPs believing and accessing Confidence.
“Or maybe we have been so overwhelmed by the challenges of our sensitive nervous system that we are in survival mode, instead of truly living our life with purpose.”
She asks “What is stopping you from what you want?
“What would you need to do to find it and let go of what’s holding you back from accessing the most beautiful parts of yourself and your inner gifts?
“I’ve been hearing a lot of HSPs be held back from the worry of judgment from others or being different or listening to others’ expectations of you, or even self-judgment and fear of failure.
“Why is that? What would it take for you to let go of that?”
How does confidence affect our lives and how can we feel it more? (Excerpt from the full podcast):
The thumbnail image above that I picked for this episode of The Creative Mind Audio is actor Bill Nighy, who once commented:
“You come to realize there is this huge disparity between what you think about yourself and your work and what other people think about you and your work, at first you either think they’re insane or that it’s a conspiracy to make you look stupid. Or maybe, just maybe, they’re right, and you’re sometimes quite good at what you do.”
From my article Nurture your healthy self-esteem to thrive as an actor and artist.
You can also read more notes and hear the full Episode 117: Confidence: Let’s Explore Where it Comes From and How to Get it, with Julie & Willow at The HSP Podcast.
Follow the link to her site with many more resources: books, articles, free classes, courses and more.
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“So many artists and actors only believe in their own gifts once an agent, a casting director or a producer has declared and affirmed their merit.” Natalie Roy
“Just because you’re an actor doesn’t mean you’re not going to have the same insecurities as everyone else. If anything, it’s magnified.” Eva Noblezada
“Self-doubt is creeping in your mind. A part of you knows you are a performer. A part of you doubts who you are.” – Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz.
Here is a short video of mine with more quotes:
Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz addresses this topic of self-esteem – especially crucial for actors and other performers.
She writes:
Are your feelings the result of poor treatment as a child or has something more recent left you questioning your worth?
The external pressure to be more and do more can wear down anyone’s self-esteem.
Especially if the past is informing your perception of your abilities, skills, talents and overall potential.
If you are a highly creative person – someone with a big drive or determination to achieve your life goals or dreams – an injured self-esteem will show up in your journey over and over again…
It will interfere with your ability to invest yourself in creating your life.
An unrealistic or harsh internal voice can repeatedly stifle your creative spark or disconnect you from your performing abilities.
As challenging as it may feel, when your self esteem issues are triggered it’s an opportunity for you to heal and build a healthier and more grounded sense of self-worth.
See more in my article
Nurture your healthy self-esteem to thrive as an actor and artist
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John Lennon once expressed a perspective on some of the self esteem challenges experienced by many creative people:
“Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.”
He also said: “There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see.”
Therapist Sharon Barnes works with creative, sensitive, intense and/or gifted teens and adults, and hears from many of them statements like Lennon made.
She has developed a home-study video program to help creative people – see more in my article: Creative people can feel “There’s something wrong with me.”
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Helen Mirren has portrayed many confident, even imperious, women in her long and successful career.
But personally, as she commented in a British newspaper interview, she has experienced insecurity throughout her life.
She emphasized that it should be called “experienced” rather than “suffered” – a helpful framing of what is often perceived as a negative feeling.
“I’m beginning to get a bit fed up of all this ‘suffering’. But yes, I have experienced insecurity all my life, and I still do on a daily basis.”
From article: How to build your confidence as an artist
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– Psychologist William James.
Our needs for attention and appreciation may be basic, and grounded in survival as a child, but for some people, those needs are especially potent.
Ben Kingsley has commented about being a performer as a child, and like so many other people, experiencing some hurtful responses from his parents.
“I had always been the song-and-dance man of the family,” he says.
“I remember my father referring to me as ‘our little Danny Kaye’ when I was about seven. That was the only remotely positive comment I remember from them.
“They never praised me or acknowledged a gram of talent in me.
“Their way was to mock – ‘when are you going to finish with this acting lark’, that sort of thing. My mother, far from being proud, was very jealous of my success.”
[She was an actress, with only a few small roles, according to Kingsley.]
His interviewer notes that mention of being knighted, in 2002, “seems to make Kingsley glow.”
“I told you about my parents, and the fact that any kind of embrace was totally absent from my life,” he says.
“So to be embraced by Her Majesty… I felt like stopping people in the street, saying my mum loves me, you know. Because that’s what it felt like, to me. The filling of a vacuum in the universe.”
See more in article :
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Comedian, writer and actor Amy Schumer has related an experience of her low esteem and confidence:
“Right before I left for college, I was running my high school. … People knew me. They liked me. I was an athlete and a good friend. I felt pretty, I felt funny, I felt sane.
“Then I got to college in Maryland. My school was voted number one … for the hottest freshman girls in Playboy that year.
“And not because of me. All of a sudden, being witty and charismatic didn’t mean sh*t.
“Day after day, I could feel the confidence drain from my body. I was not what these guys wanted. They wanted thinner, blonder, dumber.”
[Photo is from her imdb section.]
~ ~ ~
Psychologist and author of multiple books about highly sensitive people, Elaine Aron, PhD notes:
“In spite of our focus on raising self-esteem, we have had little success.
“In fact, research [indicates] low self-esteem is in a sense natural, one result of our instinct to rank ourselves among others…
“Repeating self-affirmations, the most common self-help treatment, only increases low self-esteem in those already feeling bad, as many hapless souls have found.”
See more in post: Ranking and Self-Esteem on the Highly Sensitive site.
One of her books is The Undervalued Self – here is a video about it:
~ ~
“The most creative people are typically not models of high self-esteem.”
Elizabeth Mika, a provider of assessment for gifted children and counseling for gifted adults, notes:
“High self-esteem is something we, Americans, all want.
“To be sure, a similar obsession with self-esteem is rarely, if ever, found in other civilized countries, whose languages often do not even possess an adequate equivalent of the term.
“Here, however, self-esteem is a major preoccupation of psychologists, educators and pundits alike.
“Whole enterprises are built on the conventional wisdom which teaches us that high self-esteem is good, while low self-esteem can be hazardous to our health.”
She adds, “Let’s face it, having chronically high self-esteem is often a sign of either stupidity, delusion, or a lack of conscience — or all three combined.
“So what is so desirable about it? The feeling-good-no-matter-what part?
“Their inner lives are often plagued by self-doubt, worries, fears, and feelings of inferiority.
“One reason for this chronic insecurity is that they base their self-evaluations on very high personal standards, and thus their own behavior seems inadequate and far from ideal in comparison.
“But this insecurity is usually a sign of an active conscience at work.
She quotes Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet and writer, and a Nobel laureate:
“From early on writing for me has been a way to overcome my real or imagined worthlessness.”
Read more in her article What Is Wrong With Feeling Good?
The photo is Helen Mirren – although she has portrayed many confident, even imperious, characters, a British newspaper article says she “has talked of how insecure she has felt nearly all her life.”
And she said “I still get insecure.”
Another example of a highly talented and accomplished actor with imposter feelings is Meryl Streep, who has said, “I have varying degrees of confidence and self-loathing.
“You can have a perfectly horrible day where you doubt your talent… Or that you’re boring and they’re going to find out that you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Read more in post: Gifted and Talented but Insecure.
~ ~
Some more examples of impostor feelings and thinking:
Lupita Nyong’o had not yet graduated from Yale Drama School when she was cast by Steve McQueen for his powerful movie 12 Years a Slave.
She said, “I had impostor syndrome until the day I landed in Louisiana [for the shoot].
“I was certain that I was going to be fired.”
~ ~
“Any moment, someone’s going to find out I’m a total fraud.” (Emma Watson)
“I convince myself I’m fooling people.” (Jonathan Safran Foer)
“I felt inadequate the entire time I was in graduate school.” (Rosalyn Lang, Ph.D.)
Read comments by other artists, and by coaches and psychologists, in my article Overcome Impostor Syndrome Feelings.
~~~~~
Confidence and body image
Lady Gaga is among many performers who have talked about experiencing self esteem challenges and insecurity.
In a magazine interview, she commented:
“I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.”
Interviewer: “But do you consider yourself to be beautiful?”
“Not conventionally beautiful. If there was some sort of mathematical equation for beauty, I don’t know if I would be the algorithm.
“I’ve always been OK with that. I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.
Interviewer: “I think that’s interesting. Because every time I see a shot of you stripped down without makeup or a costume, I’m struck by your physical beauty. Your layering of costumes—is that because of insecurity? Are you afraid of what’s under all those layers?”
“I would say that I am. Maybe it’s from the things I experienced in my past, you know?
“Being beautiful is not so fun when you’re in a business with all men.”
From The Monster Talent: Lady Gaga By Andy Cohen, Glamour October 29, 2013.
This photo of Lady Gaga is also used in my post Emotional Intelligence To Be Creative, which includes material about her work with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Born This Way Foundation.
[Over the years, I have collected many quotes on body image.]
Trauma and self esteem
Lady Gaga was bullied, even thrown into a trash can. She said, “I was called really horrible, profane names very loudly in front of huge crowds of people, and my schoolwork suffered at one point.
“I didn’t want to go to class. And I was a straight-A student, so there was a certain point in my high school years where I just couldn’t even focus on class because I was so embarrassed all the time. I was so ashamed of who I was.”
Another artist who suffered abuse and this kind of erosion of self esteem is Halle Berry.
Referring to being abused as a child by her violent father, who also assaulted her mother, she said:
“I think I’ve spent my adult life dealing with the sense of low self-esteem that sort of implanted in me. Somehow I felt not worthy.”
One of the dynamics of acting may be in allowing people to “step away” from their painful histories and hurt selves by “becoming” someone else for a time.
Berry commented about acting in her intense movie “Gothika” (2003):
“Although physically I would feel exhausted and tired, my back would hurt, my arms would hurt and my feet would be raw from running through all the stuff, there was still something about it that felt good, like I had a cathartic experience.
“I got a lot of stuff out of me that was pent up in little corners of myself, so I felt good at the same time.”
Quotes are from my article Creative People, Trauma and Mental Health.
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The quiet ego
This image is from the book: Transcending Self-Interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego by Heidi A. Wayment, Jack J. Bauer, Editors.
The Amazon.com summary notes the term quiet ego refers to “an ego less concerned with self-promotion than with the flourishing of both the self and others.”
In his post on the site of Susan Cain, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman refers to this book and notes “The researchers found that those with a quiet ego reported being more interested in personal growth and balance and tended to seek growth through competence, autonomy, and positive social relationships.
“While a quiet ego was positively related to having a higher self-esteem, it was also related to various indicators of self-transcendence, including prosocial attitudes and behaviors.”
He adds, “This is consistent with the idea that a quiet ego balances compassion with self-protection and growth goals. Indeed, a quiet ego is an indication of a healthy self-esteem—one that acknowledges one’s own limitations, doesn’t need to constantly resort to defensiveness whenever the ego is threatened, and yet has a firm sense of self-worth and value.”
From article The Surprising Benefits of a Quiet Ego.
Scott Barry Kaufman is Scientific Director of The Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of books including Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined and Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind.
Susan Cain is author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.
For more on being an introvert and/or highly sensitive, see:
site: Highly Sensitive and Creative
Resources for Introverts and Highly Sensitive People
Programs for Introverts and Highly Sensitive People
~ ~ ~
A comic take on all this self-esteem stuff, from The Big Bang Theory TV series:
Leonard Hofstadter (a physicist at Caltech, played by Johnny Galecki): I am clearly not the only person who is tormented by insecurity and has an ego in need of constant validation.
Sheldon Cooper (also a physicist; played by Jim Parsons): So you admit you’re an egotist?
Leonard Hofstadter: Yes! … I could never please my parents, so I need to get all of my self-esteem from strangers like you.
From the episode: The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization (2008) (Video)
[Photo is from another scene from the show, probably not this episode.]
~~~~~~~
Some related articles from my various sites:
Self-Knowledge, Self-Esteem and the Gifted Adult by Stephanie S. Tolan
“Self-identification as a gifted adult is complicated by the great diversity among the gifted adult population. What does a gifted adult look like? Unfortunately, for many gifted adults, it looks like somebody else.”
Self-esteem, Self-confidence and Trusting Your Creative Self
If we are willing to put our creative work out there – into the world in some way – it will be judged and ranked. But what if our book doesn’t make it to a bestseller list, our painting is not accepted by a gallery, our blog doesn’t show up on a Google page one, or our movie doesn’t get invited to a film festival? One consequence is we may feel deflated, and question our worth as a creator.
Can self-esteem distort our personal development?
A study led by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge [titled “Egos Inflating Over Time”] warns that years of school self-esteem programs and media that “promotes the self relentlessly” could cause significant personal and social problems for people reaching adulthood.
Building self esteem and identity – what we tell ourselves about ourselves
How we identify and classify ourselves can have a profound impact. Director Jane Campion, praised for “The Piano” and other films, once commented, “I never have had the confidence to approach filmmaking straight on. I just thought it was something done by geniuses, and I was very clear that I wasn’t one of those.”
Are self-help books worth it?
Books can be valuable tools for self-understanding and change, but are they always worth the investment of time and money? One of the top selling self-help titles has been “Awaken the Giant Within” by Tony Robbins. In their Scientific American Mind article “Do Self-Help Books Help?”, Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld use this as an example of self-help authors who “often make grandiose promises which invite a skeptical look.”
Can we do self-improvement too much?
Personal growth, personal development, self-improvement, self-help: these are topics that many of us explore. Maybe most of you reading this. But can we be overdoing it sometimes?
Deal with your negative thinking, but be careful with affirmations
Science writer Ed Yong explains “positive mantras like ‘I am a strong, powerful person’ have been championed at least as far back as Norman Vincent Peale’s infamous book The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952. But a new study suggests that despite its popularity, this particular brand of self-help may backfire badly. Ironically, it seems to be people with low self-esteem, who are most likely to rely on such statements, who are most likely to feel worse because of them.”
How to build confidence by Morty Lefkoe
“It is important to distinguish between confidence about being able to perform a specific task (such as fly a plane or speak a foreign language) and confidence in yourself. One might not be confident about being able to perform a specific task even though they have high level of self-confidence. Such a person knows that her inability to perform a specific task means nothing about her as a person.” – See links in this article to The Lefkoe Method programs to improve confidence and overcome limiting beliefs such as the ones above.
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