(reprinted from January’s edition of “Mentality” for men)

Healthy self-esteem is a critical component in a well-balanced life. Guys need it just the same, and it’s a consistent practice over time to maintain and refine good self-esteem, or the relationship that we have with ourselves. The way we treat ourselves is a direct reflection of the way we attract others into our lives. Who we attract into our lives is a direct reflection of how we feel about ourselves – good or bad. Let’s take a look at some components to developing better self-esteem for men.

Here’s how this will happen: we’ll look at four common areas affected by self-esteem, and give four tips for each category.

• At Work
  • Feel accomplished by breaking up large projects into easy to manage tasks, and structure your time.
    • Check these free forms out to help get you better organized: http://davidseah.com/
  • Periodically ask for constructive criticism from superiors to do a better job. Don’t wait for your review. It’s not ass kissing if you to want to perform better, and wiser.
  • Use your lunch productively: do some stress management for yourself for thirty minutes
  • Set quarterly goals for yourself on the job, and work towards gradual achievement of them; if you’re unhappy at work, set quarterly goals to get yourself out of there and into a better job or career
• Relationship with Ourself
  • Identify and watch the toxic “self-critic”. Start to watch how it beats you down mentally, and how much of your behavior may be driven to succeed to “show” or compensate. This is the voice inside your mind that tells you “you’re not good enough, smart enough, successful enough.” Yes, that one.
  • Identify your needs and communicate them to the people that can meet them for you. Deal with the ones that can’t.
  • Identify your feelings and communicate them to the people that can listen to them. Deal with the ones that can’t.
  • Know what your limits are. Learning to say “no” is just as important for men as it is for women. Having healthy boundaries – which originate in ourselves first – is the foundation for practicing self-care, and developing good self-esteem.
• Lifestyle
  • List three things you’ve been saying you’re going to do – that you’re not already doing – and develop an action plan to start to do them. This includes interests, hobbies, investment in relationships, etc. Identify the blocks and barriers, and write them down. Repeat.
  • Consider your friendships, and how they should be mutually satisfying for both parties. Do you feel good about them, and feel like you’re getting from them, as well as giving to them? If not, is a change needing to be made? Our friends can be great mirrors of our self-esteem, if we look closely. Research shows that mental health,  like depression, can be socially contagious, so why wouldn’t positive (or negative) self-esteem? Surround yourself with well-intentioned people who are good for your self-esteem.
  • Practice 20-30 minute regular exercise routines and do it not for an end-result, but as a commitment towards greater energy and positive self-esteem. Do it for your partner (or kids) if nothing else. We’re not talking Lance Armstrong here. Shake up those feel good brain juices.
  • Align your values with your behaviors. Are you practicing what you preach? Are you doing things in the world that are consistent with what you believe in? Sometimes, recalibrating them brings improved self-esteem, when we’re living from our core values instead of someone else’s.
• Stress Management

• Practice 10-15 minutes of conscious breathing (you can do this at work) or mindfulness meditation. You’ll be able to “unstick” from negative thinking about yourself through this process. E-mail me for instructions on meditating or breathing exercises.
• • Create a “stress list”, and record the daily items that stress you. Dump the stressors onto that list, and put the list in your desk drawer, or in a glass jar labeled “To Worry About”. Don’t stress: you’ll get to them later.
  • Practice better anger. You can exercise it out, yes, but you can also get in touch with the experience of anger in yourself, and communicate your anger in a healthy way to those that are the cause of it. Don’t stuff your anger, but don’t explode either. Choose “the middle way,” and cool your anger and frustration each time it comes up. But time it well.
  • Don’t smoke, and drink a little less. Both will spike stress, and exacerbate negative thinking about yourself (especially if you then tell yourself you want to quit. This is called “cognitive dissonance”, when stress appears as a product of two competing ideas. (“I want to quit, but I’m still doing it.”)

Self-esteem is a relationship that we build with ourselves over time. It requires some work, and continuing to do the right things over and over again. If you think you have chronic self-esteem problems, and need help, contact me to see how counseling or psychotherapy might benefit you.

Gary Vaynerchuk seems to know a thing or two about passion. His book – “Crush It” – details the application of his passion, and how he built his family wine business into a multimillion dollar empire. In a talk tonight at Changing Hands bookstore in Phoenix, AZ, Gary thought that finding one’s passion lies in what they consume. In response to an audience member’s question, Gary said that to find one’s passion for work, he might try looking to what he was already consuming – t.v., media, hobbies. What was he already doing?

I think that says a lot, because when work isn’t work, it’s flow. Time seems to take a backseat, and one’s passion and creativity get unleashed. The passion begins to flow, and the line between work and play seems to blur.

I’m interested in two things: finding what you love to do, and then figuring out how you stop that forward progress. What negative messages and roadblocks do you experience on your way to meeting that love?

Sometimes the “I’m not good enoughs” or “Someone is already doing that – I can’t do what they’re doing” get in the way. “Time is limited” or “I need more training” or any number of other folkish aphorisms get in the way. An invisible ruler starts to dictate behavior, comparing yourself to this and that.

Passion is there, where you listen to it or not. Passion for the work you do, or for the people you help. Passion for the play that you invest in, or in the relationships you built. Passion for the new ideas that germinate in your brain, or passion for the way you do seemingly trivial or mundane tasks.

As men and women, we get a lot of our self-esteem and identity through outside sources: work, sport, friends, partners and through roles we play. But how much of that is internally-derived self-esteem?

Depending on outside sources for primary self-esteem needs is a losing proposition in the long run. Because outside sources sometimes fail to provide or to come through for us when we need them, we need to look to inner sources of self-esteem inside of ourselves.

How do you create self-esteem from the inside?

From my work with men, a lot of self-esteem comes from identity sources, like the work that they do. Men often overidentify with their work and careers in a way that their self-esteem becomes overly contingent on their professional life. When the professional life fails to come through, then self-esteem becomes damaged. Depression and stress, as well as relationship difficulty, often come as byproducts of external sources that fail to provide for our self-esteem needs.

Refining your inner self-esteem, that place of knowing and centeredness inside yourself, is an important step in “living from the inside.” It becomes easier to weather the storms of our lives and our environment, especially when those “external” sources that we expect will come through for us fail to do so. We cling less to those sources for the fuel that we need, because we become generators of that self-esteem from within.

The thing about winning is that it also produces losers. Somebody’s gotta lose. We’ve been winning and losing since we were young. From our earliest experiences, from the kickball field to the career ladder, we have been confronted with opportunities to be winners and losers, and sometimes this becomes such as serious pursuit, that we wrap our sense of identity around whether we win or lose.

It’s hard for many of us men to wallow in loss, because it stokes our experience of shame. Shame as losers. Shame as men. Shame as people who are not the best.

Our development and our culture reinforce the idea that winning is superior to losing. Now, I’m not saying that to be a loser is an admirable quality. But, we learn early on that winning is everything. We have competitions and spelling bees and systems based on GPA that sets up competition from the beginning. We grow into men that seek winning in career, life and relationships above all else, and start to depend on winning for our self-esteem.

Are you this guy? Do you put winning above everything else? Do you have to win at all costs?

Feeling like a loser inside doesn’t change. Winning at all costs brings a lot of fame, power and external success, but men who strive continually for this end up subjecting their self-esteem to the forces at work on the outside. Competition ends up dictating how men feel about themselves, and they end up losing their “inner sense” of self. If you end up needing praise and validation from everyone else all of the time, then you lose that sense of ease inside yourself. Success becomes contingent on people and events outside of oneself, who are bound to disappoint at some point.

To deal with the shame of “being a loser” messages is what men who overcompensate by winning should do first. We have to first get in touch with the shame place, and deal with that face to face, instead of seeking out more people and events that validate our sense of “being a winner.” But does this happen in reality? No. I may be an idealist, but I’m also a realist, too. There is too much to lose in always striving to be a winner, too many material acquisitions and too much external power to have. Why work on it?

Also, just easing up that need to win at all costs is a practice that I would recommend. If possible, try to put some competition in perspective then next time it grabs you and doesn’t let go. The next competition should elicit some fun, whether it’s a pickup game of basketball or video games. Can you play for fun and not to win?

The cost of winning can sometimes eclipse the intial high of the win, especially when messages of shame and self-worth underlie the victories to begin with.