Lesson 7: How to Be Even
Better at Low Self-esteem
The term ‘low self-esteem’ is often used by psychologists but is, perhaps, less familiar in everyday conversation. It means exactly the same as low self-confidence or lack of self-belief and often shows up as shyness, embarrassment or being uncomfortable either in the company of unfamiliar people or when asked to perform or stand out in some way. For ease, I am going to use the term ‘low self-esteem’ to include all of these ideas and behaviours. As mentioned, this is a must-read chapter, even if you don’t experience low self-esteem, as it will show you how to understand the structure of an ELF (Excellence of Limited Function).
Armed with your knowledge from the previous chapters, you’ll understand what I mean when I say:
‘In order successfully to dû low self-esteem you must dû the following things. It simply will not work properly if you don’t.’
Let’s look through the recipe that creates the genius of the Low Self-esteem ELF – you could use it to teach people how to be even better at low self-esteem (although I wouldn’t advise it) – but mainly we’ll explore how easy it is to fail at being a genius at it.
You remember the ‘filter for red’ exercise where looking for red objects made red things show up?
In each ELF recipe, instead of looking for red, we become brilliant at looking for something very specific – which is different for each recipe. Again, naturally, when we look for these things they show up too.
So, in the recipe for low self-esteem it’s important to set our filter to:
» Worthless, wrong or bad we are.
» We always get it wrong.
» We don’t deserve good things.
» Any success can be explained away as either ‘easy to do anyway’, the result of someone else’s action or just random chance events.
» We are less good than others. There is a sense these people are ‘better than me’.
Exception filter
However, there’s an interesting added twist, called the ‘exception filter’, which comes into play whenever ‘things seem to be going right’, in spite of our negative predictions. This presents a real danger to the stability of our ELF and our negative feelings. But the ELF is so well designed that it has a built-in protection mechanism for situations such as these. It works in this cunning way:
As soon as it spots ‘things seem to be going right’ it convinces us that, as we are certain to mess everything up with an error very soon, this sense of ‘everything is okay’ is simply a temporary illusion.
Deluding yourself into believing ‘everything is okay’ will only mean that, when it all goes wrong, it will make everything seem even worse. We will have set ourselves up for such a fall that it might possibly totally destroy us. As a result, this news that ‘things seem to be going right’ doesn’t stand a chance – it doesn’t make us feel comforted or reassured at all.
Here’s the filter in a handy table for quick reference:
| Pattern | Single event | Creates prediction | Filter |
| Low self-esteem | A challenge arises | I’m going to get it wrong again; it’ll just reconfirm how bad I really am; someone else would do it better | Everything I do always turns out bad because of my shortcomings |
Do you sometimes use any of the above filters?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Remember, these are things you dû, so there will be some times when you aren’t dûing them; naturally, in those times, you won’t experience low self-esteem.
The power and fragility of the ELF
We can see how having this way of interpreting the world, and these expectations of the future, will easily and rapidly create a spiral of low self-esteem. Good experiences can’t get a foothold or exist for any period of time before being quickly extinguished.
The ‘exception filter’, in particular, is an extremely effective way of keeping us stuck. It’s so well designed it destroys any glimpses of evidence that might disagree with the ELF’s fundamental perspective that everything we do turns out bad, or that we are bad and wrong.
However, in spite of its powerful appearance, the ELF is fundamentally a fragile, easily exposed con trick.
Notice what happens when you consider what would naturally result from swapping these filters, and instead:
What would happen if you were to take on this new set of filters and applied them with exactly the same amount of determination and consistency as those old low self-esteem filters?
You’d get a similarly powerful, but very different experience of the world and yourself. And this is the secret of success. Fail to be a genius at any one element of the ELF and, just like the illusion of the Emperor’s new clothes, it will simply disintegrate in front of your eyes, stop working and you won’t be able to take it seriously any more.
This describes the ability we all have to brilliantly amplify how extremely challenging a problem is by beginning to edit out all types of events that don’t fit or agree with a particular point of view we have.
Editing has a whole chapter later in the book (see The horse and the forest) but, for the moment, consider it to be a bit like coming home from a trip and looking through the photos you’ve taken, separating out the great shots from the dreadful ones and then throwing away the good ones and keeping the bad ones. As a result of that kind of editing process, it now appears from the photos you possess that either you are consistently appalling at taking photos or everything and everyone you saw was blurred, badly lit, or un-photogenic.
When we do this with our memories, selecting all the worst ones and ignoring the great ones, it creates a vast library of apparently similar events that seem to join up together and accurately represent the whole of our past.
This distorts our reality to make it appear that this problem occurs a lot, or maybe all of the time and gives it a sense of permanence, complexity and enormity that it doesn’t really deserve.
Language
Once again, it’s really worth listening to the language you use, as that’s your first clue that you’ve become unintentionally involved in this kind of self-deception. When we are ‘editing, distorting and connecting’ we’ll hear ourselves making generalized statements about things, or expressing beliefs that limit our view of the world. These will suggest that the world is one particular way, when, if we stopped to listen to ourselves for a moment, we’d know what we’d said wasn’t entirely accurate. Generalizations and beliefs are, in most cases, very harmful and the basis of all bigotry, racism, sexism and any other -isms, but can easily be spotted by listening out for words such as:
These words (technically called ‘universal quantifiers’) help to suggest that this one event is part of a larger series of events, which always happen ‘this way’.
Low self-esteem generalizations
What we actually say varies from ELF to ELF, but for low self-esteem it works really well to say things like:
Do you sometimes find yourself using these kinds of ways of thinking or speaking?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
As you learn the tools in this book you’ll become a genius at turning these kinds of patterns around. For now, notice how quickly the following technique highlights these ways of thinking and rapidly changes how you see things.
Every time you hear one of these universal quantifiers just repeat it to yourself in a questioning way. Do this by raising your voice slightly at the end of the word while raising your eyebrows.
So, in the example, ‘I never get it right’, follow this by the questioning phrase, ‘Never?’
Suddenly it all becomes clear that you don’t actually buy into the version of the world you’ve been selling to yourself. Once again, we can see that any shift away from the basic steps of the recipe will mean the ELF falls apart.
There’s a very simple rule in functional neurology, which is if you wish to have a more powerful emotional experience of a memory, you need to trigger as many of the nerve pathways that are connected to the original memory as possible. As we obviously experience the world fully immersed in our body’s sensations, recalling it in that way will trigger the strongest response and feelings. Recalling an event in any other way, for example, distanced, as an observer or with some perspective, will produce a less emotional or powerful impact. The short way to remember this is:
In a similar way to the ‘filters’ of step one and the ‘editing’ of step two, step three of every ELF recipe deepens our experience of the ‘bad’ side of the world/life by getting us to immerse ourselves in ‘bad’ thoughts and states and distancing ourselves from the ‘good’ ones.
With practise, and the brain rewiring process of neuroplasticity, we can become amazingly skilled at feeling the ‘bad’ feelings very strongly. It also means that even if we do stumble across a good experience, anticipation or memory, we are geniuses at making them seem weak, bleached out, as though they happened to someone else. As a result, we successfully destroy most of the positive feelings from any potentially useful or supportive memory. This is vital to do otherwise the positive memories will spoil our ‘well-crafted’ low self-esteem irreparably.
In and out for low self-esteem
In this ELF, we need to remember to step into feelings of wrongness, worthlessness and incompetence; and make sure we avoid high self-esteem by stepping away from any good feelings of powerfulness, self-acceptance or success. This is summarized in the table for quick reference:
| Pattern | Step into | Step away from |
| Low self-esteem | Wrongness | Acceptance, feeling okay, power, responsibility, abilities, and success |
Do you sometimes find yourself devaluing or distancing yourself from positive memories and experiences and immersing yourself in disempowering or negative memories or anticipations?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Failing at the ELF
Once again, we can see the fragility of the ELF. It’s easy to see that if we just switch this around so we immerse ourselves in positive life-affirming memories, anticipations or experiences and step away from the disempowering ones, then the whole ELF just falls apart, and instead we become a genius at having great self-esteem.
Each of the ELFs has a slightly different relationship to how we process time. You may not have considered this before but time is such an important part of our every thought and sentence. This is because to make any sense they all need to include a verb, which has a tense – a time reference – whether it’s past, future, present, etc. We can see from the chart below the specific uses of time in the Low Self-esteem ELF:
| Pattern | Past | Present | Future |
| Low self-esteem | Being wrong | Beating self up for past, present and future; and being wrong for still being wrong | Being even more wrong |
Do you sometimes find yourself having these kinds of relationships to your past, present and future?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Failing at the ELF
Again we can see that any change to how we choose to think of the past, present or future will completely change how successfully the ELF runs. For example, if you decide to predict a future where you are successful and confident or focus on your previous successes it will prevent the ELF from running.
First, everyone talks to themselves and it’s not a sign of madness; it is completely normal. The only question is whether what you say to yourself is useful or destructive.
Each individual ELF has a mixture of phrases, some of which are common to many ELFs and some of which are very specific to that particular ELF. These are the best and most common ones for generating genius levels of low self-esteem:
It also really helps if you can also include any phrases that discount or marginalize any of your successes and especially those which compare you negatively to others.
Do you have a negative soundtrack that sometimes encourages low self-esteem?
Yes/No
When you dû that, does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Failing at the ELF
If low self-esteem is your ELF you probably recognize some of these examples. Comparing yourself negatively to others is one of the key behaviours and, interestingly, something people with high self-esteem simply don’t do.
Imagine if you started to say the opposite things to yourself with the same conviction and authority that you currently use when telling yourself the negative things – just notice what would naturally happen as a result. If you start to do (consciously and intentionally) the things that people with high self-esteem dû without thinking, then the ELF couldn’t work any more and you’d naturally start to feel the same about yourself as they do about themselves.
When I was a kid I was often told off at school for not sitting up properly but, being a rebellious sort of lad, I just ignored my teachers as much as I could, safe in the knowledge they had no idea what they were talking about.
It turns out I was wrong.
Later, as an osteopathic student, I studied anatomy and physiology, and discovered there are some sound reasons why posture is important. When we slump, we actually compress the ribcage, making breathing less effective. In turn, it’s not as easy to get oxygen into the bloodstream, and this puts the whole body and especially the brain under a degree of stress. Slumping also puts stress on the upper part of the back (the thoracic spine). This is an extremely important area as a whole section of the nervous system (the sympathetic nervous system), which controls the basic maintenance, sewerage, plumbing and stress-response systems, leaves the safety of the spinal column and runs out through the body from this region. Slumping therefore compromises the effective management and function of all these vital systems.
In addition, there is an important arterial system called the ‘vertebral artery’, which carries oxygenated blood and fuel to the brain. It actually runs through a small tunnel in each of the vertebrae (bones) of the neck. As a result, poor neck posture can affect the flow of blood, oxygen and fuel to the brain.
There are many more reasons why posture is linked to physical function, and especially brain function, which I could bore you about for hours… but it turns out that not only is our posture incredibly important in terms of our spinal and physical health, it also massively affects our emotional wellbeing. Therefore, posture isn’t just ‘standing up straight’, it means the whole way you carry yourself in any given moment. As a result, certain postures, ways of moving and gestures are very closely linked with certain ELFs.
To maintain this ELF it helps to increase inertia, reduce physical activity and adopt a low self-esteem posture – this classically involves:
Although there are many variations of this extreme caricatured version, just catch yourself when you’re feeling/dûing low self-esteem; and notice whether your body posture is reflecting your internal thoughts.
Do you sometimes notice your posture encourages feelings of lack of confidence in certain situations?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Failing at the ELF
I’m not a big fan of the phrase ‘fake it ‘til you make it’, as this suggests you’re still feeling bad inside and pretending that you feel okay on the outside to others. Instead, I would be much more interested in changing how you feel, or what you are dûing, to start with.
However, using your posture to assist you to get into a different state is a really useful asset. There’s been some very interesting research5 recently, which supports the idea that osteopaths, other physical therapists and some enlightened psychotherapists have had for years, that your body doesn’t just carry your mind around, the body and mind are deeply interlinked.
Therefore being aware of your posture is central to your use of the tools in the ‘integration’ section of this book.
When any one of the ELFs is at work, it really feels as if it’s all just happening to us and there’s little we can do about it. It’s as if we have to just wait for it to pass, which puts us completely in the passive, powerless, victimized position that we discussed in the section on ‘dû’.
It also leaves us with the sense that, since we can’t sort it, we are reliant on others to fix it. We feel we must need someone else’s support or an external remedy, such as friends, drugs or therapy, to cure or stop it. This is a problem, especially when we find those external supports either don’t work or simply aren’t always available when we need them – what do we do then?
With low self-esteem the fact that we can’t even sort our lives out very successfully naturally further lowers self-confidence, which creates one of the many ‘beautifully designed’ destructive, self-perpetuating spirals that seem to populate so many areas of life where we get into trouble.
Failing at the ELF
As soon as we begin to recognize we do have some power, this piece of the Low Self-esteem ELF ‘machinery’ melts away because it thrives on, and needs you to have, a sense of powerlessness to keep you trapped in it. Once you’ve seized back the reins of control again, the ELF just can’t function and it completely fails.
Having looked through this pattern, you should have noticed that when you dû low self-esteem you use these styles of thinking. And when you don’t think in that way, you have high self-esteem and feel good about yourself.
Consider the bit of the recipe that you use most often – check out what would happen if, instead of dûing what you normally do, you started to do the opposite – what would happen to that low self-esteem then?
So, you can see, from this detailed and ‘upside-down genius’ celebration of the skill of low self-esteem, that it’s quite an achievement; much work has been put into reaching such professional levels of low self-esteem. So, if you’ve achieved excellence in this ELF at any point in your life then – well done!
We can now also see there are so many weak points in the Low Self-esteem ELF’s make-up that render it very vulnerable to change. Altering any one of these steps will result in the whole thing crashing down.
Now you know that an ELF has a structure, you can see that rather than being a victim of it, unwittingly you are the engineer and caretaker of this amazing piece of machinery. And once you realize that, you know from now on it’s going to be yours to command; just think of what you’ll be able to do when you harness this amazing talent, this exquisitely designed machine, to something much more life-enhancing…
