And all these podcasters were saying it in a different way. And I was thrilled to find that Dr. Marisa Franco has looked at pretty much the whole question of how do we hold the self in a way that made a lot more sense to me compared to the sort of general understanding I had before.

Now, there’s this whole idea that we have to love and value ourselves, right? I hear that all the time from spiritual writers, from psychologists, from sociologists. If you have a high self-concept, you’re going to do better and everything. But Dr. Franco divides self-esteem into two categories. One is self—well, she calls one self-esteem and one is self-worth, and they’re different.

And the problem is that when researchers look at self-esteem, they’re conflating these two kinds of valuing the self. So Dr. Franco divides it into self-esteem and self-worth. So traditional self-esteem is where you go out and you find things that reflect well upon you. You find friends, you find love, you achieve things, and you then start to develop this sense that you’re pretty good, you’re pretty hot stuff, but it relies heavily on external measures of your success. So it’s very, very volatile.

In fact, one of the things I thought was most interesting about it is that people who don’t truly value themselves in the second way, which we haven’t talked about yet, but traditional self-esteem where you’re building yourself up in sort of the Pyramid way—”I’m climbing higher on the pyramid than other people. Look who admires me. Look what I can put my name on. Look at the power that I have.”—that kind of self-esteem is actually very fragile. In fact, if you’re not constantly feeding it, external markers of your own success and importance and amazement, you get very devastatingly hungry for more.

So you need your name on more things. You need your legacy to be bigger. You need more people to tell you how wonderful you are. You need more markers. You need, you need, you need. And the more you get of these external markers of success, the more your appetite grows. I’ve met lots of people out there in the world who are doing incredibly well according to all the external markers of success, but they’re hungry, hungry, hungry for more.

On the plane, on the way back from doing a podcast, I watched a documentary. I think it’s produced by Michael Phelps, the great Olympian swimmer who has enough Olympic gold medals to fully pave an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Not really, but kind of, if you made gold leaf out of them, Stop it, Martha. Okay, I’m coming back. So this whole documentary, it wasn’t actually silly. It was very, very serious. It was about how incredibly depressed Olympic medalists can get, or people who’ve trained for the Olympics and then not gotten a medal. They all become incredibly needy for external markers of success, and they’re all really young when they have their Olympic moment, and then they can’t continue it for very long and they don’t know what they are and they don’t know what to do. And it was talking about, and he interviewed several different Olympians, and they were talking about depression so low that some people actually, trigger alert, did end their own lives. These were people who were literally on the podium, on the first place podium. They were still so depressed when they lost that sense of identity that they could not face life at all. I mean, if external markers of identity really helped us feel good, that would be weird.

But in fact, Dr. Franco looks at why that happens. There’s an actual backfire effect. When you don’t have any genuine self-worth, you’re just looking outside yourself for self-esteem—and people who don’t really value themselves tend to look for that, to sort of replace what should be there as self-worth. They’re trying to get stuff from outside. But they have a theory of self, which basically defines them as not being worth anything. Interestingly enough, when you threaten that sense of identity by telling someone they’re actually worth a lot, when they don’t believe they’re worth a lot, they actually kick back. In fact, research shows that when you take someone without high self-worth and you start to praise them, their blood pressure spikes, they get incredibly uncomfortable, they have psychological dissonance, and they basically run.

Anybody done that? Story of my life until well into my 50s. Anyway, so if you have this thing of you always want to do well and you feel great for a little while after you’ve gotten an external marker of success, and then you don’t feel worthy and you go looking for more, and somebody says to you, “But Bobby, you’re so amazing. Let me tell you all the great things about you. You shouldn’t need these external markers” and you get more anxious when they tell you you’re worthy, that shows that you do not have an actual sense of self-worth that is deeply anchored in you.

Now, where does real self-worth come from? This is so interesting. One of the things, I did a podcast with Blake Mycoskie who created the Tom’s Shoes empire and then sold the business for lots and lots of money. Even after this massive success that he had, he felt like he was not enough, and he went into a deep trough of depression that lasted, I think, seven years. And now everywhere he goes, he wears bracelets and gives them away that say, “Enough,” and he puts it on books, the word, and he puts it on handbags. “Enough” is everywhere.

Well, self-worth replaces the self-esteem question “How can I be enough?” with the question “How can I be myself?” So now that Blake has landed on, “I am enough,” I think what’s growing in with him is, “I am myself, that is enough, but how can I be more myself?” So that is what tends to detox us from the self-esteem dependency and start to build self-worth.

How does self-worth get built? It can’t get built from winning prizes. It can’t get built from having your friends tell you how wonderful you are. I love Dr. Franco’s method of creating true self-worth. Here’s what it is. It is sensitivity to your own feelings, your own subjective experience. Even when your emotions are uncomfortable or even when they’re very slight, you’re watching, you’re observing yourself compassionately. Not with the self-obsession of, “Am I good enough? Am I big enough? What does he think about me? What does she think about me? Where is my name in lights? What have I accomplished? What can I achieve? Who can I tell about my achievements? Ooh, you haven’t met me yet. I’m going to tell you all my achievements.” So that’s the self-esteem monger. 

When you’re going for self-worth, instead you say: “Oh wow, I have this really strong urge to go tell that person all my accomplishments. Hm. I’m really not experiencing a lot of self-worth here that I really am thirsty for self-esteem the way it’s been taught to me. How interesting. Oh, if I look under that, it’s because I really feel kind of crappy about myself right now. I’m judging myself. I’m going to go sit with the part of myself that is experiencing these emotions and that is saying these things internally about me like, ‘You’re not really all that big. You better go out and do enough, right? You better do much. You haven’t done enough.’ Okay. I’m going to sit instead of going out and trying to do enough, I’m going to sit with the part of me that says I have to go do more and say, ‘Oh, you seem really unhappy.’” 

And you respond to those emotional selves with compassion, and you don’t try to shame or suppress them. Shame is the great enemy of traditional self-esteem, but it’s intrinsically connected with it. They are inextricably entwined. If you’re getting self-esteem from external sources, shame is right behind it.

As the Tao Te Ching says, “Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. Whether you go up the ladder or down, you’re on unstable ground. If you stand with your two feet on the ground, that’s when you’re going to make progress.” So the ladder is: self-esteem is up here and shame is down here, and you’re always climbing, climbing, climbing, and it’s basically going up the down escalator. We’re mixing so many metaphors. I love this.

So you’re climbing, climbing, climbing on the self-esteem escalator, which is always pulling you down, down, down into shame. Somebody comes and tries to buck you up by praising you. What do you feel? More shame. Why? Because your internal concept of yourself is not worthy, it’s now being blasted by the other person’s insistence that what your inner self is feeling is not worth focusing on, not worth loving, not worth sitting with.

“I don’t feel good.” “Okay, well then run, go do something.” “I don’t feel good.” “All right, let’s sit with it. Let’s just sit with that.” So it’s so interesting to me. I’ve been reading a lot of Western philosophy lately and the whole idea of, in Asian philosophy, of sitting in self-contemplation until untrue concepts dissolve on their own because of observation, it’s so absent from a lot of the Western philosophy I’ve been reading, and I really think we need to get there.

And Dr. Franco’s book is telling us we need to get there culturally. She doesn’t go through the Asian philosophy way of self-contemplation, but that’s basically what she comes back to as a psychologist. You have to have sensitivity and responsiveness to your own emotions. So notice what you feel and take action to offer yourself care. Use the emotion as a meaningful bit of information that tells you, “Oh, there’s a wound in my psyche. I’m going to sit with the wounded part and instead of shaming it, I’m going to welcome it. I’m going to feel its experiences all the way through, and I’m going to relax until what is false in my self-concept falls apart by itself.”

And if you come into presence and you have mindfulness, which is watching what’s going on inside you, and equanimity, which is saying, “I will stay with myself,” that is the one thing you need to offer yourself to solve this lack of self-esteem or self-worth issue is just stay.

If you’ve meditated more than 10 minutes, you know how hard it is to stay. If you have kicked yourself in the shins a thousand times because you don’t think you’re good enough, and then you try to stay with that unbearably tense, anxious, ashamed person, you know how hard it is to stay. You know what? Do it anyway. Stay with your wounded self.

Read Dr. Franco’s book, which is called Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, and begin, begin again. And she also says this is a practice, not an end goal. The practice of sitting with the self that is wounded and just staying will completely transform your inner life. It’ll take you from self-esteem, which is very fragile, to self-worth, which is amazing. There’s a whole bunch of data in there about how whatever life throws at you, you can turn it into something positive with self-worth, and whatever life gives you, you can turn it into something negative with traditional self-esteem.

So let’s get to our meditation and then to some questions, okay? So this is another way of staying. For those of you who’ve never done this before, we’re going to get comfortable, take a few deep breaths, and then go into what I’ve come to call the Stillness, Silence, and Space meditation. And it starts by asking a question that is designed not to be answered, just to be held in the mind. And the question is: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Silently ask yourself that without answering. Let the question trigger something that is not an answer. Then ask yourself: Can I imagine the distance between the surface of my forehead and the back of my head? Can I imagine the distance between those points? Can I imagine the distance between the crown of my head and the nape of my neck? Can I imagine the distance between the nape of my neck and the base of my spine? Can I imagine the internal space in the molecules and atoms that make up my spine, knowing that matter is almost entirely made of empty space?

Can I imagine the space inside my rib cage? Can I imagine the distance between the tiny bits of matter in my rib cage and the bits of matter that are floating in the space that connects everyone on this call? Can I imagine the space that is most of what we are continuous with space throughout the universe? Can you imagine the silence in which every sound occurs? Can I imagine the stillness in which the action of my body, the atoms, the molecules, the muscles, the mind? Can I imagine the stillness in which all action occurs? Can I imagine this space, stillness, and silence all alive and filled with love? Can I imagine that that is my true nature?

Okay, come on back and let’s do some questions here. Question: “How do I help my teenage daughter grow self-esteem and self-worth?”

Well technically, according to the language that Dr. Franco suggests, you want to build up self-worth less than self-esteem, just semantics.

“She feels defective,” the question says, “She is neurodivergent, often not great at compromising, lots of sensitivities, and doesn’t like her looks.”

Well, that just described all of us. So how do you help her describe—create self-worth? Well, first of all, what doesn’t work is to tell her how wonderful she is. I’m sure you’ve done that, done that, done that. It doesn’t seem to help. In fact, there’s that backfire effect that comes from being told things that are at odds with our self-perception and our concept of self. So praising people backfires. Try not to do it. It’s not that you can never praise them, but just know that’s not going to fix the problem. What will fix the problem is sitting, is staying. Stay. Be the person who stays when she’s in a deep funk. Be the person who stays when she’s saying negative things about herself. Be the person who stays when she’s talking about being bullied or whatever it is. Don’t be so reactive to her pain that you run away from it. To do that, to be able to tolerate your child’s pain, you have to do it with your own issues. So find the place where you are groping and grasping for self-esteem.

I mean, parenting is, it can get to be a real spitting contest with everybody saying, “Here’s my kid. Here’s my kid. Look what my kid did. Look what my kid did.” You’ve seen that bumper. There are bumper stickers that say, “My kid’s an honor student at such and such school.” And then other people get bumper stickers that say, “My kid beat up your honor student kid.” That is the world, the clawing, scratching, pyramid-shaped world in which we’re supposed to have self-esteem. Everybody grabbing for how they can be bigger, be better. That world is what is tearing at our teenagers. And when we make our parenting fit into the Pyramid that way, then our kids are just fuel for our own ego gratification. So look at what you need to believe about yourself as a parent, and then see the pain in that, and then stay. Stay with it and say, “I really see that. I really see how you’ve been conditioned that way to think that your child not feeling great or not doing well at something is a personal blow to your own ego. I’m going to sit with you in that and I’m going to let you feel it all the way to its conclusion.” And when you get to its conclusion, you’ll find that that doesn’t really hold water.

If you do this for yourself, you’ll be able to sit with your daughter when she’s having a really rough time and not be afraid. I love the definition of enlightenment from, this is from Zen, of being without anxiety over imperfection. So the Pyramid says, “You should be perfect. Here are the rules.” And the Pool, the new consciousness says, “Let’s sit together and be without anxiety over imperfection.” And if you can do that, it will genuinely help your daughter do it for herself and then she’ll be able to find self-worth.

Okay. Question: “I’ve had a number of clients decide not to pay me for work already done. It’s happened enough for me to question my self-worth, and my self-esteem gets battered. How do I navigate this?”

Okay, this is really interesting. One of the things Dr. Franco talks about is how low self-worth becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and she actually talks about people who stay in horrible financial situations or job situations because we think that going outside of those is not going to help because we’re basically not worth anything. So we seem to attract or at least to stay in work situations where people are taking advantage of us. So the first step is not to grab a sword and run out to fight for justice for yourself. If you don’t already have self-worth, that’s going to backfire. There’s something about pursuing the Pyramid, chasing that—the greyhound racer chasing the rabbit of value from our culture. It messes us up and it leads to self-fulfilling prophecies about our own failures.

The first step you take is to look at the feelings that make you afraid to leave the situation or afraid to confront other people or whatever it is. Don’t tell yourself, “I should be confronting them” because that’s, “Okay, I’ll have another marker of I did it right.” No. Sit with the part of you that says, “I’m afraid to do that. I’m afraid to ask for what I’m worth. I actually don’t think I’m worth that much.” Sit with it. “I see you. I love you. Is that true?”

Self-contemplation and then self-acceptance is the way you acquire self-worth. And it may look like, “No, no, I need someone to run in and hire a lawyer, go after them” if that’s the way, I mean, I’m not telling you what to do, but I will tell you that if you just get a lawyer and go in and sue them without ever looking at your own self-worth issues, you probably will spend so much on lawyers that you end up in a financial hole anyway.

I love Dr. Franco’s discussion of how this affects finances. It’s really powerful. So finding genuine self-worth is directly reflected in the worth that other people see in us and the amount of money that comes our way, so she says. Now that doesn’t mean that everybody who has real self-worth it gets rich easily. She’s talking about whatever your level of privilege, if you have traditional self-esteem where you’re going after external markers of success, even if you’re born with high privilege, you’ll slide into a failure mode. But if you have self-worth, any level of privilege that is given to you will be turned to your advantage. So a person who’s born at a lower level of privilege but has high self-worth often does better than a person who’s born into more privilege, but has no self-worth, has only self-esteem, right? “I’m higher on the Pyramid than you.” It’s not going to work. You’re either going to slide down financially or emotionally or both.

So start doing the thing where you stay with the parts of you that are in pain and then just watch what action implications come as your self-worth starts to increase. My own experience with this is that the moment you decide to react to your anxiety by sitting with yourself and staying, the self-worth starts to build where there was none, and the effects are actually rather quick. Certainly, they’re a hell of a lot quicker than not doing it. So it may not be an instantaneous process, but it will be successful. It’s worth the investment of time.

Okay, question. “When I think about self-esteem, I can feel the connection to shame, but when I go to self-worth, there seems not to be a connection. Does the author talk about the shame connection?”

Yes. The shame and self-esteem in the traditional way, they’re definitely linked. One is the opposite of the other, and here’s the thing about polar opposites. They’re always together. You can’t say, “I want to be rich, rich, rich,” and never have, “I’m afraid of being poor, poor, poor,” come up. I asked someone once who had been born into one of the big, big money families in the world, and I said, “What are people afraid of when they’re not afraid of losing all their money?” And she said, “I’ve never met a person like that.” And this is a person who knew billionaires, like multiple billionaires. She’s like, “I’ve never met someone who’s not afraid of losing all their money.” So weirdly, no matter how much evidence you get, the self-esteem is always connected to the opposite of that evidence. No matter how rich you get, you’ll still be afraid of being poor. No matter how smart you are, you’ll still be afraid of looking stupid. Every oppositional pair.

My Substack post this week was about this: Opposites live together and the Pyramid is made up of these paired opposites. So if somebody tells me, “You’re great, you’re wonderful,” I’m thinking, “No, I suck.” The opposite of that is right behind it. And as I said in my post, around every pair of opposites is a field of meaning where those opposites exist. So “life is not the opposite of death, the opposite of death is birth, life has no opposite.” That’s an Eckhart Tolle quote.

So if I have self-esteem, shame is the polar opposite, and it’s always at my heels, right? What is the field in which these two things exist, self-esteem and shame? According to Dr. Franco, it’s self-worth, it’s genuine love of the self, and that one action implication to stay—the field of staying with yourself, like letting your attention rest on everything that’s happening inside you on the quest for self-esteem and the shame that goes right around it, the shame that’s always lurking underneath it, when you have self-worth, you sit with that because you value yourself, and there is no opposite to that.

The fields in which our opposites take place are outside the system of dualities. And for that reason, I think they’re actually more real, more valid, and they create really powerful effects. When you start thinking, “The opposite of death is birth, my life has no opposite,” you behave differently than when you think life is the opposite of death. And when you say, “I will stay with my own suffering until I have seen through it, no matter what it does, no matter how bad it is,” you have given yourself the field of love in which achievement and disgrace exist. And you could have either one of them, you could have both during one lifetime, but you will always really be situated in the field in which they occur, which is compassion, self-love, or as Dr. Franco says, self-worth.

So I hope that we all can do that this week, and I will see you back again on The Gathering Room next time we meet.

Bye.