You Don’t Need High Self-Esteem. You Need High Self-Compassion
No, they're not the same. Self-esteem is finicky. Self-compassion is not
By | Aytekin Tank | www.entrepreneur.com
Say you’re unveiling a new product to a group of investors. Meeting-wise, it’s as important as they get. Your team has been prepping this launch for months, and now, it’s go-time. Things are going pretty well, until suddenly, you space on a key metric — one you know you know; one you’ve always recalled with ease. But now, when it matters, it’s nowhere to be found. You can feel the investors’ judgment, and panic starts to well up in your chest. No two ways around it: You are blowing this.
You soldier on, but once it’s over, you know the meeting did not go well. Time passes. A week later, you think about the meeting again. How do you feel? Are you right back in that meeting, reddening with shame all over? Beating yourself up for what a colossal, idiotic failure you are? Or do you accept that what happened was human? A lapse in memory that happens to even the best of us?
The latter response is an example of self-compassion. Unfortunately for many people, this isn’t their go-to way of handling failures or setbacks. Far more common is the first response: Relentlessly reliving the scene in your mind until shame has driven you to curl up on the floor.
A lot of people were raised on the idea that we need high self-esteem to be happy and successful. But what if instead, we focused on self-compassion? Let’s look at the difference between the two, and what either has to do with being an entrepreneur.