A Life-Pivoting Change of Identity

Developmental psychology professor Jim Stigler says he found his research focus while observing a fourth-grade classroom in Japan, watching one student struggle to catch up with others.

As Stigler recounts the incident, "The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper, and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do it and told him to go and put it on the board.'"

At the board, the child tried over and over. Every few minutes the teacher asked his classmates if he had succeeded. They were honest—nope, not yet. When he finally got it, the class broke into applause. The student smiled, clearly proud of his accomplishment.

To Stigler, this suggested a difference in how American and Japanese cultures measure intellectual merit. As he summarizes, ‘For the most part in American culture, intellectual struggle in schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern cultures it is not only tolerated but is often used to measure emotional strength.”

Whether this generalization applies uniformly across the two cultures, it points to a distinction worth noting: Taking pride in what you know vs. taking pride in your ability to grow.

Pride matters. After air, water, and food, positive self-esteem may be our most essential resource. We all go to great lengths to get it. Not getting it can feel almost as distracting as hunger.

When things are going well, it’s easy to maintain our self-esteem. When things aren’t going well, we have to stretch more to convince ourselves that we’re fine. You know the sound of someone reassuring themselves, saying what they need to hear in order to feel good about themselves in tough times. At times, you’ve probably made that sound too.

At the extreme, the stretching to maintain self-esteem can become a real problem. You may know people who fall into a vicious cycle. They make a lot of mistakes. To feel good about themselves despite their mistakes, they stretch hard. They make up excuses, far-fetched reasons why it’s not their fault. As a result, they don’t learn from their errors and so make still bigger errors, errors that land them in situations that make it still harder to avoid errors. Their mistakes get bigger and bigger, their excuses become more and more far-fetched.

We see the vicious cycle in drug addicts. They’re not just addicted to drugs that make them feel good about themselves despite their failures. They’re addicted to excuses. The more addicted to excuses they are, the more immune they are to interventions. They have a bogus excuse for every challenge. We see this same vicious cycle in plenty of people who aren’t addicted to drugs, people who simply become addicted to self-esteem boosting excuses. We’re seeing it a lot in government these days, bigger lies to keep their heads up high.

People who desperately have to believe that they can do no wrong, generally do a lot of wrong. They pride themselves on what they already know, and if what they know isn’t yielding them the success they expect, the just dig in their heels with more and more flimsy excuses.

You encounter this vicious cycle every time you deal with someone who dismisses criticism without considering it. They close their eyes and make you listen as they craft far-fetched self-justifications that would make the slipperiest PR agent proud.

How can we avoid addiction to ever more irrational self-esteem boosting? Some say that the answer is to get over your need for self-esteem. Become selfless. Get over yourself. Stop caring about your status. Stop trying to feed your ego.

No matter how you cut it that solution won’t work. You can’t just stop needing self-esteem any more than you can stop needing food. If you pretend you don’t need self-esteem, you’ll get it by sneaky underhandedness. And even if you could stop needing self-esteem it would not make you more willing to admit to errors. If you were truly selfless, why would you need take responsibility for yourself? Just say it wasn’t you because there is no you.

Others say do the opposite. Grant yourself permanently high marks. Don’t care about what others think of you. Hold your head high no matter what. That’s no solution either. If anything it makes a virtue out of the vicious cycle. Drug addicts often give themselves permanent high marks.

The best solution is not to lower your demand for self-esteem to where it vanishes into egolessness. Nor is it to elevate your self-esteem to a permanently high. Rather, it’s to change what you have self-esteem about. Become more like the Japanese student, proud of your ability to learn.

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Don’t identify with what you know but how you grow. Don’t identify with your current self but your learning self. Give yourself praise points not for being right but for wanting to figure out what’s right. Have faith in yourself as a winner but as a learner. Have faith in your ability to reflect, grow and improve. That way, your ability to admit errors becomes a badge of honor and pride. You can stand proud even and especially when you stand corrected.

One positive side effect is that others will like you more. As you know all too well, people who can’t afford to hear a discouraging word about themselves are no fun at all. They think they’re demonstrating enviable confidence but they’re really demonstrating anxious clinging to an image of themselves as natural born winners who already know what to do. If you shift your identity to how you grow, most people will applaud you as they applauded that Japanese student.

The company that most people really love to keep is people capable of give and take living and learning together. Good people laud receptivity. We simply can’t be receptive if we can’t tolerate the possibility that we’re wrong. No mistake you make is as bad as your inability to admit to it.

A stitch in time saves nine, but since we can’t always make that stitch in time, it’s worth remembering that the reverse is also true. A self-corrective save in time (“hey, my bad”) stitches nine. You can make that self-corrective save proudly if you shift your proud identity from what you know to how you grow.