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Re:The great self-esteem con by mowenz on Monday June 05, 2017 @05:09AM (#14486216)
Perhaps people get self-esteem from different sources?

Personally I think people conflafe self-esteem with confidence. The article and the subject of it are doing this, and I'm a bit surprised it's not mentioned.

"Unconditional positivity" will probably build confidence--faith in positive outcomes--but it doesn't appear to build self-esteem--high value or love for oneself.

And someone can be completely unconfident and have very high self-esteem...

But who knows: perhaps artificially-induced confidence can at least trick people into feeling like they love themselves. If it does, then good for them?

Personally I could see myself end up thinking, worrying and beating myself up about being fake or phony, but that's just me. I might say it's not for me, but I would try not tell them directly with a Dwight-from-The-Office demeanor: "Wrong. Self-esteem comes from..."

Re:The great self-esteem con by crawfordcomeaux on Monday June 05, 2017 @12:32PM (#14488939)
Not only do they get it from different sources, but how they get it from those sources can be wildly different. There seem to be multiple definitions of self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-worth floating around online, so I won't address them specifically. I'd say they all generally deal with finding meaning in one's self & the world. And finding meaning is a deeply personal thing.

For example, I discover new meaning in my experiences by projecting their content/context into songs I'm listening to.

My take on tricking myself into something: if learning to love myself requires some level of confidence, temporarily inducing said confidence, can be helpful when combined with a practice for learning how to love myself. The trick is doing it with intention and then weaning off the confidence booster.

I already do this in various ways therapeutically. I was thinking about the second conscious voice in my head I accidentally created through my experiments & wondering if it's truly a second personality or if I'm simply playing pretend & naively fooling myself. Then I realized it doesn't matter because it's something helping me & as long as it's done in a transparent, authentic manner, nobody else has to care which it is, either.