By Alan Weiss
Every day, your esteem level and confidence increases your success or failure. If you neglect your self-esteem, you will never achieve “escape velocity” from the mediocre. You’ll constantly be sacrificing, retreating, and hiding your talents and opinions. High esteem provides for success in all environments, whether perceived as “friendly” or “unfriendly.”
Contrary to popular belief, high (and appropriate) self-esteem is not a fundamental cause of success, but is more often an outcome of it. Your esteem should be stable, firm, and high, unrelated to immediate past performance, and including an accurate assessment of your strengths. It is based on your intrinsic worth, not on your latest achievement (though it may well account for your latest achievement).
Reinforcing the certainty of your own self-worth creates the momentum that will enable you to continually leap the chasms of any self-doubt, including these six explicit dark crevices:
Chasm #1: Dependency on approval– When you’re dependent on approval, you don’t understand that self-worth is inherent in each of us. Hence, you believe you’re valued and valuable only when you perform well. This creates a fear of making mistakes and leads to dysfunctional preparation.
The Leap: Do not seek others’ approval. Maintain your own metrics of success, which are fungible dependent on the situation facing you. Accept only solicited feedback from those you trust and never entertain unsolicited feedback. Do not engage heavily in social media.
Chasm #2: Imprinting from inappropriate “authorities” – The depth of this chasm is a result of others’ digging, not your own. If you’ve had highly critical parents, teachers who are seldom satisfied, tyrannical bosses, or humiliations that are reinforced at family gatherings, and so forth, you risk losing your agency.
The Leap: Pay no attention to unsolicited feedback, evaluation sheets, or random comments. Focus on positive results you’ve achieved, not setbacks. Keep a “success journal” that you write in daily, no matter how small or large the success.
Chasm #3: Distorted and incorrect metrics – The tendency to compare your internal thoughts and feelings to what you see and hear externally from others is heightened in this age of social media. Such comparisons can be devastating. Even though each post is curated, it’s easy to let yourself believe that the norm for others is better than your own.
The Leap: Never assume everyone knows what they’re doing except you. Use accurate, external feedback, and never allow “projection” from others. Never refuse to try something you wish to attempt just because of what others may think.
Chasm #4: Listening to the wrong people – Feedback is valuable when provided by respected, trusted, and chosen sources who have your best interests in mind. That is solicited feedback. But unsolicited feedback is always for the sender, not for you. That’s not to say that feedback isn’t important, but selectivity in sources is vital for effective feedback.
The Leap: Hard work with zero feedback breeds doubt and questions of worth. Find people who will honestly tell you the truth, positive and negative, and ask them for examples of your success. Refuse to listen to unsolicited feedback.
Chasm #5: Overconfidence– We can get so good at building our esteem and, hence, our confidence (our positive feeling about taking on nearly any task) that we run through the guardrails and find ourselves hurdling down the cliff. People who are cocky tend not to listen to even trusted advisors and assume they can fly off the barn roof by flapping their arms, which only lands them in a pile of manure.
The Leap: Dissect your confidence and make sure you understand its effectiveness in any given situation. Feeling ambiguity doesn’t imply incompetence, but rather prudence.
Chasm #6: Undue fear of consequences – There’s an upside and downside to all decisions. The tendency is to view choices simplistically, which leads you to inevitably overstate the downside and understate the upside. For example, hesitating to ask a client if they have anyone they would refer to you.
The Leap: Convince yourself to maximize the upside and minimize the downside. In the example above, why not position your request in the other person’s self-interest? Thus, your question to your client might be, “Do you have a close colleague for whom you’d like to provide a favor?”
Leaping the chasms of self-doubt situates you to adjust for conditions you can’t prevent or don’t see coming. You’re able to rise above people who are malicious and bullying. Your continuous high esteem becomes your gyroscope to help you determine the appropriate (not “perfect” or “permanent”) behavior in any situation.
Alan Weiss, PhD, is a consultant, speaker, and author. Through his consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., he has worked with more than 500 leading organizations, including Merck, Hewlett-Packard, GE, Mercedes-Benz, The Federal Reserve, and the New York Times Corporation. A sought-after speaker at major conferences, he’s also published more than 60 books, many of which have been on the curricula at top business schools. His new book is The Courage of Your Talents:How to Build Your Self-esteem, Trust Your OwnJudgment, and Constantly Succeed in Business(and Life) (Productivity Press, Oct. 12, 2026). Learn more at alanweiss.com.
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