Water, Snow, Water: Constructive Living for Mental Health

Chapter 4 Common Sense

28 Common Sense It’s not common sense! It doesn’t even fit your own experience!­ Nevertheless, some people have swallowed the pill-sized doses of mental health beliefs excusing all sorts of hurtful behaviors because of strong feelings or poor experiences in childhood. You’ve been told that teachers and parents can instill self-esteem and self-confidence in a child, that children (or adults, for that matter) need self-esteem before they can accomplish anything. There are two kinds of foolishness here. First, you don’t need self-esteem or self-confidence to get done what you need to do in life. When you start out on any new undertaking you are unlikely to begin it with the assurance that you will succeed. You do your best and sometimes you do succeed. When people tell you that you have done a good job, when you see the desired results of your work, it is then that you begin to feel confidence in your ability to do the job well, not before you begin it. So you can begin a project without self-confidence; just begin. The second fallacy is that someone else can give you self-­ confidence or self-esteem. You don’t receive self-confidence, you earn it. You know that from your own experience. Self-esteem is earned through effort and success. It cannot be conferred on someone by a teacher or a parent or a therapist or anyone else. We acquire self-­ confidence after we have tried doing something and have succeeded at it, not before. Thinking won’t produce self-confidence. Neither will talking to someone. You have to put your ideas into the arena of 4 Common Sense 29­ action, risking failure, in order to earn self-confidence. No one can talk you into it. Those of you who have been alive long enough to experience your first days on a new job, do you remember how you hoped you wouldn’t make too many mistakes, how you dreaded appearing foolish and inept? You didn’t start your new job brimming with confidence . But after a while, when people began to praise you for doing your work well, the self-confidence began to emerge. Perhaps you had a similar experience when starting out at a new school in your youth. Freshmen rarely have the confidence about getting around to ­ classes that juniors and seniors have earned through experience. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing . . . you may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.” I suppose what people mean by self-esteem is feeling good about yourself and feeling confident. But those feelings are elusive and temporary . It is better to build a history of living life fully, and the way to build that history is to live life fully now. You can’t change the past; you can’t live in the future; all you have to work with is now. Then, from the point of view of next week and next year, this now becomes the past; this now becomes your history. You change yourself by changing what you do now. One of the problems with making the achievement of more self-confidence one’s primary, immediate goal is that it ­ focuses attention on introspection (Do I have enough self-­ esteem yet?) and distracts us from the forward/outward orientation that gets things done in life. Accomplishing goals in life often creates self-­ confidence as a side effect. In order to sustain some measure of self-esteem without the effort of activity and risk we have come up with socially accepted ­ excuses. It is easier to say that you are depressed than to admit that you are lazy. Additional excuses for not making an effort include: My history, my upbringing, my genes; My illness, my handicap, my neurotic quirks; Water, Snow, Water 30 My education, my IQ, my race, my culture; My business partner, my spouse, my parents; My boss, my supervisor, my manager, my coworkers; The economy, the times, the society, the government; My enemy, my rival, my ex-spouse, the devil. Trying to support a constant image of self-esteem makes you purposely seek to ignore your real weak moments, your real unkind moments , your past failures. It is better to focus on...