self-compassion over self-esteem (in finances and beyond)

Many of us born after a certain year have had “self-esteem” drilled into us since we were children. “Good job!” is still ringing in our ears after the innumerable times it was said to us — to the point where the words have almost become meaningless. And why not? Confidence seems to be the underpinning of almost every form of success, even more so than intellectual ability, and the best way to build confidence in someone is to continually tell them how awesome they are, right?

Wrong.

Per the book by Dr. Kristin Neff of our very own University of Texas, this is more like “stuffing ourselves with candy.” We get a brief “high” of increased self-worth…which then crashes in despair when reality tells us something different. We try to pump ourselves back up by more “positive self-talk”, ignoring our faults and placing the blame for failures on something (anything!) outside of our responsibility…which sets up a continual high/crash cycle that ultimately goes nowhere. After all, how can we improve — really improve — if we refuse to learn from our mistakes?

This affects every aspect of life — including finances. Full of confidence in our ability to stick to a budget, we get aggressive in cutting back on perceived luxuries like new clothes or electronics; the next month, we stare in horror at our five-hundred-dollar Nordstrom or Fry’s bill, and give up budgeting entirely in despair. Full of confidence in our ability to time the market, we load up on “sure-fire winners”; then the bubble pops, and in the ensuing financial and emotional crash we pull our money out of the market entirely. It happens everywhere, all the time; self-esteem not only blinds us, it hobbles us and keeps us from growing.

The alternative? Self-compassion.

Self-compassion goes by several names, like humility or perhaps intellectual honesty, but it is, in its basic essence, deciding not to judge yourself. This does not mean refusing to evaluate your performance in any given area; rather, this means separating that performance from your worth as a human being. It means allowing yourself to make mistakes, with the knowledge that we grow by making those mistakes and allowing ourselves to embrace and learn from them. By acknowledging that we can and will make those mistakes, we can better deal with the consequences.

Of course, this applies to finances as well. When making a budget, we might set more realistic spending limits, or create an “oops” category for mistakes, or set aside a regular time to adjust next month’s budget based on last month’s spending. When designing a financial plan, we might be more willing to seek outside help and opinions, more able to take the right amount of risk, and less likely to panic and “sell everything” in the face of the unexpected.

So, great; how do we do that? The first step, of course, is in acknowledging that self-compassion is a valid choice — perhaps the hardest step for many of us, with our artificially-inflated egos that are more afraid of giving up that false self-esteem than we are of the inevitable real damage that it causes. But by taking this step, we are allowing ourselves to take the next: to surround ourselves with compassionate people. By choosing friends and advisors that judge our actions without judging our character, that compassionately tell us what we need to hear rather than what our egos want to hear, we are setting ourselves up for real growth.

And the more often we hear truth delivered with compassion, the more our self-compassion will grow, our egos shrink, and our lives improve.