Self Esteem, Confidence, How To Love Yourself, Human Needs & Humanistic Psychology

new videos every day do you have low self-esteem do you like yourself do you consider yourself a confident person or do you wish you had more confidence in yourself when other people are critical of you does it make you feel real badly about yourself in this video i want to talk about people’s esteem needs and talk about ways that we can have more self-respect and just in general be happier with ourselves we’ve done several videos talking about humanistic psychology and maslow’s hierarchy of needs and one of those needs is the esteem needs so today we want to look a little more in detail at how the hierarchy of needs relates to our self-confidence and our self-esteem this is maslow’s original hierarchy of needs now i want to emphasize that it isn’t necessarily the most perfect model of human behavior but it’s certainly an observable model and that we can easily observe that people are motivated by wanting to fulfill these various needs but we don’t necessarily need a perfect model in order to have a useful model and maslow’s hierarchy is a very useful model in looking at our own behavior and things that motivate us as well as what motivates other people to behave the way that they do this is maslow’s expanded hierarchy of needs three different levels have been added that is a need to understand a need for beauty and at the top a need to transcend the self now this is the psyche truth hierarchy of needs and in a future video we’ll go into more detail into the levels we’ve added but we’ve added underneath the physiological needs a need to avoid pain and experience pleasure and between the esteemed needs and the need for understanding we’ve added in a need to contribute but back to the official maslow hierarchy the first four levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs are the physiological needs the safety needs love and belonging and esteem needs and he referred to those four levels as the deficiency needs meaning that you’re if you’re ever deficient in any of those needs it’ll motivate you into action to fulfill them some really easy to see examples might be i feel hungry so i eat i’m feeling lonely so i call up a friend i’m feeling low self-esteem or feeling badly about myself so i seek approval from other people another example might be feeling fearful so you’re locking your doors or purchasing mace maslow also referred to people fulfilling these needs as coping behavior now the rest of the needs a need to understand a need for beauty and self-actualization needs and needs to transcend the self these higher needs he referred to as the being needs or the b needs and attempts to fulfill these various needs was called expressive behavior it’s important to make the distinction between coping and expressive behavior in general coping behaviors are an attempt to satisfy a deficiency and in this way they’re an attempt to receive or consume expressive behavior on the other hand is generally an attempt to express the self and in this way it’s generally more geared towards giving or creating something so where the coping needs are often trying to produce an inflow of things to consume the expressive behavior is actually producing an outflow from the self some examples of coping behavior might be you’re thirsty and so you get a glass of water and you have a drink or you’re feeling bad about yourself you’re feeling low self-esteem so maybe you fish for a compliment or maybe you pick a fight with someone just so that you can make them wrong another example might be that you feel lonely and so maybe you buy a prostitute or engage in promiscuous behavior whereas the expressive behaviors might be cooking a meal for you and all of your friends or setting a goal of something you’ve always wanted to achieve and then achieving it or something like creating maybe you’re creating art or music maybe you’re building a house in order to achieve self-respect it’s important to focus on the expressive needs more so than the coping needs so let’s go back to maslow’s original hierarchy of needs basically the theory worked like this at the very bottom you had your physiological needs and if you got to a point in life where you were satisfying all of your physiological needs eating sleeping things like that then you could move on to your safety needs and begin addressing your safety needs once you feel fulfilled those you could start addressing love and belonging needs and once you fulfilled those you could start addressing your esteem needs and once you fulfilled those needs you could start looking at the higher needs the self-actualization needs now maybe this is where maslow’s hierarchy is somewhat flawed because in my personal opinion i don’t think it’s possible to fully be fulfilling our esteem needs without addressing some of those self-actualization needs so in essence we can’t truly be satisfying our self-esteem needs without addressing our self-actualizing needs so let’s talk about that in a little more detail maslow actually published his own list of qualities held by self-actualizing people and i want to share some of those with you now number one the self-actualizing person has spontaneity simplicity and naturalness in other words this kind of person is not hung up on being as others think he should be number two the quality for detachment the need for privacy for all his social mindedness the self-actually actualizing person has a need to be by himself or a need for solitude he enjoys times for quiet reflection and doesn’t always need people around him he can be with the few people that he would be close to and not even need to communicate with them their presence is sufficient in and of itself number three interpersonal relations self-actualizing people have deeper and more profound interpersonal relations than other adults they are capable of fusion greater love and more perfect identification that other people could consider possible they generally tend to have relatively few friends but those relationships are deep and very meaningful in other words self-actualizing people usually aren’t running around trying to win a popularity contest they don’t have a whole whole lot of friends but the friends they do have are close friends and while they’re very socially aware of what other people are thinking they don’t care as much as other people what people are thinking of them so why is all of this important thinking about someone who doesn’t care what other people think or doesn’t take things personally when people are rude to them or mean to them how workable is it for us to really try and make everyone like us or to worry about what everyone thinks of us and is it workable for us to have our entire self-esteem vested in what other people think and how in this day and age where we as humans really kind of have this natural you know worry of what other people think we naturally would like for other people to like us how is it possible to get to a point where we don’t let the way other people treat us affect us we don’t take it personally when other people are mean to us or rude to us so the problem is i’m running around trying really hard to fulfill my self-esteem needs and everyone else on this planet is also running around trying to fulfill their esteemed needs so have you ever felt like there’s really cool things about your personality that nobody’s ever really acknowledged or noticed have you ever worked really really really hard on something and then maybe your boss doesn’t even thank you doesn’t tell you good you did a good job they just demand more from you have you ever helped someone and they didn’t say thank you well unfortunately people aren’t always as appreciative as they should be and we don’t always get validated as much as we should for the things that we do and accomplish another complication is that people who are deficient in their own self-esteem or are trying to fulfill their own self-esteem needs will often do so to the detriment of other people’s esteem needs so often they’re over critical and they make themselves feel better by making other people wrong or less than they are an example might be i feel good about myself because i’m prettier than so and so or i have a more attractive boyfriend than so and so or i have more money or more expensive clothes than another person or even something as i’m smart and everyone else is stupid so we can see then that it’s very dangerous to vest our own self-esteem in the way that other people treat us or in the way that other people approve of us because there definitely are people out there that will make us feel bad about ourselves so that they can feel better about themselves and if you’re seeking approval from a really critical person then you’re just going to feel miserable about yourself so it’s one thing to realize that if we want to feel better about ourselves we should care less about what other people think of us and it’s quite another to actually not care what people think of us it’s very very difficult so let’s talk a little bit more about how we could actually achieve a state of not worrying what other people think so let’s look back again at the psyche truth hierarchy of needs we’ve added in a need to contribute in between the esteem needs and the need for understanding now i need to contribute you could look at that as i need to help or be of service to others i need to produce or be productive and a need to have feel like you have some value to society or that you’re contributing to society and looking again at the higher order needs how do you feel when you’ve really truly helped someone how do you feel when you learn something new or you finally understand something that you never thought you would understand before how do you feel when you create things whether it’s an artistic creation or just being productive at work or cooking a meal how do you feel when you achieve goals that you’ve set for yourself generally these things build you up they make you feel good about yourself so maslow also referred to these as the growth needs and i think that it’s important to realize that these things generally help us to improve our self-esteem make us feel better about ourselves rather than making us feel worse about ourselves so in essence what we’re saying is that if you want to fulfill your esteem needs you should really take a look at those higher order needs and see if by fulfilling some of those needs you don’t also fulfill your esteem needs as i mentioned before we’re all running around trying to fulfill our esteem needs so what often happens is that people are so self-interested so concerned with themselves that they don’t even notice your good qualities or your accomplishments so it’s really important for us to validate and acknowledge ourselves and our accomplishments to really consciously make a point to recognize what we’ve done or recognize that we’ve fulfilled a goal and recognize that we feel good about that after all we’re the ones who have to live with ourselves day in and day out of every single day so it’s really important for us to be our own biggest fan continuing to think about self-confidence and self-respect another quality that maslow recognized in self-actualizing people was morality so in thinking about morality we can think about how we feel when we do something that we we know is wrong that we know we weren’t supposed to do if you’ve ever felt guilty about doing something you know that feeling guilty doesn’t make you feel very good about yourself so while i’m not trying to tell you that you need to have these morals or these religious morals or live up to anyone else’s moral standards i’m just pointing out that we all kind of have a general understanding of what’s right and wrong and when we violate that we usually feel pretty badly about ourselves so to summarize all this number one you have to live with yourself 24 hours of every single day so it’s actually more important how you feel about yourself than how other people feel about you number two acknowledgement and validation can be very scarce so it’s important that we recognize and acknowledge our own accomplishments number three our self-worth is largely reliant on how much we contribute to other people so we’re going to get a lot more joy out of fulfilling our expressive needs of creating things of learning of accomplishing our goals than we are just by dealing with our coping needs or trying to attract idle compliments number four you have to live with yourself so it’s important to be true to your moral values and not do things that you don’t think you should do number five other people with low self-esteem will often make other people wrong or less than them or make them feel bad about themselves and attempt to feel better about themselves so it’s important to realize that if somebody is being really critical of you or saying mean or hurtful things to you that it’s probably more of a reflection on how they feel about themselves it has a lot less to do with you and shouldn’t be affecting the way that you feel about yourself now for any of these recommendations you could easily say easier said than done and certainly it’s not as simple as just deciding not to care what other people think of you or just deciding to feel really good about yourself but i think it’s important to realize that we do have a lot of power in the way that we feel about ourselves and a lot of control in whether or not we take personally the ways that other people treat us so i’ve talked a lot about self-actualization but what about relationship actualization in a future video we’re going to look at how maslow’s hierarchy of needs could be used to have a healthy sane relationship with another person and in another video i’m going to delve deeper into mental illnesses and ask are mental disorders really biological diseases well i did some research and you might be interested to see what i found out thank you so much for watching this video today i hope that it was useful to you or interesting to you i’d appreciate your comments good or bad give me a thumbs up if you like this video and be sure to subscribe to psyche truth you
Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplaY196ARw