Hi, welcome back to the Personality Hacker podcast. My name is Joel Mark Whitt.

And I'm Antonia Dodge. I've been thinking about this idea that I call the selves. It's

all of the ways that we reflect back to ourselves effectively how we feel about ourselves.

There are words that we use all the time, self confidence, self trust, self worth, self

esteem. All of the things that are our assessments of who we are and how valuable that we are as

people, what is our worth, what's our value. And I've noticed a lot of particularly self-help

rhetoric that starts on a basis of assumption that we should just be giving ourselves those

feelings. We should give ourselves a feeling of self confidence and give ourselves a feeling of

self trust and self worth and self esteem. And I suspect the reason why there's this idea of

just be stowing it upon ourselves is it started out basically being an answer to a more modernist

perspective or thought that a lot of us come from a Judeo-Christian background that insinuates

that we're actually broken. At least culturally. Right, exactly. At least culturally. We have this

almost like a guilt folded into existing. And so we become very susceptible to this idea of

feeling guilty. Whenever anybody insinuates that we should feel guilty, we tend to absorb it and

take it in very quickly and go, okay, yeah, you're right, I should feel guilty for that. And as

an offset to this idea, this intrinsic, you know, warminess, right, you're terrible worm,

you're deserving of death, right, this idea. As a countermeasure to that, I think that there was

a lot of rhetoric for a while, particularly in personal growth circles, about fighting that

with seeing it as the opposite. No, you're not, you know, you're not intrinsically bad,

wrong or evil in full of sin. You're actually divine and ascended and this magical creature and

this sort of thing of wonder. And you should be loving yourself as this kind of creature.

And I think both of these have a measure of truth to them, but neither of them is complete.

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