The Surprising Role of Self-Compassion in Adolescence with Dr. Ronald Siegel

One thing that comes up again and again in life is how complicated self-esteem can feel. There are moments where you feel confident and secure, and others where your self-worth feels tied to things like grades, friendships, or how you think others perceive you. Because of this, I started to wonder: what truly is self-esteem? And what is connected to make those emotions so severe? To explore these questions, I’m honored to welcome Dr. Ronald D. Siegel to Growing Forward.

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Dr. Siegel's Book: The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary, Finding Happiness Right Where You Are.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone and welcome to Growing Forward, a podcast by Positive World, Positive People. I am your host, Sadie Sonaborn Malachi, a 16-year-old from Southern California, and I'm really glad you're here with me today. If this is your first time listening, welcome. Growing Forward is a space where we take the experiences that often feel confusing during the adolescent years and try to understand them more clearly through conversations with experts and professors who study how we grow and develop. One thing that comes up again and again in conversations with friends and in my own life is how complicated self-esteem can feel. There are moments where you can feel really confident and secure in who you are and what's happening around you, but in other points in time where your self-worth feels tied to things like grades, friendships, or how you think others perceive you. Because of that, I started to wonder why doesn't self-esteem always come naturally during adolescence and what actually helps teens build a stronger, more stable sense of self over time. To explore these questions, I'm honored to welcome Dr. Ronald Siegel. Dr. Siegel is a clinical psychologist, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, and a longtime faculty member at Harvard Center for Mindfulness and Compassion. He has spent decades studying how mindfulness and self-compassion can help people navigate difficult emotions, build resilience, and develop a healthier relationship with themselves. So without further ado, Dr. Siegel, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join us on Growing Board.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

So let's begin this on a little bit of a different note, but I want to learn who you are. So what led you to focus your work on mindfulness, self-compassion, and emotional well-being?

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Well, so as you can tell, if your vision and your Zoom screen's okay, I'm an old guy, right? So I've been at this for a long time. And I got interested in adolescent. Uh actually, you know, trying to manage my own ups and downs, trying to manage what was going on with my girlfriend, trying to figure out, you know, how to how to deal with uh the constant roller coaster of success and failure in life. And that drew me to um uh to meditation practices. And then I got trained as a psychologist, and then I became part of a a group of us here in and around Harvard Medical School who for actually many decades have been looking at how these meditation practices might be able to help us in psychotherapy, help our clients um and the like.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Oh, that is wonderful to hear that it really started all the way back when, but in our adolescent years, again, to just show that your passions now, your interests now can lead to something in the future. And you've really taken it throughout your whole life and done wonderful things with it at the Harvard Medical School program, as an assistant professor, whatever it may be. You've done really wonderful work in teaching people and just coming on podcasts, speaking at different conferences, whatever it may be. So I really appreciate you just giving that insight before we jump into the question.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Yeah, no, then it's an important point. You know, there's a lot of stuff we do when we're young that we might hit some other point in our life where we think, uh, you know, I wasted a lot of time on that. But almost everything that we do winds up informing our life and giving us opportunities to do what we do later in a better way. So um, it's an important point that you make that our interests when we're young, even if we go off in different directions, can turn out to be very valuable.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

True. So true. So let's jump straight into our first question. When we talk about self-esteem in adolescent members, what are we actually referring to? How should we understand it from a psychological perspective and understand what self-esteem truly is?

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Yeah, so so so I think it's important to separate out a number of different ideas that that seem similar but are actually different. So self-esteem in the psychology world refers to the way in which we evaluate ourselves and either feel good about ourselves or bad about ourselves. And everybody does that in different areas. You know, for one person, it's like, um, how good do I look is is the main thing that makes us feel good or bad about ourselves. For somebody else, it's how well am I doing at school makes us feel good or bad, or how popular am I, or even how kind am I, how generous am I? We we all we all use different criteria to evaluate ourselves. But what's what's critical about self-esteem is that when we are evaluating ourselves, we're implicitly making a comparison between ourselves and others. So let's say I like to think that I'm intelligent. As a kid, I got hooked on that because I I was good at school and all that. Got hooked on it very young, and it was uh it was a building block of self-esteem. But if I think of myself as intelligent, I'm actually making a comparison, whether I'm conscious of it or not, between myself and other people. I'm saying, well, I'm more intelligent than that person. And and I wasn't great in sports as a kid. So I thought of myself as athletically not so hot. But there too, it's like comparing myself to others. So we find out that I see, so the self-esteem business has to do with making these social comparisons between ourselves and other people and either coming out on top or coming out behind. One of the reasons why self-esteem doesn't work well to give us well-being, well, there's two reasons. One is our comparison group keeps changing. So, you know, there was a time where, you know, I might have compared myself to another college kid, you know, or another high school kid about what I knew or not. If I did that today and I felt, yeah, I know about as much about psychology as the average um high school kid, I wouldn't feel so good about myself anymore. And and when you look at the accomplishments we use to develop self-esteem, we get used to all of them. Remember back to what it was like to ride a bicycle for the first time. Or, you know, when we're kids like put together those um uh those toys that most of us have, that's a series of rings that go on a pole, and if you get it right, it looks like a cone or a Christmas tree. Yay! Did that. That's cool, right? You know, so many accomplishments, first boyfriend or girlfriend, graduating from elementary school, graduating from high school, these things they feel like a big deal, but what and they boost our self-esteem for a little while. But then what happens is we recalibrate. We get used to this, and then we need something new. And as an old guy, I can tell you this goes on throughout the entire lifespan. So any accomplishment that we feel is going to do it for us, after a little while, we get used to it. We call this habituation in psychology. We habituate to it, and then it no longer floats our boat. And as though that weren't enough of a problem, there's the problem that what goes up goes down. Let's say we are really, really good at what we do and we win the, let's say it's athletics, we actually win the gold medal in the Olympics. We're like the best in the world at this sport. Well, what's going to happen in four years? What's going to happen in eight years?

SPEAKER_00 7:13

What's nine?

SPEAKER_01 7:14

What goes up goes down. So that's why, even though we all get hooked on the self-esteem stuff, it's a very unreliable pathway to well-being. And it's because it's based on comparing ourselves to others. Now, there are other things that we can get into, which is a feeling of self-worth or or something called self-compassion, which is doesn't involve comparing ourselves to others and is are way more reliable for feeling okay in life.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

I think that for adolescents, as you said, that kind of comparison every day that we do is so significant to, as you said, our self-esteem, our self-worth, what we think about is happening around us, what is happening within ourselves. All of that comparison traces back to that. And a lot of the times, especially in the current state of society with social media and a lot of different platforms, we see that occurring not in a positive way. Yeah. You can only look at it as a sense of, okay, maybe I'm not that person, but that is okay. However, there's the opposite side of it that a lot of adolescents tend to lean to in the sense of, well, I'm not them. I have to be them. I have to try to be them in a different way. When in reality, I think what we're going to touch on a little bit is that you don't have to conform to those other different people. You yourself, by doing the opposite of kind of what that comparison is, think of your benefits instead of the negatives that you're not doing and all of those different things. But comparison and you highlighting comparison as such a significant thing in this entire process is really crucial, especially for younger adolescents and just changing people. And another thing that I want to note is how you said that it's not consistent. As you said, throughout time, we're changing, we're going through all these stages in life. You start in elementary school, you jump to middle school, and you jump to high school. And each one of those times, you're going to have a graduation. And in those moments, you feel accomplished. You feel like you did something. But yet again, you're going to move on. A different thing is going to happen straight in front of your eyes, and you're going to have to adapt to it. So that little bubble of self-esteem, as you said, is not really consistent. It's not reliant on who you are, who you're becoming. And that's what I want to touch on. I want to touch on how we can become reliant on different things and how we can integrate it still into our lives and have a positive self-esteem while not doing those things.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Yeah. Let let's talk about that in a moment because it's super important. But I'm really glad you brought up what I've been calling selfie esteem, right? Which which is just how hard all this stuff is in the age of social media. That, you know, when I was a kid, it was bad enough to be home in high school on a Saturday night, not having heard from friends and wondering what's going on, you know, or people get together and I don't know about it, you know, maybe making a phone call or two and not getting an answer. That was bad enough. Now to see everybody's curated feeds, and you know, very few people write on social media, you know, woke up this morning, had the runs again, think I'm gonna fail my chemistry test, and my girlfriend's gonna leave me. No, it's like here I am looking fantastic, doing fantastic things with fantastic people, and you weren't invited. You know, this is what everybody's seeing all day. And it's just heartbreaking. I mean, it you know, it is so hard to live in this world, and it makes it so important as young as you can muster it to see if you can get off the self-esteem roller coaster, to see if you can start to find other ways to other things to put your energy in toward other than this.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

It's uh kind of like this cycle of every single year, every single day, we see this new positive thing online or what we ideally think is positive. As you said, people aren't talking about the low points in their lives. They're only putting out what is the best of the best. However, that's how we start that comparison cycle online because we're only seeing the best of the best. And then we think no one else is struggling, no one else is struggling with their self-esteem, no one else is comparing themselves to one another. And they start going into a different side of things, an anxiety side, a depression side, and whatever it may be, but it does relate to that comparison. And as you said, it was different back then, but now we're gonna have to adapt to this future where social media is going to be a part of our lives. And we can't work against it in a lot of situations unless you completely remove yourselves from it, which for a lot of a lot adolescent members, it's very difficult to do.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

No, you can't do it. And I understand that that that's not that doesn't feel like an option. It is pretty bizarre though. That you know, if we were countries or nation states, it would be as though we were reading our own crime and poverty statistics and looking at other countries' travel brochures. You know, these images that are out there are so unrealistic. They're so just one slice of the pine. There is one thing, though, a very practical thing that you can do about social media, even if you're a kid and even if everybody else is on it, to just start to notice which are the interactions on social media that make me feel more connected to my friends, make me feel like more like we're communicating with each other, and which are the ones that are just stimulating the self-esteem addiction, that are just making me feel either good about myself, hey, look at all the followers I got, look at all the likes I got, or that are making us feel crappy about ourselves. Look, nobody cared. I, you know, they're doing this great thing, I'm not doing this great thing. And to begin to sort of notice, all right, some of these things feel like useful, like because I want to have friends, I want to connect to people, and some of these things feel really not useful. Like they're just they're just stimulating this addiction that I've got to trying to figure out a way to feel good about myself.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

And I think that, as we said, these can become patterns that teenagers can fall into or adolescent members. They fall into this cycle of not knowing how to stop comparing themselves online. So, how do negative thought patterns like this self-criticism or comparison begin to shape a teen's sense of self over time? Where does it start and how does it get to this drastic point?

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Well, you know, it's it starts early. Look, some some of it has to do with how our parents treat us, right? Some parents are better able to communicate that even if you've screwed up, I love you.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

And I don't love you just because you did well. You know, I love you anyway, right? That, you know, whereas other parents, their own self-esteem is a little bit more on the line, and they need their kid to either behave well or perform well so they can feel good about themselves. And you know, your parents got there. If your parents are like that, they got there naturally, right? They they got there from their own pain in childhood, and this just keeps going throughout the the life cycle. But if that's what's going on, you could realize that some of the critical messages I've I've received may be more about them than about me, right? This may be more about them needing me to be a certain way than there being something wrong with me. So that's one way it gets started, is when parents are critical that way. It's hard. You know, we're in school. School is inherently, you know, competitive in the sense of you get grades and and that kind of thing. The this idea of comparing ourselves to others is baked in there. It's even baked into our biology. If you go out to the African uh to go on a so-called safari, the naturalist is going to show you the same pattern over and over. They're gonna you'll see this like group of uh uh you'll see like a dominant male surrounded by literally a harem of healthy, attractive young females, right? Then over in the next field, there's another group of younger guys doing the species-specific equivalent of playing basketball or football, trying to get up the skills to be dominant. Well, what's up with all this dominant stuff? I mean, there are species of crickets, you put them in a box, and inside of a few seconds, they've created a dominance hierarchy and even chickens, pecking orders, right? Like this sort of stuff goes on everywhere. There's these hierarchies, this ranking everywhere. And in the animal world, it's because if you're a winner, if you're dominant there, your chances of reproducing successfully and taking care of your kids go up. So we've got this thing in our genes pulling us in this direction. And even just so it doesn't sound, you know uh too sexist, even in in species of animals in which the uh the females are more powerful or more on top, they've got their own dominance hierarchies. They do this too, you know, like who's really the queen, right? This kind of stuff. Um so so we've got this is part of our instinctual nature. So it's not gonna just go away. And that means don't beat yourself up for finding yourself making social comparisons because it's it's just baked in. However, we also have other instincts. We've got instincts toward connection, toward love, toward cooperation, and they work in a different direction, right? Because everybody in the tribe had to cooperate, right, to protect, to protect the group against predators, to find food, to do all this kind of stuff. So kind of what we have to do is look for ways to build on those instincts, practice those things more, and put less energy into this other stuff. It's not going away. We're gonna feel it, we're gonna see it when we open our our phones. We can make it not our main focus. And particularly, and you know, the re the reason I pointed out that you can't win at the self-esteem game, knowing that is super important. Because otherwise, we're likely to think, well, I feel good when I'm more popular, I feel good when I get followers, I feel good when I get likes. I should do more of that, right? Not really. You feel good when you eat donuts, right? There, that's that's built into wanting fat and sugar, because out there in the African savannah, if you had fat or sweets, it meant there was nutrients. But you know, if you eat donuts all day, you're gonna feel sick. We've all done it, right? Exactly. So it's the same thing. It's like it's natural to want it, it's natural that it feels good, but it makes us sick. It really makes us unhappy in the long run. So we really can start putting energy into these other things instead and find much more enduring pathways to well-being.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Exactly. And I like that last analogy that you gave of if you keep chasing these things that are maybe the social hierarchy, or if you want more followers on Instagram or TikTok, whatever platform it may be, that donut analogy in the sense of like, it may feel good for a moment, it may feel satisfying for a brief period of time. However, at the end of the day, you're gonna be consumed by all of these thoughts. It's gonna overwhelm you. There has to be a balance. And as you said, you can't completely quote unquote fix yourself of your self-esteem. It's innate. It's a thing that, as you described, is through our human characteristics. There are ways that adolescent members can kind of begin to notice and shift those internal patterns while also not completely fixing themselves so that it's a good balance between both worlds.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Totally. Well, the first thing is just keep an eye out for the self-esteem highs and collapses. Just notice how many times in the course of a day you start to feel, hey, I'm pretty good, or you know, failed again. Right? Because when you start to notice this, it happens a lot. And it doesn't just happen to kids. Grown-ups are going through this stuff constantly. This is this is really baked into human human psychology. And just noticing it and noticing, you know, this makes me miserable, is it's a it's a really good place to start because then it's like maybe this isn't where I should be putting my energies. And then we can start to experiment with a lot of simple things. One of them is simple phrase for this, see if you can make a connection, not an impression.

SPEAKER_02 19:07

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Whenever you have an encounter with someone else, could be a teacher or a parent, could be another kid. What if what if I was mostly focused on how do I connect with this person instead of impressing this person? And you know, if you're with a friend, how do you connect with a friend? Start by being honest. Tell them, yeah, if you're having a crappy day, oh, I'm having a crappy day, this was horrible. You know, this thing happened in school, this thing happened with this boy or girl, this thing happened, you know, with my parents, whatever it is, start being honest so that you're not just presenting a curated view of who you are, so they can see you're a real vulnerable human being who has ups and downs. And then they, if they have some courage, will start to admit to you what their real experience is like. And as soon as you're connected to another person in that way, where we're really telling each other what it feels like to be alive as a human, all this evaluative stuff, it starts, it starts to settle down because we become a we, right? We become, and it doesn't have to be, you know, a romantic partner or something, just anybody. We start to become a we because we're sort of sharing honestly what it feels like. And it shifts the whole thing. You know, when we're in a good conversation with a friend, we're usually not going up or down thinking I'm great or terrible. We're feeling, hey, uh, this is this is cool, this is a good friend. This feels this feels connected. So make a connection, not an impression, is a really pretty reliable thing that we can practice every day.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

I mean, especially as humans are social beings, as we see throughout the wild and just our day-to-day interactions, we want to have good connections with one another. We want our family connections to be good, our friendships, our teacher connections, whatever it may be. We want them to be positive because that makes us feel good. That makes us feel happy and complete. So I like that idea of you want that connection. You want to feel engaged with someone else. And if you keep going on this spiral of comparison, it's gonna divide you too. And is that what you truly want? You have to ask those bigger questions. And maybe you do have to be brave and open up, and that's a scary thought for a time being. However, if you embrace it and base it straight on, it's gonna feel so much more satisfying in the end. On the other side of things, not on the note of connection anymore in other people interactions, you emphasize self-compassion earlier on. So, how is self-compassion intertwined with self-esteem or different from it? And why might it be especially important for adolescents?

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Yeah, that's a really important question. So, self-compassion has been studied a lot in the last maybe 15, 20 years in psychology. And uh it it it came from the observation that when we fail, when we screw up, when we get rejected, we tend to Do three things. We tend to get very self-critical. Like we start to talk to ourselves. We talk to ourselves in ways we wouldn't talk to other people. I I have no trouble at all, even now as an old guy saying, You idiot, what were you thinking? I don't talk to my family or friends or colleagues that way. If I did, I wouldn't have family, friends, or colleagues, right? So we we we talk to ourselves very critically. We tend to isolate ourselves. You know, we feel ashamed of having screwed up or failed, and we kind of don't want to be seen. We don't want to be, you know, shame is this feeling of I don't want to, I'm not fit to be part of the human family. So we tend to hide out and we tend to get very stuck in rumination and going round and round thinking about ourselves. Boy, I really am a failure. Boy, I'm really dumb, boy, I'm really ugly, boy, whatever it is, we start getting caught in that. And uh a number of my colleagues have been studying this for years, they say, you know, you can actually kind of purposely create antidotes to those three. So instead of self-criticism, can you talk to your can you find a way to talk to yourself with kindness, to actually treat yourself the way you would treat a friend? And there's a there's a really simple exercise you can do for this. You know, next time you screw up and you're beating yourself up, just think of a wise and caring friend that you've got.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

And imagine that you told your story to them, and just you can even write a letter to yourself with how would they respond? And it's almost always stuff like, oh gosh, you know, that that happens to me too, or you tried your best, or don't be so hard on yourself, or I love you anyway, or right? It's you know we know what a a wiser loving person would do, and we've got that alive inside of us. We just need to wake it up. We need to wake up that part of ourselves so we can actually talk to ourselves like a caring person. And then instead of isolating ourselves to really start noticing what we call it common humanity. It's it's the sense that everybody makes mistakes. Everybody feels ashamed, everybody beats themselves up. Like all the stuff that we're doing that makes us feel like we're not part of the human family, it's totally human. It's what everybody else does. So we can we can get it that, okay, you know, we're not alone in this. And then instead of getting caught in the, you know, all the talking about it, you know, talking to ourselves and ruminating, well, the the the people who developed this said practice mindfulness, which basically means just pay attention to the present moment. Bring your attention out a little bit from all the stuff going on in your head, and go for a walk and like look at the trees, look at the clouds, realize that there's a real world out there that's separate from me talking to myself all day long. And it turns out that when people can be compassionate with themselves when they screw up, they're way, way more resilient. They can bounce back. A lot of studies uh around academic failure. When people fail a test, if they beat themselves up, you idiot, why didn't you they tend not to want to go near it. They don't want to study. If they can be nice to themselves, then all right, you screwed up, we all screw up, we all fail some tests, you know, then they can pick themselves up and start studying again when they're ready to. And it's not about self-esteem, because with self-compassion, it's not like I'm better or worse than anybody. It's just I'm being nice to myself because I'm a human being and I deserve some kindness here.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

And I think that all of those things that you just mentioned are so much simpler than a lot of adolescents believe them to be. It just takes a little bit of bravery and strife to incorporate those day-to-day actions of interacting with maybe your friends in a different way, or interacting with yourself and writing yourself a note. Like I love that message that you said of writing yourself a note and how your friend would help you in this situation. Because instead of beating you down, they're gonna lift you up. And that's what you should do with yourself as well. And it's so simple, it's so easy to say that and say that, okay, I'm gonna do that and incorporate it. And it may be difficult though, on the opposite sides of things, but truly it is that simple and easy. It is as easy almost to say those things to do them because they're just simple tasks that can help us relieve ourselves and it can help us build up our self-esteem, build up our self-compassion, because as you said, it's intertwined with one another. And when they're intertwined with each other, it just becomes so much more reliant and crucial that you do develop on them, that you do embrace that side of yourself so that you don't stray away because they are that important.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

Yeah. And and we're not actually going to be developing our self-esteem. We're gonna be developing the self-compassion and the sense of self-worth. Because it turns out that self-esteem is always comparative in this way. And and you can't, you just can't win. You know, you just can't win consistently doing this. In fact, you know, you're in California. There the state of California actually had this huge project in the 1990s, right?

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Ancient history.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

And the idea was that kids who join gangs or get pregnant before they're ready to, you know, take care of a child, that kind of thing, they have low self-esteem. So we'll build up everybody's self-esteem. And that's where we started getting into things like, well, you get a participation award and everybody gets a trophy and that kind of stuff. And the idea was it'll be a social vaccine if we if we build up everybody's self-esteem, then they'll live good lives. Yeah. It didn't work. It was a miserable failure as a project. And the reason it was a failure is because they got the they got the direction of how this works wrong. They got the arrow wrong. Yes, kids who are, you know, who are successful at school, who have friends and the like, they do tend to feel better about themselves than gang members and people getting pregnant at too young an age. They do feel better about themselves. But it's not because they feel better about themselves that they're doing this good stuff. It's because they're living their life well, and that that le lets you feel feel better about yourself. Um so it it turns out that trying to develop self-esteem, forget about it. Let that be. But do try to connect to people, do try to develop self-compassion, do realize that you're a worthy human being because we're all worthy. Again, not because you're better than anybody. You're also not worse than anybody either. You're you're part of the human family. And when we feel that, it's just so much safer, so much easier. And but it does mean not doing too much of the donuts. It does mean, you know, trying not to get too hooked on these little signs of success that feel really good in the short run, but just addict us more to trying to trying to always be the best.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

And I think that idea of self-esteem is something that, as you said, we can't do. We can't compete with it just because there's so much comparison intertwined with it. So shift your perspective. Think about your self-worth, your self-compassion. And those ideas that you have a negative self-esteem, quote unquote, will alleviate. It'll make you feel better, even if you're looking at it as, huh, I don't have a high self-esteem. Okay, maybe you don't have high self-compassion. Look at it in a new light.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

Look at it in a new- Yeah, you don't need to have you don't need to have high self-esteem. You just have to be kind to yourself and connect well to your friends and family.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

I love that so much. So finally, Dr. Siegel, what message do you want our listeners today to hear from you?

SPEAKER_01 29:29

I'll stick with the make a connection, not an impression. Every time you find yourself trying to impress people, see if instead you can connect. And usually how we connect is through honesty. So it's it's about risking honesty. You know you've got a million insecurities. So do other people. This is this is this is the human condition. Let them know that you know it and you're actually okay with yourself, even though you've got insecurities. And if there's somebody who might turn out to be a good friend, they'll start sharing the same with you. And ironically, this even works well in situations where we think that we have to impress the other person. Like, all right, you know, you're looking for a boyfriend or girlfriend, and you're wanting to, you know, put on your best game. Risk trying to connect. You don't even have to start with your vulnerabilities. You can just start with asking the person about their life, about what matters to them, what brings them joy, what's scary or hard for them. Just start by trying to connect by being through this kind of honesty channel and then risk it yourself. And even if you're in a job interview, you know, or you know, you're you're looking to impress the boss, ask them about them. Ask them about, you know, what they like about working here or what they like about running the business or or doing what whatever their role is. This kind of stuff that connects us to other people almost always works out, it almost always works out better than the constant worry about how am I looking, how am I doing, and are they impressed by me.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Because it breaks down those barriers. If you start to open up, they're gonna start to open up, and then we'll sway into a whole different cycle of no longer do we need to compare ourselves with one another and feel that, okay, I'm not them, so I'm not worthy. If you look at it as I'm confident in myself, and I'm gonna show them that they too can be confident in themselves, and that is completely okay. By shifting your perspective, you can change the perspectives of other individuals, and then we can start this new world where everyone believes in themselves and everyone has that self-worth that we truly do need day to day. So, Dr. Siegel.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

I was gonna I was just gonna add one other resource. So I actually wrote a book about like how to do this, and it's it's geared toward uh adults. You know, if if you're somebody who's who's feels comfortable reading adult books, you could check it out. It's called The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary, Finding Happiness Right Where You Are, and you could see how it's consistent with our theme here today. But um, but I you know, I I do know kids who have read it and have found it useful. So you could check it out if you're interested.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

That's wonderful. So if any of you want to hear that again, I will put it in the caption below just to make sure that you do get access to that book. So thank you so much for sharing that, Dr. Siegel. And to close us all out, thank you again, Dr. Siegel, for sharing your perspective today. Your insights help bring clarity to something that can feel really personal and at times truly difficult to know.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

And to everyone listening, self-esteem isn't something that always needs to feel steady. Look at it in a different way. Think about your self-compassion, your self-worth. There will be moments where you do feel unsure, whether it is comparing yourself to other people or things you see online. However, if you change your perspective, a new light can show up and a new way to think about everything around you can also become true. So thank you for being a part of this episode of Growing Forward Everyone today. And I'm really grateful that you're here for these conversations as we continue to learn how to grow, not just in what we achieve, but in how we understand ourselves and the things around us. Until next time, signing off with loads of positivity. Your host, Sadie Sun of Orn Malachy.