- CareerCoacha
- Posts
- You don’t want self-esteem
You don’t want self-esteem
PLUS: The absolute requirement
For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.
In today’s email:
You don’t want self-esteem
Help others gain self-efficacy
The absolute requirement
Hang out with happy people
Shan Lyn-Ma’s career wisdom
ON YOUR CAREER
You don’t want self-esteem, you want self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is much better than self-esteem. Self-efficacy is knowing we’re effective based on our actual achievements. It’s justified self-confidence. We’ve earned the belief that we have virtues because we’ve lived them. We are prepared to work hard and smart.
Our self-esteem may or may not be justified. It’s often untested. Some people believe they bring great value because they’re inherently valuable. Yet they may not have worked hard to develop the skills and knowledge to be valuable to colleagues and customers.
We can increase our self-efficacy at work by recording our significant achievements. Reflect on the value you created. What you did well. The obstacles you overcame. This helps embed achievements in our long-term memory which means we can recall them when we have setbacks. Self-efficacy builds resilience.
Under pressure, self-efficacy is a rock. Unearned self-esteem is like cotton candy.
People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.
COMMUNICATION
Helping others gain self-efficacy
We help our colleagues build their self-efficacy by acknowledging their effectiveness and their achievements:
✅ We won the deal because they trust you.
✅ Thanks for mentoring me, I’m much more confident now.
✅ This is beautiful tiling, well done!
Would any of your colleagues benefit by you acknowledging their effectiveness?
People who regard themselves as highly efficacious… produce their own future, rather than simply foretell it.
PRODUCTIVITY
The absolute requirement
Every person I know who is effective at their job has worked hard. Hard work demonstrates to others that we’re motivated. That we care. Hard work is often the best way to overcome an obstacle. We can be smart and sharpen the axe, but we still have to chop the wood.
Working hard isn’t the only thing you need to do. But it’s absolutely a requirement.
1 MINUTE TO HAPPINESS
Hangout with happy people
The mood of other people is contagious. If we spend a lot of time with unhappy people, it can take effort to stay positive.
Hanging out with happy people tends to elevate our mood. Laughter and smiles are infectious. We are energized by their company.
None of this means to avoid friends and family who are experiencing setbacks. It’s about cultivating relationships based on positivity. Happiness ripples.
CAREER WISDOM
Shan Lyn-Ma
Shan-Lyn Ma (1977 — ) was born in Singapore and grew up in Sydney. She completed an MBA at Stanford and worked at Yahoo and Gilt Groupe. In 2013, Ma co-founded the online wedding-registry Zola. Services have expanded to provide comprehensive wedding planning services. Ma’s goal was to create “a company that would do anything for love,” addressing the frustrations she and others experienced in the wedding planning journey. In 2023, Zola Baby was launched. Ma has also provided venture capital to multiple tech start-ups. Some of Ma’s career wisdom:
What I've come down to for myself is identifying the things that give me a lot of energy and making sure that I carve out time to do those things.
It's never a case of you learn it once and then you're always great at it.
Your time is your most valuable asset, so think about if what you’re doing is really what you want to spend your time on, think about if it’s getting you to a place that you want to go in the long run.