failure, it may not help to tell them that in your eyes they are a suc-
cess, because repeated failure is a sure way of lowering self-esteem.
Telling someone who has low self-esteem to cheer up or be
more confident or pull themselves together is very unlikely to help.
What they need to do is reprogram their mind and come up with
new mental models to see them through the difficult time.
Martin Seligman has argued that it is important not to con-
fuse low self-esteem with having a naturally pessimistic frame of
mind. In particular, both states produce a feeling of perceived
powerlessness that can pervade all aspects of life.
Two approaches to raising self-esteem seem to work well: cog-
nitive behavioral therapy and neurolinguistic programming, NLP
for short. Both have the effect of creating a new mental model and
hence a new mood. The starting point of both approaches is an
acceptance that you are experiencing something unpleasant and
that there are things you can do to improve the situation. You need
to talk and think about what is on your mind, to try to put into
words what you are feeling low about.
Cognitive therapy improves your mood not by working
directly on it, but by working on the thoughts that have brought
you there. To begin with, it is important to challenge your point of
view and see other possible interpretations. Perhaps you are feeling
hard done by about a particular job that you applied for and did not
get. It may actually be helpful to decide that the interview was
unfair and that it was not carried out very well. Or you may have
been feeling steadily undermined by your new boss. You may have
made certain assumptions about this: for example, that you are no
good at your job and that you must be doing things all wrong if
your boss feels it necessary to intrude. Or there may be a defect in
your superior’s character of which you need to be aware. Some ther-
apists go on from here and help you to stop “beating yourself up”
about it. By this, they mean that it is counter-productive to waste
time blaming yourself when the cause is elsewhere.
Another element of cognitive therapy is the close connection
between feelings and thoughts. Interestingly, Susan Greenfield, in
The Private Life of the Brain, puts feelings at the center of conscious-
ness and what it means to develop your mind. This is a long way44 Power Up Your Mind