# Why Your Self-Esteem Matters to Others

By Nina Lu · 2022-07-12 · Things That Matter (Medium) · Original: https://medium.com/@ninajlu/things-that-matter-why-your-self-esteem-matters-to-others-e2cd0d922b49

I’ve been meaning to write these piece for a while because I grew up one of those self-hating Asians. It took me a really long time to figure out why hating yourself hurts others, beyond just the “you can take care of others better when you take care of yourself” logic which I think is true but hackneyed and could be explained sufficiently in an IG or TikTok post, as many have done.

Why your self-esteem matters to others was truly crystallized to me through two incidences that occurred in the last year.

The first happened during my Touchy Feely class, which is one of the most famous classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The best way to explain Touchy Feely is that it is group therapy with a focus on providing and receiving feedback on how what you say impacts other people. So, one of the girls in my Touchy Feely group had a habit of continual self-deprecation. One session, she told us that she felt like she had just “stumbling into the GSB” and that “everything she accomplished felt like it was just from luck”. I was extremely upset by her comments and it took me a while to understand why, especially in light of the fact that I had on many occasions thought and felt the same ideas about myself. Why did it upset me so much to hear imposter syndrome felt by someone else? I can only imagine it was because she was acting as a foil for myself and because I, of course, am allowed to say hurtful things to myself that other people are definitely not allowed to say to me or themselves.

In that moment of hearing her say those words and thoughts, I realized two things that are really wrong with this approach of talking down to yourself.

1.  **Saying that you got something “out of luck” that other people put concerted effort into undermines the effort that they spent striving for that thing.** In this example, saying you “stumbled into the GSB” seems to discount the tremendous effort people put into taking the GMAT, writing and re-writing their admissions essays, getting recommendation letters, interviewing, and investing in a high-sacrifice, high-intensity career that would make you an interesting candidate for an extremely competitive MBA program.
2.  **Saying that you got something out of luck makes people wonder how you think about them.** Do you apply this same thought process to degrade and judge them? If you don’t, why would you talk that way to yourself?

Thus, it became clear that talking down to yourself and then sharing that self-deprecation with others actually brings them down in the process by undermining their effort and making them wonder whether you judge them. Judging anyone is extremely poor form. If you are determined not to judge other people, you should start by not judging yourself so people have faith that you aren’t someone who would apply that logic blindly to them.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/925/0*Y1_wv0mrFCkjThis)

How not to reply to someone’s self-deprecation.

The second example that made this point that your self-esteem matters to others happened when I was in Indonesia. I was wearing a neon yellow bikini, which matched the neon yellow flippers and mask that the boat we were on lent me to go snorkeling. As girls do on vacation, we started taking pictures on the beach in our swimsuits to document this awesome outfit. I yelled, jokingly (but kind of serious), at the girl taking photos to “make me look skinny!” which I had heard my sister do to me on multiple occasions.

As the girl showed me the pictures that we had taken together on her phone, she made some comments that made me feel like she was self-conscious about her body. I admonished her, stating that I would not stand for someone as skinny as her feeling negatively about her body at all because that was just brainwashing by women’s magazines and the beauty industry convincing us we needed to look anorexic to be beautiful. She then replied that my comments demanding that she make me look skinny in photos perpetuated this idea that women need to be skinny to be beautiful. I stopped in my tracks, realizing that I had actually been a real hypocrite. In being negative about my own skinniness, I had perpetuated the messaging that women should be judged for on their appearance and that skinny was, in the value-set hierarchy, better than being of a normal, healthy weight. As a result, my low self-esteem and my expression of my low self-esteem had the effect of making another girl more self-conscious about how she looked and thus perpetuating negative societal expectations. The analogous reasoning for why my self-esteem mattered to others, in this case, was:

1.  **Saying I was worried about my appearance when I am of a normal weight made other people more self-conscious about their weight**, perpetuating the belief that being slimmer is better than being of a normal, healthy weight.
2.  **Saying I was judging myself in those pictures made people wonder if I was scrutinizing and looking at their stomaches as much as my own in the pictures and judging them for it.** Even if it isn’t true (which it isn’t), that is a reasonable conclusion to draw that if someone is judgmental about themselves, they could be applying the same judgement to other people.

Thus, this situation is actually analogous to the self-deprecation example mentioned earlier and detrimental to others for similar reasons.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*8e8HCcDkVEpfePYM.png)

The body dysmorphia is real!

The parallel across both situations is that self-deprecation undermines other people’s confidence and seeds the worry that you are applying the same logic of the self-judgment to them. This is frequently not true since people are often uniquely hurtful and critical of themselves versus other people. However, the belief alone is negative enough to hurt others.

Your self-esteem matters in your interactions with others for the IG reason that you have to take care of yourself so that you can show up happy and kind and calm for people in your life but also for the more subtle reasons I describe above. When your own low self-esteem leaks out, which it inevitably will, you will hurt those around you indirectly in subtle but nonetheless destructive ways.