Exercises — Chapter 10: Self-Esteem and Self-Efficacy

Part A: Self-Esteem — Concepts and Assessment

Exercise 1: Secure vs. Contingent Self-Esteem

A) Define secure and contingent self-esteem in your own words. What is the core difference between them?

B) Review the six common contingency domains listed in the chapter (academic/occupational performance, physical appearance, social approval, virtue/moral standards, competitive achievement, family approval). Rank these from most to least central to your own self-esteem. Where does your self-esteem most depend on meeting specific conditions?

C) Describe a recent situation in which a setback in your primary contingency domain affected your overall sense of self-worth. How did you respond? What would a person with secure self-esteem have done differently?

Exercise 2: The Self-Esteem Treadmill

The self-esteem treadmill describes the cycle in which each achievement temporarily boosts contingent self-esteem, but the boost fades and the next achievement is required.

A) Is there a domain in your life where you recognize this treadmill pattern? Describe it specifically — what types of achievements "count," how long the boost lasts, and what triggers the need for the next one.

B) What would it mean to step off the treadmill in that domain — to maintain a stable sense of worth regardless of performance? What would you lose? What would you gain?

C) What would you have to believe differently about yourself (or about the relationship between performance and worth) to make the treadmill less necessary?

Exercise 3: Assessing Self-Esteem Stability

Stability of self-esteem — how much it fluctuates with events — may matter more than level.

Over the next seven days, rate your self-esteem each evening on a simple 1–10 scale. At the end of the week: - Calculate your average rating and your range (highest minus lowest) - Identify the events or interactions that produced your highest and lowest ratings - What do those triggering events reveal about your self-esteem contingencies?

Exercise 4: The Baumeister Review — Evaluating the Claims

The popular self-esteem movement claimed that high self-esteem would produce improvements in achievement, relationships, and prosocial behavior. Baumeister's review found mixed results.

A) Why might it be appealing to believe that raising self-esteem would solve a wide range of social and psychological problems? What are the intuitive arguments?

B) The research suggests the causal direction may often be reversed — that performance produces self-esteem more reliably than self-esteem produces performance. Describe two scenarios that illustrate this reversed causality.

C) If artificially inflated self-esteem is counterproductive, what are the implications for parenting, education, and organizational development? What should replace the self-esteem approach?

Part B: Self-Compassion

Exercise 5: Self-Compassion vs. Self-Esteem

Kristin Neff distinguishes self-compassion from self-esteem along several dimensions.

A) For each of Neff's three components of self-compassion (self-kindness, common humanity, mindful awareness), give a concrete behavioral example of what it looks like in practice when responding to a personal failure.

B) Describe a recent failure or disappointment. Write two responses to it: - Response A: From the perspective of contingent self-esteem (evaluate the failure against your standards, assess what it means about your worth) - Response B: From the perspective of self-compassion (self-kindness, common humanity, mindful awareness)

C) The chapter notes that self-compassion does not undermine motivation — that the intuition that being kind to yourself about failure reduces effort is not supported. Why might this counterintuitive finding be true? What does self-condemnation do to motivation?

Exercise 6: The Good Friend Test

Kristin Neff uses a simple exercise to demonstrate self-compassion: how would you respond to a good friend in the same situation you are responding to with self-criticism?

A) Identify a situation in which you have been harsh or self-critical with yourself — something you said or did that you have judged yourself for significantly.

B) Write the response you would give to a close friend who came to you with the same situation. Use your actual words — what would you actually say?

C) Now re-read your self-criticism. Where is the gap? Why do we apply different standards to ourselves than to others we care about?

Part C: Self-Efficacy — Sources and Assessment

Exercise 7: Your Self-Efficacy Profile

Self-efficacy is domain-specific. You may have high self-efficacy in some areas and low self-efficacy in others.

Create a simple self-efficacy map by rating your confidence (1 = very low, 5 = very high) in each of the following domains: - Technical skills (specific to your field) - Interpersonal communication in high-stakes situations - Managing your own emotional reactions under pressure - Learning new skills outside your current expertise - Physical performance (exercise, sport, physical challenge) - Creative work - Leadership and managing others - Handling conflict effectively

For your two lowest-rated domains: what specific experiences contributed to the low rating? Can you trace the low self-efficacy to specific failure experiences, absent mastery experiences, or missing models?

Exercise 8: Tracing Self-Efficacy to Its Sources

Bandura identifies four sources of self-efficacy: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological state interpretation.

Choose a domain where you have genuinely high self-efficacy and trace it: - What mastery experiences built it? Describe 2–3 specific situations. - Were there vicarious models — people similar to you who succeeded? Who were they? - Was there verbal persuasion from credible sources? What was said, and who said it? - How do you typically interpret physiological arousal in this domain?

Then choose a domain where you have low self-efficacy and conduct the same analysis. What sources are missing or negative?

Exercise 9: Mastery Experience Design

The most powerful source of self-efficacy is mastery experiences — direct successful performance.

A) Choose one domain where you currently have low self-efficacy but want to build it.

B) Design a graduated mastery sequence — a series of 5–7 progressively challenging experiences in that domain, starting with something achievable and building toward the level of challenge you are ultimately aiming for. Be specific: what is each step, and how will you know if you have succeeded?

C) What obstacles might prevent you from executing this sequence? What specifically could you do to address each obstacle?

Exercise 10: Vicarious Experience and Models

Vicarious experience (watching similar others succeed) is the second most powerful source of self-efficacy.

A) In a domain where your self-efficacy is low, identify someone who is similar to you (in background, age, circumstances, or starting point) who has successfully developed competence in that domain. This person could be someone you know personally, a public figure, or someone whose story you have read.

B) What specifically about their path demonstrates that someone like you can succeed in this domain?

C) Are there ways you have been choosing models who are too distant from you — observing elite performers when you need to observe peers? How could you find better models?

Exercise 11: Reappraising Physiological States

Pre-performance anxiety and excitement produce similar physiological signatures. Research by Alison Wood Brooks shows that reappraising anxiety as excitement improves performance.

A) Identify a type of performance situation that reliably produces physiological arousal for you (anxiety, racing heart, elevated attention). What is the situation?

B) How do you currently interpret that arousal? What does the internal commentary say?

C) Design a specific reappraisal — a sentence or phrase that interprets the same physical state as preparation rather than panic. Test it in the next relevant situation and observe the effect.

Part D: Learned Helplessness and Explanatory Style

Exercise 12: Your Explanatory Style

Seligman identified explanatory style as a key determinant of whether failures generalize into helplessness or stay contained. The three dimensions: permanent/temporary, pervasive/specific, personal/external.

A) Think of three significant failures or setbacks from the past two years. For each one, write down how you explained it to yourself at the time. Then classify each explanation on the three dimensions.

B) What pattern emerges? Is your explanatory style for negative events relatively optimistic (temporary, specific, external where accurate) or pessimistic (permanent, pervasive, personal)?

C) Choose one of the failures you analyzed. Rewrite the explanation using the optimistic style — not by minimizing the role of your choices or effort, but by being accurate about what is temporary vs. permanent, domain-specific vs. pervasive, and what was external vs. internal.

Exercise 13: Helplessness vs. Actual Inability

Learned helplessness involves giving up based on the expectation that responses won't work — not based on actual inability.

A) Identify one area of your life where you have stopped trying — where you are operating as if the situation is uncontrollable even though it may not be. Be honest.

B) What experiences produced the "it won't work" expectation? Were those experiences genuinely uncontrollable, or were they controllable events that you interpreted as uncontrollable?

C) What would be the smallest possible test of whether the situation is actually controllable? Design a minimal action that would produce meaningful evidence.

Part E: Impostor Phenomenon

Exercise 14: The Impostor Inventory

Rate how strongly you identify with each of the following statements (1 = not at all, 5 = very strongly):

I often feel that my success is due to luck or timing more than my own ability.
I worry that people will discover that I'm not as capable as they think I am.
When I receive positive feedback, I find it hard to fully accept or believe it.
I attribute my accomplishments to external factors more than to my own skills.
I have difficulty acknowledging my own expertise even in areas where I genuinely have it.
I feel like a fraud when I'm recognized or praised.
I expect that people will eventually realize I don't belong where I am.

Total score: 7–14 = minimal impostor experiences; 15–25 = moderate; 26–35 = strong.

If your score is moderate to strong: What specific domains trigger impostor experiences most strongly? What life events or patterns established these experiences?

Exercise 15: Rewriting the Attribution

Impostor phenomenon typically involves externalizing success (luck, timing) while internalizing failure (fixed inability).

A) Write down three significant professional or academic accomplishments. For each, write the impostor version of why it happened (external attribution).

B) Now write the accurate version — one that gives appropriate credit to your own preparation, capability, effort, and judgment. Be specific: what did you actually do that contributed?

C) What evidence would you need to genuinely internalize one of these accomplishments — to count it as real evidence of your capability? What is preventing that from happening?

Part F: Building from the Inside Out

Exercise 16: The Competence Path to Self-Esteem

The research suggests that the route to genuine self-esteem is not affirmation but genuine accomplishment.

A) Identify one domain where your self-esteem is lower than you would like it to be.

B) Design a competence-building plan for that domain — not a self-affirmation plan, but a genuine skill- and mastery-building plan. What would you need to learn, practice, or accomplish to have an evidence-based reason to feel capable?

C) What is the minimal first step — the thing you could do in the next week — that would begin building genuine competence?

Exercise 17: The Self-Worth Audit

Consider the areas of life on which you currently base your self-worth. Rate each domain as a source of self-worth (0 = not at all, 5 = heavily): - Performance at work or school - Physical appearance or fitness - Social approval (what others think of you) - Competitive standing (being better than others) - Family role (being a good parent/child/sibling) - Living according to your values - Relationships and belonging - Creative or intellectual achievements

Reflect: - Which sources are internal and relatively stable vs. external and contingent? - Which sources are most vulnerable to circumstances outside your control? - Which source would you most benefit from moving toward?

Exercise 18: Chapter Synthesis

Write a 400-word essay addressing:

"The chapter distinguishes between self-esteem and self-efficacy, and between secure and contingent self-esteem. Based on what you've read, what would a psychologically healthy relationship with oneself actually look like — not a grandiose or inflated one, but a genuinely grounded one? What would characterize it?"

Your essay should draw on at least five concepts from the chapter.

Discussion Questions

Discussion 1: "Tell children they're special" was the implicit message of the self-esteem movement. What is the right message? What should children be told — and shown — to develop genuine, stable self-worth?

Discussion 2: Self-compassion is non-comparative and non-evaluative. But much of what drives people to achieve is precisely the desire to evaluate favorably against standards. Is there a tension between self-compassion and achievement motivation? How is it resolved?

Discussion 3: Impostor phenomenon is more common among members of underrepresented groups in high-status fields. How much of this reflects individual-level attributional errors vs. structural realities (tokenism, differential evaluation standards, actual discrimination)? What are the practical implications?

Discussion 4: Seligman's learned helplessness research was conducted on animals and then applied to humans. What are the ethical limits of applying this model? Are there forms of genuine helplessness — situations that actually are uncontrollable — where the "learned optimism" framing may be harmful?