![]() ![]() ![]() Defensiveness blocks us from hearing feedback and evaluating if we want to make meaningful changes in our thinking or behavior based on input from others. In order to try to limit our exposure to information that differs from how we think of ourselves, we get defensive and overjustify, make excuses, minimize, blame, discredit, discount, refute, and reinterpret. Any perceived call-out of our weakness is experienced as an attack on our worth, so we fight hard to defend ourselves against it. It makes sense that defensive-ness occurs in areas of our lives where we have fragile self-esteem, or across several areas of our lives if the fragility is more general. With grounded confidence, we accept our imperfections and they don’t diminish our self-worth. In our work, the opposite of a fragile self-esteem is grounded confidence. Our research team member Ellen Alley explains that our self-esteem is considered fragile when our failures, mistakes, and imperfections decrease our self-worth. At its core, defensiveness is a way to protect our ego and a fragile self-esteem. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |