Question: Do you think a balance can be found between narcissism and self confidence?

Stephen Baillargeon answered on 15 Jun 2018:

Oo, this is something I’ve spent a lot of time and energy thinking and reading about. One of the reasons I study self compassion (The tendency to mindfully and unconditionally treat yourself with kindness and understanding) instead of self esteem (how positive or negative your assessment of yourself is) is because people with high self esteem do tend to have symptoms of narcissism. This is pretty concerning to me because although people with high self esteem are happy, they are more aggressive, and that’s a pretty harsh side effect. People discovered self compassion as an alternative very recently and have slowly been checking it for side effects as well. They’ve found that it reduces aggression and has no correlation with narcissism, and just as strong if not stronger a correlation with happiness. People’s biggest concern is that it might reduce motivation for self improvement, but it turns out that having your self worth not depend on improving actually takes the pressure off and makes that motivation easier. So overall, people who practice self compassion are able to be very confident because they aren’t paralyzed by the fear of failure, but they’re also not narcissistic because their self worth is derived just from being human, which justifies compassion instead of narcissism. So the confidence vs narcissism balance is actually a huge reason I’ve gotten into researching self compassion, and it’s a huge part of the reason why I’ve started a YouTube channel putting good ideas like that forward.