Diego didn’t consider himself someone with low self-esteem. That label seemed like it was for other people. He just noticed that, unlike his colleagues, he never talked up his successful classes, never asked for recognition, and whenever someone gave him a genuine compliment, he immediately looked for the reason they were mistaken.
Where he started
Twelve years of teaching. Students remembered him, sought him out years later, sent him messages. Diego received those messages with a mix of gratitude and suspicion — it must have been a good period for them, or they had few other reference points. Constant comparison followed him everywhere. His younger colleagues seemed confident, updated, connected to newer methods. Diego had been using the same class structure for five years and struggled to believe it worked if others were doing more innovative things.
The first days
On day 2, the achievement log exercise felt simple from the outside but impossible from within. Writing “what I did well today” activated an immediate filter: was it really his merit, or was it the group, the material, the timing? He kept writing anyway, filter included.
Day 5 brought a module on constant comparison. For the first time, Diego recognized the pattern as a mechanism, not an objective measurement. The comparison didn’t actually measure anything — it produced the same result regardless of the data.
The turning point
On day 9, a student messaged him to say he had chosen education as a career “because of your classes.” Diego read it, thanked him, and was about to close it. Then he opened it again. For the first time, he tried receiving it without immediately discarding it. He didn’t fully believe it. But he let it stay.
The cognitive restructuring exercise on day 11 revealed something: the standard he used to evaluate himself was different from the one he used to evaluate his own students. For a student who improved, Diego acknowledged the progress. For himself, he didn’t.
Where he is now
By day 14, Diego still didn’t advertise his classes. But he had stopped actively looking for the flaw in every compliment he received. The achievement log had fifteen days of entries. Some were modest. None were wrong.
Techniques that helped
- Cognitive restructuring: identifying the double standard applied to oneself versus others
- Achievement log: recording without filtering to build a personal archive of evidence
- Self-compassion: receiving others’ recognition without immediate disqualification