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Notes -
A lot of complexity here. IMO: there are contexts where high confidence is beneficial even if it is not externally-administered, for instance in making friends and finding partners where people gravitate to confidence. Similarly, you can have high external valuation and yet have a low assessment of yourself, causing a shyness that is unwarranted and unbecoming, which leads to problems in social life.
There’s also the question of proportionality: you can be confident and have reasonably high self-worth and yet still feel pain at social defeat and feel pleasure at social victory. The default self-worth can buffer against unwarranted catastrophizing. If you’re a chess player and go into hysterics at every loss you will probably not play chess for long. Self-confidence is also (counter-intuitively?) judged as good by others, for instance when a defeated opponent keeps a stiff upper lip and praises the winner.
The ideal is a reasonable amount of sensitivity regarding your external persona, which is guided by a reasonable amount of self-respect and self-judgment that filters and optimizes longterm social sensitivity. You don’t want to commit sepukku every time you fail at an obligation. Neither is it necessarily advantageous to primarily judge yourself by some narrow and fleeting social obligation.
Religious language can offer some insight here. God judges every deed, while both loving and disciplining as a father. This is an archetypally correct mode of social feedback because nothing is more optimized for behavioral shaping (the psychological term of art) than how a loving Father/mentor teaches his Son/student. This is how evolution has guided the best possible identity-formation / behavioral-shaping, through love and loving chastisement (which is very cool actually). So we see for instance that a child who feels socially secure is most adaptive to learning in school. That’s the correct balance of self-worth [forever loved by the Eternal Father] and reasonable social sensitivity [humility, growth mindset, interest in others].
Frankly I do not find the term self-[worth / judgment / assessment] ideal. How can I be the one negatively evaluate what I myself am doing? Why would the problematic me negatively evaluate the exact same problematic me, and why would problematic me listen to problematic me when evaluated? In what sense can I be disappointed in myself when I am the same person through and through? I am disappointed in myself being disappointed? What’s really happening in any self-judgment is that we imagine a hypothetically reasonable and perfect Judge and how that Judge would feel about us. We then internalize this judgment and measure our action against it. It is at least quasi-religious. It is more healthy to admit that I myself suck, and that there is instead an independent, omnipresent judge who I answer to. In ages of old, when a person felt the watchful eye of their deity over them, what they are really doing is what we would call “self-judgment” today. This is very optimal, because we have a built-in instinct of external administration that can be sublimated in the imagination, whereas there is no “self-judgment” instinct so it gets confusing and paradoxical and unhelpful.
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