Self Esteem--Earn Some, Want None.

This is an interview of Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Coach. Coach is a small book about his high school baseball coach that every high school coach should read at least once a year. The coach, Billy Fitzgerald, was under fire and parents were calling for his firing, after 30+ years of coaching. Forget the state championships, it was the building of young men that mattered to him. Here is what Fitz has to say about self-esteem.

"What he said to me afterwards was, one of the things that has changed in the world is the notion of self-esteem. He said, `I have always thought of it,' he said, `as something that was earned. You started with zero, and it was through your acts in the world that led to the acquisition of self-esteem.' And what he faces now is a notion that's very much alive in the world and in these children that they're born with a fixed quantity of self-esteem, and when a coach yells at him or a teacher gives him a C or whenever anything bad happens to them, it damages, it reduced the fixed quantity. And so the person who's responsible for lessening the self-esteem gets all kinds of grief. So what he's trying to do is build the self-esteem. The parents see him as trying to take it away."