Then, the appropriate reaction is to relax the constraints we impose on ourselves, test if the relaxation is valid, and take best action we've got left. If we were able to do this reliably, we would find ourselves doing the best we can, and low self-esteem would be a non-issue.
Do you think that this is a strategy that someone who has imposter syndrome could use to make his imposter syndrome a non-issue? I would be surprised if that's the case.
Actually, getting rid of a "I'm not good enough" belief, through methods like what's described in Steve Andreas Transform Your Self, seems to me much more likely to help the person.
I think I abstractly described a thing that would work, but I gave the reader no clues on how to do that thing. Thank you for pointing out a work that actually does give practical tips!
A friend asked me, "what's the right amount of self-esteem to have?" Too little, and you're ineffectual. Too much, and you get cocky. So how do you choose the right balance?
I replied that this is a trick question.
People with low self-esteem have thoughts like "I'm a loser", "my IQ is too low to succeed", "no one could love someone as fat as me". Their problem is not quite that they've got inaccurate beliefs. They make in fact be a loser. Rather, their problem is that they've attached their identity to concepts that limit their action space.
For instance, the notion of low IQ. This is a construct that's predictive at a population level, but it doesn't give you some predictive power on an individual level unless it's the only thing you know about a person. But you can rapidly accumulate info about someone, or yourself, that outweighs the info expressed by "your IQ is 101". E.g. if you want to know someone's test scores, you'll do a lot better by using their scores on mock exams than by using their IQ.
Which means that someone who says "I can't fix my car because I've got a low IQ" isn't actually making full use of the info available to them. They're relying on a sticky prior. What they should actually be doing if they care about fixing their car is asking "what's stopping me from fixing it?" and checking if solving that problem is worth the costs compared to paying a mechanic. The cost may be large. They may have to put in dozens of hours of work before they understand cars well enough to fix their problem without paying anyone. But they could do it.
So the issue is that the belief about "low IQ" has led to imaginary walls around what can be done that do not actually reflect reality.
In other words, low self-esteem turns a bump in the road into a cliff of seemingly infinite height, cutting off an entire avenue of approach. It reduces your sense of what is possible, and from the inside, it feels like you've got less free-will.
What is the solution? Knock down the walls.
In day to day life, we have to simplify the action space because we are computationally bounded systems. We introduce simplifications for good reasons, and for bad reasons. That's normal. Thing get problematic when those simplifications restrict the space till there is no good action left. Then, the appropriate reaction is to relax the constraints we impose on ourselves, test if the relaxation is valid, and take best action we've got left. If we were able to do this reliably, we would find ourselves doing the best we can, and low self-esteem would be a non-issue.