Deborah Hill Cone: Self-esteem takes a hit in the kitchen

Sharing frustration with Jaime Oliver’s recipe online drew a wounded response from the man himself. Photo / AP

Dinner parties and self analysis recipes for disaste.

I am a terrible cook. But in a crowded field, this does not even make it into my top five of my bad qualities. (Selfish, incompetent, thick, lazy and of course, fat knees, but these vary daily.) So I don't know what possessed me to invite people for dinner.

I don't normally do dinner parties. My table is resolutely sticky; I don't have matching plates; have to supplement chairs with stools, and someone always has to eat with a spoon, like Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. (He actually had a cork on the end of his fork, but hey.)

Even worse, my guests were two judges, New Zealand's top corporate lawyer, a friend with a PhD from Oxford and an anthropologist who had just returned from a death conference in Transylvania. At least no pressure to be the L and S of the P.

I found a Jamie Oliver curry recipe online and at great expense congregated the odd constituents. How hard could it be? The recipe had three parts and was incomprehensible. "Really scrunch together with your hands." Scrunch WHAT together? Add to the pan and coat the chicken. But you just told me to take the chicken OUT, you dick. "Squeeze in the juice from both the limes." Into what; the curry paste or the chicken or the kim chi? I would have been better off improvising as usual.

When I posted this observation on Facebook, I found I wasn't the only incompetent cook. "Break four eggs into a large bowl, add the sugar, flour and then slide into the mixture." Wow, just like jelly wrestling but with carbs. What I don't like in recipes are sneaky past participles. "Mash three cups of cooked chickpeas."

The magic of Facebook meant there was even a message from Jamie Oliver. "I've never done kimchi in a curry?" (Sorry dude, kim chi slaw). I am writing about cooking as a ruse to get around to the topic of competence and my lack thereof.

I had a revelation this week about why I'm so useless at everything after reading a book by Professor William Swann which is a takedown of the "self-esteem movement". I'll try to summarise it for you, although I've wasted a lot of words on the curry.

As humans our strongest drive is for stability; we seek to control our environment. Therefore we prefer to be around people who see us as we see ourselves.

We find it threatening when people see us differently, for example as a nice person when you think you are bad.

People with negative self-views prefer to be around others who evaluate them negatively. Many elegant experiments have been done that prove this, although my checkered romantic history would probably have saved them the trouble.

So most things you do to improve people's self-esteem - in my opinion including the "think happy thoughts" method underpinning Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - don't work because we have a strong drive to see ourselves as we already do (Self-Verification Theory) .

We are deeply ambivalent about this though - everyone wants praise - but even so, getting it can challenge your understanding of the world in an uncomfortable way.

If you see yourself as an incompetent slattern you get a sense of "disintegration anxiety" - you feel like you are falling apart - when you receive favourable evaluations. (I hope no one liked the curry.) All this I have probably dribbled on about before, but the bit that was new to me was that there are two strands to having a positive self-image. One, feeling you are loveable and two, feeling you are capable.

The revelation: I know it's hard to believe, but I have never really thought about trying to be capable. (To wit: the cooking disasters).

This realisation opens up a whole new vista of sunlit uplands, frankly. I could stop trying to get people to like me and instead try to be, you know, good at something.

Morris Dancing? It won't be cooking. Once you become aware of it, you can see this loveable v competent contrast everywhere.

Prime Minister John Key, with his flags and pandas, may be spending too much time on the first and not enough on the second. Labour Party leader Andrew Little, other way round. If I were a better writer I could finish with an amusing anecdote about the dinner party, but I can't remember much of it.

I woke in the morning with a bottle of a perfume called Zagorsk I must have stolen from a guest and a headache so immense, my 7-year-old son tried to make it better by putting "special cream" (Savlon) on my forehead.

There's heaps of curry left over though.