The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Nathaniel Branden

Most of the issues of integrity we face are not big issues but small ones, yet the accumulated weight of our choices has an impact on our sense of self.

I’d tell people when they do things that bother

Where there is no power, there can be no responsibility, and where there is no responsibility, there can be no reasonable self-reproach.

though the wronged person may have offered forgiveness. None of that may be enough; self-esteem remains unsatisfied.

When guilt is a consequence of failed integrity, nothing less than an act of integrity can redress the breach.

We cannot practice integrity in an intellectual vacuum.

“Live consciously—take responsibility for your choices and actions—respect the rights of others—and follow your own bliss.”

the truth had to be told and that by procrastinating and delaying I merely made the consequences for everyone more terrible.

If integrity is a source of self-esteem, then it is also, and never more so than today, an expression of self-esteem.

The more I live consciously, the more I trust my mind and respect my worth; and if I trust my mind and respect my worth, it feels natural to live consciously.

We are not always fully conscious of our beliefs. They may not exist in our minds as explicit propositions. They may be so implicit in our thinking that we are hardly aware of them or not aware of them at all. Yet they clearly lie behind our actions.

Each person is the owner of his or her life; no one is here on earth to live up to my expectations.)

I will usually be liked and respected by the people I like and respect.

If people treat me discourteously or disrespectfully, it is a reflection on them, not on me. It is only a reflection on me if I accept their treatment of me as right.

If someone I like does not return my feeling, it may be disappointing or even painful, but it is not a reflection on my personal worth.

I am better served by knowing what is true than by making myself “right” at the expense of the facts.

If I persevere, I can understand the things I need to understand.

No other individual or group has the power to determine how I will think and feel about myself.

It is not what “they” think; it is what I know. What I know is more important to me than a mistaken belief in someone else’s mind.

No one has the right to force on me ideas and values I do not accept, just as I do not have the right to force my ideas and values on others.

Happiness and success are natural conditions to me—like health—not temporary aberrations of the real order of things; as with disease, it is disaster that is the aberration.

I need to be on the lookout for temptations to evade unpleasant facts; I need to manage my avoidance impulses and not be ruled by them.

I can accept my feelings and emotions without necessarily liking, approving of, or being controlled by them; I do not deny or disown them.

I can accept that I have done what I have done, even when I regret or condemn it. I do not deny or disown my behavior.

My self-esteem is more valuable than any short-term rewards for its betrayal.

The principle is: Describe the behavior (hitting a sibling, breaking a promise), describe your feelings about it (anger, disappointment), describe what you want done (if anything)—and omit character assassination.

There is no such emotion as “You are the most rotten kid who ever lived.” The actual emotion here is rage and the desire to inflict pain.

School was not a place to learn independent thinking, to have one’s self-assertiveness encouraged, to have one’s autonomy nourished and strengthened. It was a place to learn how to fit into some nameless system created by some nameless others and called “the world” or “society” or “the way life is.”

Schools were interested not in autonomy but in the manufacture of someone’s notion of “good citizens.”

What is needed and demanded today, in the age of the knowledge worker, is not robotic obedience but persons who can think.

“There is evidence that children who are too obedient may have difficulty functioning in today’s work world.”

The aim must be to teach children how to think, how to recognize logical fallacies, how to be creative, and how to learn.

always did poorly in math in school,” a client said to me, “and I always knew I could never do well—until I met a teacher who refused to believe me. She knew I could do math, and her certainty had so much power it was irresistible.”

one of the greatest gifts a teacher can offer a student is the refusal to accept the student’s poor self-concept at face value, seeing through it to the deeper, stronger self that exists within if only as a potential.

Research tells us that a teacher’s expectations tend to turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. If a teacher expects a child to get an A—or a D—either way, expectations tend to become realities.

When we ask our students to do something, we usually have a better reason than because I said so. Telling them the real, logical, and intrinsic reason for a limit or a rule—so the markers do not dry out, so that we do not disturb anyone on our way down the hall, so that no one trips and falls—builds commitment and cooperation even from rebellious students.

In the example [of the sluggish class], the students missed lunch because of a poor choice they had made, not as a punishment for misbehaving.

I have already quoted from one designed by Robert Reasoner: Building Self-Esteem: A Comprehensive Program for Schools.

the greater the number of choices and decisions we need to make at a conscious level, the more urgent our need for self-esteem.

“what about the people who don’t want to learn new skills? Why should they have troubles? Aren’t they entitled to security?

This meant, I pointed out, that the ambition, the farsightedness, the drive to do better and still better, the living energies of creative individuals were to be throttled and suppressed—for the sake of those who had “thought enough” and “learned enough” and did not wish to be imposed on further or to think about what their jobs depended on. Is that what he was proposing? His response was silence.

Capitalism created a market for the independent mind.

Let your people see that it’s safe to make a mistake or say “I don’t know, but I will find out”: to evoke fear of error or ignorance is to invite deception, inhibition, and an end to creativity.

When the behavior of someone creates a problem, ask him or her to propose a solution: whenever possible, avoid handing down solutions but give the problem to the responsible party, thereby encouraging self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, and intensified awareness.

Remember that a great manager or leader is not one who comes up with brilliant solutions but who sees to it that his people come up with brilliant solutions: a manager, at his or her best, is a coach, not a problem solver for admiring children.

Avoid overdirecting, overobserving, and overreporting: excessive “managing” (“micromanaging”) is the enemy of autonomy and creativity.

acknowledge and support this behavior in others; give your people the

I frame the process in terms of its consequences for self-esteem. I want clients to notice how their choices and actions affect their experience of themselves.

There is value in expressing feelings without having to deal with criticism, condemnation, sarcasm, distracting questions, or lectures. The process of expression is often intrinsically healing.

When the client’s need for emotional expression has been met, then it sometimes can be useful to invite him or her to explore feelings more deeply and examine underlying assumptions that may need to be questioned.