The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Nathaniel Branden

The level of our self-esteem influences how we act, and how we act influences the level of our self-esteem.

To trust one’s mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem.

The higher our self-esteem, the stronger the drive to express ourselves, reflecting the sense of richness within. The lower our self-esteem, the more urgent the need to “prove” ourselves—or to forget ourselves by living mechanically and unconsciously.

There is no greater barrier to romantic happiness than the fear that I am undeserving of love and that my destiny is to be hurt.

What is required for many of us, paradoxical though it may sound, is the courage to tolerate happiness without self-sabotage until such time as we lose the fear of it and realize that it will not destroy us (and need not disappear).

When we are moved primarily by fear, sooner or later we precipitate the very calamity we dread. If we fear condemnation, we behave in ways that ultimately elicit disapproval. If we fear anger, eventually we make people angry.

When we doubt our minds, we tend to discount its products. If we fear intellectual self-assertiveness, perhaps associating it with loss of love, we mute our intelligence. We dread being visible; so we make ourselves invisible, then suffer because no one sees us.

An inadequate self-esteem may reveal itself in a bad choice of mate, a marriage that brings only frustration, a career that never goes anywhere, aspirations that are somehow always sabotaged, promising ideas that die stillborn, a mysterious inability to enjoy successes, destructive eating and living habits, dreams that are never fulfilled, chronic anxiety or depression, persistently low resistance to illness, overdependence on drugs, an insatiable hunger for love and approval, children who learn nothing of self-respect or the joy of being. In brief, a life that feels like a long string of defeats, for which the only consolation, perhaps, is that sad mantra, “So who’s happy?”

High-self-esteem people can surely be knocked down by an excess of troubles, but they are quicker to pick themselves up again.

Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is in being who they are, not in being better than someone else.

When we have unconflicted self-esteem, joy is our motor, not fear. It is happiness that we wish to experience, not suffering that we wish to avoid. Our purpose is self-expression, not self-avoidance or self-justification. Our motive is not to “prove” our worth but to live our possibilities.

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

Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of happiness.

To have high self-esteem is to feel confidently appropriate to life.

To have low self-esteem is to feel inappropriate to life; wrong, not about this issue or that, but wrong as a person.

The point is not that our self-esteem “should” be affected by the choices we make but rather that by our natures it must be affected.

Any time we have to act, to face a challenge, to make a moral decision, we affect our feelings about ourselves for good or bad—depending on the nature of our response and the mental processes behind it. And if we avoid action and decisions in spite of their obvious necessity, that, too, affects our sense of self.

Confidence in our basic efficacy is confidence in our ability to learn what we need to learn and do what we need to do in order to achieve our goals, insofar as success depends on our own efforts.

Self-efficacy is not the conviction that we can never make an error. It is the conviction that we are able to think, to judge, to know—and to correct our errors. It is trust in our mental processes and abilities. Self-efficacy is not the certainty that we will be able to master any and every challenge that life presents. It is the conviction that we are capable in principle of learning what we need to learn and that we are committed to doing our rational and conscientious best to master the tasks and challenges entailed by our values.

Again, trust in our processes—and, as a consequence, a disposition to expect success for our efforts.

Alternatively, if he does experience healthy self-efficacy, his security lies less in what he knows than in his confidence in his ability to learn.

Self-respect entails the expectation of friendship, love, and happiness as natural, as a result of who we are and what we do.

we need to trust ourselves and we need to admire ourselves, and the trust and admiration need to be grounded in reality, not generated out of fantasy and self-delusion.

Self-esteem contemplates what needs to be done and says “I can.” Pride contemplates what has been accomplished and says “I did.”

Authentic pride has nothing in common with bragging, boasting, or arrogance. It comes from an opposite root. Not emptiness but satisfaction is its wellspring. It is not out to “prove” but to enjoy.

Pride is the emotional reward of achievement.

But does anything take more courage—is anything more challenging and sometimes frightening—than to live by our own mind, judgment, and values?

It expresses itself in an ability to preserve a quality of harmony and dignity under conditions of stress.

Then, on the purely physical level, we can observe characteristics such as these: We see eyes that are alert, bright, and lively; a face that is relaxed and (barring illness) tends to exhibit natural color and good skin vibrancy; a chin that is held naturally and in alignment with one’s body; and a relaxed jaw. We see shoulders relaxed yet erect; hands that tend to be relaxed and graceful; arms that tend to hang in an easy, natural way; a posture that tends to be unstrained, erect, well-balanced; a walk that tends to be purposeful (without being aggressive and overbearing).

Relaxation implies that we are not hiding from ourselves and are not at war with who we are.

High self-esteem is intrinsically reality oriented.

A mind that trusts itself is light on its feet.

If I am secure in my right to exist, confident that I belong to myself, unthreatened by certainty and self-confidence in others, then cooperation with them to achieve shared goals tends to develop spontaneously. Such a response clearly is to my self-interest, satisfies a variety of needs, and is not obstructed by fear and self-doubt.

Empathy and compassion, no less than benevolence and cooperativeness, are far more likely to be found among persons of high self-esteem than among low; my relationship to others tends to mirror and reflect my relationship to myself.

Fear of the humiliation of failure and, sometimes, the responsibilities of success. We live more to avoid pain than to experience joy.

The danger is that we will become the prisoners of our negative self-image. We allow it to dictate our actions. We define ourselves as mediocre or weak or cowardly or ineffectual and our performance reflects this definition.

Poor self-esteem not only inhibits thought, it tends to distort it. If we have a bad reputation with ourselves, and attempt to identify the motivation of some behavior, we can react anxiously and defensively and twist our brains not to see what is obvious—or, out of a sense of guilt and generalized unworthiness, we can be drawn not to the most logical explanation of our behavior but to the most damaging, to that which puts us in the worst light morally. Only self-condemnation feels appropriate. Or, if we are confronted with unjust accusations from others, we may feel disarmed and incapable of confuting their claims; we may accept the charges as true, paralyzed and exhausted by a heavy feeling of “How can I decide?”

The base and motor of poor self-esteem is not confidence but fear. Not to live, but to escape the terror of life, is the fundamental goal. Not creativity, but safety, is the ruling desire. And what is sought from others is not the chance to experience real contact but an escape from moral values, a promise to be forgiven, to be accepted, on some level to be taken care of.

Pseudo self-esteem is the illusion of self-efficacy and self-respect without the reality.

Nothing is more common than to pursue self-esteem by means that will not and cannot work. Instead of seeking self-esteem through consciousness, responsibility, and integrity, we may seek it through popularity, material acquisitions, or sexual exploits. Instead of valuing personal authenticity, we may value belonging to the right clubs, or the right church, or the right political party. Instead of practicing appropriate self-assertion, we may practice uncritical compliance to our particular group. Instead of seeking self-respect through honesty, we may seek it through philanthropy—I must be a good person, I do “good works.” Instead of striving for the power of competence (the ability to achieve genuine values), we may pursue the “power” of manipulating or controlling other people. The possibilities for self-deception are almost endless—all the blind alleys down which we can lose ourselves, not realizing that what we desire cannot be purchased with counterfeit currency.

The ultimate source of self-esteem is and can only be internal—in what we do, not what others do. When we seek it in externals, in the actions and responses of others, we invite tragedy.

Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness—that is, the absence of supportive feedback from their social environment. They are more willing to follow their vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored spaces do not frighten them—or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power

That which we call “genius” has a great deal to do with independence, courage, and daring—a great deal to do with nerve.

What determines the level of self-esteem is what the individual does, within the context of his or her knowledge and values. And since action in the world is a reflection of action within the mind of the individual, it is the internal processes that are crucial.

One does not have to attain “perfection” in these practices. One only needs to raise one’s average level of performance to experience growth in self-efficacy and self-respect.

Sometimes there was great lack of congruence between what we say our goals or purposes are and how we invest our time and energy.

The world belongs to those who persevere.

Of course, sometimes we may rationally choose to discontinue our efforts to understand or master something because, in the context of our other values and concerns, a further expenditure of time, energy, and resources is unjustified. But that is a different issue and off our immediate point, except to note that the decision to discontinue should be conscious.

Living consciously implies that my first loyalty is to truth, not to making myself right. All of us are wrong some of the time, all of us make mistakes, but if we have tied our self-esteem (or our pseudo self-esteem) to being above error, or if we have become overattached to our own positions, we are obliged to shrink consciousness in misguided self-protection.

To find it humiliating to admit an error is a certain sign of flawed self-esteem.