The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Nathaniel Branden

We know that winners look for solutions and losers look for someone to blame.

Each person has a unique mixture of intelligences, or ways of understanding the world—linguistic, logical, mathematical, spatial, musical, physical (the use of the body to solve problems or make things), understanding of others and understanding of self. Also, each person has a different learning style. Some may respond best to visual information, others to language (lectures, reading), others must touch or engage the physical world for things to make sense. Once we understand this, it becomes malpractice to treat kids as if their minds were all the same.

“Looking back over our therapy, I feel that nothing else that happened was quite so impactful as the simple fact that I always felt respected by you. I pulled everything I could to make you despise me and throw me out. I kept trying to make you act like my father. You refused to cooperate. Somehow, I had to deal with that, I had to let that in, which was difficult at first, but as I did the therapy began to take hold.”

“The goal is not to prove that you are brilliant. The goal is to assist clients to discover that they are brilliant.”

for the detective, the crime is known and the challenge is to discover the identity of the criminal, whereas to the psychoanalyst, the criminal is known and the challenge is to discover the crime.