The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Branden, Nathaniel

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  A business leader who operates at a high level of consciousness plans for tomorrow’s market.

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  If we are operating a business, perhaps we need to revise our advertising strategy. Perhaps the, manager we counted on is proving unable to do the job. Perhaps the product that seemed like a brilliant idea when first conceived has been made obsolete by a competitor. Perhaps the sudden emergence of new competitors from other countries obliges us to rethink our global strategy. Perhaps recently reported changes in demographics has future implications for our business that we need to be examining now and relating to our present projections. How quick we will be to note such developments and respond appropriately has everything to do with the level of consciousness at which we operate.

  A business leader who operates at a high level of consciousness plans for tomorrow’s market; a leader operating at a more modest level thinks in terms of today’s; a leader operating at a low level may not realize that he is still thinking in terms of yesterday’s.

  On a more personal level, suppose I would like certain new behaviors from my spouse. I take certain actions aimed at evoking these changes. Do I persist in these actions without noting whether they produce a desired result? Do my spouse and I have the identical conversation forty times? Or, if I see that what I am doing is not working, do I try something else? In other words, do I operate mechanically or consciously?

  Persevering in the attempt to understand in spite of difficulties. In my pursuit of understanding and mastery I sometimes encounter difficulties. When this happens, I have a choice: to persevere or give up. Students face this alternative in their school studies. Scientists face it in struggling with research problems. Executives face it in the thousand challenges of everyday business. Everyone faces it in personal relationships.

  If we persevere in the will to efficacy yet seem stopped by a barrier we cannot move through, we may take a rest or try a new approach, but we do not surrender to despair or resign ourselves to defeat. In contrast, if we give up, withdraw, fall into passivity, or go through the motions of trying without meaning it, we shrink the level of our consciousness—to escape the pain and frustration that accompanied our efforts. The world belongs to those who persevere. I am reminded of a story told about Winston Churchill. He was invited to address a graduating class at a school, and the students waited expectantly through the laudatory introduction he received, eager for what the great man would say. Finally, Churchill stood up, looked down at the class, and thundered, “Never-never-never-never-never-never-never give up!” Then he sat down.

  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.

  Being receptive to new knowledge and willing to reexamine old assumptions. We are not operating at a high level of consciousness if we are absorbed totally by what we believe we already know and are uninterested in, or closed to, new information that might bear on our ideas and convictions. Such an attitude excludes the possibility of growth.

  The alternative is not to hold everything we think in doubt but rather to maintain an openness to new experience and knowledge—because even when we are not mistaken to begin with, even when our starting premises are valid, new clarifications, amendments, and improvements in our understanding are always possible. And sometimes our premises are mistaken and need to be revised. Which leads to the next point.

  Being willing to see and correct mistakes. When we accept certain ideas or premises as true, it is almost inevitable that over time we become attached to them. The danger then becomes that we may not wish to recognize evidence that we are mistaken.

  It is said of Charles Darwin that any time he encountered some fact that seemed to militate against his theory of evolution, he wrote it down immediately because he did not trust his memory to retain it.

  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.

  Seeking always to expand awareness—a commitment to learning—therefore, a commitment to growth as a way of life. In the second half of the nineteenth century the head of the U.S. Patent Office announced, “Everything of importance that can be invented has been invented.” This was the prevailing viewpoint throughout almost all human history. Until very recently, for the hundreds of thousands of years that Homo sapiens has existed on this planet, people saw existence as essentially unchanging. They believed that the knowledge possible to humans was already known. The idea of human life as a process of advancing from knowledge to new knowledge, from discovery to discovery—let alone of one scientific and technological breakthrough following another with exhilarating and disorienting speed—is only a couple of seconds old, measured in evolutionary time. In contrast to all the centuries behind us, we are living in an age when the total of human knowledge doubles about every ten years.

  Only a commitment to lifelong learning can allow us to remain adaptive to our world. Those who believe they have “thought enough” and “learned enough” are on a downward trajectory of increasing unconsciousness. The resistance of many people to becoming computer literate is a simple example. I recall a vice-president in a brokerage firm saying to me, “Having to struggle with learning a computer was devastating to my self-esteem. I didn’t want to learn. Yet I had no choice—it was necessary. But what a battle!”

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

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  A concern to understand the world around me. All of us are affected, in more ways than we can know, perhaps, by the world in which we live—physically, culturally, socially, economically, politically. The physical environment has consequences for our health. The cultural environment affects our attitudes, values, and the pleasure we take (or don’t take) in what we see, hear, and read. The social environment may have an impact on the serenity or turbulence of our existence. Economic factors affect our standard of living. Political factors affect the measure of our freedom and the extent of our control over our lives. Some would add to this list of the significant constituents of our context the cosmic or religious or spiritual dimension, however one interprets those words. In any event, this list is clearly an oversimplification and is offered only to point in a direction.

  To be oblivious to such forces, to imagine that we operate in a vacuum, is truly to live as a sleepwalker. Living consciously entails a desire to understand our full context.

  Obviously a person of high intelligence with a philosophical disposition may carry this concern farther than a person of more limited intellect. But even among persons of modest powers we can discern differences in interest level with regard to these matters—differences in curiosity, thoughtfulness, awareness that there is something about which to think. And again, since we are neither omniscient nor infallible, it is our intention and its expression in action that is of primary importance.

  A concern to know not only external reality but also internal reality, the reality of my needs, feelings, aspirations, and motives, so that I am not a stranger or a mystery to myself. In the course of my work as a psychotherapist I have met many people who are proud of their knowledge of the universe, from physics to political philosophy to aesthetics to the most recent information about Saturn to the teachings of Zen Buddhism—and yet who are blind to the operations of the private universe within. The wreckage of their personal life is a monument to the magnitude of their uncon
sciousness concerning the internal world of the self. They deny and disown their needs, rationalize their emotions, intellectualize (or “spiritualize”) their behavior—while moving from one unsatisfactory relationship to another or remaining for a lifetime in the same one without doing anything practical to improve it. I am not living consciously if my consciousness is used for everything but self-understanding.

  Sometimes our efforts at self-examination hit an impasse for which we require the assistance of a guide, teacher, or psychotherapist. My focus here, again, is on an underlying intention, an orientation: a concern to know the inner world of needs, feelings, motives, mental processes. As contrasted with what? That condition of self-estrangement and self-alienation that to varying degrees is the state of most people (and about which I wrote in The Disowned Self).

  This intention or concern shows up in such simple questions as: Do I know what I am feeling at any particular moment? Do I recognize the impulses from which my actions spring? Do I notice if my feelings and actions are congruent? Do I know what needs or desires I may be trying to satisfy? Do I know what I actually want in a particular encounter with another person (not what I think I “should” want)? Do I know what my life is about? Is the “program” I am living one I accepted uncritically from others, or is it genuinely of my own choosing? Do I know what I am doing when I particularly like myself and what I am doing when I don’t? These are the kind of questions that intelligent self-examination entails.

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  Do I know what I am doing when I particularly like myself and what I am doing when I don’t?

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  Note that this is entirely different from a morbid self-absorption that consists of taking one’s emotional temperature every ten minutes. I am not recommending obsessive self-preoccupation. I do not even like to talk about “introspection” in this context because it suggests something far more technical and remote from the average person’s experience. I prefer to talk about “the art of noticing.” Noticing the feelings in my body. Noticing my emotions during an encounter with someone. Noticing patterns in my behavior that may not be serving me. Noticing what excites me and what drains me. Noticing whether the voice inside my head is truly my own or belongs to someone else—perhaps my mother. To notice, I have to be interested. I have to think the practice worthwhile. I have to believe there is value in knowing myself. I may have to be willing to look at troublesome facts. I have to be convinced that, longterm, I have more to gain from consciousness than unconsciousness.

  Why do we need to notice bodily feelings? Well, to offer only one of many possibilities, this would be very useful to a driven individual who would prefer to avoid a heart attack and who would thus benefit from advance warnings of stress. Why do we need to notice our emotions during an encounter with someone? To better understand our actions and reactions. Why do we need to notice our patterns of behavior? To know which actions are producing desired results and which aren’t, and to discover what patterns need to be challenged. Why do we need to notice what is exciting and what is draining? To do more of the first and less of the second (a correction that by no means happens automatically or “instinctively”). Why might it be worth our efforts to identify the different voices speaking within? To recognize alien influences with alien agendas (the voice of a parent or a religious authority, for example), to learn how to distinguish one’s own true voice from all others, to operate one’s life as an autonomous human being.

  A concern to be aware of the values that move and guide me, as well as their roots, so that I am not ruled by values I have irrationally adopted or uncritically accepted from others. This point is closely related to the foregoing. One of the forms that living unconsciously takes is obliviousness to the values guiding one’s actions and even indifference to the question. All of us sometimes draw mistaken or irrational conclusions from our experience on the basis of which we may form values harmful to our well-being. All of us absorb values from the world around us—from family, peers, and culture—and these values are not necessarily rational or supportive of our true interests; often, in fact, they are not.

  A young person may see many examples of dishonesty and hypocrisy while growing up, may conclude, in effect, “This is the way the world works, and I must adapt to it,” and may as a consequence disvalue honesty and integrity.

  A man may be socialized to identify personal worth with income; a woman may be socialized to identify personal worth with the status of the man she marries.

  Such values subvert healthy self-esteem, and almost inevitably lead to self-alienation and to tragic life decisions. Living consciously, therefore, entails reflecting on and weighing in the light of reason and personal experience the values that set our goals and purposes.

  A Note on Addictions

  The avoidance of consciousness is clearly evident in problems of addiction. When we become addicted to alcohol or drugs or destructive relationships, the implicit intention is invariably to ameliorate anxiety and pain—to escape awareness of one’s core feelings of powerlessness and suffering. What we become addicted to are tranquilizers and anodynes. Anxiety and pain are not extinguished, they are merely rendered less conscious. Since they inevitably resurface with still greater intensity, larger and larger doses of poison are needed to keep consciousness at bay.

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  Self-destruction is an act best performed in the dark.

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  When we become addicted to stimulants, we are avoiding the exhaustion or depression they are intended to mask. Whatever else may be involved in a particular case, what is always involved is the avoidance of consciousness. Sometimes what is avoided are the implications of a lifestyle that requires stimulants to be sustained.

  To the addict, consciousness is the enemy. If I have reason to know that alcohol is dangerous to me and I nonetheless take a drink, I must first turn down the light of awareness. If I know that cocaine has cost me my last three jobs and I nonetheless choose to take a snort, I must first blank out my knowledge, must refuse to see what I see and know what I know. If I recognize that I am in a relationship that is destructive to my dignity, ruinous for my self-esteem, and dangerous to my physical well-being, and if I nonetheless choose to remain in it, I must first drown out the voice of reason, fog my brain, and make myself functionally stupid. Self-destruction is an act best performed in the dark.

  A Personal Example

  All of us can look back over our life and think of times when we did not bring to some concern as much consciousness as was needed. We tell ourselves, “If only I had thought more!” “If only I hadn’t been so impulsive!” “If only I had checked the facts more carefully!” “If only I had looked ahead a bit!”

  I think of my first marriage, when I was twenty-two years old. I think of all the signs (apart from our youth) that we were making a mistake: the numerous conflicts between us, the incompatibilities in some of our values, the ways in which at the core we were not each other’s “type.” Why, then, did I proceed? Because of our shared commitment to certain ideas and ideals. Because of sexual attraction. Because I desperately wanted to have a woman in my life. Because she was the first person from whom I did not feel alienated—and I lacked the confidence that another would come along. Because I naively imagined that marriage could solve all the problems between us. There were “reasons,” to be sure.

  Still, if someone had said to me (or if I had somehow thought to say to myself), “If you were to bring a higher level of consciousness to your relationship with Barbara, and to do so steadily, day after day, what do you suppose might happen?” I have to wonder what I might have been led to face and come to grips with. To a mind that is receptive, so simple yet provocative a question can have astonishing potency.

  The fact was, I examined neither the feelings driving me toward marriage nor the feelings signaling danger. I did not confront the logical and obvious questions: Why marry now? Why not wait until more is resolved between you? And because of what I did not do, my
self-esteem suffered a subtle wound—some part of me knew I was avoiding awareness—although it would be years before I fully understood this.

  There is an exercise that I give to therapy clients today that I wish I had known about then. The course of my life over the next decade or so might have been different. I will discuss this exercise and others like it below, but for the moment let me say this. If for two weeks I had sat at my desk each morning and wrote the following incomplete sentence in my notebook: “If I bring a higher level of consciousness to my relationship with Barbara—” and then wrote six to ten endings as rapidly as I could, without rehearsing, censoring, planning, or “thinking,” I would have found myself making more and more conscious, explicit, and inescapable all the deep reservations I had about this relationship as well as my process of avoidance and denial.

  I have given this exercise to clients who are confused or conflicted about some relationship, and the result almost invariably is major clarification. Sometimes the relationship radically improves; sometimes it ends.

  Had I known to use this technique, I would have had to face the fact that loneliness was driving me more than admiration. If Barbara had done a similar exercise, she would have realized that she was no more rational than I in what we were preparing to do. Whether we would have had the courage and wisdom to stay at this higher level of awareness is something I can only speculate about now. That one wakes up for a time is no guarantee that one will remain awake. Still, judging from the experience of my clients, it would have been extraordinarily difficult for us to persist blindly on our course because we would no longer have been blind, and opening one door clears the way to opening another and then another.