A Personal Example
I have said that moral decisions are not always easy and that sometimes, rightly or wrongly, we experience our choices as agonizingly complex and difficult.
Many years ago I was married to a woman I was very attached to but no longer loved; my romance with Ayn Rand was fading but not “officially” terminated. Both relationships were painfully unresolved when I met and fell passionately in love with a third woman I would later marry: Patrecia, who would die at the age of thirty-seven. For a long time my mind was a chaos of conflicting loyalties, and I handled things very badly. I did not tell the truth to my wife or to Ayn as soon as I could have—never mind the reasons. “Reasons” do not alter facts.
* * *
Lies do not work.
* * *
It was a long road, but at its end was painfully acquired knowledge I had possessed at the beginning—that the truth had to be told and that by procrastinating and delaying I merely made the consequences for everyone more terrible. I succeeded in protecting no one, least of all myself. If part of my motive was to spare people I cared about, I inflicted a worse pain than they would otherwise have experienced. If part of my motive was to protect my self-esteem by avoiding a conflict among my values and loyalties, it was my self-esteem that I damaged. Lies do not work.
Sentence Completions to Facilitate the Practice of Integrity
If we examine our lives, we may notice that our practice of integrity exhibits inconsistencies. There are areas where we practice it more and areas where we practice it less. Rather than evade this fact, it is useful to explore it. It is worthwhile to consider: What stands in the way of my practicing integrity in every area of my life? What would happen if I lived my values consistently?
Here are sentence stems that can aid the process of exploration:
Integrity to me means—
If I think about the areas where I find it difficult to practice full integrity—
If I bring a higher level of consciousness to the areas where I find it difficult to practice full integrity—
If I bring 5 percent more integrity into my life—
If I bring 5 percent more integrity to my work—
If I bring 5 percent more integrity to my relationships—
If I remain loyal to the values I truly believe are right—
If I refuse to live by values I do not respect—
If I treat my self-esteem as a high priority—
A suggestion: Work with the first four of these stems for the first week, and the second four the following week. On the weekends work with the stem: If any of what I am writing is true, it might be helpful if I—. If you choose to bring a high level of awareness to what you produce, you may discover that living with greater integrity has become more realizable.
A Practical Application
“Do you think padding my expense account is really so awful?” a client asked me. “Everyone does it.”
“I imagine,” I said to him, “that something about it must disturb you or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I’ve been doing these stems, ‘If I bring 5 percent more integrity into my life,’ and the other day when I began to fill out my expense sheet with padded items, I don’t know, it didn’t feel comfortable, it felt wrong.”
“Lying gave you a bad feeling,” I remarked.
“Yes, so I filled it out truthfully, and then, later, I wondered if I wasn’t a sucker.”
“You wondered, why be concerned with my integrity if other people aren’t concerned with theirs?”
“Hell, no, if I’d thought about it like that, I’d—” He broke off and stared thoughtfully into space.
“What?”
“What you just said is what it all really comes to, doesn’t it?”
“And if so, the question that naturally arises is: Do I take a poll on what I’ll call acceptable behavior?”
“But I think lying about my expenses is wrong!” he said, almost perplexed.
“So, then, what’s the question …?”
“When I do something I think is wrong, it leaves, you know, a bad taste.”
“I wonder what policy you’ll adopt for the future.”
“I feel cleaner when I’m honest.”
“So you’re saying, from the perspective of self-esteem, honesty is the best policy?”
“That’s what it’s looking like.”
“I think that’s a fairly important observation.”
Keeping Your Integrity in a Corrupt World
In a world where we regard ourselves and are regarded by others as accountable for our actions, the practice of integrity is relatively easier than in a world where the principle of personal accountability is absent. A culture of accountability tends to support our moral aspirations.
* * *
The challenge for people today, and it is not an easy one, is to maintain high personal standards while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.
* * *
If we live in a society where business associates, corporate heads, political figures, religious leaders, and other public personalities hold themselves to high standards of morality, it is relatively easier for an average person to practice integrity than in a society where corruption, cynicism, and amorality are the norm. In the latter kind of society, the individual is likely to feel that the quest for personal integrity is futile and unrealistic—unless he or she is extraordinarily independent and autonomous.
The challenge for people today, and it is not an easy one, is to maintain high personal standards while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer. Grounds for such a feeling are to be found in the behavior of our public figures, the horror of world events, and in our so-called art and entertainment, so much of which celebrates depravity, cruelty, and mindless violence. All contribute to making the practice of personal integrity a lonely and heroic undertaking.
If integrity is a source of self-esteem, then it is also, and never more so than today, an expression of self-esteem.
The Principal of Reciprocal Causation
Indeed, this leads to an important question. About all six pillars it might be asked, “To practice them, does one not need already to possess self-esteem? How then can they be the foundation of self-esteem?”
In answering, I must introduce what I call the principle of reciprocal causation. By this I mean that behaviors that generate good self-esteem are also expressions of good self-esteem. Living consciously is both a cause and an effect of self-efficacy and self-respect. And so is self-acceptance, self-responsibility, all the other practices I describe.
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. The more I live with integrity, the more I enjoy good self-esteem; and if I enjoy good self-esteem, it feels natural to live with integrity.
Another noteworthy aspect of the dynamics involved here is that the practice of these virtues over time tends to generate a felt need for them. If I habitually operate at a high level of consciousness, unclarity and fog in my awareness will make me uncomfortable: I will usually experience a drive to dispel the darkness. If I have made self-responsibility second nature, passivity and dependency will be onerous to me. I will experience internal pressure to reassert the control over my existence possible only with autonomy. If I have been consistent in my integrity, I will experience dishonesty on my part as disturbing and will feel a thrust to resolve the dissonance and restore the inner sense of moral cleanliness.
Once we understand the practices I have described, we have the power (at least to some extent) to choose them. The power to choose them is the power to raise the level of our self-esteem, from whatever point we may be starting and however difficult the project may be in the early stages.
An analogy to physical exercise may be helpful. If we are in poor physical condition, exercise is typically difficult; as our condition improves, exercise becomes easier and more en
joyable. We begin where we are—and build our strength from there. Raising self-esteem follows the same principle.
These practices are ideals to guide us. And—this can hardly be overemphasized—they do not have to be lived “perfectly” 100 percent of the time in order to have a beneficent impact on our lives. Small improvements make a difference.
It might strike the reader, reflecting on this list of self-esteem practices, that they sound very much like a code of ethics—or part of one. That is true. The virtues that self-esteem asks of us are also ones that life asks of us.
The practice of personal integrity is the sixth pillar of self-esteem.
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The Philosophy of Self-Esteem
To the extent that the six practices are integrated into our daily life, self-esteem is supported and strengthened. To the extent that they are not, self-esteem is undermined and subverted. This is the central thesis of Part II thus far. But what of an individual’s beliefs, premises, ideas? Is it only practices that matter or do convictions also play a role in supporting self-esteem?
The answer is that convictions are important because they give rise to emotions and actions (practices). They are a crucial factor in the development of an individual’s self-esteem. What people think, what they believe, what they tell themselves, influences what they feel and what they do. In turn, they experience what they feel and do as having meaning for who they are.
Part II began with a chapter entitled “The Focus on Action.” Action has the last word, in that no living value can be achieved or sustained without it. Beliefs in a vacuum, beliefs divorced from action, mean nothing. But since beliefs do affect actions, since beliefs have action implications, we need to examine them in their own right.
There are beliefs that lead toward the practices I have been describing, and there are beliefs that lead away from them. When I speak of “beliefs” in this context, I mean convictions deeply grounded in our being. I do not mean notions to which we pay lip service or ideas we tell ourselves in the hope they will spark desired motivation. I mean premises that have the power to evoke emotion and to stimulate and guide behavior.
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.
We can think of these ideas as “the philosophy of self-esteem”—a set of interrelated premises that inspire behaviors leading to a strong sense of efficacy and worth. We can also see in them an explication, in outline form, of the basic philosophy driving this book.
I place beliefs that have a bearing on self-esteem into two categories: beliefs about self and beliefs about reality. In each case the relevance of the idea to self-esteem is obvious.
Beliefs About the Self That Support Self-Esteem
General
I have a right to exist.
I am of high value to myself.
I have a right to honor my needs and wants, to treat them as important.
I am not here on earth to live up to someone else’s expectations; my life belongs to me. (And this is equally true of every other human being. Each person is the owner of his or her life; no one is here on earth to live up to my expectations.)
I do not regard myself as anyone else’s property and I do not regard anyone else as my property.
I am lovable.
I am admirable.
I will usually be liked and respected by the people I like and respect.
I should deal with others fairly and justly and others should deal with me fairly and justly.
I deserve to be treated courteously and with respect by everyone.
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.
No other individual or group has the power to determine how I will think and feel about myself.
I trust my mind.
I see what I see and know what I know.
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.
* * *
If I persevere, and if my goals are realistic, I am competent to achieve them.
I am competent to cope with the basic challenges of life.
I am worthy of happiness.
I am “enough.” (This does not mean that I have nothing more to learn and nowhere further to grow; it means that I have the right to primary self-acceptance, as discussed earlier.)
I am able to rise again from defeat.
I have a right to make mistakes; that is one of the ways I learn. Mistakes are not grounds for self-damnation.
I do not sacrifice my judgment, do not pretend my convictions are different than they are, to win popularity or approval.
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.
If my goals are rational, I deserve to succeed at what I attempt.
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.
Self-development and self-fulfillment are appropriate moral goals.
My happiness and self-realization are noble purposes.
Living Consciously
The more conscious I am of that which bears on my interests, values, needs, and goals, the better my life will work.
It is joyful to exercise my mind.
I am better served by correcting my mistakes than by pretending they do not exist.
I am better served by holding my values consciously than unconsciously—and by examining them rather than by holding them uncritically as not-to-be-questioned “axioms.”
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.
If I understand the wider context in which I live and act, I will be more effective; it is worth my while to seek to understand my environment and the wider world around me.
To remain effective, I need to keep expanding my knowledge; learning needs to be a way of life.
The better I know and understand myself, the better the life I can create. Self-examination is an imperative of a fulfilled existence.
Self-Acceptance
At the most fundamental level, I am for myself.
At the most fundamental level, I accept myself.
I accept the reality of my thoughts, even when I cannot endorse them and would not choose to act on them; I do not deny or disown 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.
I accept that what I think, feel, or do is an expression of myself, at least in the moment it occurs. I am not bound by thoughts, feelings, or actions I cannot sanction, but neither do I evade their reality or pretend they are not mine.
I accept the reality of my problems, but I am not defined by them. My problems are not my essence. My fear, pain, confusion, or mistakes are not my core.
* * *
At the most fundamental level, I am for myself.
* * *
Self-Responsibility
I am responsible f
or my existence.
I am responsible for the achievement of my desires.
I am responsible for my choices and actions.
I am responsible for the level of consciousness I bring to my work and other activities.
I am responsible for the level of consciousness I bring to my relationships.
I am responsible for my behavior with other people—co-workers, associates, customers, spouse, children, friends.
I am responsible for how I prioritize my time.
I am responsible for the quality of my communications.
I am responsible for my personal happiness.
I am responsible for choosing or accepting the values by which I live.
I am responsible for raising my self-esteem; no one else can give me self-esteem.
In the ultimate sense, I accept my aloneness. That is, I accept that no one is coming to make my life right, or save me, or redeem my childhood, or rescue me from the consequences of my choices and actions. In specific issues, people may help me, but no one can take over primary responsibility for my existence. Just as no one else can breathe for me, no one else can take over any of my other basic life functions, such as earning the experience of self-efficacy and self-respect.
The need for self-responsibility is natural; I do not view it as a tragedy.
Self-Assertiveness
In general, it is appropriate for me to express my thoughts, convictions, and feelings, unless I am in a context where I judge it objectively desirable not to.
The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem Page 19