The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Branden, Nathaniel

  We can learn that a pain or fear confronted is far less dangerous than a pain or fear denied.

  We can learn that we are accountable for what we choose to do, but that feelings as such are neither moral nor immoral—they simply are.

  Today, this is the kind of understanding some people gain only in psychotherapy. But in the schools of the future, no one will finish the twelfth grade without having been exposed to these ideas. They will be an integral part of everyone’s education because of their clear importance to the achievement of a decent life.

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  We can learn to recognize and accept our emotions without losing our minds.

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  It need hardly be added that if a teacher is to succeed in teaching self-acceptance, he or she must be comfortable in accepting the feelings of students, must create an environment in which such acceptance is felt by everyone. Children who feel accepted find it easier to accept themselves.

  This point was made previously in our discussion of effective parenting and of necessity it is made again here. Indeed, virtually all of the principles identified in the preceding chapter have application in the classroom. For example, handling mistakes with benevolence rather than as if they were shameful; for reasons I trust are clear, how a teacher responds to a student’s mistakes can have an impact on the rest of the student’s life.

  Few schools today teach the art of thinking and fewer still teach the things I have been saying about emotions. But the schools of the future will have to.

  Dealing with Others

  Another subject will have to be added at the grade and high school level: the art of interpersonal competence.

  If self-esteem is confidence in our ability to cope with the basic challenges of life, one of these challenges is to relate effectively with other human beings. This means to relate in such a way that our interactions, more often than not, are experienced as positive and successful both for ourselves and for the other person(s). Consider that today about 95 percent of people who work for a living do so in an organization—they work with other people. If they lack the security and skills to relate competently, they are usually badly limited in what they will be able to accomplish. Any list of the four or five most important attributes for success in an organization mentions the ability to work well in cooperation with associates. True, people who relate poorly to others are sometimes successful, but it is the hard way around and the odds are against it.

  We know a lot about the skills that make for competence in human interactions, and this knowledge needs to be part of a young person’s education.

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  We know a lot about the skills that make for competence in human interactions, and this knowledge needs to be part of a young person’s education.

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  We know, for example, that the best relationships rest on a foundation of respect for self and respect for the other. We know that win-win (mutually beneficial) negotiations, in which both parties gain values, are superior to win-lose negotiations, in which one person’s gain is another’s loss (a theme, incidentally, that is encountered more and more often in business literature). We know that dealing with people fairly and justly provides the security they need to give their best. We know that a spirit of benevolence, compassion, and mutual aid—without self-sacrifice—serves the interests of everyone. We know that people who keep their word and honor their promises and commitments evoke trust and cooperation, and those who don’t, don’t. We know that winners look for solutions and losers look for someone to blame. We know that verbal and written communication skills are of the highest importance, especially in the workplace—and are in fact one of the most significant determinants of career success. We know about active listening and appropriate feedback and the role of empathy—and also about what happens when these elements are missing. We know that the individual practice of self-responsibility and the willingness to be accountable can give teams a synergistic power obtainable in no other way. We know that appropriate self-assertiveness can enrich, not subvert, team efforts, and that fear of assertiveness can sabotage them. We know that no human interaction can be optimally successful if one or both parties are afraid of normal self-assertiveness and self-expression.

  Is this knowledge of less importance to a young person’s education than information about geography?

  In providing training in interpersonal effectiveness, we accomplish two goals simultaneously: We nurture self-esteem, and we build competence in that which life asks of us.

  Competence and Skills

  We see, then, that what students need from teachers if they are to grow in self-esteem is respect, benevolence, positive motivation, and education in essential knowledge and vital skills.

  Necessarily, children arrive in any class with significant differences in ability. Effective teachers know that one can learn only by building on strengths, not by focusing on weaknesses. Consequently, they build competence (and self-esteem) by giving the student tasks geared to his or her present level of ability. The successes that this approach makes possible allow the student to progress to the next step.

  A teacher’s job is to make victories possible—and then build on them.

  Since the experience of mastering new challenges is essential to the growth of self-esteem, a teacher’s artfulness in knowing how to calibrate this progression is vital.

  The Grade Curve

  One of the most unfortunate practices in schools today is marking students on a grade curve. This places every student in an adversarial relationship to every other student. Instead of wishing to be among bright students, one is given reason to wish to be among dull ones—since the competence of others is a threat to one’s grades. Obviously there need to be criteria for measuring progress and for ascertaining level of mastery of a subject. I am not criticizing grades as such. But these criteria need to be objective. A standard that has no objective reference to knowledge or mastery and that makes every student the enemy of every other is no friend to self-esteem.

  If I cannot write a two-page essay without half a dozen grammatical errors, the fact that everyone else in the class made over a dozen errors does not make me an A student in English Composition. If I am to grow and learn as I need to, I must be held to reasonable standards of competence. To provide those standards is one of the responsibilities of educators. Resorting to the grade curve is a default on this responsibility.

  Cognitive Individuality

  In the past it was assumed that everyone learned the same way and one teaching method could be right for everyone. Today we know that people learn in different ways, have different “cognitive styles,” and that teaching at its best is adapted to the specific learning needs of individual students.9 The better schools have begun to integrate this understanding into their teaching methods.

  To quote Howard Gardner, a pioneering theorist in cognitive science:

  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.10

  Systems have been developed that identify the three or four major learning styles of people, so that course material can be presented in the way most likely to be effective. It is safe to predict that this is going to be enormously important to the self-esteem of young people who in the past would have had to struggle to adopt to a cognitive style less natural to them than their own.

  The Obedient Student Versus the Responsible Student

  Let us contrast more traditional ways of teaching with the kind of teaching that nurtures self-esteem by way of
a set of comparisons. What we are comparing are the characteristics of the obedient student with those of the responsible student—the student who experiences “the locus of control” as external to self versus the student who experiences “the locus of control” as internal. The contrast helps us understand some of the goals of “the new education.” I have adapted this material from Jane Bluestein’s 21st Century Discipline.

  The Obedient Student is characterized by the following traits: The Responsible Student is characterized by the following traits:

  1. Motivated by external factors, such as the need to please authority and win extrinsic approval. 1. Motivated by internal factors, such as the need to weigh choices and experience personal consequences.

  2. Follows orders. 2. Makes choices.

  3. May lack confidence to function effectively in absence of authority figures; lacks initiative; waits for orders. 3. More confident to function effectively in the absence of authority; takes initiative.

  4. Self-esteem is defined externally; feels worthwhile only when receiving approval. 4. Self-esteem: defined internally—worthwhile with or without approval (or even with disapproval).

  5. Feels “I am my behavior” (and somebody else probably made me this way). 5. Knows “I am not my behavior, although I am responsible for how I behave.”

  6. Difficulty seeing connection between behavior and its consequences. 6. Better able to see the connection between behavior and its consequences.

  7. Difficulty seeing choices and options; finds it hard to make decisions. 7. Better able to see choices and options and to make decisions.

  8. Feelings of helplessness and teacher dependency are common. 8. Personal sense of empowerment and independence is common.

  9. Operates from an external value system (usually that of someone important to him or her, that is, “significant others”) that may not be personally appropriate and may even be harmful. 9. Operates from internal value system (what is best or safest for him or her), while being considerate of the needs and values of others.

  10. Obeys; may think. 10. Thinks; may obey.

  11. Lacks confidence in internal signals and in ability to act in own self-interest. 11. Has confidence in internal signals and in ability to act in own self-interest.

  12. Has difficulty predicting outcomes or consequences of actions. 12. Better able to predict outcomes or consequences of actions.

  13. Has difficulty understanding or expressing personal needs. 13. Better able to understand and express personal needs.

  14. Limited ability to get needs met without hurting self or others. 14. Better able to take care of own needs without hurting self or others.

  15. Limited negotiation skills; orientation is “You win-I lose.” 15. Better developed negotiation skills; orientation is “You win-I win.”

  16. Compliant. 16. Cooperative.

  17. Oriented to avoid punishment, “keeping teacher off my back.” 17. Commitment to the task, experiencing outcome of positive choosing.

  18. May experience conflict between internal and external needs (what I want versus what teacher wants); may experience guilt or rebelliousness. 18. Better able to resolve conflict between internal and external needs (what I want versus what the teacher wants); less inclined to guilt or rebelliousness.

  19. May make poor choices to avoid disapproval or abandonment (to make my friends like me more). 19. May make poor choices to experience personal consequences and to satisfy curiosity.

  Moral Implications

  To anticipate one of the conclusions toward which I am heading, I want to draw attention to one moral aspect of the shift from the ideal of obedience to the ideal of responsibility.

  Whereas the obedient student will, under different circumstances, sacrifice self or others (this has been the practice of obedient people throughout all of human history), the responsible student, ideally, will be taught to operate outside the sacrifice paradigm. This is implicit in the “win-win” philosophy, although, unfortunately, it has not been identified explicitly. At best, the responsible student may learn a new concept of human relationships that rejects the propriety of practicing human sacrifice.

  On the one hand, he or she will be far less ready to sacrifice others in pursuit of personal goals. On the other hand, he or she will be far less willing to be sacrificed for the alleged greater good of some alleged higher value—that is, for someone else’s goals. He or she will be far less willing, for instance, to sacrifice a personal life for the good of the company (or the tribe) and will be far less willing to die (or kill) in a war dreamed up by leaders for reasons that offend human intelligence.

  The obedient student was taught not to challenge authority. The responsible student is prepared to question—and if need be, to challenge—anything. As we will see more clearly in the next chapter, that is what the marketplace now requires. More broadly, it is what civilization requires.

  Self-Esteem Curricula

  A number of educators have designed specific programs for the school system aimed at building the self-esteem of students. I will only mention two of which I have personal knowledge and that I admire.

  I have already quoted from one designed by Robert Reasoner: Building Self-Esteem: A Comprehensive Program for Schools. This program has been adopted by a sizable number of California schools, and its success has been impressive—measured in terms of improved grades and attendance, significantly reduced dropouts, teenage pregnancy, and drug addiction, and a massive drop in vandalism. Indeed, most of the schools where the program is used were subsequently ranked by an independent agency to be among the finest in California.

  Another powerful program is Constance Dembrowsky’s Personal and Social Responsibility.11 The aim of this course is not self-esteem explicitly but the cultivation of self-responsibility and the development of the kind of skills that generate the experience of self-efficacy—which means it is a self-esteem program in everything but name. Designed for teenagers, it can be especially effective with teenagers who are at risk. Ms. Dembrowsky is in the front ranks of those in the self-esteem movement who understand that the roots of healthy self-esteem are internal rather than external. Her focus is on what the young person must learn and do to become empowered.

  One of my hopes for this book is that it will contribute to the creation of new self-esteem programs for the schools designed specifically to develop the practice of the six pillars in young people.

  The frustrations, pressures, and challenges teachers face test their self-esteem, energy, and dedication every day. To preserve throughout their careers the vision with which the best of them started—to hold fast to the idea that the business they are in is that of setting minds on fire—is a heroic project.

  The work they are doing could not be more important. Yet to do it well, they need to embody (at least to a decent extent) that which they wish to communicate.

  A teacher who does not operate at an appropriate level of consciousness cannot model living consciously for his or her students.

  A teacher who is not self-accepting will be unable successfully to communicate self-acceptance.

  A teacher who is not self-responsible will have a difficult time persuading others of the value of self-responsibility.

  A teacher who is afraid of self-assertiveness will not inspire its practice in others.

  A teacher who is not purposeful is not a good spokesperson for the practice of living purposefully.

  A teacher who lacks integrity will be severely limited in the ability to inspire it in others.

  If their goal is to nurture self-esteem in those entrusted to their care, teachers—like parents, like psychotherapists, like all of us—need to begin by working on their own. One arena in which this can be done is the classroom itself. Just as parenting can be a spiritual discipline, a path for personal development, so can teaching. The challenges each present can be turned into vehicles for personal growth.

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  Self-Esteem and Work

  Self-estee
m, which has always been an urgent personal need, has gained new significance in the last decades of this century. Changed social and economic realities have created new challenges to our trust in ourselves.

  Let us remember the primary meaning of self-esteem. It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind, in our ability to think. By extension, it is confidence in our ability to learn, make appropriate choices and decisions, and manage change. The survival value of such confidence is obvious; so is the danger when that trust is missing. Studies of business failure tell us that a common cause is executive fear of making decisions. But it is not just executives who need trust in their judgment; everyone needs it, and never more so than now.

  The Context

  We live in a period when we are faced with an extraordinary number of choices concerning our values, religious or philosophical orientations, and general life-style. We are very far from being a monolithic culture to which everyone more or less conforms. As I pointed out earlier, the greater the number of choices and decisions we need to make at a conscious level, the more urgent our need for self-esteem. But here I want to focus not on the culture at large but on the world of work—the challenges to economic adaptiveness both for individuals and organizations.

  In clarifying why I assert that the economic need for large numbers of people with decent levels of self-esteem is unprecedented and represents a turning point in our evolution, I must ask the reader to follow me through a number of brief historical excursions. Without this historical understanding, I do not believe one can fully appreciate the moment in history at which we have arrived—nor its significance for self-esteem.