The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem

The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem is the definitive piece on one of the most important psychological traits we need to live a happy life, and lays out how you can introduce six practices into your life, to assert your right to be happy and live a fulfilling life.

You can read headlines like “10 Tips to Appear More Confident” or”How to Boost Your Self-Esteem” everywhere, but if I asked you to really explain what self-esteem is, could you do it?

It surely has to be more than the drunken confidence of frat guys trying cheesy pick-up lines on girls, right? Yup!

Nathaniel Branden says self-esteem is the immune system of consciousness, with the ability to resist, make it strong and regenerate it.

In a way, self-esteem is like calcium. Calcium is what makes your teeth and bones strong, making it an essential part of a healthy body. While a lack of calcium won’t kill you, if you stay depleted over a long time, living a fully engaged life becomes really hard, as your body gets weak.

The same is true for self-esteem and your psychological well-being. Sure, you can navigate through life without it, but you’ll always get pushed around and not truly live in accordance with your goals, purposes and values.

This is because self-esteem works like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you expect yourself to be capable of, the more these expectations influence your behavior in a way that makes your actions align with them. Therefore, your self-esteem is a way to turn your desires into reality.

I can’t describe all six pillars here, but number 2 and 3 are important. They are self-acceptance and self-responsibility, which may be a bit hard to differentiate at first, so let me try. Self-acceptance is connected to mindfulness. You choose to value yourself, just the way you are, without practicing judgment. For example, yesterday I bit my nails very badly. I could get mad at myself and regret this, but if I choose to accept that it happened, I can then ask why I bit in the first place. The answer is that I was stressed, because I felt behind on what I wanted to accomplish for the day, and biting my nails was a physical relief for the stress that I created in my head when my expectations didn’t match reality. If you practice self-acceptance and dig deeper, you’ll make repeating this bad behavior a lot less likely. A caveat: Self-acceptance shouldn’t be confused with complacency. To the contrary. The only way to find the drive to get better is to accept yourself as you are now, otherwise you’ll waste all of your time agonizing over your past mistakes. Self-responsibility…