What is Self-esteem and how do you increase it?

Saturday = peace within – High Self-estem = peace within = saturday everyday

Saturday my friend. Yes. That’s a fact. And I Imagine that’s the case for you too. It’s my  ‘me-time’ time and preparation for the coming week’s challenge. Hence, I’m going to keep it short so I can focus on understanding the decision-making process, which is the challenge theme of next week!

Instead I’m going to talk briefly about my favourite book The Six pillars of self-esteem, written by Nathaniel Branden, a self-esteem researcher and a guru within the field until he passed away some years ago. It’s without a doubt the book that has made the biggest impact on my life. Why? It gets to those 20% that makes 80% of the difference, and is does so in a straight forward and easy to grasp way. It’s about changing from within, taking control of what you can take control of. Your mind.

The book presents Six pillars that are essential if we are to develop and live a life with high level of self-esteem. The six pillars of self-esteem are:

  1. The Practice of Living Consciously
  2. The Practice of Self-Acceptance
  3. The Practice of Self-Responsibility
  4. The Practice of Self-Assertiveness
  5. The Practice of Living Purposefully
  6. The Practice of Personal Integrity

What’s self-esteem you may ask, because I didn’t even know there was a difference between self-esteem and confidence two years ago. Nathaniel Branden, came to the following definition:

“Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. 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 respond effectively to change. It is also the experience that success, achievement, fulfilment – happiness – are right and natural for us. The survival-value of such confidence is obvious; so is the danger when it is missing.”

So, what’s the point of this blog post? Well, I just wanted to open you up to the concept of self-esteem, and personally testify to how it changed my life after putting some serious effort into developing it. If you’re curious, you can listen to the audiobook here (link), it’s only three ½ hours long. And if you want to have it as an mp3 on your phone, just copy the YouTube link and use this webpage (link) to download it.  If you want the quick fix, here’s kind of a summary I did a while back:

 

Besides that, I wish you a great day. For me, the evening is going to be spent with friends and board games. Did I mention I love Saturday?

/Alexander

About the author: alenils

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