Nathaniel Branden: It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is eas...

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.

Nathaniel Branden

second-chance change acceptance

Your choices have psychological consequences. The way you choose to deal with reality, truth, facts - your choice to honor or dishonor your own perceptions - registers in your mind, for good or for bad, and either confirms and strengthens your self-esteem or undermines and weakens it.

Nathaniel Branden

choices self-esteem reality

Our motive is not to prove our self-worth, but to live up to our possibilities.

Nathaniel Branden

possibility self-worth self-esteem

How do we keep our inner fire alive? Two things, at minimum, are needed: an ability to appreciate the positives in our life – and a commitment to action. Every day, it's important to ask and answer these questions: ‘What's good in my life?’ and ‘What needs to be done?

Nathaniel Branden

motivation leadership commitment

If you are an adult, you are responsible for your life and well-being. No one owes you the fulfillment of your needs or wants; no one is here on earth to serve you. If you respect the principle of self-ownership, you understand that no one else owns you and that you do not own anyone else. Only on this understanding can there be peace on earth and good will among human beings.

Nathaniel Branden

adults understanding self

Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.

Nathaniel Branden

pain eye should

Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is being who they are, not in being better than someone else.

Nathaniel Branden

positive happiness inspirational

The more you surrender to the fear of someone's disapproval, the more you lose face in your own eyes, and the more desperate you become for someone's approval. Within you is a void that should have been filled by self-esteem. When you attempt to fill it with the approval of others instead, the void grows deeper and the hunger for acceptance and approval grows stronger. The only solution is to summon the courage to honor your own judgment, frightening though that may be in the beginning.

Nathaniel Branden

eye self-esteem acceptance

A commitment to lifelong learning is a natural expression of the practice of living consciously.

Nathaniel Branden

expression practice commitment

Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.

Nathaniel Branden

self-confidence self-esteem inspirational

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence-to look at the world through our own eyes-to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning-to be, in a word, self-responsible.

Nathaniel Branden

eye philosophy thinking

It is impressive to see a person who has been battered by life in many ways, who is torn by a variety of unsolved problems, who may be alienated from many aspects of the self-but who is still fighting, still struggling, still striving to find the path to a fulfilling existence, moved by the wisdom of knowing, "I am more than my problems."

Nathaniel Branden

fighting struggle self

Live with integrity, respect the rights of other people, and follow your own bliss.

Nathaniel Branden

rights integrity people

If my aim is to prove I am 'enough,' the project goes on to infinity-because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable.

Nathaniel Branden

issues battle goes-on

Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.

Nathaniel Branden

self-esteem acceptance depression

Most of us are taught from an early age to pay far more attention to signals coming from other people than from within. We are encouraged to ignore our own needs and wants and to concentrate on living up to others expectations.

Nathaniel Branden

age expectations people

You can be loved by your family, your mate, and your friends yet not love yourself. You can be admired by your associates yet regard yourself as worthless. You can project an image of assurance and poise that fools almost everyone yet secretly tremble with a sense of inadequacy. You can fulfill the expectations of others yet fail your own. You can win every honor yet feel that you have accomplished nothing. What shall it profit a person to gain the esteem of the whole world yet lose his or her own?

Nathaniel Branden

expectations winning love-you

Stressing the practice of living purposefully as essential to fully realized self-esteem is not equivalent to measuring an individual's worth by his or her external achievements. We admire achievements-in ourselves and others-and it is natural and appropriate for us to do so. But that is not the same thing as saying that our achievements are the measure or grounds of our self-esteem. The root of our self-esteem is not our achievements but those internally generated practices that, among other things, make it possible for us to achieve.

Nathaniel Branden

stress self-esteem practice

If you face life without confidence in your own powers, you succumb too easily to setbacks and adversity; you lack the will to persevere.

Nathaniel Branden

confidence adversity faces

One of the most significant characteristics of healthy self esteem is that it is the state of one who is not at war either with himself or with others.

Nathaniel Branden

self-esteem inspirational war

It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively--which means to live authentically--is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding--from others and also from themselves.