10 Lessons From Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem Book (PDF Bonus)

Everybody wants more confidence. What if six traits could double yours? We’re going over those in the “Six Pillars of Self-esteem.” It says that all self-awareness, self-worth, and everything in our lives is derived from how we feel about ourselves and how we see the world.

If we constantly walk around with low self-esteem, we will not have great relationships because we feel worthy. We will not have the confidence to excel in our jobs or entrepreneurship or whatever we want to do. It is because we don’t feel like we deserve it. We’re not going to make money because it’s evil, and we’re not supposed to have any right.

Top 10 Lessons From Six Pillars Of Self-esteem Book

We live in a world where everyone has been told they’re special. It is not true in the way we’ve been told. Everyone is indeed unique, but not everyone can become world-famous. No matter how special you are, you cannot become a pro basketball player if you don’t have the physical disposition.

Modern society has started to tell us that we’re unique because they think this will raise our self-esteem. Also, this will counteract the effect of bullying and decrease suicidal tendencies. However, that’s not true. Nowadays, a common thing in schools is giving participation certificates to make everyone feel equal. In contrast, the common sense group would say this will increase everyone’s self-esteem. That’s not what’s happening.

This article is fixing some of the misconceptions about raising your self-esteem. Most of the ideas I will present in this article come from Nathaniel Branden’s book “The Six Pillars of Self-esteem.” He defines self-esteem as the ability to trust one’s mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness.

1. Arrogance Vs Self-esteem

The flight attendants do their safety drills upfront when you board a plane. She instructs you about the oxygen masks that pop down in an emergency. She says you should put your mask on first because you’ve got about three seconds when the cabin rips open in thirty thousand feet in the air. You’ve got three seconds before you pass out.

So if you don’t have oxygen on, it doesn’t matter how much of a hero you are. You can’t help anyone else around you until you’ve done that yourself. They even tell you to do that before your kids sit next. The same goes for self-esteem. No one will feel good about us if we don’t feel good about ourselves. It’s contagious.

If we don’t have inner self-confidence, no one else will be confident in us. It will be hard to accept it if we don’t feel like we deserve it. We don’t want arrogance. Nathaniel says that arrogance is comparison-based. Compared to X, Y, and Z, how am I doing? It’s putting your mask on first and giving more instead of trying to take, compare, and be better.

Keynotes:

  • If you feel and believe your self-esteem, it only works in your mind.
  • Don’t compare your self-esteem with others.

2. Kill your inner pessimist

Nathaniel Branden goes over signs of low self-esteem in three of them.

A) Self-fulfilling prophecy.
B) Self-sabotage.
C) Constant dissatisfaction.

That’s a sign of low self-esteem. Feel like it’s never good enough like you never hit your mark. That’s low self-esteem. We realized that confidence, self-esteem, and belief in ourselves are unnatural. Why? It is because our brains are two million years old and are not designed to make us feel great about ourselves all the time and confident. Their priority is to keep us alive and make us survive.

So we have all these distinctions in our brains. One of those is looking for every threat, every potential threat in our immediate environment. You’re looking around all day in your brain, saying there’s something wrong. There is an area where self-sabotage. There’s not enough fill-in-the-blank.

So we got to kill that inner pessimist. We can’t have that inner track playing of our two million-year-old brain constantly trying to make us feel like there’s a threat in the future.

It will never go away if you have the inner pessimists who are right. The best golfer said he is terrified he’s stirring up before tournaments. So it’s not that you will never have fear. It’s learning how to reprogram it. So with self-esteem, it’s not that you’re always going to feel confident 24/7.

Keynotes:

  • You can not remove your fear, but you can win.
  • Find out your weakness and try to learn to reprogram them. (Ex- If you fear spiders, then you can set a spider wallpaper on your phone)

3. Brave life

We’ve got to find ways to reduce fear using living. Most people go through life like that and don’t have self-esteem because they’re not fully immersed in what they’re doing. Nathaniel Branden says that if we want self-esteem, we must practice being in the moment, living bravely, and everything else will follow. That is because we’re so engaged in what we’re doing.

We have to not be on autopilot because those are much less than you probably thought. We had a dollar for every day. Spend it however you want to put it on black, maybe double it when you look back on time. I’ve found that the years are short, but the days are long. A day can feel like forever, but a year goes by before they’re up. We got to live bravely.

Keynotes:

  • You can’t control your whole life because it’s full of surprise and danger.
  • Only brave people can overcome the problems quickly and restart themselves easily.

4. Self-acceptance

While self-esteem is a general feeling you have the entire day, self-acceptance is a conscious practice. Self-acceptance is one of the most important aspects of having healthy self-esteem. More broadly, it is a prerequisite for self-improvement. One of my favorite sayings comes from psychologists who see two kinds of people.

There are the kinds of people who need tightening. These are the celebrities who are off the rails. Go to Celebrity Rehab. This is the guy with a midlife crisis, spending his inheritance, buying a sports car, whatever they need to tighten up. They need more structure and rigidness.

But the other type of people psychologists see is the kind that needs loosening. If we don’t have self-esteem or lack confidence, it’s because we’re too tight. If we let go, we’d have everything would start flowing more. What Nathaniel’s saying here is that we got to loosen up. We’ve got to be that second kind of person. What he’s saying is that we got to improve on what we can change and accept what we can’t change.

Keynotes:

  • How bad people may seem, don’t be judgmental towards yourself.
  • Try to accept little problems and things. The sooner you accept, the better you forget regrets.

5. Self-responsibility

There’s a famous study. Martin Seligman was in on it of the dogs, the shock experiment. They had two dogs and a cage with a series of shocks. One dog can move away and escape the shocks whenever they administer it. The other dog could not move away from it no matter where he went. It would always shock him.

They found that the dog that could move away when they administered the same shocks started to move away. But the dog couldn’t stay there and remained stuck. Now, this is the fascinating part. They took both dogs out and moved them to different cages. The next day, they found the dog who could escape shocks was perfectly fine. But the dog who had who could not escape the shocks cowered up and gave up in the corner.

It is what they call learned helplessness. When we have no control over our environment, we give up and go into victimhood. And it’s a lot harder to escape whatever shock we’re going through in our life.

Self-responsibility doesn’t mean we have to fake positivity. That doesn’t mean we have to ignore whatever bad thing is happening. It means we can’t be like that second dog, and we got to get up and keep fighting and pushing forward.

Keynotes:

  • Be independent, try to solve without any help, and develop your responsibility.
  • Keep struggling and push yourselves forward.

6. Self-assertiveness

Self-assertiveness means the willingness to stand up for yourself and treat yourself with respect. All human encounters with this are all about is believing in yourself. That sounds as cheeseboard as it can get. But if you don’t believe in yourself, no one else’s.

You teach people how to treat you and that you’re not if something is going on in your life. At some level, we’re tolerating that we teach people how to treat us if we don’t stand up for ourselves. We’re going to get walked all over.

It could be in a relationship. You don’t stand up for yourself, and you’re having issues. You’re setting a precedent that this is how we communicate in the future. Then the same problem arises, and it gets shut down repeatedly. You see this all the time in workplaces. Someone is walking all over the other person, and it could be a superior, inferior, whatever. You teach people how to treat you to yourself.

Keynotes:

  • Assertiveness is standing up for yourself, holding yourself to your standards, and holding others to your standards.
  • Respect yourself and present yourself as a confident man/woman.

7. Living purposefully

If we want self-esteem, we need to have a goal. We need to be striving towards something. Goals make us feel great. And what makes you feel better is growth. We’re either growing or dying when it boils down to one thing. Tony Robbins says, look around you right now.

Every single thing around us in this world is either growing or dying. Look at nature, and the leaves are growing. Then, when they stop growing, they fall to the ground, dying to make room for other things that will grow from them. If we could sum it up in one word, it’s growing.

Keynotes:

  • Living purposefully is about having goals, about growing.
  • Set your life goal and dream about the future with desire.

8. Personal integrity

Personal integrity is about holding yourself to higher standards for yourself. In your life, where someone says a one-liner, someone says a quote, and it always sticks in your head. Character is what you do when no one’s looking. Character is what you do, and no one’s looking.

Personal integrity means walking the talk. It means doing that the best you can. So personal integrity doesn’t mean you have to be on it one hundred percent of the time. If you’re not, you can be honest about that and have that self-acceptance from pillar number one.

Keynotes:

  • Personal integrity is being aligned with how you, what you say, and act.
  • Nathaniel Branden says to find it humiliating to attempt an error is a sign of flawed self-esteem. If we make a mistake, own it, own up to it. Don’t be afraid to look stupid.
  • Don’t be afraid to admit when you’re not where you want to be, or don’t be afraid to admit mistakes.

9. Affirmations and mindsets

Affirmations are a great way to say things you want to believe out loud. It is a belief shift. When you say something out loud and hear it to yourself, it’s way more powerful than when you read it or say it in your head. If you’ve never tried affirmations or incantations, the next time you’re driving in a car alone, you have the house to yourself.

Mistakes are not grounds for self-damnation. Try some of these or look some online or make your own. Also, it’s amazing the power of speaking when you have that level of conviction.

Keynotes:

  • Talk clearly and loudly, which creates a good conversation.
  • Learn from your mistakes and accept your mistakes.

10. Live consciously

In our society, most people are weak but not truly conscious. We go through the motions daily, wake up, go to work, come back, have the same argument, watch TV, and sleep. Even if your daily itinerary looks more productive than this, chances are you’re probably still going through most of your life on autopilot. The root cause of this problem is that we are unaware of it.

If you give this up for long enough, you’ll start seeing patterns in behavior, and you’ll start living more consciously automatically.

You will start to understand why your self-esteem isn’t where you want it to be. Maybe you don’t have a great relationship with your parents. So talk to them about it. Maybe you feel lazy or do so. You should start exercising more. Once you’re more conscious about what it is, you need to take action and fix it.

Keynotes:

  • To raise your self-esteem, you have to pay attention to yourself.
  • Start keeping a journal every morning. Write down three things you’re grateful for and three things you want to change about yourself.

Conclusion

People who have high self-esteem accept that their life is their responsibility. No one’s going to swoop in and save you and if you want to become rich, buying lottery tickets is not how to accept one’s ability. You must read books, find mentors and try new things on everything that goes wrong in your life.

When you find your purpose and work hard to realize it, your life will always remain in perspective. It could be as simple as taking care of my body more and exercising more often. It doesn’t matter if your purpose was big or small. As long as you have one, you will be well on raising your self-esteem below.

Always stay true to yourself, be honest, be kind, and humble. It’s going to be hard at first. There will be a lot of temptation to give in and sacrifice your values for short-term gain. But believe me, no amount of money or media possessions will compare to the increase in self-esteem you get if you stay true to who you are.


Learn more: Six Pillars Of Self Esteem Review With Summary


Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem

Author: Nathaniel Branden
Average Rating: (4.6 /5)
Category: Self-Improvement, Communication, Social Skills, Motivation, Workplace, Parenting, Education, Psychotherapy.


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Pauline Jackson

I like to talk about popular books. My book review inspires you to read and save time. Also, I summarize the book and give you the best lessons or ideas that can change your life. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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