Nathaniel Branden's Self-Esteem Every Day


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March 17 – Self-Esteem Every Day

Often, a flight from reality is a flight from the reality of your inner state, the thoughts and feelings you are frightened to face or understand.
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March 18 – Self-Esteem Every Day

Among the many crimes committed against the younger generation, one of the worst is that young people are taught next to nothing about reason, rationality, or the importance of critical thinking.
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March 20 – Self-Esteem Every Day

One of the meanings of living consciously is paying attention to what works and doing more of it and trying to understand the principles involved. And also paying attention to what doesn't work and not doing it.
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March 21 – Self-Esteem Every Day

The question is, do you invest your activities with your keenest consciousness, or do you settle for something less than that.
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March 22 – Self-Esteem Every Day

When you are frightened, you typically pull energy in to your center, seeing less, hearing less—shrinking consciousness precisely when you need to expand it.
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March 24 – Self-Esteem Every Day

If you are wise enough to base your self-esteem not on being "right" but being rational—on being conscious—and on having integrity, then you recognize that acknowledgment and correction of an error is not an abyss into which you have fallen but a height you can take pride in having climbed.
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March 25 – Self-Esteem Every Day

One of the ways you convey respecct for another human being is through the consciousness you bring to the encounter—through seeing, hearing and responding in a way that allows him or her to feel understood.
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March 26 – Self-Esteem Every Day

If you are willing to stay fully present to your emotions without denial or disowning, the typical result is not hte collapse of lucidity but its enhancement. In other words, feel deeply to think clearly.
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March 27 – Self-Esteem Every Day

If you bring more consciousness to what you do when you are afraid or angry, you will see that other options exist.
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March 29 – Self-Esteem Every Day

The need to live consciously has acquired a new urgency in the modern age. The more rapid the rate of change, the more dangerous it is to live mechanically, relying on routines of belief and behavior that may be irrelevant or obsolete.
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March 30 – Self-Esteem Every Day

The age of the muscle-worker is past; this the age of the mind-worker. That your mind is your basic tool of survival is not new; what is new is that this fact has become inescapably clear. The market is rapidly diminishing for people who have nothing to contribute but physical labor. An economy in which knowledge, information, creativity—and their translation into innovation—are the prime sources of wealth demands minds, people who are able and willing to think.
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March 31 – Self-Esteem Every Day

Whoever continually strives to achieve a clearer and clearer vision of reality and our place in it, whoever is pulled forward by a passion for such clarity is, to that extent, leading a spiritual life.
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April 1 – Self-Esteem Every Day

If you deny and disown pieces of who you are—your thoughts, feelings or actions—because they do not fit your official self-concept, you damage your self-esteem. You send yourself a message that who you are is not good enough.
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April 2 – Self-Esteem Every Day

Self esteem is impossible without self-acceptance. But self-acceptance is not an easy idea for most people to understand. They confuse acceptance with liking, condoning, or even admiring. Yet acceptance does not imply any of these things; it means awareness without critical judgment or condemnation. It means not denying or fighting reality. It means respect for the facts of your own being. It means saying, I’m not happy that I had that thought, but yes, I accept the fact that I had it. It means, I’m not pleased to have these feelings, but I had knowledge them as mine and allow myself to look at and experience them. It means, I am not proud of that behavior, but yes, it was I who did what I did. When you open yourself to reality—even when the reality is painful—you make yourself stronger.
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April 4 – Self-Esteem Every Day

To be self-accepting does not mean to be without a desire to change, improve, or grow. Self-acceptance has nothing to do with complacency. The paradox is, self-acceptance is a precondition of change. If you cannot accept the fact that those unwanted thoughts occurred to you, how can you think about or learn from them? If you cannot accept the fact that you have these distressing emotions, how can you resolve to grow beyond them? If you cannot accept the fact that you have been acting unconsciously, how will you learn to act more consciously?
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April 5 – Self-Esteem Every Day

In one of my therapy groups, a woman grew angry with me and said, “You’re always talking about self-acceptance. But I’ve got lousy self-esteem. Am I supposed to accept that?” I answered, “If you don’t accept the fact that right now your self-esteem is low, how do you think you will learn to raise it? You think you will do better for yourself if you deny the reality of the problem? All that accomplishes is to leave you stuck.”
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April 7 – Self-Esteem Every Day

The challenge of self-acceptance is not confined to acknowledging faults. You can be as frightened of your assets as of your shortcomings. Some of us are afraid to accept our own intelligence, ambition, excitement, or beauty. We might be afraid that these traits will alienate us from others or invite their envy and hostility.
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