On Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is the disposition to experience ourselves as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness.

In A Woman's Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden shares personal stories and intimate accounts of how woman struggling with issues of self-esteem have transformed themselves and created lives that are powerful, energized, and motivated.

We have no need more powerful than the need for self-esteem — the inner certainty that we are competent to meet the challenges of life — yet countless forces within our culture obstruct the fulfillment of this need. Honoring the Self builds on the recognition that self-esteem and personal autonomy are indispensable conditions for human well-being. It empowers the individual to achieve these crucial goals.

Taking us far beyond his earlier explorations into the psychology of self-esteem, Nathaniel Branden shows us how the level of our self-regard affects our work, our creativity, our love life, our sexual psychology, all the struggles and goals of our existence. He makes us aware of the kinds of actions we take in our daily life that raise self-esteem or lower it.

Integrating theory and practice, Honoring the Self clarifies our understanding of the process by which we become unique individuals. The book demonstrates that not selfishness but absence of self is the root of most of our suffering.

Branden invites us to rethink some of our most prevalent beliefs about ego, selfishness, goodness, and human survival. He sees the quest for selfhood — individuation — in heroic terms and awakes us to the heroic potentialities of our nature. Writing with compassion and respect for human dignity, Branden illuminates the psychological meaning of our daily struggle to create a fulfilling existence and provide many practical insights and exercises to facilitate our growth and energize our aspirations.

Honoring the Self is a passionate invitation to participate actively in our own evolution. To everyone struggling for self-esteem, to everyone longing for the experience of autonomy and personal integrity, it is for you that this book is written.

On both a professional and an organizational level, self-esteem has become a prime determinant of success in the new Knowledge Economy. Only organizations staffed with people who are confident, creative, and highly adaptive — traits built on self-esteem — will be able to meet the unique challenges of the Information Age. In this book, Dr. Nathaniel Branden presents an unprecedented guide managers can use to successfully advance their careers by synergistically linking work with the purposeful development of higher self-esteem and the strategic needs of their organizations.

Reactions to to Self-Esteem at Work

"I want to personally thank Nathaniel Branden for adding a million dollars to our sales this year, which I don't believe we could have had without his ideas triggering new thinking, building exciting self-concepts, and fueling a sales-driven organization to record accomplishments.
— Thomas E. Trumble, president and CEO, Leanin' Tree, Inc.

"Nathaniel Branden is a giant. His work integrating innovation and entrepreneurship with self-esteem is the cutting edge and shows how the qualities of high self-esteem are the same attributes needed for success in today's environment."
— Ken Blanchard, coauthor, The One Minute Manager

"The principles and practices are profound and right on target for rapidly changing corporate environments." — Peter Lakey, group chairman, The Executive Committee

"Dr. Branden teaches us the self-esteem connection between individual and organizational success with the sharpness of a laser beam and the brilliance of a Tiffany-cut diamond."
— Dick Sethi, manager, executive education, Leadership Development Program, AT&T

"Nathaniel has the courage to make us look at truths about self-esteem, ego, pride, and heroism that we have tended to disown in recent decades." — George Leonard, editor, Esquire, and author, Walking at the Edge of the World

Over the past two decades, many thousands of people have been challenged and inspired by the work of bestselling author Nathaniel Branden. Now, the world's foremost authority on self-esteem presents a collection of enlightening observations, in some cases adapted from passages in earlier writings, in others written specifically for this volume. These ideas, one for every day of the week, will show us how to live more consciously while growing in self-esteem and spiritual maturity.

In this book, Nathaniel Branden goes beyond his previous writing on self-esteem to offer a compelling account of the critical roles of self-responsibility, self-reliance, and personal autonomy in the development of healthy selves. Taking Responsibility, is a path to self-realization through self-reliance — and a vision of society transformed by a new ethical individualism.

Moving from the private and personal to the social and political, Branden demonstrates that only by taking responsibility for ourselves can we have any real power over our lives. Only a culture of personal accountability can sustain and preserve a civilized society. Our basic choice — to think or not to think, and to live responsibly or irresponsibly — reflects the essence of what it means to be human. our freedom to choose is our burden, our challenge, our glory.

In Taking Responsibility Branden delineates four goals: to illuminate the meaning and implications of self-responsibility as a way of living and being in the world; to show that this practice is not an onerous burden but a source of joy and personal power; to establish that we create ourselves — shape our identity — through what we are willing to take responsibility for; and to demonstrate that self-responsibility, self-reliance, and individualism are essential to the well-being of our society.

Whether our goals concern career issues or love relationships, we need to understand how intimately success and happiness are tied to self-responsibility. We need to know what is up to us and what is not up to us. We need to understand that independence begins with the act of thinking — of choosing to look at the world through our own eyes — and of consciously choosing the values that will guide us, rather than uncritically accepting them from others.

The issue of self-responsibility, Branden shows, has acquired a new urgency in the modern world, in which mind work has replaced muscle work; authoritarian hierarchical structures are giving way to more open, communicative structures; and cognitive skills are of paramount importance. Today's world needs men and women who are able and willing to think, to be self-directing and self-managing, to respond to problems proactively rather than passively waiting for someone else to do something, to be initiators and innovators. In Taking Responsibility, Branden demonstrates not only the personal and social importance of self-reliance but the specific steps by which it may be achieved.

Consciousness is our basic tool for successful adaptation to reality. The more conscious we are in any situation, the more possibilities we tend to perceive, the more options we have, the more powerful we are — perhaps even the longer we will live.

Living consciously means seeking to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals — and behaving in accordance with that which we see and know.

Practiced consistently, mindfulness is an orientation, a discipline, a spiritual commitment.

In this book, Nathaniel Branden takes us into new territory, exploring the actions of our minds when they are operating as our life and well-being require — and also when they are not. In this book, Branden clearly illuminates what mindfulness means:

in the workplace (what does it mean to work consciously?)
in the area of romantic love (what does it mean to love consciously?)
in child-rearing (what does it mean to parent consciously?)
in the pursuit of personal development (what does it mean to participate consciously in the process of one's own evolution?)

One of the book's most exciting ideas is that of the spirituality of reason, which invites us to rethink our assumptions about both rationality and spirituality.

The practice of living consciously invites us to rethink many of our beliefs about our everyday activities, about morality, about life in the Information Age, about God. Today we are exposed to an unprecedented amount of information and an unprecedented number of opinions about every conceivable aspect of life. We are thrown on our own resources as never before — and we have nothing to protect us but the clarity of our thinking. The Art of Living Consciously is an operating manual for our basic tool of survival. It is also a call to the best within us.

In this new book, Nathaniel Branden examines in unprecedented depth what it means to live consciously — from the most intimate areas of life, to the workplace, to the social/political arena. One of the most exciting ideas he introduces is that of the spirituality of reason. This is an operations manual for our basic tool of survival — the mind — and a summons to the best within us.

This major psychological work presents a brilliant new concept of human nature, of mental health and illness, and of the conditions necessary for the achievement of mental well-being. Nathaniel Branden breaks radically with the mainstream of contemporary psychology, challenging and rejecting the basic premises of both psychoanalysis and behaviorism. his book is a revolutionary contribution to man's understanding of himself.

From the introduction to The Psychology of Self-Esteem

The central theme of this book is the role of self-esteem in man's life: the need of self-esteem, the nature of that need, the conditions of its fulfillment, the consequences of its frustration — and the impact of man's self-esteem (or lack of it) on his values, responses, and goals.

Virtually all psychologists recognize that man experiences a need of self-esteem. But what they have not identified is the nature of self-esteem, the reasons why man needs it, and the conditions he must satisfy if he is to achieve it.

Virtually all psychologists recognize, if only vaguely, that there is a relationship between the degree of a man's self-esteem and the degree of his mental health. But they have not identified the nature of that relationship, nor the causes of it.

Virtually all psychologists recognize, if only dimly, that there is some relationship between the nature and degree of a man's self-esteem and his motivation, i.e. his behavior in the spheres of work, love, and human relationships. But they have not explained why, nor identified the principles involved. Such are the issues with which this book deals.

If the science of psychology is to achieve an accurate portrait of man, it must, I submit, question and challenge many of the deepest premises prevalent in the field today — must break away from the anti-biological, anti-intellectual, automaton view of human nature that dominates contemporary theory. Neither the view of man as an instinct-manipulated puppet (psychoanalysis), nor the view of him as a stimulus-response machine (behaviorism), bears any resemblance to man the biological entity whom it is the task of psychology to study: the organism uniquely characterized by the power of conceptual thought, propositional speech, explicit reasoning and self-awareness.

This work serves as the theoretical foundation for much of Branden's later writings.

[Total Program Length: 37 min.]

This audio product is part of the four-part "Living Consciously" series of MP3 downloads made excluvively available here at Nathanielbranden.com. This brand new series of audio programs is adapted from Nathaniel Branden's The Art of Living Consciously.

Is spirituality inherently incompatible with rationality – or can there be a rational vision of spirit and spirituality?

Total file size 18 MB.

[Total Program Length: 50 min.]

This audio product is part of the four-part "Living Consciously" series of MP3 downloads made excluvively available here at Nathanielbranden.com. This brand new series of audio programs is adapted from Nathaniel Branden's The Art of Living Consciously."

Of all the serious misfortunes that can befall us, while we are alive and not threatened by terminal illness, the most grievous is loss of mind, or, more specifically, loss of our intellectual power – loss of our rational thought” – philosopher Mortimer J. Adler

Total file size 25 MB.

[Total Program Length: 37 min.]

"Living Consciously" Series, Part 3: Reason and Mysticism (MP3) This audio product is part of the four-part "Living Consciously" series of MP3 downloads made exclusively available here at Nathanielbranden.com. This brand new series of audio programs is adapted from Nathaniel Branden's The Art of Living Consciously.

Can there be a “rational” epistemology of mysticism? The problems that mysticism leaves unsolved.

Total file size 18 MB.