Concept
The six pillars of self-esteem
Branden's six pillars are the practices that build self-esteem, understood as the reputation you acquire with yourself: living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully and personal integrity.
Branden's definition of self-esteem is stricter than the popular one: the experience of being competent to cope with life's challenges and worthy of happiness, earned rather than declared. The pillars are how it is earned. Living consciously means seeking what is real, including what you would rather not see. Self-acceptance means refusing to be at war with your own experience. Self-responsibility means owning your choices and their results. Self-assertiveness means honouring your wants and views by expressing them. Living purposefully means having goals and acting toward them. Personal integrity means matching behaviour to values. Used as a worksheet, the six are a diagnosis: score them from one to five for the specific area where confidence is low, and the lowest score names the practice to resume this week. That is more useful than a general sense of inadequacy, because a practice can be restarted tomorrow.
A real-life example
A junior architect in Istanbul scores his work: consciousness four, acceptance two, responsibility four, assertiveness one, purpose three, integrity four. The two lowest tell him exactly where to start, and self-acceptance comes first because he cannot assert what he will not admit feeling.
How to use it
- 1Score the six pillars from one to five for the area where your confidence is lowest.
- 2Resume the lowest-scoring practice this week; it is a discipline, not a mood.
- 3Treat the score as a map, not a verdict, and rescore in a month.