Today's
Quotation:
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
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Today's
Meditation:
Sometimes
we seem to get it backwards and think that we are worthy
because of the things that we accomplish. Most of us
live in cultures and societies that value achievement above
all else, and that sort of attitude can get us to think that
we have to continue achieving in order to maintain our
self-esteem.
Unfortunately,
though, we don't realize that until we improve our
self-esteem, there's a strong possibility that we won't be
able to achieve much of what we set out to do. It's
hard to do our best work when we don't feel good about
ourselves, so our achievements may be lessened by the way we
see ourselves. While we may luck out and achieve
something great with low self-esteem, the chances are
that we won't.
True
self-esteem is not dependent on anything outside of
ourselves; rather, it's the way we regard ourselves as human
beings. If we see ourselves as worthy people and treat
ourselves as such, then we have a good chance to accomplish
what attempt. But succeeding or failing at that
attempt will have no effect on the way we see ourselves, for
our self-worth is already something that we accept
completely. It doesn't depend on what we do.
Sometimes
we get it wrong-- we can't improve our self-esteem by our
accomplishments, but we can improve our accomplishments by
working on our self-esteem and valuing ourselves as human
beings who deserve the best we have to give ourselves.
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