Book detail: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book provides daily insights and reflections on the concepts of self-esteem and spirituality, offering readers a contemplative approach to personal growth and well-being.
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“In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence-to look at the world through our own eyes-to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning-to be, in a word, self-responsible.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“A well-developed sense of self is a necessary if not sufficient condition of your well-being. Its presence does not guarantee fulfillment, but its absence guarantees some measure of anxiety, frustration, or despair.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“In the nature of our existence, we must act to achieve values. And in order to act appropriately, we need to value the beneficiary of our actions. In order to seek values, we must consider ourselves worthy of enjoying them. In order to fight for our happiness, we must consider ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Feel deeply to think clearly.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Suppose you feel you cannot accept some fact about yourself. Then own your refusal to accept. Own the block. Embrace it fully. And watch it begin to disappear. The principal is this: Begin where you are-accept that. Then change and growth become possible.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“You can be loved by your family, your mate, and your friends yet not love yourself. You can be admired by your associates yet regard yourself as worthless. You can project an image of assurance and poise that fools almost everyone yet secretly tremble with a sense of inadequacy. You can fulfill the expectations of others yet fail your own. You can win every honor yet feel that you have accomplished nothing. What shall it profit a person to gain the esteem of the whole world yet lose his or her own?”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“You are not likely to bring out the best in people or nurture their creativity if every time you hear about their problems you instantly offer a solution Encourage people to look for their own solutions-and project the knowledge that they are capable of doing so.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“If you are terrified of making mistakes, you will be reluctant to acknowledge them when you do make them-and therefore you will not correct them.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“For "I" to become "we" and yet remain "I," is one of the great challenges of marriage.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively--which means to live authentically--is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding--from others and also from themselves.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“If you choose not to live self-responsibly, you count on others to make up your default. No one abjures self-responsibility on a desert island.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Your choices have psychological consequences. The way you choose to deal with reality, truth, facts - your choice to honor or dishonor your own perceptions - registers in your mind, for good or for bad, and either confirms and strengthens your self-esteem or undermines and weakens it.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“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.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“The greatest barrier to achievement and success is not lack of talent or ability but rather the feeling that achievement and success, above a certain level, are outside our self-concept-our image of who we are and what is appropriate to us.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Loving consciously does not mean subjecting your relationship to endless analysis. It means something much simpler: paying attention. Noticing. This requires presence.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“If you do not feel deserving of happiness, consciously or subconsciously, or if you have accepted the idea that happiness is somehow wrong or cannot last, you will not respond appropriately when happiness comes knocking at your door in the form of romantic love. No matter how much you may have waited and cried, you will not welcome love when it arrives-you will find a way to sabotage it. What a challenge to resist this temptation! What an opportunity for true spiritual growth and transformation-to defy your negative feelings and honor the gift that life offers you!”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“If you are an adult, you are responsible for your life and well-being. No one owes you the fulfillment of your needs or wants; no one is here on earth to serve you. If you respect the principle of self-ownership, you understand that no one else owns you and that you do not own anyone else. Only on this understanding can there be peace on earth and good will among human beings.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Whether your focus is on preserving and strengthening family ties in a world of increasingly unstable relationships, gaining access to a decent job, growing and evolving as a person, or guiding a company through the stormy seas of a fiercely competitive global marketplace-whether your goals are material, emotional, or spiritual-the price of success is the same: thinking, learning. To be asleep at the wheel-to rely only on the known, familiar, and automatized-is to invite disaster.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“To accept struggle as part of life, to accept all of it, even the darkest moments of anguish; to be motivated by love rather than fear, by confidence rather than insecurity: these are the benchmarks of high self-esteem. The wish to avoid fear and pain is not the motive that drives the lives of highly evolved men and women; rather, it is the life force within them, thrusting toward its unique form of expression-the actualization of personal values.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Anyone who really loves you wants you to be authentic. And anyone who doesn't want you to be authentic doesn't really love you.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“The feeling that "I am enough" does not mean that I have nothing to learn, nothing further to achieve, and nowhere to grow to. It means that I accept myself, that I am not on trial in my own eyes, that I value and respect myself. This is not an act of indulgence but of courage.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“The more you surrender to the fear of someone's disapproval, the more you lose face in your own eyes, and the more desperate you become for someone's approval. Within you is a void that should have been filled by self-esteem. When you attempt to fill it with the approval of others instead, the void grows deeper and the hunger for acceptance and approval grows stronger. The only solution is to summon the courage to honor your own judgment, frightening though that may be in the beginning.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“If you bring five percent more awareness to your work tomorrow, or to your most important relationship, what might you do differently? Are you willing to find out?”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“If you face life without confidence in your own powers, you succumb too easily to setbacks and adversity; you lack the will to persevere.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“It is very difficult to accept in others emotions you cannot accept in yourself.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“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.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“If you overcome your fear to ask someone for a date, a raise, or help with a project, that is an act of self-assertiveness. You are moving out into life rather than contracting and withdrawing.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“You have a right to your feelings. Your feelings are there to tell you something, but they are not infallible guides to behavior.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Set goals that don't feel all that easy, that challenge you, stimulate you, and give you a chance to stretch and push yourself. That is where the power of growth lies.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“What is guilt? It is moral self-reproach-I did wrong when it was possible to have done otherwise.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Some people have a view of self and of the universe that obliges them to struggle for happiness, to yearn for happiness-"some time in the future"-perhaps next year or the year after that. But not now. Not at this moment. Not here. Here and now is too terrifyingly close, too terrifyingly immediate. They suffer from happiness anxiety.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Sometimes pain is easier to bear alone than happiness.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“The real basic power of an individual isn't what he or she knows; it's the ability to think and learn and face new challenges.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“A productive purpose to which you give yourself fully and joyfully is one of the great adventures of life. It is a uniquely human source of happiness.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“It is impressive to see a person who has been battered by life in many ways, who is torn by a variety of unsolved problems, who may be alienated from many aspects of the self-but who is still fighting, still struggling, still striving to find the path to a fulfilling existence, moved by the wisdom of knowing, "I am more than my problems."”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Some people stand and move as if they have no right to the space they occupy. They wonder why others often fail to treat them with respect-not realizing that they have signaled others that it is not necessary to treat them with respect.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Self-respecting men and women think about the consequences of their actions-and are willing to take responsibility for them.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Taking on responsibilities that properly belong to someone else means behaving irresponsibly toward yourself. You need to know where you end and someone else begins. You need to understand boundaries. You need to know what is and is not up to you, what is and is not in your control, what is and is not your responsibility.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“If you have high self-esteem, you might still know times of emotional suffering, but less often and with faster recovery-your resilience is greater.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality
“Out of fear, out of the desire for approval, out of the misguided notions of duty, people surrender themselves-their convictions and their aspirations-every day. There is nothing noble about it. It takes far more courage to fight for your values than to relinquish them.”
Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality