83The chorus of the song goes like this: “Love and truth
/ you can find / any place, anywhere, any time / but you
can just say ‘so long’ / once confidence is gone / nothing
matters anymore.”
I never knew the true power of self-confidence until I
began working with Dr. Nathaniel Branden and his wife
Devers Branden. Both are authors and psychotherapists
with the Branden Institute for Self-Esteem, and they have
provided me with the most powerful insights I’ve ever
received into how I operate as a human being.
Dr. Branden’s book, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem,
is unlike any other psychology book on the market, be-
cause in addition to its eloquently written philosophy
on how to build inner strength, it also contains a full
year’s worth of practical, powerful, user-friendly exer-
cises to raise your own consciousness and self-esteem.
His sentence-completion exercises are so effective and
exciting that if you do them, I can say without a trace of
exaggeration, you can get tens of thousands of dollars
worth of personal growth therapy for the price of a
single book.
Before you assume that Branden’s notion of self-
esteem is the same as that being bandied about by New-
Age educators, you must read his work and listen to
his tapes. Most people today think others can bestow
self-esteem on us. Such misguided thinking leads to
phenomena such as classes without grades and work
without standards for excellence. Perhaps you have
heard about that Little League group in Pennsylvania
that wanted to eliminate keeping score from baseball
games because of the damage that losing does to
children’s self-esteem.
When we confuse pampering and coddling with in-
stilling self-esteem, we really encourage the upbringing
of young, sensitive children who have no inner strength
Come to your own rescue