Self Improvement – The Top 101 Experts that Help Us Improve Our Lives

• Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or


• Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our


• If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your

fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other

virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere

dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

capacity to mold ourselves.

own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

The Best Way to Get Started with Rollo May

The best way to get started with Rollo May is to read The Courage to Create.
ay, throughout his books, writes from the perspective of an existential
psychologist. In order to appreciate what he has done for Self Improvement, it
helps to have a base understanding of existential psychology. Spark Notes from
Barnes and Nobles provides some insight:

Why are existential psychology and philosophy called “existential?”

ocus on existence in the here and now. At

each moment, a person is free to choose what he or she will do and be.

a person is not what she has genetically

treated her when she was an infant, but

how she interprets and responds to the world around her at each given

ces she makes about what to do next.

Thus, existential and humanistic psychologies reject Freud’s claim

e

ice and

responsibility are central to existential psychology, and the

ven little or no role to play.

r in
ur lives. He offers a way to help deal with our fears enabling us to become our
t l philosophers such as
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre all concurred that courage didn’t mean
the absence of despair; rather it meant “the capacity to move ahead in spite of
despair.”

M

The reason is that they f

The most important aspect of

inherited, or how her parents

instant, and the kinds of choi

that the most important factor in understanding a person is early life

experience. It also rejects the idea that biological or inherited factors

are the most important aspect of a person (though only the most

radical and misguided existentialist would claim that such factors hav

no influence on behavior). Furthermore, conscious cho

unconscious is gi

In The Courage to Create, May shows us how we can break out of old patte ns
o
fully realized selves. He also explains that existen ia