Come to your own rescue

Come to your own rescue

After a seminar I gave in Vancouver, Canada, Don Beach, the sales
manager of Benndorf Verster, one of that city's top businesses, sent me
a tape of a song that he wanted me to hear.

He said it reminded him of what I had been teaching his team about
self-esteem. The song was a live performance by the old folk-singing
duo, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. The song is called "Love, Truth
and Confidence." It's about how we foolishly chase after love and try to
discover the ultimate truth, while ignoring something much more vital to
our happiness: confidence.

The 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, because 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 exercises 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 instilling self-esteem,
we really encourage the upbringing of young, sensitive children who
have no inner strength

whatsoever. When it comes time for such overpraised, underachieving
kids to find success in the competitive global marketplace, they will be
confused, fearful, and ineffective.

The concepts taught by Nathaniel and Devers Branden are intellectually
ruthless and unsentimental. Some of the best ideas go all the way back
to Branden's years working with the great novelist and objectivist
philosopher Ayn Rand.

The Brandens have taught me how to objectively explore the
weaknesses in my own thinking and to challenge the self-deception that
was undermining my effectiveness in life.

"To trust one's mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the
essence of self-esteem," writes Dr. Branden. "The value of self-esteem
lies not merely in the fact that it allows us to feel better, but that it
allows us to live better—to respond to challenges and opportunities
more resourcefully and appropriately."

The two ideas contained in the Brandens' work that have most helped
me are: 1) "You can't leave a place you've never been"; and 2) "No one
is coming."

I used to believe that I could run from all my frightening thoughts and
beliefs about myself. But all that ever did was create deeper internal
fears and conflicts. What I really needed was to get all my fears into the
sunshine and demystify them. Once I systematically began to do that, I
was able to dismantle those fears, as a bomb squad dismantles a bomb.
Acceptance and full consciousness of those fears—and the
self-sabotaging behavior they led to—was "the place I had never been."
Once I was in that place, I could leave.

The notion that "no one is coming" was somehow terrifying to accept.
The idea that no one was going to rescue me from my circumstances is
an idea that I might never have accepted. That idea sounded too much
like the final abandonment. It contradicted all my childhood
self-programming. (Many of us, even as grown-ups, devise very
elaborate and subtle variations on the "I want my mommy" theme.) The
Brandens showed me that I could be much happier and more effective if
I valued independence and self-responsibility above dependency on
someone else.

When you accept the idea that "no one is coming" it is actually a very
powerful moment, because it means that you are enough. No one needs
to come. You can handle your problems yourself. You are, in a larger
sense, appropriate to life. You can grow and get strong and generate
your own happiness.

And paradoxically, from that position of independence, truly great
relationships can be built, because they aren't based on dependency and
fear. They are based on mutual independence and love.
Once, in a group therapy session, a client of Dr. Branden's challenged
him on his principle that "no one is coming." "But Nathaniel," the client
said, "it's not true. You came!"
"Correct," admitted Dr. Branden, "but I came to say that no one is
coming."

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