Quote

To attain success without attaining positive self-esteem is to be condemned to feeling like an imposter anxiously awaiting exposure.

Nathaniel Branden

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Nathaniel Branden
Age: 84 †
Born: 1930
Born: April 9
Died: 2014
Died: December 3
Academic
Non-Fiction Writer
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Esteem
Positive
Anxiously
Feeling
Imposter
Success
Awaiting
Feelings
Attaining
Without
Condemned
Self
Exposure
Like
Attain

More quotes by Nathaniel Branden

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The practice of assertiveness: being authentic in our dealings with others treating our values and persons with decent respect in social contexts refusing to fake the reality of who we are or what we esteem in order to avoid disapproval the willingness to stand up for ourselves and our ideas in appropriate ways in appropriate contexts.
Nathaniel Branden
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If you feel inadequate to face challenges, unworthy of love or respect, untitled to happiness, and fear assertive thought, wants, or needs- if you lack basic self trust, self-respect, and self-confidence- your self-esteem deficiency will limit you, no matter what other assets you possess.
Nathaniel Branden
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For children mastery entails struggle. This means they must be permitted to struggle. If parents inappropriately step in to help-out of impatience or solicitude-they sabotage important learning. Among other things, the child is unlikely to discover the advantages of perseverance and self-discipline.
Nathaniel Branden
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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.
Nathaniel Branden
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It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert.
Nathaniel Branden
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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.
Nathaniel Branden
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Moved by a passion they do not understand for a goal they seldom reach, men and women are haunted by the vision of a distant possibility that refuses to be extinguished.
Nathaniel Branden
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Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.
Nathaniel Branden
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When we bury our feelings, we also bury ourselves. It means we exist in a state of alienation. We rarely know it, but we are lonely for ourselves.
Nathaniel Branden
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Freedom is still the most radical idea of all.
Nathaniel Branden
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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.
Nathaniel Branden
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As you grow in self-esteem, your face, manner, way of talking and moving will tend naturally to project the pleasure you take in being alive.
Nathaniel Branden
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The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.
Nathaniel Branden
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There is only one reality - the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all
Nathaniel Branden
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If we do have realistic confidence in our mind and value, if we feel secure within ourselves, we tend to experience the world as open to us and to respond appropriately to challenges and opportunities.
Nathaniel Branden
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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.
Nathaniel Branden
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The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.
Nathaniel Branden
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To live consciously means to seek to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals—to the best of our ability, whatever that ability may be—and to behave in accordance with that which we see and know.
Nathaniel Branden
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I have to respect other's opinions even if I don't agree with them.
Nathaniel Branden
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What is guilt? It is moral self-reproach-I did wrong when it was possible to have done otherwise.
Nathaniel Branden