I'm just really really happy that I came up with this blog name. I swear, 6pillarlife.blogspot.com is the name my soul has been looking for, for ages!
What am I going to write about in this anonymous blog? Life. Just life, following the Six Pillars of Self Esteem by Nathaniel Branden. This man is amazing. I love him and his work. He saved my life. He taught me how I can learn to think for myself. He taught me the importance of having a sense of self. He taught me how to understand myself, so that I can understand others. His work is immortalized in my mind. I am willing to die for his philosophy. If someone put a gun to my head and said "give up your beliefs, or I will kill you", I would choose death. I have lived the life without a sense of self.
Socrates once said, "the unexamined life is not worth living". A life without conscious thought, is not worth living. A life lived unconsciously is a life spent plagued with thoughts like "Why am I unhappy?". Or, "Why do I feel so horrible?" Or, "Why do I have such horrible taste in women". Or, "Why do I have such crappy luck with friends".
The answers are all revealed through living consciously. Through choosing to see what others have chosen to disown. To have a sense of self. To understand that without a strong self of self, you are at the whim of others. Not everyone will exploit you, but there are people who most certainly will. The people who have self respect won't associate themselves with you, and the people who have no code of honor or respect will be there to steal your soul and your life.
Death is not the biggest tragedy in life. The tragedy is the fires that die within you while you are still alive. How many people can honestly say that genuine happiness is possible in this life? You know, the kind of happiness that is in being who you are, being the way you are around others, celebrating your achievements, celebrating the people who surround you, etc. I'm not talking about the kind of happiness you get while playing a video game or taking a drink, or having a sexual episode. I'm talking about the kind of happiness that exists when you hold your partner in your arms and know without a shadow of a doubt that you love them, and they love you. That you would be willing to stake your life on that fact, and gladly give it up to test the hypothesis. Does that exist? And if those feelings do exist, how do we obtain them. And better yet, how do we maintain them?
How many people are willing to call me out and say that happiness is a load of bullshit. The people who call me out and say that it is bullshit are the ones who have already died. Your maximum potential is not to be reached anymore, because you have given up on the thought.
Self Concept is Destiny. There is a woman in my life who has failed in every aspect of her life. Everything that she has ever attempted to pursue has been met with failure. 2/3rd of the jobs that she has held she could not hold down for more than a year. Eventually, realizing that she could not work for others, she chose to start her own business. It worked for a while, then she decided that she wasn't earning enough and found partner(s) in the business. After such events, she began to go to work late (showing up at 10 pm, when her partners were there at 8 in the morning), and leaving earlier. When she was at work, she spoke on the phone with her friends and did not concentrate on the material at hand. Her partners eventually grew tired of her lackluster performance, and chose to muscle her out of the business.
I repeat. Self Concept is Destiny. Failure is inevitable if failure has been imprinted into your mind from adolescence. If everything that a person attempts dies in failure, then this person will ultimately believe that everything he or she touches will end in failure. Eventually, they give up trying. They trade raw facts about their reality for the knowledge given to them by their self concept. At the sight of success, such people will begin an unconscious process of self sabotage. They do not notice that they are sabotaging their prosperity, but they do it unconsciously, because success is foreign to them. It feels wrong to be successful. It makes them feel nervous. Hence, self sabotage.
These people fail to ask the question of themselves..."if I am failing at my task, what can I do to better myself at my task. What is necessary to be done in order to improve my life. What can I do to improve my current situation? What kind of skill does the task at hand demand? How can I obtain such skill? What do I need to do today?". Honesty and integrity is required to answer these questions. Self acceptance is required to answer these questions. Purposefulness is required to answer these questions. Consciousness, and thought is required to answer these questions.
If this person who I described above challenged her beliefs of failure, and asked herself critically, what she can be doing different, if this person accepted herself, her flaws and assets, and asked herself with honesty, what she could do differently, and did this effort daily, rigorously, like a religious exercise, she would ultimately destroy negative beliefs and improve her self concept.
I have a story of this from my own life. Before I ever heard of Nathaniel Branden or Self-Esteem, I had always thought of myself as a complete and utter fool in the field of mathematics (I thought of myself as an idiot in many things, not just mathematics actually). Multiple failures in math classes, course withdrawals, failed tests, and just generally being told that I am an idiot in math by anyone and everyone around me had instilled me with an intense fear for the subject. My fear was so intense that I could not ask the professor a question, for fear of being made fun of or embarrassed. I could not ask my classmates any questions either, for the same exact reasons. My fear of the subject left me cornered, trapped me and put me in a situation where I could only accept failure as my outcome, because to attempt success would be to risk embarrassment or uncomfortable feelings. It felt normal to fail. It felt safe to fail.
After I had read the six pillars of self esteem, and began working with sentence completion exercises, I began to challenge such beliefs. Sometimes, my subconscious would direct me to do things that my conscious-mind wasn't fully aware of, but I did it anyway, and realized later how mental barriers had been abolished. In the fall 2013 semester of college, I began writing a self-help website that is heavily inspired by the works of Nathaniel Branden, as my senior project. This senior project required a supervisor. I could have chosen any supervisor. I could have went to any professor and asked them to supervise this project, to sign off on it. My subconscious mind had a plan for me that I wasn't even fully aware of. It wanted to prove to me that I can in fact do math, and that I am not a failure. I asked my math professor to supervise the project. My original thought process going into this was that I simply needed someone to supervise my project, and since my math professor had his own personal website, I figured that it would be a reasonable idea to go and see him about my project since, I too am building a website. Logically, it made sense, except for the fact that I ignored my internal warnings and fears about math.
What happened next? My professor agreed to supervise my project, but at a cost. I had to do some work for him on his website. The work was relatively minor, but it most certainly contained math.
I'd imagine, if my life wasn't being powered by the six pillars of self esteem, or the incredibly powerful sentence completion exercise, I would have found some way to self sabotage this opportunity. My fear of mathematics, of making a mistake, of making a fool out of myself in front of such a figure would have most certainly stopped my efforts dead in their tracks. I would have found some way to unconsciously self sabotage my efforts and fail this opportunity.
Fortunately, I came prepared. I did my very best on the work. I tried my heart out in his class. I pushed myself far beyond my own personal limitations and, in the middle of the semester I had gotten a text message from this professor, inviting me to a mathematical expo happening in a different state, where my math professor's website would be shown. I finished the semester with an A in statistics, and massive personal growth. With hardwork and effort, I was able to evaporate self-sabotaging processes that I had in math.
Are they all gone? Of course not. But if I look at myself in the mirror today and tell myself "I suck at math", I would be lying to myself. This was not the self defeating mentality I had walking into my professor's class in the beginning of the term. By challenging my mental barriers, I was able to expand my self-concept, build my self-esteem, and achieve a high level of personal growth.
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