Living With Self-Esteem

Recently I’ve been preparing a presentation on Nathaniel Branden’s Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, so it’s been on my mind more then usual! He defines self-esteem as the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. This means trust in your ability to think, learn, make appropriate decisions, and respond effectively to new conditions. It also means confidence in your right to experience success and personal fulfillment — the conviction that happiness is appropriate to you.

Self-esteem pertains to an experience of efficacy. This entails confidence in your mind at a very deep level. Not the confidence of knowing you can perform this or that task appropriately. Not confidence in how much you may know about any particular subject. But rather, trust in the processes by which you reason, understand, learn, choose, decide, and regulate action.

Then I heard the story of Natalie du Toit, the South African Olympic swimmer, and I thought there was no better way to illustrate the elements of self-esteem.

When she was in her teens, it was clear that the Natalie du Toit was a world-class swimmer. At the age of 16 she nearly qualified for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Her determination was evident and it was widely believed that she would show up strong for the 2004 Athens Olympics. Then in 2001 a car hit her on her way to school after her morning workout.

Her injuries were horrible. Most people would have lost consciousness, but du Toit, who knew immediately that she had lost her leg, is a girl who confronts reality without blinking. She remained awake the entire time.

Her leg was amputated, and that did not change her motivation. She accepted that her strengths were no longer in the shorter races, so she changed the events in which she competed. With her prosthetic leg she was better at the longer distance races, so the longer freestyle races became her events. In her own words, “It’s important to swim your own race.”

du Toit narrowly missed qualifying for the 2004 Athens Olympics, but on May 3, 2008 she qualified for the Beijing Olympics after finishing 4th at the Open Water World Championships in Seville Spain. She was only 5.1 seconds off the winner in that race. In the women's 10km race in Beijing she finished in 16th place, 1:22 minutes behind the winner.

As you listened to her story, I hope that you heard that she is a person who takes responsibility for herself, accepts herself, set goals around which she organizes her behavior, has personal integrity, lives consciously, and stands up for her authentic self. If she were not, she would not have been at Beijing. And these are the six pillars of self-esteem; self-responsibility, self-acceptance, living purposefully, personal integrity, living consciously, and self-assertiveness.

The story of Natalie du Toit is both an inspiration and a road map for self-esteem.