© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Building Yourself Table of Contents
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• There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way. Christopher Morley (1890–1957)

Note, however, before you rush to point out that indepen­dence doesn't necessarily connote wealth, that one of the many synonyms for independent is “wealthy.”

In terms of your own attitude to your life, what you do with it, who you associate with, what your goals and dreams are, you progress toward an autonomy of desire. You come to know yourself, to know what you want, what you can accom­plish, and how important all these things might be to others. Our task in this book is to accelerate that knowledge. One way to do that is to make you sit down and really think: what do you really want? Do your present plans and directions reflect what you really want? Do you know what you really want?

If you don't know what you really want, you certainly won't get it. If you don't know where you want to go, you won't get there.

To know what you want, you should start with an empty slate. But you start with a full slate: all those ideas and notions you got from parents, teachers, peers, “society,” the media. Other people have insidious and compelling ways of manipulating you into making their choices for your life.

A good friend of mine runs a flourishing business creating fancy corporate gift baskets in Manhattan. For 20 years he worked as a teacher and university professor. It was a “natural” field for him, considering the broad intellectual interests he inherited from his parents, also university professors. He had no trouble excelling in his work, getting published, rising in the hierarchy. There was only one hitch: he hated being a university professor. His psychotherapist believed his unhappiness was the symptom of a much deeper problem. She had many theories. She was also very expensive.

My friend chose the wrong career because he took the thoughts and desires of others and made them his own. He was in his forties before he said "no." He began to resent the agenda the therapist had for him. He began to see himself as unhappy, not neurotic. His realization of this gave him new insight into his lifelong process of choice (and non‑choice). In a flash he fired the therapist and fired his old career.

My friend's parents are wonderful, sweet, elderly people. They never pressured him outright to follow in their footsteps. They raised him, in fact, in an atmosphere of freedom and openness, yet they still presented him with a very compelling frame of reference. They gave him many positive values and qualities. His problem was that he took a relatively harmless “ought” and allowed it to cloud his judgment for so many years.

It's not a question of blame. My friend's problem was not his parents' problem. It was not his therapist's problem. It was his problem. Your own “oughts” and “shoulds” may have originated with someone else, but their cause is irrelevant. They're your problems now. Deal with them yourself.

There is no one quick way to exorcise the powerful demons that fog your thinking and cloud your choice mechanisms. Rebellion is a poor choice, since it really plays the opponent's game. The notion of making your own choices, while it certainly reads well on these pages, can be a painful process, filled with loneliness and doubt. Human beings have proved time and again how afraid they are of their freedom to choose for themselves. Entire nations choose to follow ideological leaders who dictate their every move, their every thought. But these systems all fall apart sooner or later. Even if they fight it, sooner or later people are forced to make unpleasant, fully‑responsible choices.

Your own dilemma is far less difficult. There is no easy solution, but once you recognize the problem, you can begin to deal with it.

The kind of autonomy I am speaking of, by its very nature, is a quiet one. What do I mean by quiet? Simply that you have nothing to prove, no one to compete with. You are autono­mous. You validate yourself on your own terms. Approval from other people is wonderful, but the measure of your success depends primarily on your own yardstick—what you need, what you want.