© 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 are men in the world who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as others from success. Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965)

It starts, of course, in childhood. The cruel neighborhood bully, who is slated to grow up into a dangerous criminal, is flattened by a truck. You don't find this news particularly distressing. The school decides to have a memorial service for him. You're eight years old. You don't want to attend the service, but parents and teachers force you to. You aren't even allowed to express your relief that the little Hitler is no longer torturing animals and humiliating his schoolmates. Some one, perhaps even another child, will tell you it isn't right for your feelings to differ from those of everyone else.

You have to be nice to your unpleasant alcoholic uncle who pinches, hurts and humiliates you because, well, just because. You have to play with the children of your parents' friends for similar unexplained reasons, even though they bore you to tears and have disgusting habits.

In adult life, you must give to the poor and “less fortunate.” A miserable wretch who only knows how to take from other people sticks his hand out on the street and you must dig into your pocket. If you complain that the government takes too much of your money and redistributes it to people who know nothing of work or initiative, you're labeled a “reactionary.” If you have teenaged children, they might be very skilled in separating you from your money on the basis of guilt. If you're having a miserable love relationship, your fear of your own possible guilt may be keeping you in it.

People in all areas of your life have methods of using the concepts of right and wrong, of guilt and shame, to manipulate others. Your personal worth, integrity and effectiveness depend on you taking strong, decisive action against any attempt to manipulate you with guilt.

Your own success, of course, is nothing to feel guilty about. The only thing remotely deserving guilt in life is failure to live it, failure to live with integrity. But envy is a strong emotion in human life and in human history. Rather than emulate a successful person, many lesser minds will turn to trying to hurt the successful person. Dealing with envy is part of the overhead of success. If you make a lot of money, you're “obscenely” rich. Well, there's nothing “obscene” about money. Self-perpetuating poverty is what's obscene. Living on other people's money is obscene.

In “society,” in the media, in newspapers and magazines, radio and television, idea after idea about what is right and moral is thrown at us. If we're not “politically correct,” if we don't toe the moral line, somehow we're racists, sexists, ageists and whatever odious tags opportunists can invent to fill newspaper space and make people buy books. A successful person with high personal integrity not only doesn't believe all this societal rot, he or she doesn't waste time debating any of these points (that's playing the morality manipulators' game). Life goes on despite the machinations of small minds and weak hearts. Be part of it.

It's when dealing with morality manipulators that you do use the “No more Munichs” strategy. They're clever, but learn to resist them. They may, in fact, be in the majority. But you have nothing to prove to other people. You're the real judge of how you live your life and what your success means. “What other people think” should never take precedence over what you in your own heart believe is right.