- Do you have a tendency of people-pleasing?
- Do you have a difficult time setting clear and healthy boundaries when it comes to relationships?
- Are you tolerating poor behaviour and bad treatment from others?
- Are you settling for less in life and lowering your standards because you're afraid to ask for what you truly want?
- Have you abandoned your own needs and well-being and not really taken care of yourself lately?
If you answered yes to any of these above, then this blog post is for you! These are all signs that you might have some work to do on improving your own self-worth.
What is Self-Worth?
Self-worth is how much you value yourself and it’s a deep inner feeling and knowing that you're innately valuable, worthy and lovable, no matter what you do or have. It’s the knowing that you have value simply because you exist.
Contrary to popular belief, your self-worth is not dependent on any outside factors, such as your appearance, job, achievements or how much money you have in your bank account. Our society has become conditioned to believe that the more belongings we possess and the more money we have or the better we look, the more worthy we are. But self-worth has nothing to do with what you do or have. Nothing outside of you defines your worth. It is an illusion that once you have a certain amount of money in your bank account, or have certain friends or a certain car or house - that then you will be worthy. You won’t find your self-worth by anything outside of you, because feeling worthy comes from within.
Self-worth is often confused with self-esteem. Self-esteem, on the other hand, is what you think, feel and believe about yourself and this is usually attached to external factors like your job, your achievements and what other people think and say about you.
Where Does Feeling Worthless Come From?
Your beliefs about your self-worth, or lack thereof, are a direct reflection of what you experienced growing up. The messages you absorbed and internalised from the society, school, your caregivers, friends and family members. Later on in life, low self-worth can also be caused by difficulties in life, whether it's physical, relational or financial.
The root cause of feeling unworthy often stems from childhood, where we have a traumatic experience. The experience doesn’t necessarily have to be anything major, and you might not even consciously remember it, but to your small human brain it was significant, because back then you had limited reasoning abilities and you didn’t have the same capacity to process things as you have today. So in order to make sense of the experience you internalized it and made it mean something about you, e.g. that your caregiver didn’t come and check on you in the middle of the night when you were screaming in your own bed, so you made it mean that you're not worthy of love and attention. When our emotional needs aren’t met in our childhood, we instead internalize the events and make them mean something about us.
Feeling unworthy is often a deep rooted belief that goes completely unconscious, yet influences all areas of our lives. A belief is just a set of thoughts and feelings that have joined together to create a framework in your subconscious mind.
Why Increasing Your Self-Worth and Feeling Worthy Matters?
Self-worth is the solid foundation that our self-respect, self-love, and self-esteem are built upon, and it’s in essence the core of ourselves. How you view your worthiness and value as a human being will intimately influence your daily thoughts, feelings and behaviours. The belief of not being worthy determines how you feel on a daily basis and it's basically the pillar of your mental health. Low self-worth has been identified as a factor contributing to addictions, anxiety and depression. Having a healthy amount of self-worth helps prevent poor mental health, but it also helps you show up as your best self in any given moment, no matter what circumstances you're in, because you value yourself. When increasing your self-worth you will also be more resilient to setbacks and faster able to move on with life, because you won't make the failures and losses mean anything about yourself.
Your self-worth is reflected in all areas of your life, be it finances, relationships, career and your personal life. Your own self-worth sets the standard for what you tolerate in your life, how you treat yourself and what kind of treatment and behaviour you accept from other people. It also sets the tone for how you show up in your life, and e.g. if you take good care of yourself and set time aside for your own well-being. Your self-worth is tied to what you are able to manifest into your life, and it also makes all the difference when you apply for jobs, negotiate your salary and ask for a pay raise. It affects the actions you take and therefore your results in life - or lack thereof! What you believe influences literally everything in your life!
Unless you tackle the deep rooted self-worth issue, no matter what you achieve or accomplish in life you won't ever feel like you are good enough. And whenever you achieve something or receive a blessing like some good things happen in your life, you receive a big success or find the love of your life - you will never feel worthy of it.
Self-worth improves the overall quality of your life, because it not only enables you to feel more confident in your own skin and enables you to show up more as your authentic self. Valuing yourself more will result in you respecting and loving yourself more, and so you will take better care of yourself and have better daily habits and routines. It will also improve the quality of your relationships and friendships because you'll show up as your true authentic self and be honest with them, while at the same time be better able to set and maintain firm personal boundaries. You will also not put up with poor treatment or disrespectful behaviour, and you will be able to remove toxic people from your life more easily. When your self-worth increases, you'll naturally set higher standards for all areas of your life and you will no longer accept and tolerate the same kind of things. When you boost your self-worth, you increase your opportunities in life.
Now that I got you convinced that improving your self-worth is important because it affects all areas of your life, it's time to look at the most powerful ways to boost your self-worth and start feeling worthy and good enough today.
You get to choose to change your situation.
