How Is Your Self Worth?

Welcome to Expand Your Life Podcast. This is Jc Jones and you’re listening to Episode 32. Welcome back, everyone. I hope you’re doing well. Today we’re going to talk about self-worth.

What is self-worth? I think the easiest definition for that would be the value that you place on yourself. This includes:

• your time
• your energy
• how you feel about you
• how you think about you
• how you act towards you
• how you talk to you
• and it also includes how you allow others to treat you

So how do you know if you’re struggling with low self-worth? Well I found a pretty good list online that I’d like to share with you, I think this particular list is pretty thorough. I’ll leave the link to the article I got it from on the Show Notes page for this episode.

1. You struggle to set strong personal boundaries.
2. You suffer from constant self-doubt.
3. You’re cynical about the value of what you do.
4. You struggle to believe that anyone could really love you. 
5. You can’t accept compliments without feeling embarrassed or skeptical.
6. You put others needs above your own. 
7. You settle for less in relationships or in your job, thinking that it’s the best that you can do.
8. You value other people’s opinions above your own.
9. You’re afraid to be who you really are, and instead you put on an act around others.
10. You allow others to walk all over you or mistreat you.
11. Instead of feeling like the King or Queen of your life, you feel like a beggar always needing help or a victim always being hurt.
12. You struggle to speak up and be assertive about your needs.
13. You don’t know what your true needs are.
14. You feel more depressed than you do happy.

I think this is a really excellent list. It really goes into detail and shows quite a few of the effects of having low self-worth. How many of those things that I was reading off did you recognize in yourself? I know there’s quite a few of them in there for me.

That’s one of the things I just really love about doing this podcast, is it gives me a chance to evaluate where I am at and to see where I need to grow more or learn more, and opens my eyes to the things that not only can I help you with, but it helps me too. So I get Just as much benefit out of these podcasts doing them as you get listening to them. So it’s a win/win.

Now, let’s look a little bit at what we normally try to build our self-worth with and why those things don’t work. Some of things that we try to base our self-worth on:

• our income
• our friends
• the amount of friends we have (whether in real life or online)
• possessions like cars, homes, etcetera
• our appearance
• our career or job title
• what others think about us

These are all things outside of us that we try to use as tools of self-worth. Well, if we have a certain job, we’ll feel better about ourselves. We’ll feel like we’re something if we get our to-do list done, or achieve our goals, or get a better paying job.

Whatever it is that we’re focusing on that’s outside of ourselves, for our self-worth, will always let us down. None of those things make you a better human being. None of those things make you more worthy.

We all have the same worth. We are all worthy. And your feeling of self-worth can only be determined by you. Not what you’re doing or what you have, but who you’re being.

Who you’re being is based on the values you have in life. What are your values? What are you known for? And not just what are you known for by those around you, but how do you know yourself? How do you view you?

Here is an exercise that can kind of help you see this a little more clearly. Imagine that everything you have is suddenly taken away from you. All of your possessions, your relationships, your friendships, your status, your job or your career, all your accomplishments and achievements. And then ask yourself these questions:

1. What if everything I have was suddenly taken away from me?
2. What if all I had left was just myself?
3. How would that make me feel?
4. What would I actually have that would be of value?

What inside of you holds value?

The key is to realize that no matter what happens externally to you, no matter what’s taken away from you, that shouldn’t affect your self-worth. That shouldn’t affect who you are or how you feel about yourself. But it really does.

So how do we change that? How do we get to the point where things outside of us don’t have an effect on the worth that we have for who we are?

I think the biggest two things that can help you in this area are becoming more self-aware and discovering and living by your values. Because I can tell you until I’m blue in the face that you’re worthy and that you are worth something. But that’s not going to help you believe it.

In order to believe it, it’s necessary to do some work. It’s necessary to figure out why you don’t feel worthy. What are the some of the things that you need to change in your thinking and how you feel about yourself in order to really believe that you are worthy and that you have value.

In order to create value, you have to have values that you act upon that create who you are as a human being. And when you start living by your values and start discovering who you are and what makes you tick, that’s when you’re going to really see progress in the value you place on yourself and having self-worth. In believing that you are worthy.

So take a little time in the next week and really think about what your values are or what you would like your values to be. Discover why you haven’t lived by those values in the past and think about different ways you can start incorporating those values that you find important into your life. Into:

• how you act
• react
• how you live
• the things that you do
• the way that you treat others
• the way that you treat yourself
• how you talk to others
• how you talk to yourself
• the time and energy you put towards things.

All of these things are based on the values we have. What are your strengths and what your weaknesses in those areas? Once you figure out what values that you want to have, or what character traits you want to incorporate or strengthen in your life, think about different ways that you can start doing that. Think about different solutions in the areas where you’ve fallen short in the past, or where you haven’t kept up on something that you place value on.

I’m not really worried too much about whether or not you’re going to take the time to do this this week, because I know that if this is something that’s important enough for you to have, you’re going to take the time to work on it.

If it’s really important enough for you to figure out, you are going to take the time and put in some effort this week in order to figure out a solution. And if you don’t all that means is that it’s NOT important enough for YOU right now.

That’s a tough lesson I had to learn again this week. At the end of the week when I saw all the things that I didn’t get accomplished that I wanted to get accomplished this week, because I got distracted or spent too much time screwing around. It just was not important enough for me.

Obviously.

I had to get tough with myself. If it was really that important, I would not have screwed around. I would have just done those things that I needed to get done.

Hopefully, that motivates you. If it pisses you off. I’m OK with that too. And I totally get it. It pissed me off when I told myself that at first, but then I had to really come clean with the truth of it. So, it’s all good.

All right, I’m gonna give you a few resources for this episode. A couple articles you can read. One of them has some exercises on developing your self-worth that are interesting if you want to try those out. Also I’ll link to the free Self-Awareness Workbook from the Resource page on the website. I’ll put all those links in the Show Notes page for this episode if you want to check them out there.

I hope you give those a try. I hope you take the time this week to really delve into this. Everyone deserves to feel worthy. Everyone deserves to feel valued. Next week, we’re going to talk about re-evaluating your goals for the year. Sometimes that’s necessary. Especially when unexpected things crap on your parade. So have a great week.

Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you’ll get updates and notifications when new episodes are released. Have a great week. Bye for now.