There is a quote by Joyce Meyer that says “if you don’t love yourself, it will be impossible for you to love others, as you can’t give away what you don’t have”.
And another that counters that, which says” It’s not that people can’t love you, if you don’t love yourself, it’s that you won’t feel it, because it will always seem like you don’t deserve it.”
Another quote by Mandy Hale is “if you don’t love yourself, you’ll always be chasing after people who don’t love you either”.
Perhaps you relate to one of these.
Our Self-Worth
Our self-worth is the result of many aspects of our life, from traumatic experiences, the combination of the 5 people we associate with the most, and our beliefs that are deeply seeded in our subconscious mind and were formed prior to the age of 8, based on what we were told or perceived about ourselves and our world at that young age.
Our self-worth has the ability to move us forward, or keep us stuck. We stay stuck when we believe we aren’t worth doing whatever it is we think we might like to do. Or we can move forward when we realize we are worth taking that one small step towards whatever it is we desire. We all have the power to design our life and live it the way we choose to, or we can sit back in a victim mentality and let life happen to us. Where are you on that spectrum?
First Step To Changing Your Self-Worth: How Are You Treating Yourself?
The first step in changing your self-worth and upgrading it, is to understand where you are at and whether you are where you truly want to be.
Let’s start by looking at how you treat yourself. What kind of food do you feed your body? Is it healthy, nourishing food, or are you eating on the run, grabbing things that you know aren’t great, but you are so busy looking after everyone else, you aren’t making time to feed yourself properly?
Do you slow down and listen to your body? Your body talks to you, and so often we ignore it, but when we slow down and listen to the symptoms, we are honoring our body and our self worth at the same time, because when we listen we are much more likely to then take action! Some examples of the body talking to you are headaches, swollen fingers or joints, from too many inflammatory foods, like sugar, dairy, gluten.
Are you following through on commitments to yourself, or do you often let yourself down, even though you wouldn’t let your best friend down? Be truthful here, this is very, very common! When we create boundaries to show respect to ourself, we have to honor them. When we say start to say no to others, so we can say yes to ourself, that is when we are building our self worth. It may mean that you have to release commitments that are saying “yes” to others, in order to have the time to build commitments for ourself in our calendar.
Second Step To Changing Your Self-Worth: Who Do You Hang Around With?
Next you can take a look at who are the people you hang around the most, do they lift you up, support and motivate you, are they interested in your personal growth, or do they discourage you from moving forward in your life, because of their own fears of being left behind? How many times have you been told ‘you can’t do that!’….and it stops you?
Do you realize that when someone else tells you that you can’t do something, it actually has nothing to do with you but is a direct reflection of what they think about themselves and it comes out of their mouth as if it’s meant for you.
You might have voiced a desire to quit your job and start your own business and were told by a “well meaning” family member –“you can’t do that, it’s too risky, what if you fail?” That is their opinion of their ability to start a business, as perhaps they’ve never thought about doing so, they don’t even have an idea, so of course they can’t start a business, plus they don’t want to see you fail, so they’d rather you stay where you are, not realizing you are unhappy and feel stuck. A regular pay cheque is no reason to accept “unhappiness” and feeling stuck. Besides, you’ve been thinking about this for a while now, you have an idea, you aren’t happy in your job, you want to move on, you can absolutely do this, you just need to find the right group of people to lift you up, support you and carry you forward in this desire.
If they hold you back, start finding a new tribe! You can find a new tribe of likeminded people, by joining groups of people with a similar interest or hobby, or taking a course you are interested in, hiring a business coach, join a mastermind group…..
Third Step To Changing Your Self-Worth: Shifting Your Subconscious Thoughts
Another important step in boosting your self worth is to shift your subconscious thoughts. This is simple to do, but not necessarily easy, but I encourage you to do it all the same, for it yields powerful results. I call this the “mirror challenge”. I invite you to make some time, and stand in front of your mirror, look yourself in the eyes, and say “I love you”. Don’t just say the words though, you need to feel them.
At first it will feel strange and awkward, but stick with it, and keep repeating the words, hear the emotion in your voice, feel the love in your body, change the intonation in your voice as needed, change the words too, such as “I love you so much”, I may not have always loved you, but I love you now, so that it’s meaningful to you.
I find this experience often results in tears, and that is ok, those tears are a necessary release of feelings you no longer need, feelings that result in a lack of self-worth. Practice this daily for 10 minutes until you reprogram your subconscious mind to know that you truly do love yourself!
You can also do a quiz, from the book “How To Be Your Biggest Fan” by Renee Cermak.
This quiz asks many questions about every day ways you live your life, with questions about whether you pay your bills on time, the condition of your desk most of the time, the amount you complain, whether you return borrowed items on time, do you make your bed every morning, volunteering your time, how often you read/listen to books, your driving record, how often you set and achieve goals and many more! You rate these as being positive, negative or neutral to come up with a score of your self-worth.
Now if that score is low, you might feel that is a blow to your self-worth, OR you can look at that as a starting point from which you can launch your self-worth journey, to take steps to build your self-worth, by changing 1 item on this list into a new habit that will boost self-worth. You might not think that making your bed daily has anything to do with self-worth, but making your bed, creates a tidy bedroom, which allows for you to have pride in the appearance of your room. The way we do 1 thing is the way we do everything, so if we start to clean up one area of our life and take more care, because we are building our self-respect, we’ll start to do that in other areas of our life and it won’t be long before we can stand in front of that mirror and say I love you and truly mean it, with a big smile on our face instead of tears.
As you start to change your beliefs about yourself, that triggers new actions and behaviours that further fuel your self-worth and love of self.
I’m not going to tell you this is easy, but I am going to tell you this is possible. If you want to upgrade your self-worth, you absolutely can. If you want to fall in love with yourself, you absolutely can! If you need help, there are many coaches that can support you in this journey. They can’t do the work for you, just like I can’t do the work for my clients, but a good coach will guide your journey, hold you accountable to yourself and draw out your own magic, that has been hidden inside for too long, to let you shine.
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