11 STEPS TO RAISE YOUR SELF-WORTH

1. Action. Taking action is the long term solution to feelings of lowered worth, confidence and acceptance. This is the first step because it underscores my formula for addressing all issues of self worth in my own life and in the lives of those I help in any way. I want to encourage you to be proactive in your life because that really is the most important relationship - the relationship we have with ourselves is strengthened by how willing we are to engage with our life. No one and nothing can give us self worth, in the long term. We may feels the exhilarating rushes of dopamine induced self esteem boosts that we get from outside acknowledgement and approval, but it doesn't last. This isn't about self esteem anyway. This is about something much deeper. To wrestle with our value, not just as a human being but as YOU, is an inside job and always will be.

2. Tend to your physiology: The way we hold our bodies is all the evidence we need to understand how we feel. Self- worth lives in the body. It lives in your chest, shoulders, neck, belly and low back. It resides in our breathing. Start breathing more deeply. Low self-worth is shallow, often held breath. Choose to do something different with your body by taking on a challenge. Start yoga, or if you are already a practitioner, approach it differently. Learn to swim, do trapeze - go outside of your comfort zone. This could be more rest and restore practices so you can breath and feel the emotions that are burrowed beneath your shame and guilt and start to let them go.

3. Do more of the things that make you come alive. Do you love to dance? If so, are you dancing much? Do you love to socialize? Do you love to read, paint, do sports, help others, travel, learn, etc etc? How can you carve out time every single day to do something small that speaks to your heart and inspires you? How can you plan for larger events so that you can look forward to participating in them? Doing things that make you forget the clock is not only a sure way to enhance your life, but by showing yourself the respect to actually do them is a radical act of self care. And, self care increases positive feelings towards yourself. At the risk of sounding totally corny, it also up levels your energy to a higher peaks of frequency. These peaks effect our emotional states for the better.

4. (Re)Acquaint yourself with YOU. What do you value on a deep core level? What would you need to value MORE in order to have the life that you want? What would you need to value LESS? What are your beliefs about money and love? Are those beliefs in conflict with what you desire? What beliefs belong to your parents and your community, but are not actually yours? What internal conflicts are you grappling with? What is most important you? Identifying, clarifying and aligning yourself with your value and belief systems are key to increasing a sense of wholeness and integration. When we feel more whole, we feel more worthy. If you are single and looking for love, you would have to align with, at least mostly, with the belief and value system of a potential mate in order to raise your chances of a healthy long term relationship. When you choose your beliefs and you define your values, you will raise your connection to self which will push you to raise your standards and increase your self-worth.

5. Make peace with the parts of yourself you dislike, and stop apologizing for who you are. There are always going to be things about you that you don’t like, but are you are war with yourself? Although the line may seem fine, it is still very much a distinct line: There is a difference between doing the emotional labor to be a better version of yourself daily and completely berating yourself for not being good enough. The difference is MERCY. Can you show yourself mercy as much as you do judgement? At the end of the day, we are all just trying to be enough - but we must try to be enough for ourselves. We all live with our own mistakes in a way that no one else does. Only you know the full scope of your wrongs in life. That's why it can be really hard not to be our harshest critic. But there comes a point, more often as we age, (but my hope for everyone is sooner rather than later) where we have to simply accept ourselves good, and bad. This is how we begin to accept others, and how we invite others to accept us. Self-acceptance is at the root of all self-worth recovery. *to go deeper into this topic including understanding the Shadow, please refer to the Self-acceptance Roadmap inside the membership.
   

6. Confront your past. None of us make it through our childhoods and adolescence unscathed. If your aim is to feel more connected, aligned and content with yourself, then you have to confront the parts of your past that have a chokehold on your present. We all have to consult with our shame, traumas, resentments and abandonments. They don’t go away by ignoring them and they have a pretty solid chance of healing when we pay attention. If you painfully struggle with your worth, then its time, perhaps with a professional, to review your history and locate the stories that are keeping you stuck in disempowering emotions and low confidence. Whenever we invest in our psycho-emotional health, we make a huge effort towards our self care and thus our future. This kind of investment is a huge self worth boost in itself because it says: “I am worth helping”.

7. Self-Care. Self care comes in many forms, including investing in our well emotional wellbeing which can be hard and painful at times. But I must reiterate: Learning how to truly take of ourselves emotionally is very profound because it means that we no longer rely on others to take care of us. *Relying on others is extremely important for well functioning relationships. But we must also be response-able for ourselves independent of anyone else. When we are, we learn how to stand on our own two feet and that is huge for our self-worth. The basics of self care are too overlooked and undermined: clean your room. Make your bed. Feed yourself well, and hydrate. This is critical.

8. Courage. The need for certainty is a foundational human need that cannot be ignored. But when it is the need we put before our need for adventure, fun and growth, we will suffer. We won't feel truly alive. This brings back step 1: in order to raise our self worth, we must engage in our lives; if we are too addicted to the familiar, we will stop engaging at the level we need to. We do not need fearlessness to live our lives we need courage. We need courage to take risks. This is the paradox: Low self worth will keep you in fear, but facing your fear will raise it. This is why we need courage - so we can bravely confront our fear of the unknown and of our past. Think of courage as a muscle, it grows as you use it. Build your courage muscle every day with small steps. The greater the fear, the more incremental your steps towards facing it should be. But keep going. This will catapult your inner certainty, and inner certainty = healthy self worth.

9. Change your relationship to Failure and Rejection. Many who struggle with confidence and issues of lowered worth have a particular relationship with failure which says: If I make a mistake, I failed, if I make a mistake I am a failure, if I am rejected, then I am worthless, unwanted, and dispensable. Perfectionism is rooted in these disillusioned perspectives of failure and rejection. But its not your fault if this describes you. It just means you weren't taught any differently. But you can still learn. The people who’s “success” you admire have very strong beliefs in this arena. They believe Mistakes = lessons and rejection = protection and redirection. I personally know some one who gets excited every time she “fails” because she knows that she's going to learn so much which will in turn bring her closer to her goal. Granted, she learned this from her father, but it is never too late to make the switch - in fact, if you were to do the research, you would see that the biggest icons by anyone's standards did not let their failed attempts in life define them.

10. Learn how to assert yourself. If you are an agreeable person by nature, then learning how to assert yourself is miraculous for self worth. As women, unless we were taught by example from our parents, we are not encouraged nor taught by society how to assert ourselves, and to do so effectively. This is a problem. When we do not assert ourselves, we become bitter and resentful. Resentment is hell. It eats away at a person, oppressing them to the point of rage. When you have something to say, you must say it in a way that makes you heard. There is an art to this, and the details to this can be found in the ASSERT YOURSELF training in the membership.

11. Contribute. There is absolutely nothing that gets us out of our own heads, stories, worries, and concerns than giving outside of ourselves. To add value to another person’s life will raise your self-worth faster than anything else. Giving back (to people, society, a community, etc) is what each one of us was born to do. The scale of that does NOT matter in the slightest. If you want to increase your confidence and self worth, find someone or something to add value to. It could be through finding deeper meaning in your work, in your family, or something entirely new. Nothing will make you help you feel better about yourself than this.