The measurements we use to evaluate success and worth, and the benchmark we use to do it are key factors in how we see ourselves.
How we value ourselves can be the difference between resilience and unshakeable confidence, or a lifetime of emptiness and comparison.
Understand that you are not your numbers
Put at its simplest, the network is the sum of your assets minus your debts.
Self-worth goes deeper than that.
Self-worth is about a sense of your value in this world as a human being. It’s about defining yourself by your beliefs, actions, and decisions.
Can you see the difference?
One is external, monetary-based, tracked in currencies and balance sheets.
One is internal, derived from your own sense of place, value, and worthiness.
Whilst net worth is often where we seek to place our value, self-worth is where the real gold is.
Know that your values are where the value is
If we value self-worth over net worth, we bring power back to ourselves.
We can accept ourselves in our human wholeness, and detach our success definition from assets, houses, salaries, clothes, lifestyles and outward displays of wealth.
Our true success is not deemed by our monetary assets in the world, but by our own sense of being, of worthiness as a human being.
Monetary value is an external measurement of worth.
Self-worth is a priceless barometer of belonging, of knowing ourselves, trusting our decisions, our values, and a true sense of who we are.
Action:
- Consider where you add value in your relationships, your interactions, and your life with other people.
- How does taking the onus away from money and worth make you feel?
Quantify that comparisonitis is not completeness
Whilst me might be used to hearing phrases about “owning your worth” in your career and in business, the link between self-worth and money can be problematic. It’s all too easy to compare lifestyles and outward displays of success with our peeps, celebrities, and online personas. Drop the comparison habit, and you can begin to find yourself in a state of completion that doesn’t rely on a salary number, a car model, or a status symbol tech purchase.
Action:
- Consider a time when you have compared yourself to someone else’s lifestyle, or monetary wealth. How did it make you feel?
From beyond your control to owning your brilliance and beliefs
“You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.” Brene Brown
Whilst accumulating assets and wealth can be an incredible experience, bear in mind that wealth is also subject to external factors. If 2020 has taught us anything so far, it’s that the world can change in a moment – that economies can be fragile, markets turbulent, and nothing as we know it is permanent.
Circumstances can change in a flash and are often beyond your control.
If you lose monetary worth, you lose things.
If you have a strong self of self-worth, you have an ability to own your brilliance and your place in the world that brings resilience and experiences that last way beyond the ups and downs of things we cannot necessarily control.
Action:
- Do you find it easy to believe you are worthy of being loved, seen, heard and acknowledged without external success?
Acknowledge that your self-worth is a lifetime gift
As you dig deeper to discover your self-worth, make it a daily mindful practice to observe those moments you find yourself in the old habits of comparisonitis, or attachment to external outcomes.
Notice those moments as you see them arise.
Let them go, and remind yourself that your true brilliance has nothing to do with net value – and everything to do with your inner dialogue and relationship with yourself.
Owning your brilliance, letting go of old beliefs, and coming home to yourself is worth so much more than numbers on a balance sheet.
So, dream big, but go within and do the work there first.
It has a much higher ROI as an asset for life.