By Carrie Halladay
We live in a world that gives us plenty of opportunities to measure ourselves.
We measure our success by our careers, our bank accounts, our homes and sometimes even the cars we drive. We compare our appearance to other people, count likes on social media and notice when someone else seems to be doing better than we are. It’s easy to begin believing that our worth is determined by how successful, attractive, productive or well-liked we are.
The problem is that all of those things can change.
Jobs can be lost. Relationships can end. Children grow up and need us differently. Our bodies age. Financial circumstances change. Someone will always have more followers, a nicer house or a more impressive title.
If our sense of worth depends entirely on those things, our self-esteem is constantly at the mercy of circumstances.
So where does healthy self-worth actually come from?
It begins with recognizing the difference between what we do and who we are.
You can fail at something without being a failure. You can make a poor decision without being a bad person. Someone can reject you without that rejection proving you are unlovable. Those distinctions sound simple, but they can be surprisingly difficult to make.
Many of our beliefs about ourselves begin early in life. Maybe you received attention when you achieved something, behaved well or took care of everyone else. Perhaps criticism was more common than encouragement. Over time, you may have learned that being useful, successful or pleasing to others was how you earned acceptance.
Those messages can follow us into adulthood.
We may become people pleasers. We may have difficulty saying no because disappointing someone feels unbearable. We may overwork, constantly seek reassurance or become extremely critical of ourselves when we make mistakes.
Building healthier self-worth often means challenging those old beliefs.
One place to start is by paying attention to how you speak to yourself. Many people have an internal voice that says things they would never say to someone they love. When you make a mistake, do you think, “I messed that up,” or does it quickly become, “I can’t do anything right”?
There’s a big difference.
Healthy self-worth doesn’t mean believing you’re wonderful at everything. It means being able to recognize both strengths and weaknesses without turning either into a judgment about your value as a person.
It also means living according to your values. Keeping your word, treating people well, setting appropriate boundaries, taking responsibility when you’re wrong and making choices you respect can create a much stronger foundation for self-worth than approval from other people ever will.
And perhaps most importantly, self-worth isn’t something you have to continually earn.
You don’t become more valuable when someone chooses you, promotes you or praises you. You don’t become less valuable because someone leaves, criticizes you or fails to recognize what you bring to the table.
Confidence may rise and fall. Success will come and go. Other people’s opinions will change.
Healthy self-worth is quieter and steadier.
It is the understanding that you can still be a worthwhile person on the days when you aren’t accomplishing much, when you make a mistake and even when someone else doesn’t see your value.
Your worth was never supposed to depend on your performance in the first place.
