This episode, “100 Things I wish My Dad Taught me. Episode 33. “Self worth is a state of mind.” Is bought to you by the Universal Law number 4. Harmony – What you appreciate grows.

I think you’ll agree that self-worth is a critical and important part of living happily. A person who becomes a multi billionaire might have all the wealth but if they end up with everything but no self-worth there is going to be a huge disappointment and struggle. Self-worth, therefore can be described as a fundamental essential for a balanced happy family life and a happy balanced good leadership in work. Self-worth also affects our health, because low self-worth leads to low self treatment and ultimately that leads to behaviours that are self depreciating.

Therefore, we can agree here that self-worth is important. But it is highly misunderstood. Today I would like to clarify that a little bit for you. Just as low self-worth leads to self depreciation in many aspects of life including income, health, relationship and social disengagement, mental health problems, so the opposite works as well. High self-worth leads to higher income, better health, more loving relationships, social engagement and mental health. So why would we not wish for high self worth?

I’m going to be brave and tiptoe through the minefield here. I’m going to list five or six reasons that I’ve discovered through my own journey and through the journey of the thousands of people I have been gifted to coach as to why we would not subscribed to the idea that high self worth is a pursuit. Then after discussing these five reasons, not a complete list, I will then present the formula for raising your self-worth and then you can see whether you are justifying low self worth or in pursuit of ever increasing higher self-worth.

1. The first and most common reason we would not pursue higher self-worth is because of a spouse. Sometimes one person grows in a relationship while the other doesn’t. In fact this is quite common because as one grows the other shrinks to create balance. It’s an irony that our relationship is built for the purpose of personal growth and expansion and yet one person may su may suffer the opposite. One person starts to see opportunity in the world while the other might start to focus on the ants that have invaded the kitchen or the rust that is appearing on the side of the car. One shrinks the other grows. This is not how it was meant to be in relationship but, many people have the idea that when they bond in a relationship two souls become one. That is highly inaccurate and leads to this counterbalancing affect in growth. Now, in some relationships just like they are in some businesses to grow we must counteract the expectation of others in order to move forward which makes others, including a spouse, a hanger on parent, or a boss disturbed. In this situation we have to deal with Guild and also the clever manipulation of a spouse who is feeling unloved. This is the most common reason people would keep their self-worth lower than it could be. Ultimately, this will be realised and regretted. But it may take a long time.
2. the second most common reason people would aspire to keep their self-worth at a lower or plateaued level is because of loyalty. Loyalty is one of the strangest words in human psychology. It is a made up concept. Loyalty is beautiful and we admire it in people. But it also inhibits growth. When a child grows up and feels loyal to protecting or standing by one or both parents, it is usually a form of masking that the child now an adult pretends to be somebody else in the company of the parent. This is referred to as enabling. When somebody enables us to think about ourselves as less than ourselves we like them. It makes us feel relaxed and comfortable and calm and happy all the things we seem to pursue at some level with a mistaken idea of their source. Spiritual self-awareness is the only source of those elements of life but we tried to get them through the interaction with others especially those who enable us to remain small.
3. Environment, including how we dress, the clothing we wear, the furniture we own, the level of computer we buy, the iPhone we carry in our pocket, the shoes we wear, the car we drive are all reflections of a level of self worth with them ourselves worthy of. While we remain fixated on the accoutrements of life and maintain their standard as we experienced in the past we remain at a certain level of expectation of ourselves in relation to self-worth. Nothing changes a person faster than a change of environment. Just ask a person who has been to prison how it felt to be robbed of all the external material possessions they were once comfortable with. This works in the opposite as well that if you take somebody who is used to poverty and put them in a wealth environment way above their means they will not respect it. It is most important to observe this not rather judge it, but if you go to the poorest places on earth you will also find the dirtiest and the most children meaning that when there are no jobs to fulfil a persons need for valuation in their work they gravitate to very very low levels of human behaviour, low self-worth. When we disrespect ourselves we disrespect our environment, not just the rainforest, but more importantly what we put on our body, the way we organise our work, the way we clean what we own and maintain the standards in our own life. In particular this includes food.
4. To emotions drive a person to also resist growth in their self worth. Guilt and fear. Guilt of the past puts a cloud over the future because there is some concern that there will be a heaven sent retribution for whatever crime or activity the individual feels bad about in the past. So there is in this person a hesitation to invest in themselves for the future because of great uncertainty about the past. Equally restricting his fear of the future. When a person feels safe and in control of their current reality and they have surrounding them a group of enablers, friends or family or spouse that validates them for who they used to be, it is really hard to stretch that individual to consider the future possibilities of their life. If that future possibility is not reached for then there is no benefit to expanding their self-worth and in fact it is better to hang onto memories, behaviours, ideas and self-importance from the past. This is a serious argument with human nature. It most often leads to illness and disease faster than any other source.
5. Finally, the fifth and most tenacious of all the reasons one would resist growth in self-worth is righteousness. Righteousness is a superiority complex where an individual feels that their opinion and beliefs are superior to others. It means that they are sensitive to criticism and often the 1st to jump out and condemn any opinion that is different to their own. The more righteous and individual is and the more opinionated they are, the more insecure they are. All of us are balanced people and if one person expresses their righteousness they repress their wrongness. Hidden beneath the surface of a righteous self superior individual who values their own opinion higher than everybody else’s and therefore remains somewhat stoic in the face of challenge, there is a person hanging on with grim death to their insecurity and low self-worth. The maul this person attempts to grow in life the smaller they become. This individual will most often seek psychological therapy rather than to address the truth. Therapists can be manipulated.

it was not my intent to be negative towards any group of people in the world but suggest that we all have some element of each of these five characteristics in us because nothing is ever missing it just changes in form. But, is the decision we make is to grow in self worth it also means we must address those five issues and make sure that we are not entrapped or enslaved by our own state of mind or what we might think is loyalty or friendship or love which is actually not. Being enabled to stay stuck in self-worth does not help anybody although it may be labelled as kindness and friendliness.

now it is time to address the formula for growing our self-worth on a daily basis. We have already covered the benefits of growing our self-worth, Innerwealth, on a daily basis so I will not go over that again here. Suffice to say that you will never be treated better than you treat yourself. You will never be treated worse than you treat yourself. So nobody is going to pay you more than you think you’re worth. And nobody is going to pay you less than that also. So if we want to make quantum changes in our way of life then it is a good place to start with our self worth.

I will create a list here as a summary and not try to be absolutely complete in the summary but to give some Boundry to the topic of growing self-worth.

1. Separate expectations and love. Expectations are quite often bound up with love. When a parent has high expectations of a child they will continually feel like a failure and therefore have low self-worth. When a parent has low expectation of the child the child will inherit those low expectations and have low self worth. In both situations the expectations of others have influenced the child and the child until the age of 12 is innocent. But once they hit the age of 12 their self-worth is their responsibility and they may start saying to the parent or to Rivers expectation they have been living up to or down to buzz off. That may not be a pretty sight but if you don’t do it when you’re 12, you may never do it.
2. Look long and hard in the mirror every day. When you look in the mirror at your eyes you see every human being on earth. Every human being has every human trait. We just express those traits differently. Simply put, everybody lies, the only question is in what aspect of life that lie is justified. So when we look in the mirror the objective is to see the entire universe of humanity in our own eyes. This is both a humbling experience because it reveals we are no better or worse than anybody else, and it is also an amazing enablement because it basically says we are an amazing creation. It does both and for growth in self-worth this is an important hurdle to jump daily.
3. Have a purpose bigger than yourself. Every day I wake up and ask how can I serve the world? I don’t ask how I can serve the world in vegetables, or in cocktails, or in meat, that’s not my purpose. I ask how I can serve the world in my purpose. Because of that my ego is clearly identified. And clearly identifying the limitations put on us by our ego which says serve yourself, and making sure that we are never completely controlled by that ego is very important to growth in self-worth. I may want to be right, I may want to be applauded, I may want to be paid, I may want to be attracted and all those things are fun but when they become the focal point of my day my self-worth is going down while my work is trying to go up. Having a purpose bigger than yourself is a key to our daily totem of self-respect.
4. Understand the difference between self-esteem and self worth. If there is ever a confusion that can cause a person to spend the majority of their life vacillating between high and lows of emotion this is the cornerstone of it. Self-esteem is when we feel good about ourselves because something has great happened and we are on a high. That means we go up with the uppers and down with the lowers. So when we hunt for applause for approval we are hunting for arise in our self-esteem thinking that this is a rise in our self-worth. Self-worth on the other hand is dualistic. Dualistic means that for every opposite is a downer so if I’m going to celebrate something that is really great that I did there must be something really shit that I did at the same time. In fact the thing that I did that’s really great is in itself really shit. For example I might help somebody and help them through a challenge but the negative of that is I might of made that person weaker by not pushing them to do it themselves. Self-worth grows when we understand that there are two sides to everything and no matter what we do that makes us feel elated that same thing will also make us feel depressed. Self-worth is interested in neither it is the midpoint between high self-esteem and low self-esteem. Better to try to stay in the middle rather than suffer the infatuations and resentments of self-esteem.
5. Self-worth is holistic. If we grow in self-worth in relationship that will automatically mean we grow in self-worth in our work. But if we grow in self-worth in our relationship and it does not translate across into our work then it was not growth in self-worth. Hypothetically let’s do an example where at work you do a training program which produces another million dollars of bottom-line profit and you say wow look at myself worth growing I am really amazing how fantastic am I? Look what I’ve done, look at me I’m much better at work. If you are coming home to the same person in the same relationship you were in before that million dollars growth then that relationship must’ve undergone significant change. But if it hasn’t then the shift you experienced at work is either temporary or your relationship will welcome some serious conflict. Self-worth is holistic.
6. Self-worth you can’t be guilty. In other words, the definition of compassion must change in order for self-worth to grow while others don’t. We call this coach them up or coach them out and it really means that as you grow others will struggle and you can respect their need to struggle or their complete confusion as to what’s going on but that cannot be the determining factor of your behaviour. What determines your behaviour in the aspiration for increased self-worth is your vision and purpose. We’ve spoken many times about writing down and having a clear vision. One of the challenges with this is the need to continually upgrade it. No this is easy when it comes to work but when it comes to domestic or more personal matters we often gravitate towards compassion for others based on not disrupting their comfort. And example might be that we lose interest in a sport or lose interest in a social engagement or stepparents and find that we are operating on a different wavelength than where we were and hearing the disappointment and complaints of others. This can make us very guilty but as long as our intent is not bullying or cruelty, we must allow our compassion to include challenging others as well as supporting them.
7. Self-worth does not mean being pure or puerile. Let’s put this in context. Many people will mistake self righteousness, being good or better than somebody else, as the benchmark of their self-worth. But self-worth as much as it grows in positive qualities also expands in negative. The higher we go the lower we go. In biblical terms as above so below. That means that if we are going to embrace our enlightenment we must also embrace our endarkenment. If we are going to be highly focused we need to also embrace our lowly focused. If we are going to embrace our genius we must also embrace our dumbness. If we are going to embrace our success we must equally embrace our failure. Self-worth does not grow in one dimension but to. If you can imagine the metaphor used often in Buddhism that the stronger the Lotus sitting on top of the water, our good qualities, the deeper the roots of the Lotus must be buried in the shit and the mud. We must on both sides. When you own both sides of yourself you get to choose how you express those sides. In other words if you own the fact that you can be mean and cruel you can choose the format in which you express that rather than in cruelty or rage against a human being.
8. Self-worth you do not measure your life by how you feel. We have spent a lot of time with Innerwealth explaining that feelings are things you dictate to yourself not things that I dictated to you by yourself. You are the driver of your mind and you are the driver of your body. When it goes the other way, your appetite determines when you eat, your thirst determines when you drink, your emotions determine what do you drink, and your thoughts determine what you eat. You become the prisoner of your mind and your body. With clearly shown that to be the CEO of you, you need to be in charge of your mind and in charge of your body. You feed your body what it needs rather than what it wants, you feed your mind what will cause your mind to give you the result you are looking for. I.e. if you want to be happy you choose happy thoughts to focus on. With Innerwealth we do not play victim. Building self-worth you cannot be a victim of circumstance.
9. Self-worth does not personalise hardship. We grow at the border of support and challenge and therefore when we are challenged it is not a message from the gods as some people may think that we have messed up. It’s the opposite. In other words when we are going really well in life and so being supported by everything else around us we will also equally be challenged by things around us. So the reward for achievement in life is challenge. The purpose we create in coaching environments is to create an environment where you can be challenged away from your work and away from your home life so that you can grow without real-time disturbance. We create what is called the synthesiser. The synthesiser is a virtual reality environment called coaching where we go off-line to go online to be coached. The purpose of coaching is to support and challenge you. Not one or the other. This grows yourself worth.
10. Self-worth is measurable. In the accumulation of your goals and the assets or objectives that you strive for with your goals in a material sense you are measuring yourself worth. If all of a sudden you have targeted a $1 million asset improvement but achieve only a $100,000 improvement then you might be justified in recognising that your self-worth has gone down rather than gone up. It is very easy to substitute hard work and worry for self-worth growth. Self-worth growth has nothing to do with the amount of stress, hardship, resilience, endurance, anxiety, pain or dare. It is 100% to do with what disturbs what is in your heart.

to close this very long article is important to put a rider over all of this. No matter what you’ve done or not done you are worthy of love. That would be the awareness of a person of high self-worth. And just because you achieve that state of mind today does not guarantee that it will stay tomorrow. The one thing we know about nature is there a growth rings. Just like the growth rings of a tree. We call those growth rings frustrate. If the tree stops growing there are no more frustrations. Therefore a sign that you are in a state of decay is that you are happy content and satisfied. Every time you hit that frustrate you are in a state that is happy, content and satisfied, but, the second you hit the frustrate and enjoy that experience, new challenges come your way and a new possibility emerges in your life which creates new frustration. To really grow in self-worth we must embrace this idea that challenge is a healthy thing and when we say challenge we mean chaos. We know in Innerwealth that there is water in the chaos but we don’t always see it that way. The faster we can see the order in the chaos the faster we can return to the next frustration, process it and grow in self-worth.

I personally do not measure myself worth by my bank account. I measured myself worth by the number of people in the world I can share Innerwealth with. When that number expands I know my self-worth is increasing because self-worth drives that growth. If I targeted my finances I would measure it by my finances. But I don’t. I measure myself worth by the number of people in the world who are understanding the universal laws of nature and therefore living their lives inspired by love, leading with love, living in a relationship with love and sharing that love with as many people as possible. What I know is the world will only change one heart at a time. And that’s how I measure my self worth.

That’s the end of this Episode. 100 Things I wish My Dad Taught me. Episode 33. “Self worth is a state of mind.”

With Spirit

Chris