On self worth

Alex: I’d like to ask a question. It's around minding and nurturing your own self worth. My question is how do you hold your own value and worth, and not need to look for appreciation and affirmation outside of yourself? My experience is this is harder for women. I am the only woman in a four-person team. I find myself looking for appreciation from my colleagues for my hard work, and noticing how little I get.?

Somehow women have been taught to question ourselves, our value, and what we have to offer. And this is compounded for those of us who come from a family of origin where love and affection is rarely expressed in a demonstrative and open way. And where criticism and judgement was high on the agenda.

What tools and tricks have you found to be effective tools in holding onto and nurturing the value that you bring, without needing to feel small, or like you are not appreciated by colleagues? Or even the need to have appreciation and recognition from colleagues? But rather, to just know your own value and worth in yourself?

Thank you, Alex for your insight and openness … and your great question.

Initially I tried to combine this with Zoe’s question from my previous blog on confidence and humility . But as I got into it I realised that while they are related, you’re asking about something different.?

Coming up to twenty years ago Trish and I did a high-performance ski program in Canada. We had to fill out a questionnaire about how good we were at skiing different types of conditions, terrain etc.

When we spoke to them, we explained that while my score on the self-assessment was higher than Trish’s, she was actually a better skier than I was.

“Oh, that’s fine” the woman replied, “we always lower the score that men give us.”

They had come to the same realisation that you have, Alex. That nurturing self-worth is generally harder for women. (And that men often have the opposite problem.)

In The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know , Katty Kay & Claire Shipman unpack the science behind this. Their conclusion is that women consistently underestimate what they can do, while men on average overestimate by 30%.

So, what to do about it?

One thing is to recalibrate your self-talk. Whenever you listen to the voice in your head evaluating your performance, recalibrate it up. Just imagine it’s like a clock that you know is 20 minutes slow … you have to add 20 minutes. Treat your self-talk the same way. Just assume you’re 50% better than the voice in your head gives you credit for.

Secondly, I’d accept that getting appreciation and recognition from our colleagues is affirming, whether or not we want to depend on it. So create a project to change the culture where you work to one where appreciation is the norm, not the exception.

Hope that helps.