Where did you get your Self-Worth from?

Sounds like a simple question but I didn’t know as I was growing up and I never asked myself this question either. I was running a successful consultancy business and driving a soft topped car with a house on the country, but my self worth was through the floor. I was very well educated but my self-worth was covered up by this and bravado.

How is this possible?

I didn’t know at the time that psychologically it was really my ‘false self’ that was running the show. Only after countless courses and books did I discover this. It would have really helped to know this sooner as I would have saved myself a huge amount of money, energy and stress.

But how could I not have a lot of self-worth? On the face of it, it looked like I had.

Ok, here’s the deal

We are actually born with our self-worth in tact, it is our surrounding environment that clips us down. As psychologist Eric Berne wrote;

“People are born princes and princesses, until their parents turn them into frogs”.

And this is no disrespect to parents, we all do it to our children. You have to think back to when you were a tiny child and what your parents were thinking. In my case my parents were up from the country and so they wanted their children to ‘do better’ to ‘be better’. This meant school and university and obviously good results.

What happens when our parents want us to ‘be better’ than we are is that being our ‘natural self’ is not good enough and so we need to ‘Be’ something else. It is at this point that we part company with our natural self and become our ‘false self’. This is not a major problem when you are young and have lots of energy but in your middle years being your false self becomes exhausting and meaningless. We get anxiety and stress and we don’t understand why, we are simply trying to do our best. Yes just like our parents told us to do! Do everything except be your natural self which was not good enough.

Once we understand the dynamic and that we are not simply tired and exhausted due to work but also the huge energy it takes to act as our false selves. I hear clients say “ok!, so that’s why I’m exhausted and burnt out! That makes total sense.”

We all do it, you might think you’re the odd one out, I’d love to hear from you if you do, the research really points to all of us living our lives like this.

The Way Through.

Connecting with our natural self is key but we need to do it consciously, because when we were our natural selves as tiny children we were unconscious of it. We cannot do this unconsciously now because we are adults, and so as adults it’s vital to be conscious.

There are many ways to do this. I wanted, in this article, just to get awareness as to how you arrived at this point. I will write more about how to get your natural energy back through consciously embodying your natural self, this is the work I do in my 1-1 mentoring with clients.

I hope it made sense as it is a vital piece of the puzzle for people living in our current fast paced world of today in order to save time, energy, money and stress. To understand more about the dynamics of your psyche, I’m running a ‘21 day Inspiration Challenge for Men’ on May 25th 2023. Link below:

https://www.thedivinemeridian.com/21-day-black-knight-inspiration-challenge