Many of us are achieving a lot in our careers, but struggling or getting stuck in other areas of our lives, and often relationships. 

One thing’s for certain, in all your getting, your mind will not lead you where it don’t know to be…

LOW SENSE OF SELF-WORTH: A MENTAL STRONGHOLD

Part of my mandate as a life transformation coach is to help you release and pull down mental strongholds, anything that rises up against the knowledge of who God is and what He says about you.

Strongholds include harmful thought patterns, inner conflicts/arguments and harmful beliefs. They keep us in bondage, in self-sabotaging cycles, oppressed and limited.

They are internal, not external. Influenced by the external yes, but nobody is really forcing you to make the decisions you make, or act the way you act.

For a stronghold to take root, our mental programs first get disempowered by life’s experiences, our own or our ancestors’ (check out epigenetics).

One such disempowerment is in the area of self-worth.

Self-worth means an internal knowing of being good enough, greatly useful and highly essential for existence (last part my own take on it).

This feeds into how we value ourselves, and consequently how others will (externally) value us. Because your outer world is a reflection of your inner world.

If you don’t value yourself, you’ll have a perception that they don’t value you even if they do, or they’ll really not value you because you don’t value yourself.

Recalling my business school days, I like thinking about these 2 concepts this way: worth is the number (price) that they put on a product, and value is how useful a customer perceives it to be and what he is willing to pay for it.

And they are not necessarily the same.

The value of the wealth of knowledge and the ability to cause a transformation in a R200 book is in the tens of thousands.

Some find a R20 000 stamp of great value. To me, it’s not, and I won’t even take it for free.

We tend to live on this external validation, i.e. the value placed on us by others, because, well, we were never meant to be islands. 

It can be a dangerous thing, chasing this validation. I know for a long time I did, in relationships and career, and I got burnt out.

Rest in our own true worth is what we need to do. When we have a healthy sense of self-worth, there’s congruence between our sense of worth and value, and we are more likely to progress with less friction.

However, when there’s an unhealthy sense of self-worth, low or high, the incongruence further fuels internal conflicts.

The incongruence arises because YOU DO HAVE WORTH, but you don’t sense it accurately, so you are acting out of alignment with your true being.

Low sense of self-worth is always unhealthy. Heightened sense of self-worth can be limiting and harmful, think narcissistic patterns.

I’m careful to say SENSE of self-worth, because that’s exactly what it is, a perception and not necessarily the truth.

The truth is you were created with very high worth, so much so that God Himself, in Christ, had to come and die to get you right.

I ask you today: Do you know your worth? Do you know how valuable you are? Do you know you are worthy?

Are you careful not to equate your worth with how much money you have, what accolades you collect, the beauty you possess? Because, what happens when these go away.

In current culture, people talk about high value men or women, unfortunately largely referring to how much money they make. So I can understand why we could fall into such a trap.

Again, your worth and worthiness is an internal thing.

Do you know you are worthy? Simple question, and most likely a quick yes.

Because many times we consciously know we are worthy, but not so subconsciously. As in, you’ll say you know you are, but be behaving or finding yourself in situations that scream the opposite!

I’ve been a Christian my entire life, and intentionally been establishing an intimate relationship with God for the past 17 years.

I knew what He said I’m worth: Far above rubies. (Fun fact, rubies are considered rare and more valuable than other gem-quality stones, including diamonds.)

I knew what He said I’m worth: His Son’s body on the block (of wood, cross, in case I’m offending you), such a high price.

I knew it, but I didn’t understand what that meant, and so I didn’t live it. I knew all that, I said I believed Him, but my actions and choices said otherwise.

Until I started my healing journey, I’d never asserted my worthiness as an individual. Heck, I’d never ever told myself ‘I’m worthy.’

I was just going through life, making decisions, meaning well, but many times ending up with outcomes that surprised me🤔, until I wasn’t surprised anymore because they’d become unbreakable and harmful patterns.

Little did I know that my outcomes were governed by how I saw and felt about myself internally, subconsciously: I had low sense of self-worth. My mind would not lead me where it didn’t know to go, it only knew oops, we’re not worthy to go there!

I consider myself a high achiever and it dawned on me: many high achievers are chasing validation, overcompensating for the low sense of self-worth, and I was one such!

Thank God, not anymore!

So, how does low sense of self-worth manifest?

LOW SELF-WORTH: SOME WARNING SIGNS

🔥Having a generally negative overall opinion of oneself

🔥Harsh self-criticism and judging oneself, focusing on mistakes

🔥Brushing off compliments or positive qualities (hmm, ya this one!)

🔥Avoiding challenges

🔥Becoming upset or distressed by any criticism or disapproval

🔥Bending over backwards to please others

🔥Being extremely shy or self-conscious

🔥Avoiding or withdrawing from intimacy, vulnerability, or social contact

🔥Being less likely to stand up for oneself from being abused or neglected

🔥Lacking confidence

🔥Self-doubt, impostor syndrome

🔥Feeling undeserving of love or success or happiness

🔥Relying on others’ approval or validation

🔥Constantly comparing oneself to others, and feeling inferior

🔥Pushing oneself to achieve more and more

🔥Setting impossibly high standards for oneself and by extension others – perfectionism

🔥Being afraid of being assertive

Any one of these does not necessarily spell low sense of self-worth, it is when we consistently experience these, and/or they limit us in our progress in life, that we should start paying attention to what’s really going on internally.

THE TAKE HOME

For us to experience a low sense of self-worth, somewhere back in our life, many times in our childhood, circumstances led us to believe we weren’t good enough as a person.

This mental story keeps looping for as long as it goes unaddressed. This is part of what keeps us stuck, part of why we keep getting in our own way.

At certain points in our lives, we desire to successfully attain certain things, yet no matter how many times we try we just fall flat because something is not in alignment.

Could it be that deep down you don’t think you are worthy of such a thing? Could it be that deep down you don’t think you are deserving of such a thing, not good enough for such a thing?

Perhaps it’s time we faced our deep downs and confronted them of the stories that come against who/what we consciously know we are, who/what God tells us we are.

Regardless of your looks or possessions or accolades, YOU ARE WORTHY AND VALUABLE just as you are.💝

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