My life changed when I began to *really* and truly learn how to value what I brought into the world.
I was awful at doing this and what’s worse is that I was BLIND to how it affected the quality of my life.
I used to breeze through “all the things” I had to get done. They were things to tick off, or do to get paid.
It never occurred to me to stop and put them all together.
They were so mundane, non-glamorous, or so routine that I did them on auto-pilot without giving it a second thought. When I started to pay attention, I began to see a much bigger picture of what I was capable of achieving.
That’s when the light bulb went off: I started to examine everything I did. I mean, nothing was too small–and I started to praise them all by articulating their value.
“Congratulations, Jeffrey on waking up at 5:00 AM! You just started the day early and gave yourself so many advantages.”
“Jeffrey, you tackled that project by starting the first small task–way to go; you are building a momentum.”
Sure enough, by sticking with this process, do you know what I discovered?
I discovered my fucking confidence.
Yep. My confidence was like, “Bitch, what the fuck took you so long to see how amazing you are!? And, by the way, stop giving people free shit.”
LOL. My confidence is a total bitch boss with a potty mouth and I love it.
Seriously though, I was also left in shock. For so many years, decades–hell, most of my life–I never properly valued ALL the things I was doing right. They were at best after thoughts. That way of thinking became so normalized in me that I was no longer capable of actually seeing when I did something truly remarkable.
Instead, I became hypercritical of what wasn’t done, what had yet to be accomplished. This attitude was horrible. It became a psychic cancer that ate away at my self worth. It filled my world with the message that I was not enough.
I could not do enough because there was always something unfinished. I could have cared less for everything else that was successfully completed.
This made me blind to what was valuable and turned me poor. I became the proverbial beggar living on a mountain of gold, incapable of seeing what I was really worth and believing myself to be chronically deficient. This had another unintended horrible side effect: it made me open to exploitation.
A lot of other people were not blind to my worth and quickly figured out that I wasn’t able to value it. They made a lot off of me, getting tons of value for pennies on the dollar. I’m not mad at any of them because it’s on me. It was always my responsibility to know my worth.
Now, I do the work: I evaluate all my actions and it’s given me a much deeper sense of the value I create and put into this world. All that value adds up and gives me a huge dose of confidence. It gives me faith in myself:
I really can weather life’s storms.
I really can adapt.
I really can evolve.
I really can be amazingly successful.
That confidence allows me to move forward to advance in a healthy way, not from a place of feeling deficient.
It’s also improved my relationships with others. Now that I know how to articulate and measure value in my own work/activities/decisions, I can also see the value in others more broadly too. This creates an opportunity to bond with someone else by pointing out their value. That has become a magic elixir for taking relationships to new levels and of course boosting my own feeling of worthiness!
