The Importance of Self-Worth: 4 Steps to Improve Yours

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Good morning! Here’s to the start of a wonderful week!

One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the gift of believing in our inherent worth as a human being. Without a clear appreciation of your own worth, you can’t go forward and touch others’ lives in a way that’ll be beneficial to them. Without this critical self-worth, you open yourself up to dangerous toxic relationships and settle for less than you truly deserve in life.

Self-Worth and Yourself

Your view of your own self can be hard to nail down. We’re so often concerned with what other people think of us that it can get in the way of truly knowing, and loving, yourself. Many of us live our lives based on the acceptance we can garner from others, and our identity is tied into that.

Achieving a high level of self-worth, and maintaining it, isn’t always easy. But it’s always rewarding. Self-worth can be learned, too, so not to worry if you grew up with less-than-optimal parenting that affected your self-worth. It’s a daily effort that needs to be made to pinpoint negative thinking and negative self-talk and turn that into their positive counterparts.

Self-Worth and Relationships

Self-worth is especially important in relationships. If you don’t value yourself, you’ll almost always settle for much less than you deserve in a partner. In these situations, you can’t imagine meeting your “dream” partner and falling in love with them – or more accurately, you can’t believe they’d ever fall in love with you. This can lead you down a road that’s not only unhealthy for you mentally, emotionally, and psychologically, but could end up being dangerous if you meet and fall in love with someone who is especially toxic. We see the tragic result of this every day in the news.

Self-Worth and Self-Care

A lack of self-worth can also result in a lack of caring for yourself. When you feel that you lack worth, you won’t make sure your needs are met because you simply don’t feel it’s that important. This can cause problems if you’re prone to suffering from depression and anxiety, as the negative thinking that goes along with a lack of self-worth can start a downward spiral that can be especially difficult to pull out of once it begins.

Striving for a healthy level of self-worth will keep you cared for, loved, fulfilled, and protected from inevitable smaller bumps in the road that might otherwise bring you down. A failed business project, a hobby that didn’t turn out as you wished – these are small things overall but can seem like big failures if your self-worth isn’t intact and healthy.

How to Improve Your Self Worth

Your self-worth is all about how you view yourself and the value you provide to others. It’s very closely linked to your self-esteem, which is how you feel about yourself. Your self-worth can change your entire mindset and actually keep you from being successful in your personal and professional life. Keep reading if you want to learn how to improve your self-worth.

Tell Your Inner Critic to Shut Up

If you have low self-esteem or find that you’re constantly berating yourself, it’s likely the fault of your inner critic. This is the voice in your head that keeps you bringing you down every time you want to think positively of yourself. Maybe it tells you that you can’t achieve something, that you are doing everything wrong, or that you’ll never be good enough. Not only does it create this negative mindset that’s really hard to get past, but you often believe all of these thoughts, continuing to devalue yourself until you truly believe you’ll never be able to achieve something.

The first step to finding your self-worth and gaining more confidence is to tell this inner critic to quiet down. It isn’t easy in the beginning, but with time, you’ll start gaining more tools to focus on the positive aspects of your own talents and successes, not the negative ones.

Celebrate Your Successes

The first way you can begin ignoring that voice in your head and feel good about yourself is to acknowledge and celebrate your successes. Big or small, everyone has something they can be happy or proud of. Perhaps you got into college or graduated with honors, you finished a project at work that was very challenging, or you learned a new skill that wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Really reflect on your past and present and celebrate every single success you have had.

Surround Yourself with Positive People

This is common advice when you are working on self-improvement because the people you surround yourself make all the difference. If most of your friends and loved ones put you down or don’t provide the right support, you aren’t going to feel very good about yourself. You need uplifting, supportive people who will help you along the way, encourage you, and keep reminding you of your worth. Soon you’ll feel that way too.

Practice More Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is another integral part of increasing your self-worth. If you don’t feel that you deserve something, then perhaps you should figure out why. What thought, feeling, motivation, or fear is keeping you from valuing yourself? There’s likely something you will discover if you look within yourself.

Just remember you are worth it!

Have a lovely day!

Loving Life—The Reboot!

Dominique