How to Build Self-Worth (Even If You've Struggled With it Your Whole Life) - Terri Cole

Well, hello there and welcome to this episode of The Terry Cole Show, that I want to start with a question. Do you have a tendency to undervalue your own accomplishments? If someone says, oh, you did a great job, or you're kind of like, nah, it's not so, it's not, it's nothing, I didn't do anything. Or do you use humor that puts you down? Right, it's sort of like self-effacing humor where it's almost like you put yourself down before anyone else can put you down. And the real question is, how do you feel about your own worthiness? Because that is the topic of this video. So in today's video, I'm going to be covering why many of us feel unworthy, just in general, in life. Raising your awareness about how you talk to yourself and how you talk about yourself, because that has everything to do with worthiness. And how to begin to start really feeling more worthy in your life. And trust me, it is a valuable pursuit. So before we get started, if you happen to be new to this channel, please make sure you introduce yourself in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell icon so that you get notified every time we roll out something new, which is every Tuesday and every Thursday. And since I create all this content for you, I wouldn't want you to miss it. So please subscribe. I also want to say thank you for all the questions and all the comments and all of the participation that we have, because it really makes me know that I'm not alone. And hopefully it makes many of you know that you're not alone. So I love to put a highlight on that. I read all of your questions and your comments. So thank you. And this is from Pretty Girl P. And this is under the video, Nine Signs You're in a Codependent Relationship. Pretty Girl P says, Wow, I used to do so many of these codependent behaviors. With your book and talk therapy, I am well on my way to recovery. It feels so good to know that I have actually changed my behavior. Was it super easy? No. But it has been so rewarding when you can see all that you've accomplished with boundaries in place. Thank you so much, Terry. I'm so grateful to have found you. Well, Pretty Girl P, I am so happy to have been found. Thank you for taking the time to write the comment. It really warms my heart. I appreciate it. All right, let's move it on into today's content, shall we? So what is self-worth? We were going to say, what is it? It's in an eternal sense of being good enough, of being worthy of love and belonging with others, right? It actually is the sense that you're not. That is the feeling. There's a ton of misconceptions, though, out there around worthiness. And many of us feel like we need to earn it or achieve it, right? That you're only as, you know, when you think about actors, there's all these sayings that, like, you know, you're as good as your last job, basically, or you're as good as your last accomplishment. But when we're talking about worth, actual worth, the truth is that you are inherently worthy, simply by virtue of being alive. Like, that's the truth about your worthiness, is that you are worthy. You don't have to do anything to be worthy. When you think about kids, right? Do you look at them? Do we expect them to, like, cook us dinner or throw us a parade or whatever? We don't. We love them. They don't do anything. They eat, drink, poop, cost us money. We don't care. You are that child who is worthy simply by virtue of being born. So why do we feel unworthy, though? Well, part of it is we weren't raised by the adults in our lives maybe could not consistently show us love or care or maybe they were very critical. Another thing is having immature parents. What if you have parents who are emotionally immature, who are in competition with you? I was just watching the Sylvester Stallone documentary on Netflix called Sly, and his father was totally abusive physically and horrible, but he also was in competition with Sylvester his entire life. And as much as he was happy to take sort of credit for his accomplishments, he was really threatened by it. And believe it or not, after he wrote Rocky and was super successful, his father wrote a screenplay and it was called, like, After Rocky or something like that and brought it to Sylvester Stallone's writing partner behind his back. Like, that is a level of cynicism and immaturity and sadism that is beyond. But even if you didn't have that parent having immature parents emotionally can make us feel unworthy, right? Because if you had a parent who was in competition with you and maybe not to that degree, but who felt threatened by you, let's say, or who simply could not show up consistently for you because that's also what we're talking about. This can create a lack of self-worth, right? And you have to really get right now, the adult you has to understand that there is nothing wrong with you, if your parents or your parental impactors or the adults in your life, whoever raised you, if they had limitations, if they had their own stuff, that doesn't make you unlovable or unworthy. It just sucks that that was your experience, but we can build self-worth. And here's the thing, once we're grown up, it's our job to build it, regardless of the ways that our parents failed us and all parents are gonna fail you in some way. But neglectful or immature parents, they really can reinforce the fear that we are unworthy or that we're unworthy of unconditional love, right? Because this is how we learn is from family of origin most of the time. And from the adults or the situation that you were raised in, how worthy we are, what love looks like, what do we need to do? And a lot of times we need to perform and we need to add value and we need to do something, which is what I was saying at the top. So what are indications of having low self-worth? Well, difficulty taking risks, difficulty being brave, right? Because if you feel okay within yourself, it's easier to be brave because you know, hey, if I fail, I'm gonna be okay. Like ultimately, nobody wants to fail. We don't want to fail. But when you have decent self-worth, you know that to do anything great, you have to take risks and that you're probably gonna fail before you succeed. And it's not the end of the world. And I think that when we have low self-worth, we're more fragile around those things. Again, as I said at the top, you think you're only as good as your last whatever it is, your last accomplishment, your last accolade, your last job, your last whatever. And it's really about how people perceive you. There's an external importance on what other people think about you, especially when you're not sure what you think about you. And this perpetual fear of failure, right? Because if we're not super solid inside, there is a fear that we are only as good as what we accomplish or what we do for other people. I find there's a lot of codependency can also be a part of this experience. Because when we're not filling up our own bucket or when we don't know how or when we don't think we can, we're really looking for validation from the outside, which can be exhausting. So another thing to look at is, how do you talk to yourself? How do you talk about yourself? And how do you talk to yourself? And in the guide, you guys, I'm going to include a whole bunch of questions that you can ask yourself. But it's important to know that, to really get what is that internal dialogue about? Are you putting yourself down to yourself? I was talking to one of the beautiful members of my mastermind group. And she was talking about when she was younger, how there was such a lack of self-worth that she had a friend who would tell her things like, oh, this person said you were beautiful. And it was so far away from her to think, or that you're a nice person or whatever it is. And she had such a lack of self-worth that she literally thought in her mind, oh my God, I'm so pathetic that my friend is making that up to make me feel better about myself. But it never entered her mind. It could actually just be true, right? That it could be true that this person said she was a wonderful person or she was talented or she was beautiful or whatever it was. Now, that is like the depths of feeling this lack of self-worth. And yet through the process, through therapy, through being in a mastermind, through exposing yourself to other people who hold you in high esteem, especially in intimate gatherings with women, I find that there's something, such a profound amount of healing that comes from being in a safe and sacred container with other women. I think that sometimes it can be challenging to find that, but having it is so, it makes you so brave because we're all so honest, right? When you're in a container, because I've been in masterminds and I also run my own mastermind called Flourish, when you're with people that you respect, people that you care about, and you see their humanness as well, there's something so amazing. It's similar to the way that I talk about my marriage as a soft place to land over and over again in a hard world. That's actually what a group of nonjudgmental, caring, kind, inspired, ambitious women, having your back, what that can do is it becomes a soft place to land as well, a place to tell the truth, a place to allow your wounds to exist, but not dominate you. So it isn't just getting over this lack of self-worth, it's learning that you're worthy with your warts and all. And a lot of times having that reflected back at you from other people that you respect and care about is so incredibly powerful. So if you get a chance to do a mastermind with folks like that, actually, I've got my mastermind coming up if you're interested, terrycole.com forward slash flourish. It is a life changing experience to be in a container for a year with people that you respect, who have your back. You want to talk about being courageous, you talk about taking risks, you talk about changing the things that aren't working in your life. Yeah, it is an accelerated course in growth. I love it so much. So another thing to be mindful about of yourself is how much of your self-worth is contingent on external events. As we were saying, it's accomplishments, but it's also being in a relationship, not being in a relationship, having the right kind of friends, having the right kind of house, car, apartment, whatever it may be. Then I think we really have to look at how much of your self-worth are you getting from those things in your life? Because the problem with that is that if we get our self-worth from other people or from external events, Wayne Dyer once said to me many years ago when he was still on this earth about how there's something so dangerous about giving people the power of your self-worth, right? Because when people approve of us and the sun is shining, oh, it's so beautiful. But now they have the power to take it away from you. And that really struck me. This is probably, I don't even know, maybe 15 or 20 years ago. And it really struck me as true that, of course, with the people we care about, right, we care what they think of us. But really, this is such an inside job. It has to be you. Our self-worth can only be established on our own, right? We can only do it ourselves. So another thing that may happen, and this may be a symptom of having low self-worth, is having crappy boundaries, right? Having a lot of self-abandonment. If we are prioritizing other people because we're not positive, we're getting our self-worth from the approval of others, this can be what ends up happening, is that we have really porous boundaries, saying yes when we want to say no. There's something in my own life, when you have negative self-talk, when you, as my friend Patricia Moreno would say, stop fighting for your limitations. And it's like when I was younger, I had this hang-up about my legs. I didn't like my legs, blah, blah, blah. And I remember after Vic and I got together, he made a positive comment about my legs, about having great gams or something he said. And I remember I was looking at him like, is this guy making fun of me? Seriously, that's how caught up or hung up I was on not liking my legs for whatever reason. And when I realized that he meant it and that it was a sincere compliment, I remember thinking, well, I could probably convince him that my legs are gross, or maybe I could just generously view my legs through that lens of love that this guy has. And why even waste this time and energy giving a crap about my legs? How about just love it all? How about accept it all? How about you're just fine? If this guy thinks your legs are great and you're in love with him and you're building a life with him, then why do you have to hold on to that limiting belief that there's something wrong with them? And that really did shift the way that I felt. There was a whole shift. It meant having a husband who's an artist, who's drawn me many different times. And I remember sharing something and it was a bunch of years ago. I think I was turning 47 at the time. And he drew this and it's from the back, but it's like a naked picture of me and I shared it on Instagram. I mean, it's more of a cartoon, right? Not what I'm saying. It's like, it wasn't like an actual real life, still life thing. Anyway, point being, I shared it because actually I thought it was very flattering and I loved that that's how he viewed my body as well. And some lady was like, wow, you're so brave to share this. Like so many of us would want to hide that. And when she meant that, she meant like my butt. You know what I mean? And I was dying. I was like, oh my God, this lady's trying so hard to give me a compliment. But what she's really saying is that if she had an ass like mine, she certainly would not be sharing that picture is what I got from what she said. And I was laughing, but to myself, I was thinking, oh, look how far you've come. How little you care about what someone you don't know thinks about your body. I wasn't mad and it didn't offend me, but it also allowed me to say how far I came. Because what really matters is how I feel about my ass and how my husband feels about my butt and how I feel about myself, right? It's the whole package and that is self-worth. And trust me, that wasn't always there. So I'm not acting like I was born with it because I wasn't. I've been in therapy for 30 years. Like I've worked really hard at having good self-worth. So I know if I can do it, you guys can do it as well. So what can we do? These are a couple of steps that you're going to take to up your self-worth. For 24 hours, you're going to watch how you talk to yourself. You're going to write down any time that you're having a negative self-conversation, you're putting yourself down, you're calling yourself a bad name. Because when you really think about it, we would never treat other people the way we treat ourselves. Would you ever talk to a niece that you loved or your daughter or your son that way? Not in a million years. A lot of times we reserve the most caustic tone of voice and things that we say for ourselves. So you're going to write them down and then you're going to start to use the rubber band trick where you're putting a hair tie around your wrist and whenever you have that thought, that negative self-talk thought, you're going to snap the rubber band and you're going to replace it with something like I'm good enough, like I'm worthy as is, or I was born worthy. Like we'll come up with your own affirmation for it. But we don't want to just let it stand, right? Because it's not okay. And the bottom line is that it continues to scratch away. At your self-worth, you're also going to really think about this whole process as reparenting, right? If you did not have parents that were great and maybe you did, you could still have low self-esteem even with great parents, trust me, right? It's not only that, but let's say you didn't have great parental impactors. I want you to think about this time. Give yourself the gift of your own attention. Treat yourself like your own beloved child because you are, right? This is what reparenting is, is sort of doing for ourselves what, you know, we kind of become the good parents if we didn't have them. And also I have the baby photo exercise, which I've given you guys before, but I love it. And if you haven't done it recently, I would love for you to do it where you find a picture of yourself as a little one. And then you put that on your phone, have it as your desktop, right? You just have it as your screensaver so that, and every time you see that little face, really feel the feelings of love. Send love to yourself, but also get it. That face. There's no way you look at that face and think that that kid needs to do something to be worthy. You understand. You have always been worthy. You were born worthy, and you are worthy right this very moment. And I feel like that is a very powerful exercise. And I'm giving you a couple of other ideas in the guide. So just go to terrycole.com forward slash guide. One is going to be an inventory. One is going to be a sort of download a blueprint. A couple of questions for each of those for you to really understand, like why you feel the way you do. But also I hope that this episode is uplifting for you because you can change it. I promise you it is an inside job and I would am happy to walk you through it. I don't want you to wait until the end of your life to realize that you were worthy all along. You were amazing all along. You could have done what you wanted all along. And if you are interested in being a part of an incredibly powerful, loving group of like-minded, like-hearted women, check out my mastermind. We start January 16th. All right, go to terrycole.com forward slash flourish. Okay, I hope that this added value to your life. I'd love to know what you think about it. So let me know. And as always, take care of you.