Where Do You Find Your Self-Worth?
“Whether labeled self-esteem or self-worth, the feeling of significance is crucial to man’s emotional, spiritual, and social stability and is the driving element within the human spirit. Understanding his single need opens the door to understanding our actions and attitudes.”
- Robert S. McGee, The Search for Significance
Have you ever taken a moment to think about where you find your significance? If so, is that working for you or are you feeling like your self-worth is at an all-time low? Maybe there are times when you feel like you’ve “arrived” and you will always know your self-worth, then you have a bad day and feel like you’ve been completely blindsided by feelings of having no meaning, purpose, or significance in your life. It can be so easy to think this way and find yourself in a negative thought pattern.
I have started into The Search for Significance, and I couldn’t wait to share because this topic is so instrumental to living a more fulfilled life. We can so easily get this wrong and look for significance in things that are not solid and when they change, we are deeply impacted in a negative way. For example, you might be going through a breakup with someone you thought you were going to marry; someone you thought was going to bring significance to you for the rest of your life. Now that is no longer an option for you, what’s next? Maybe you’ve found your significance and self-worth in your performance at work or how well you played your specific sport, but what happens when you don't play well or you don't get your work agenda accomplished? When you think back to those instances, did you feel like you had no importance, purpose, or meaning in life? Most times we don’t realize we are doing this until we are left feeling like we will never measure up or be accepted.
“We all develop elaborate defense mechanisms to block pain and gain significance. We suppress emotions, we are compulsively perfectionists; we drive ourselves to succeed, or we withdraw and become passive; we attack people who hurt us; we punish ourselves when we fail; we try to say clever things to be accepted; we help people so that we will be appreciated; and we say and do countless other things.
- Robert S. McGee, The Search for Significance
Have you tried to build your self-worth by finding a way to feel good about yourself? For you, that might mean always having a boyfriend or talking to guys that say affirmations that make you feel good for a short time, then for some reason you are left feeling empty. Maybe you are trying to find your significance in what your boss says about your work. I’m not saying affirmations are bad or not needed, because we definitely need them in the right context. It’s when we are constantly needing affirmation from others in order to feel a sense of worth that can be very detrimental to how you view yourself. We can so easily fall into thinking that self-worth is feeling good about ourselves, but it is so much more than that.
