09 Nov Create more happiness by building more self-worth
via the Huffington Post by Sherrie Campbell
When you have spent significant time in any type of unhealthy emotional environment it is easy to lose track of your worth. If you were given too little, you may view yourself as not good enough. If you have been starving for the love you never received you may be extremely hard on yourself and insecure in conflictual situations because you fear being seen as wrong or being abandoned. You may spend too much energy trying to prove yourself to others.
Conversely, if you were given too much, you may overly depend upon other people to fill you up and make you happy and become angry and abandoning when the world doesn't shift on its axis to give you what you want when you want it. When you have never been made to be responsible for sustaining your own well-being you become emotionally immature and demanding.
1. Change your self-talk. To increase your self-esteem improve the way you talk to yourself. Change the inner dialogue that you are not good enough or that you must prove your worth. When you feel this way it causes you to be inauthentic and to over-function.
Conversely, if you feel you are owed your worth and are only good enough if people are bending over backward for you, placating to your needs, constantly building you up you will suffer from the disappointment of unmet and unrealistic expectations causing you to become angry, demanding and to feel chronically empty.
Work on being good enough for yourself.
2. Find balance. If you notoriously put yourself second and are not getting your important needs met, start putting your needs first before meeting the needs of others. When you put yourself first you give yourself the sense of importance you so desperately seek to feel from others.
If, on the other hand, you expect others to put you first and expect them to do everything for you, you never learn to put others before yourself, and therefore, do not develop the all-important trait of empathy necessary for sustaining healthy bonds.
Find the balance between what you need to do for yourself and what you should realistically expect from others.
3. Know your worth. If your worth is dependent upon pleasing others you will come up empty. Nothing you do for others will be enough to make you feel valued and appreciated in the way you desire. Knowing your worth has to come from within. Your worth is determined by the treatment you accept or expect for yourself, not by how much of yourself you give away.
Conversely, when you expect others to constantly soothe you, build you up and make you feel like you exist you do not gain the skill of developing your own self-worth. You will measure your worth on how important others make you causing your sense of self to be fleeting and dependent upon people outside of you.
To know your worth take charge of your life and see how it feels to experience your own power…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE