Who is responsible for your Self Worth?

Self-worth is how you value yourself. It's not based on what others think of you or the things you have (or haven't) accomplished—it comes from within.

One of the most common mistakes you see people with low self-esteem make is to base their self-worth on one aspect of their lives—and often, that aspect is a relationship. It’s an understandable tendency to let someone else’s love for you encourage you to feel better about yourself. However, you should work on feeling good about yourself whether you are in a relationship or not.

The love of another person does not define you, nor does it define your value as a person. Whether you are single, casually seeing people, building a solid relationship with someone, or celebrating your 30th wedding anniversary with your spouse, you are worthy of love and respect, and you should make time to practice self-acceptance and self-compassion.

This is true for people of any relationship status, but it may be especially important for those in long-term relationships.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your partner’s love is what makes you worthy of love.

If anything ever happens to your partner or to your relationship, you don’t want to be forced to build up your sense of worth from scratch.

It can make breakups and grief much harder than they need to be.

Although this facet of the issue might be enough to encourage you to work on your self-worth, there’s another reason it’s important: Having a healthy sense of self-worth will actually make your current relationship better too.

When you learn to love yourself, you become better able to love someone else.

People with high self-respect tend to have more satisfying, loving, and stable relationships than those who do not, precisely because they know that they need to first find their worth, esteem, and happiness within themselves.

Two people who are lit with self-worth and happiness from within make are much brighter than two people who are trying to absorb light from each other (Grande, 2018).

Similar to the dangers of anchoring your self-worth to someone else, there are big risks in tying your self-worth to your job.

Like a significant other, jobs can come and go—sometimes without warning.

You can be let go, laid off, transitioned, de-hired, dismissed, downsized, redirected, released, selectively separated, terminated, replaced, asked to resign, or just plain fired.

You could also be transferred, promoted, demoted, or given new duties and responsibilities that no longer mesh with the sense of self-worth your previous duties and responsibilities gave you.

You could also quit, take a new job, take some time off, or retire—all things that can be wonderful life transitions, but that can be unnecessarily difficult if you base too much of your self-worth on your job.

As noted earlier, your job is one of the things that don’t define you or your worth. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of what you do, finding joy or fulfilment in it, or letting it shape who you are; the danger is in letting it define your entire sense of self.

We are all so much more than a job.

Believing that we are nothing more than a job is detrimental to our wellbeing and can be disastrous in times of crisis.

It is especially important for us to be able to identify, build, and maintain a normal, healthy sense of self-worth.

Learning about self-worth can teach you how to be more happy and fulfilled in your authentic, loveable self.