When we doubt our worth, we normally look for ways to increase it. Whether it’s getting the best education, earning more money, upscaling our social status, or dating a more attractive partner, to feel worthy we create worth. And yet, when we get the education, or the job, or the house, we still find ourselves doubting our worth. So we set more ambitious goals and pursue the next signpost, and invariably when we get there, we pursue a farther one, and a farther one. We keep on chasing and not getting there.
We don’t get there, because no matter how successful we are in achieving our goals and how great our accomplishments are, we can never accomplish what’s not a matter of accomplishment. Or in other words, no matter how ingenious the solutions, they can never solve what’s not the problem.
To feel secure in our worth, we don’t need to become more worthy, we need to remove what makes us feel unworthy. Attaining the intellectual, material, or spiritual achievements we associate with worth can’t ever leave us feeling complete, regardless how far we pursue, regardless how impressive our credentials. Because the issue isn’t that we haven’t attained the right amount of worth, but that we have an underlying narrative that we are unworthy. And no value we create with achievements and accomplishments can remove the subconscious dialogue that we are not valuable. It’s in the reconciliation and dissolution of whatever makes us feeling unworthy that we find peace not in the chasing of more worth.
Our worth is inherent. But, first, many of us are not brought up with this understanding and we don’t have awareness around it. And, second, our childhood experiences make us doubt our worth. The teacher that tells us off for something, the parent that ignores us when we need attention, as children we take such events to mean that we aren’t valuable enough. But the reality is people’s behaviour toward us has all to do with them and very little to do with us. And the meaning of someone telling us off is the meaning we assign to it.
Our worth doesn’t change throughout life. But our stories around it do. Examining these stories and our subconscious programming is how we remove what’s preventing us from feeling worthy and deserving. If, on the deepest level, someone thinks that they are not enough or that they are a loser, no value they create will remove that limiting belief, which is why they’ll never feel secure in their worth by creating more of it. What will remove the limiting belief and create stability in their value is seeing that the limiting belief is false—that it’s a lie.