5 Ways You May Hurt Your Self Worth
“We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.” - Malcolm X
Self-worth or self-esteem stands for confidence and respect for one’s abilities. Self-worth and esteem are important constituents for the happiness and contentment of any person.
It is impossible to achieve success without conserving one’s self-esteem. But it is easy to hurt your self-worth by various ways. Some of them are:
1. Holding on to the Past
Whether it is the mistakes committed, embarrassments faced, or any experience that brings uncomfortable memories and makes you stand in bad stead; you must not hold on to them. Holding on to your mistakes and embarrassments will make you aware of them all the time. It will hurt your self-worth like nothing else will. It will also make sure all your future endeavours get affected.
2. Comparing Apples and Oranges
Comparing yourself with others is a heinous crime. You don’t need to do it actually, there will be someone or the other doing it for you all the time. A problem comes when you yourself start comparing your life with others along with the decisions and other such issues. Everyone has a different set of skills and life.
If you undermine yourself due to success someone else has had, you are doing yourself a disservice and killing your self-esteem.
3. Putting Others Before Self
We value certain people in life more than even ourselves. With parents, children, spouses, etc., this is the pretty common scenario. The problem comes when we start putting others before ourselves. It is completely alright to serve others with love and selflessness but the golden rule is to serve yourself before others.
Therefore, you can’t avoid what is close and important to you all the time for someone else’s wish and work. For self-worth, put yourself above everyone else.
4. Letting Weakness Override Strengths
As a human, it is natural to have certain shortcomings in personality. It is important to know them and try to work them out. But sometimes, despite best intentions, we aren’t able to change some parts of our personality. It doesn’t mean we don’t have any strengths. Working on weaknesses is important, as is strengthening your strengths further.
Thinking only about weaknesses will make you really weak and put a bad impression of yourself in your eyes. It is best to balance weaknesses and strengths and work on both sides.
5. Putting Off Important Tasks
Sometimes we find ourselves putting off tasks that are important to us. That solo trek you always planned about, those guitar lessons, the gym sessions, and so on- all you wanted to do for yourself but didn’t find time for, take away your self-worth. To bring it back, you need to do things as per your heart’s desire. It will then understand it is being heard and you are making good progress.
It is extremely important to care your self-worth above anything and anyone. It is also important not to mistake it as ego or attitude. Ego is about ‘only you’, while self-worth is ‘you’.
