How To Develop Self-Worth As A Man

Talking points: mindset

This is something I’ve seen a LOT of men battle, and with no success—and I include myself in that. This week, I want to reframe the idea of self-worth and give you a few insights that will likely change the game for you. Dig in.

(00:00:00) – Reframing self-worth, and why many men struggle with it

(00:04:27) – Reasons why self-worth gets damaged

(00:07:26) – You don’t build it by winning all the time; recognize effort instead. Here’s why it works

(00:12:00) – Release the beast from the basement

Transcript

How do you as a man develop self-worth? This is something that I have seen so many men struggle with, something that I struggled with for a very long time. And so today I’m going to be talking to you about what self-worth is, what infringes on it and actually inhibits your ability to have inherent self-worth and develop self-worth, and then what can you do specifically to begin to develop it. I’m going to lay those three things out.

There’s so much more that you can do to develop self-worth, but I’m going to give you some of the core tools and tenets that I think are very important. So let’s just start at the beginning. What is self-worth? Well, self-worth, by definition, is a kind of inner recognition of your life, your thoughts, your existence as holding inherent value independent of external approval or validation. External approval, validation, or accomplishment. 

Now that last part is pretty important because for the majority of men, the reason why you struggle with self-worth is that you have offloaded and outsourced that validation that is necessary to the external world, to society, to women, to parents, to other men, to friends, etc. And so there is no internal mechanism of self-recognition, of validating your own existence, your own value, and your own worth, and there’s a constant looking for other people to validate that value for you.

So self-worth is something that is internalized, okay? Something that is internalized. It’s the intersection for me, and I’m going to give you a redefinition of what it is. Self-worth is the intersection of having done hard shit to develop competency in areas that you give a shit about and genuinely liking who you are and being able to recognize both, okay? So self-worth, and I’m just going to break it down very simply.

Self-worth is your willingness to do hard things that you genuinely care about that are meaningful and liking who you are in the process and the ability to validate both. So you can validate, I do hard things. I do things that I really care about. I do things that are meaningful to me, whatever those might be. Maybe it’s woodworking. Maybe it’s volunteering.

Maybe it’s the work that you do as an accountant, as a real estate agent, and I like who I am while I am doing it. I like who I am as a father, as a husband. I can acknowledge the worth and the value that I bring into these relationships.

So self-worth is kind of that duality of I am able to recognize my skill in what I do and how I do it and how well I do it. My mastery of it or my, you know, the journey that I’m on to master it. And I’m also able to recognize how I show up in relationships.

So what I do and who I am relationally. Now, there’s a couple of things that really damage and impact self-worth. And this is very important for you to know. And it’s important for you to know because in order for you to develop self-worth, you are likely going to have to work through the things that damaged it. So maybe you don’t have a lot that you feel like you can celebrate yourself for. Maybe you don’t like how you operate in relationships.

This was a big one for me. How I operated in relationships wasn’t good. I didn’t honor my word. I wasn’t faithful. I was, you know, kind of slippery. And then how I operated in my life professionally was like mediocre, subpar. I didn’t feel very masterful. I didn’t feel very competent. And so it was very hard for me to celebrate myself.

Now, part of the reason for that as I discovered was that my sense of self-worth growing up was really damaged. And this is the case for a lot of men. A lot of you had your sense of self-worth or your value diminished and damaged when you were younger.

So there’s a couple of things I’m going to lay out. Number one, any type of trauma, whether it’s physical abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, all of those types of traumas will and can damage your sense of self-worth. There’s many different reasons for this.

But one of the main reasons is that when you are young, you have a high level of omnipotence. You have a high level of ego. And so you think that you’re at the center of everything.

And anything that happens in your environment, you think that somehow you had something to do with it. So if you’re a kid and your parents are constantly arguing, you think that you have something to do with it. You don’t think it consciously.

But in an unconscious way, what you take on is, I’m causing this. Or I should be able to fix this. Or I should be able to solve this. Or what’s wrong with me that this keeps happening? This is very common in kids that experience divorce. Their parents get divorced. The big internal question is, what did I do to cause this? How am I responsible for this? Same thing if you experienced abuse, any type of verbal, emotional, etc.

The common trope for a lot of, for almost every single individual is, what was wrong with me that that was happening? How did I cause that? So kids take on the stuff that happens to them in their environment with their primary caretakers and around them in their primary caretaking system, your family, etc. So any type of trauma will do that. Any type of verbal abuse will do that.

Hypercriticism will do that. A lack or we’ll call it malnourishment of validation and recognition. Children need encouragement. There’s a lot of research and data that shows that children really need to be praised for their efforts specifically. Not necessarily coming first place. Not necessarily coming second or third.

But having their efforts praised really helps them to develop a robust sense of self-worth and self-value and capacity and ability, etc. So you may have grown up in an environment where nothing was ever good enough. Your parents were the classic perfectionists or they were constantly criticizing, right? You’d bring home a 95.

Where’s the other 5%? Or you only got love and validation when you performed well, right? You’d get an A-plus on a test. Boom, you’d get love and praise. You would do well in a sport. Boom, you’d get love and praise. But your love and praise was very conditional on how you operated. You didn’t receive any I love you’s, you’re a great kid just because.

And so children need that. They need to have love infused into them for no good reason whatsoever. And they also need to have their efforts praised in order for them to develop that sense of self-worth and confidence.

Now, why is this important? Why am I telling you this last part specifically? Because this is giving you a clue into what you are going to need to do. Oftentimes as men, what we think we need to do to develop self-worth is win all the time and then celebrate those wins. What likely needs to happen for you, and this is, there’s two parts I’m going to be talking to you about today, about how you can develop self-worth.

The one major thing is that you need to start to celebrate your efforts in a meaningful, continuous, consistent way. And your ability to continually reinforce and recognize your efforts, right? The alarm goes off. You said you’re going to get out of bed. You get your ass out of bed. Celebrate the effort for getting out of bed, not the outcome of getting out of bed. 

That is a big mindset shift. Because what happens for a lot of men who lack self-worth is they are chronic perfectionists or chronic procrastinators. So they’re never taking action because why bother? Or when they do take action, they shit on themselves because it’s not perfect. And both of those erode self-worth because no effort is being praised. Effort is seen as the enemy. An outcome is the god that they are praying to in some capacity. 

So hopefully that frame and context resonates with you. But the main point here is that you have to start to develop a really rigorous and meticulous system of recognizing your efforts in all areas of your life, physically, mentally, emotionally, in your health, in your finances, recognizing your effort in having the conversation with your wife or your girlfriend, not the outcome, right? It’s like, did it go perfect? Probably not. Recognize your effort in having the conversation that felt uncomfortable or confronting, right? Going to the gym. Maybe you haven’t been in weeks or months on end.

And you go to the gym. Praise your effort. Recognize your effort for doing so instead of, was the workout perfect? Did I do everything that I said I was going to do? Blah, blah, blah, blah. Recognize the effort. This isn’t about a participation trophy. This isn’t about any of that.

It’s that you start to develop a rigorous internal system of being able to validate and recognize when you are putting effort into something. That does a couple things. Number one, it starts to reinforce you have capability and capacity.

And number two, it starts to reinforce self-respect. When you can consistently put effort in, it reinforces self-respect. You start to like yourself more, even if the outcome isn’t always what you want it to be. And it de-weights or it de-indexes. That’s probably not a word. That’s probably not a way of saying it.

It downgrades the importance of the outcome, which we can oftentimes get fixated on. And you get fixated on outcomes because when you lack self-worth, those outcomes need to happen in order for you to feel like you might have value. So your worth and your value becomes externalized on the outcome, on the result.

Now, obviously, I’m not saying that those things don’t matter. Results do matter. Outcomes do matter.

Again, I’m saying that those things are important, but they are not the indicators of whether or not you have worth and value. They are independent of your worth and value. However, the man that lacks self-worth will have conflated those two things together.

Your worth and your value will be contingent on outcome and results. And for relationships, this is brutal. This is where anxious attachments go wild. And I’ll be doing a separate video on that. So start to recognize and validate your efforts that you put in in every single place in your life. Journal it.

Recognize yourself real time. I’m proud of myself that I put that effort in. I really love how much effort I put into that conversation, into that work project, into getting out of bed in the morning.

You know, it was a battle, but I did it. Really start to recognize yourself day in and day out and shift the culture in your inner dialogue. The second thing I’m going to say, and then we’ll wrap it up, is release the beast from the basement.

All of you have a kind of beast in the basement of your psyche, of your body, of your mind that is waiting to be let out, that is really designed to charge you towards something meaningful and that is meant to fight for your sense of value and worth. And that part of you, if you experience trauma or abuse or neglect or abandonment or hypercriticism or whatever it was that you experience that diminished your sense of self-worth, that thing got locked away. That hunger to pursue meaning, that vitality, that wants to pursue something hard, right? That wants to actively pursue hard things and do hard things.

That part of you got locked away and what replaced it was a voice of harshness or criticism or feebleness or meekness instead. And so you have to be willing to release a little bit of the beast from the basement that’s going to start to contend with that inner dialogue that is constantly shitting on you, putting you down, hypercriticizing you, judging you, telling you that you can’t do it, telling you that you’re not worth it. You know, when you look at your girlfriend, I want to have that conversation or take this to the next level.

I want to approach that woman and it’s like, you can’t do it. You’re not worthy of it. You have to find the fire inside of yourself to fight that conversation.

There has to be a bit of confrontation inside of you that says, I’m no longer going to stand for this. I am no longer going to speak to myself like this because this is the last thing I want to drive home. It is very common that when you lack self-worth, you are carrying on the legacy of what you experienced earlier on in life that diminished your self-worth, okay? So you become the legacy of the person who neglected you, abused you, abandoned you, criticized you, never gave you the love and affection that you needed, made you question your own self-worth.

We take on that commentary internally, that belief structure internally, and we have to be able to battle that a little bit. So you have to release the beast from the basement. Let me know your thoughts on this one.

Please don’t forget to man it forward and share this episode with somebody that you know needs it. Until next week.