Pay attention to YOU.
To feel worthy, you must first make your own instincts worthy of your attention and your effort.
pg. 223 (From The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins)
Many of us struggle or have struggled to feel worthy. We know that it’s important to feel worthy. We know that we should feel worthy. But how do we actually start to feel worthy? Where does worthiness come from?
In my experience, feeling worthy is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight, though when it does happen, it seems to have happened overnight! But it’s really due to all the work we’ve done with ourselves over time.
The first step to feeling worthy is to become aware of the ways in which we don’t feel worthy. This can show up in different forms and in different areas of our lives. Maybe we feel worthy in some aspects of our lives, so getting accolades at work feels natural. Or being in a healthy partnership comes easy. Or being financially stable is just a “given.”
But in the areas in which we don’t feel worthy, those are the areas where we struggle.
- We don’t feel we deserve great friendships, so we shy away from connection and wonder why we feel lonely.
- We don’t feel worthy of the praise from our boss, so we don’t believe her kind words.
- We don’t feel deserving of the gifts from our loved ones on our birthday, so we feel guilty receiving them.
- We think the new apartment we moved into is “too good” for us and feel undeserving to live there.
- We wait for the other shoe to drop when a new relationship starts, like “Wait until they really get to know me…” or we end up sabotaging it ourselves.
Again, it can come up in various forms.
To feel worthy, one thing we must do for ourselves is to pay attention to ourselves. For me, I was always disregarding myself, ignoring myself, abandoning myself.
I did this in order to please others, to have what I THOUGHT I wanted, even if it meant dishonoring my needs and what I REALLY wanted. I wasn’t paying attention to myself, my instincts, and what was true for me. I tried to convince myself to want what didn’t really align with me, I contorted myself to fit what someone else wanted. I lied to myself and lied to others – unintentionally – because I thought it was the “right” thing to do in order to seek approval.
By paying attention to ourselves, we learn what is true for us and how truth FEELS for us. We then know when we’re lying to ourselves. When we lie to ourselves, that is a form of abandoning ourselves. When we pay attention to ourselves, we show ourselves that we are worthy of attention and effort. Especially from ourselves.
When we start paying attention to ourselves, our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors change. They become more aligned with our truth. We start to see that we have always been worthy. And what we are engaging in is the process to UNLEARN our feelings and beliefs of UNworthiness.
I learned about some of my unhealthy beliefs about worthiness through therapy and life coaching. And I’ve been doing the work to UNLEARN all the ways I thought I wasn’t worthy before. Coming from a place of worthiness changes everything.
So I’ve created an introductory coaching series called “Tools to Change Your Life” to support others on their own path to UNlearning all the ways they believed they were unworthy before to seeing that they have ALWAYS been worthy.
You can consider this program for yourself or for someone in your life who could benefit from a program like this!
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What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.
The Healing Modalities 