Boost Your Sense of Self-Worth

Personal growth is the work of moving toward your fullest potential by sharpening your self-awareness and getting clearer about who you are. It happens through the self. Someone who wants to grow might turn to counseling, hire a life coach, sit in on a seminar, or pick up self-help techniques, and the growth can be emotional, cognitive, physical, spiritual, or some combination of those. A good place to start that work is by building up your sense of self-worth.

So what is self-worth? One definition calls it the sense of one's own value as a person, closely tied to self-esteem and self-respect. In plainer terms, it's knowing your value and accepting yourself for who you are. It means recognizing your strengths and your weaknesses and making room for all of them. Lao Tzu put it this way: "Because one believes in oneself, one doesn't try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn't need others' approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her."

When you have a sense of self-worth, you believe you are worthy of love and recognized as valuable, both to yourself and to the people around you. The belief systems underneath that feeling reach into every part of your life. They shape how you think, how you feel, and how you behave day to day, at work, at school, within your family, in any situation involving other people. Much of this gets laid down in childhood, then shaped further by what you've lived through since. Your experiences and your interactions become the raw material for your beliefs about who you are, what you can do, and how the world works. A child nurtured by a parent, a sibling, another relative, or a teacher tends to come away with a positive sense of worth.

None of this is fixed. Self-worth can shift when a hostile situation or a damaging person enters the picture. Picture someone who grew up feeling solid about themselves, then later landed in an abusive relationship or survived something like war or rape. Experiences like those rewrite what a person believes about what they are, what they're capable of, and what they deserve. With low self-worth, you might decide you aren't deserving of a good job or a good relationship. You might quietly expect to fall short, convinced you're not worthy of better, and you may undermine your own chances without ever noticing that you're the one doing the sabotaging.

Plenty of things feed into how a person values themselves. The family comes first, since it's your earliest contact with other people, so that's where most of your identity takes shape. Negative family conditions tend to produce negative self-worth; positive ones tend to produce the opposite. The single heaviest influence on the negative side is a parent's negative attitude toward a child. That can look like name-calling, demeaning remarks ("you're worthless, you'll never amount to anything"), abusive behavior, refusing to let a child have a voice or an opinion, or ignoring and neglecting the child entirely. How parents treat their children maps directly onto how those children come to value themselves. Parents stand in as guides for how to live safely and well in the wider world, and a child who isn't accepted at home often grows up expecting society to reject them too.

Peers matter as well, at every age, though the pull is strongest through childhood and the teen years. Research into bullying, both the physical kind and the cyber kind, has shown how deeply a peer's words and actions can cut into someone's sense of self. Schools now have anti-bullying rules, and there are laws against hate crimes, measures meant to protect people who are targeted and to head off the slide into low self-esteem, depression, and in the worst cases suicide. Social media carries its own accounts of this, including stories of people whose self-esteem sank so low that suicide felt like the only escape from the weight of those feelings.

The feeling that you are fundamentally worthy of existing and of good experiences can be rebuilt at any point in life, and as we move into adulthood the chances to do that kind of growth only multiply. There's no shortage of resources for working on self-worth in particular: a counselor, a life coach, a workbook, or any number of online options a quick search will turn up. If you suspect your self-worth runs low, give yourself the time to look into them. Raising it can open the door to success and lift how happy you feel across your life. - Kim B.