How Valuable Are You?

I love antiques and recently I was watching one of my favorite shows, “Antiques Roadshow.” This guy brought in a watch and it was valued at $500,000. The owner fainted and then he got back up and was astounded. I thought this guy was going to walk away holding that watch with kid gloves. He’s probably going to have people guard the watch and then put it in a safe deposit box. He’s going to value the watch because of its monetary value.

It got me to thinking about how much I value myself. How much value do you place on yourself? Self-worth and self-esteem is really just a sense of one’s own value as a person. When we have high value or high self-esteem/self-worth, we appreciate our qualities. We invest our time, energy, effort and sacrifice in to nurturing ourselves and maintaining ourselves. We do all of that because we value ourselves. We put time, effort and energy into ourselves. 

Many of us don’t do that. Many people don’t value themselves. We all have those little gremlins, the negative committee that meets in our head, the critical inner voice, the condescending, cruel coach that lives inside of us. It talks to you in a very unkind way and sometimes the reason why we have this inner gremlin is because of some things that happened in our childhood, things we cannot let go of. Some times the gremlins are because of things happening now: mistakes you’ve made, the things you’re ashamed of or the problems you’re having. 

How we can claim our value

1. What you and I can do to grab our value back is to challenge that gremlin, that voice, that horrible coach. We can talk to ourselves and ask, “Why are you saying this? What makes me believe what you’re saying?” 

2.  Another thing that we can do to value ourselves is to practice self-compassion. We can acknowledge our feelings, emotions and thoughts and ditch comparing ourselves to other people and ditch the idea of perfection.

3. The other thing — this is what I’m passionate about coaching people on — is we can begin to value and see our greatness. Did you know that you have a Zone of Genius inside of you? You have a Fascination Factor inside of you just the way I do. What is the Zone of Genius? It’s those things that you do so well, and it comes naturally to you. I challenge you to get curious and ask yourself, “What is inside of me that I absolutely love to do? What comes naturally?” It’s that voodoo that you do so well. When we believe ourselves to have those things, our value increases. 

4. We can also remove or walk away from those people in our life who don’t belong there because they are toxic. They treat us like a doormat. They take advantage of us. They belittle us. When you and I learn how much we’re worth, we’re going to stop giving discounts to people. Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see how valuable and worthy you are. It doesn’t make it decrease because somebody can’t see it.

5. We need to learn to say no when we don’t want something and say yes to the things that we’ve always wanted but we’ve never deemed ourselves valuable enough. Here is how undervaluing ourselves can play out in lives and business. As a business coach, I need to pitch a price point to my potential clients. I have to tell them the price for my services. I cannot lower my price because I don’t value what I have to offer. When I undervalue it and reduce the price, I’m not seeing it as a value. People do that in business all the time. When you keep reducing the price, you are undervaluing it.   

Self-worth, self-esteem, self-love, self-respect all begin with the word self. All of that begins with you. When you don’t value yourself, you are so shortchanging all that you can bring to the world and the world needs your Zone of Genius. It needs your Fascination Factor so don’t shortchange yourself. Value yourself like you would a good friend.

I want to show you how much I value you. I’d love to send you some video affirmations by email every morning. I love to affirm people and show them how valuable they are.