What’s Your Worth?
Worth is a fascinating word to me. It has a very detailed definition:
the value equivalent to that of someone or something under consideration; the level at which someone or something deserves to be valued or rated.
It’s something’s value. What’s interesting though is that value is subjective. We all have different amounts that we would be willing to give for things.
The price of an item at the supermarket has a price, but not necessarily its value. Many people can agree to pay that amount for it so the price’s estimation is often accurate (or else people would not pay that amount and the store would have to adjust it).
We have all checked the price of something before and decided not to buy it. This is a healthy exercise in understanding a budget. I cover budgets in depth in “Personal Finance in a Public World”. There are plenty of resources out there to help people control their spending, manage debt, and manage their budget.
Your Emotional Budget
This is not a blog about money. It comes up because it’s related to my company’s services (Initiate Impact) and impactmakers need to be good stewards of their financial resources.
This blog is however, about emotional intelligence and doing well in the world.
Psychology Today has a quick read on Emotional Intelligence. Notice how it mentions the management of others’ emotions as well as your own.
Managing someone else’s emotions might seem a bit controlling but it’s more a form of communication than manipulation.
It is completely healthy to understand how oneself and those around them are thinking and adjust one’s actions accordingly.
However, you should also understand that you have limitations. To use the financial budget as a metaphor, you only have so much emotional energy in your savings account.
The more stressed you are mentally and the more time you’ve spent managing emotions, the harder it will be to make sound decisions.
I encourage you to know when you’re “emotional savings” is being depleted. At this point, you will be hard-pressed to make your best decisions. It doesn’t mean that you give up what you’re doing, leave the party, and go home to hibernate. It just means that your emotions have a greater effect on your thoughts. It’s an emotional magnifier that will take time to regress.
I have found that the emotional budget can be refreshed rather quickly. Sometimes it just takes a change in atmosphere or train of thought. Everyone and every situation is different. Know your own mind and understand that you may not be able to leave your given situation. In which case, you’ll need to limit decision making during that period (especially about the people around you, you’d be making it very hard for them to impress).
Too Much Feedback
I find today’s information age to be very exciting but also overindulgent. The amount of data that I was able to come up with for my book mentioned above was amazing. Even more amazing was the short amount of time that it took to find it. This is a benefit of the Internet and websites like the one you are reading this blog on.
Unfortunately, the amount of information also causes issues. There is no exacting feedback. We used to watch television and listen to the radio for information and entertainment that we desired in exchange for experiencing advertisements. Commercials were a few minutes in between what we wanted.
Occasionally, there was an ad that really spoke to you and maybe provided some feedback for your life specifically (or at least it seemed specific).
Today is different. Many of the ads that you see and hear are directly targeted to you based on your browsing and scrolling history. Internet “cookies” store information on your device’s browser and the servers you access. They help browsing happen faster but they also tell a story about you.
Application algorithms read your “story” and feed you advertisements that speak to you. For example (I tell a story about this in the book too), if you feel that you are out of shape and spent some time looking for a workout equipment, it’s likely that the next time you access the internet (which statistically is within minutes or even seconds) you’ll see an ad about more equipment (the same exact equipment if the seller has a good retargeting system).
The feedback is tailored directly to you. In the fitness example, you are being told again that you are out of shape. You’re not good enough. I can’t fault the company for wanting to see exercise equipment and help people get in better shape but the way they word their message really doesn’t matter. The message you are going to hear is, “You’re out of shape.”
You might be out of shape and need to hear that message. But, what their algorithms can’t do is make that distinction. If you take all the messages that you see every day (thousands), you are going to see way more messages than actual problems that you have. You’re not perfect in every area of life. But, how many areas are you in need of major change?
The feedback is abundant and you must be able to identify what’s most important. Act on what needs attention and understand that everything else is a drain on the emotional budget.
Internal Impactmaking
E-Impact is all about using your gifts and skills to make the world a better place - to help others. However, depending on how long you’ve been reading, you may notice that many of the entries are about the internal work you have to do to be the best you can for those around you.
See the following entries for some good examples:
Self-care is the key to maximizing impact.
The point is that we have to work on ourselves to be our best for those we care about.
I believe the concept of self-worth is extremely important in this context. We must believe that we are worth something great to have the motivation to do something great.
This doesn’t mean that there is a magic motivational pill that gives us an ability to do more than the person next to us. It also doesn’t mean that impactmaking will be suddenly easy when you have a better sense of worth for yourself.
I have said before that impactmaking is very hard. In some ways, that’s part of the reason why we choose to do it. If it were easy, a lot more people would attempt to do it. Unfortunately though, I think a lot of people would fail. This is because, although it is hard and we like hard things (because they generally accomplish more), our success is not due to our determination to do something hard (or recognition). It’s due to our belief that we are supposed to make the world a better place regardless of how challenging it will be.
Having a strong sense of self-worth is not just given to us (that could be misconstrued as arrogance) and it’s also not something that we do because we want to feel good about ourselves (that’s selfish and a message we might get from some of the advertisements mentioned above). We do it because we HAVE to.
We believe that we have something great inside of us that should be praised and used for good. If we don’t think highly of ourselves, we are negating the fact that we have gifts and skills designed for positive impact.
There will be times that we struggle to find our worth. We’re human - not perfect or always effective. That fact proves to us that the times we struggle to believe we have high worth are just times (flaws) that must be overcome. It is the belief of those gifts and skills that tells us the ought times CAN be overcome.
The most important encouragement I can share here is that impactmakers believe that part of us is great and because of that, we can overcome what is not great to accomplish amazing things.
What would you pay for yourself?
$1? $100?
I hope you can’t answer that.
Money is just a tool and an invalid measurement of your worth. There are some terrible histories across the world of enslavement and paying money for a human is abhorrent. With that being the case, don’t reduce yourself to an amount of money.
I believe an extension of placing a dollar value on oneself is dreaming of a figure you would need to give up something in your life (like a job, position, or even a limb). No amount of money could ever describe your worth.
What you are worth is everything to the people around you and the subjects of your impact.
The hard part is that it’s very hard to describe your worth. I suppose this is why money might seem like an acceptable measurement. It’s easy. But once again, impactmaking is hard and part of it is having a strong sense of self-worth.
I can’t break down your worth piece by piece. There is too much nuance. In fact, I wouldn’t even encourage you to do that.
You only need to believe that what you are good at is extremely valuable to people in the world. You don’t need validation from them though. Many may not even be able to communicate with you directly or even describe it to you if they could.
This is why it is called self-worth. It’s tough to understand in the impact space because the source is internal but the result is expressed externally (by positively impacting others).
I know your worth is immense and will always remind you. Yet, it is your acknowledgment of it that supersedes all others’.
Budgeting Your Worth
Here are the steps to believing that you’re infinitely worthy:
1. Trust that you have been given amazing gifts.
2. Serve others and give freely.
3. Manage emotions.
4. Believe that you can overcome what seems unmanageable.
5. Overcome.
6. Share your experience.
7. Repeat.