Nancy: Worthiness is an inside job. It begins within and then we draw toward us, the people, the situations and things that reflect our inner sense of our own worth. And we need to work with our own inner world in order to be the magnet to draw toward us what we are indeed worthy of.
So it is not something outside that will deem us worthy. Our worthiness rises from within. And one of the greatest tools to support you in connecting with and embracing your own worthiness is what can often be seen as an undesirable quality. And it is the quality of selfishness.
Welcome to Your Permission Prescription. I’m Nancy Levin, founder of Levin Life Coach Academy, bestselling author, master life coach, and your host. I train life coaches, aspiring coaches, and anyone who wants to add coaching skills to their current career to elevate their life and their business. I’ve coached thousands of people to live life on their own terms, and now I coach, train, and certify other coaches to do the same.
If you are ready to give yourself permission to finally make yourself a priority and mobilize your vision, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in.
Welcome back to another episode of your Permission Prescription. I’m thrilled you’re here with me today. And what if I told you that your ability to have the life you want is directly correlated with your ability to own your own self-worth?
Well, it’s true and today I’m going to walk you through what this looks like and how to integrate it into your life, so that you can value all parts of yourself without conditions, without chasing external approval or validation.
So here’s the deal, many of us think that someone or something outside of us is going to have us feel worthy, and this puts us in a very precarious position of allowing external forces to determine our worth.
So for example, I used to believe that my worth and value was directly tied to what I achieved, what I produced, and what I did for others. These are the ways I used to try to prove and earn my worth. But this is not how self-worth works. We need to actually believe from within and trust from within that we are worthy simply by being who we are. There is nothing we have to do to earn or prove, in order to be worthy. We are inherently worthy simply by being here.We are worthy from birth.
Worthiness is an inside job. It begins within, and then we draw toward us, the people, the situations and things that reflect our inner sense of our own worth. And we need to work with our own inner world in order to be the magnet to draw toward us what we are indeed worthy of.
So it is not something outside that will deem us worthy, our worthiness rises from within. And one of the greatest tools to support you in connecting with and embracing your own worthiness is what can often be seen as an undesirable quality and it is the quality of selfishness.
But here’s the deal, selfishness is the foundation for a fulfilling life. You may have learned to define selfishness as only caring about yourself. However, healthy selfishness considers your needs in addition to, not at the expense of, others. And selfishness fills your cup and allows you to ditch your people pleasing ways so you can get your own needs met as well. Until you know how to give yourself enough air, you’ll always be gasping just to keep going.
Now, you might tend to fear being selfish to such a degree that you end up becoming selfless. And being selfless ultimately means that with each giving act, you vanish, you disappear. While selfless can certainly feel rewarding at times, after a while resentment is likely to take hold if you’ve been abandoning your own needs along the way. And you may feel angry or frustrated with other people for not considering you the way you consider them. But the truth is you have not been considering yourself.
So the invitation today is to make yourself and your own needs your top priority. You actually have greater ability to be there for others in a more caring and genuine way when you learn to make your own needs as important as everyone else’s. And you learn that selfish, self-care and self-love are three sisters whose job it is to support you in honoring yourself.
It might feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable for you to put attention on yourself in this way. And if you notice any guilt arising from doing this, it’s time to see guilt in this context as an indicator that you’re on the right track. So in other words, if you feel guilty putting attention on yourself, that’s okay, it means you are honoring and considering you.
And just like we learned to label selfish as bad and selfless as good, we go through life judging parts of ourselves as right or wrong, good or bad, based on whatever messages we’ve received from our parents or our caregivers or institutions like school or places of worship, and really the culture as a whole.
Self-worth is the acceptance and celebration of our wholeness, so we are no longer driven to trade parts of ourselves for validation, approval, and love. When we reject the qualities in ourselves that we deem bad and wrong, we end up overcompensating to prove that we’re not that.
So what we end up doing is getting advanced degrees. If we don’t wanna be stupid, if we don’t wanna be needy, we never ask for help. Many of us believe that we have to hide some part of ourselves in order to be loved and accepted, in order to be worthy. And these are the parts we don’t want anyone else to see that we don’t even wanna be. And while we may think we wanna be loved for all of who we are, we actually expend tremendous energy hiding.
But here’s the truth, every single quality, every characteristic, that exists in anyone else, exists within us as well.
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So I’m going to share an analogy with you. We know the moon is always whole, but we see it in different phases. When it’s fully illuminated by the sun, it appears as a perfect round ball. But when the moon is waxing or waning, we only see parts of it while other parts remain immersed in darkness. However, the moon is still always whole no matter what we do or don’t see, it’s simply revealing or concealing parts of itself at different times.
We do the exact same thing in that we spend a good chunk of our lives concealing parts of ourselves that we don’t wanna be and don’t want others to see. But we are still whole. And once we recognize we are everything, every quality, we stop hiding and we’re no longer afraid to express all of who we are.
So here’s what happens, we decide I don’t wanna be that. I don’t wanna be selfish or lazy or mean, and we start rejecting those parts of ourselves, stuffing those qualities down in order to stay loved and accepted.
What we’re not realizing is that every single quality is an asset. Qualities themselves are not bad or good, they’re neutral – we put the specific charge on them. And one of the most effective ways to find the qualities we’ve rejected in ourselves, is to see them in others. Whatever we don’t own in ourselves, we project out onto other people. So you’ll find your own disowned qualities when you’re triggered by these very qualities in someone else.
So if you don’t wanna be selfish, you’ll attract and be triggered by selfish people. The more you disown lazy, the more you’ll be irritated by lazy people around you. And one of the ways we avoid owning up to possessing a certain quality we see in someone else is by saying, I’m not that because I don’t do X, Y, Z.
When looking for these qualities within, it’s important to remember that you may not exhibit or express them exactly like someone else does. So it is essential to find the way the quality does present in you. I know it can be challenging to imagine owning and embracing parts of yourself you’ve judged as bad and wrong, and the truth is every single part of you comes bearing gifts.
Think about it. When would it come in handy to have access to your anger? When would it be useful to be lazy? When would it be an asset to be needy? I’ll give you a couple of examples here.
If your contractor is three weeks late, it can come in handy to use your anger to help get the job done. If your schedule has been jam packed, it’s useful to allow yourself to be lazy so you can rest and recharge. If you could use support with technology, it’s an asset to be needy and ask for help from an expert.
Remember, these qualities are charged neutral. We are the ones who put the positive or negative spin on them so we can harness the energy from these qualities and use them to support us.
So I’m gonna share an example from my own life, and I’ve built it out in a particular framework so you can watch how I unpack it.
The quality I see in someone I’m triggered by is lazy. This person shows this quality by not working. I disowned this quality of lazy because my mother is highly critical of lazy people. So that’s when I made a decision to never be lazy.I hide this quality, I hide the existence of laziness in myself by overcompensating, and my overcompensation is being a workaholic. So no one could ever point a finger at me and call me lazy. But since I am everything, since every quality is in me, I do see this quality in me when I binge watch my favorite show in the middle of the day.
Now again, it’s showing up differently than it does for the person who I’m triggered by. They showed this quality by not working. That’s how they showed their laziness. I show my laziness in a different way. That’s a really important piece. We present our qualities different from each other, and then I know that this quality is an asset and serves me because it does allow me to rest, rejuvenate and replenish. Therefore, I own. I am lazy.
If you are someone who notices that even hearing me say I am lazy, starts giving you some hives, I get it. Believe me, I couldn’t say this years ago. It’s only from doing this work. It’s only from focusing on the power of The Art of Change and the potency that occurs in reinvention. Continuously coming back to myself, my own inner world, my own inner landscape, so that I can be as whole as possible. And while owning, I am lazy, certainly stung at first, I now see how it actually supports me.
Owning the totality of who we are is the key to our self-worth. You are always whole, and you can call upon the parts of yourself to serve you at all times.
So I hope that this conversation about the intersection between our own self-worth and reclaiming these lost pieces of ourselves, these parts of ourselves we’ve disowned, I hope you can see how when connected, our self-worth and our reclamation of these disowned qualities illuminate us in our wholeness, just like the moon.
Thanks so much for being here with me today, and I look forward to being with you again next time.
Thanks so much for joining me today on Your Permission Prescription. For even more, I invite you to head on over to nancylevin.com and sign up for my newsletter, The Practice, and follow me on social media.
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See you next time.