Having high self-esteem and self-worth has a huge impact on our lives. High self-esteem and self-worth mean we treat ourselves with respect and compassion.
When our self-esteem and self-worth are low we make bad choices, bad decisions, and don’t treat ourselves with the love and respect we deserve.
In this post, I want to look at 10 situations where high self-esteem and self-worth can influence our lives. If you ever wondered why self-worth is so important this list helps explain why.
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Let’s dive into the 10 ways high self-esteem and self-worth have a huge impact on our lives.
1. Walking away from bad situations
Having high self-worth means you are more likely to walk away from a bad situation. Whether it’s a boss who is mistreating you or a romantic partner who is not treating you respectfully.
A high sense of self-worth helps you walk away from toxic situations.
I know this stuff is not easy. Writing it in a simple sentence like that makes it sound easy but it’s not.
Take changing jobs for example. In a job market where thousands have or are losing their jobs, it can be scary to think about leaving your job if your boss is bullying you.
In this situation, knowing your worth might be what it takes to start looking for another job (while keeping the one you have). Knowing your worth is what gets you started, it’s the first step, the rest might be very hard but if you have the courage for that first step, you have a lot more bravery and hope than you realized and that goes a long way in getting you out of a bad situation.
Related content –
- 10 Powerful Ways to Improve Your Self-Worth and Self-Esteem
- 12 Things to Remember When You Think You Are Not Good Enough
- Know Your Worth – 10 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself
- Know Your Worth – Even When it Feels Like the Word Doesn’t Quite Agree With You
- How to Stop Lying to Yourself about your Actions and Feelings
2. Not walking into bad situations in the first place
When you know your worth, you are less likely to walk into a bad situation in the first place.
When those red flags are raised and those warning bells start going off in your head, you will know that you need to listen to them. You will trust yourself enough to listen to them.
When you have low-esteem and a low sense of self-worth you ignore those warning bells (even if they are eating away at you). Women can be particularly bad at this (and yes, I am talking from personal experience here). When it comes to love, we often love the men in our lives more than we love ourselves.
We overlook and justify their behavior and blame ourselves for their actions. We think that by loving them more we can fix the relationship.
That doesn’t work.
When we have a strong sense of self-worth we are less likely to walk into the fire. We tell ourselves we deserve better and walk the other way with our head held high.
I fully understand that sometimes it’s not that simple. We might feel sad, lonely, or vulnerable and sometimes make mistakes in the heat of the moment. But by having a strong sense of self-worth we are more able to internally deal with and process our feelings and emotions instead of seeking outside validation and comfort.
I got a lot out of reading the book – How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t by Andrea Owen. It looks at the 14 not so charming but all too common ways we sabotage ourselves in life and most importantly gives helpful ways to change and stop our behavior.
3. Not needing everyone to like you
I’m sure there are people that you don’t like. (Let’s face it, some of them might be in your own family!)
It might not even be as strong as not liking them. They might be a very nice person but you just don’t have anything in common or you have different opinions or values. As long as you are not mean or disrespectful to them, it’s fine not to like them.
The truth is there are people that feel the same way about you.
And you know what, that’s perfectly okay.
When you know your worth, you fully understand and accept that not everyone is going to like you and that is perfectly fine. When you know your worth, knowing someone doesn’t like you, doesn’t make you feel insecure. It’s just a normal fact of life and you accept it as one.
Related content – 20 Ways to Stop Caring What People Think of You
Need help appreciating just how amazing you truly are? Read one of my favorite books – You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life by Jen Sincero.
4. Not letting people pressure you
When you know your worth you don’t let people walk all over you and treat you badly. You don’t let people pressure you into doing things you don’t want to do.
I see this happen in family dynamics, though it is especially bad in families with little to no boundaries in place. They take each other for granted and have high expectations and demands of each other (which usually builds high levels of resentment and anger).
They do things out of guilt and pressure, instead of out of caring and concern.
I had an example of resisting pressure recently. My close friend asked me to attend a baby shower for one of her relatives.
I said ‘thank you for the invite but baby showers aren’t my thing so I will give it a miss’. I could tell my friend was surprised (because women are supposed to love baby showers right?) but I wasn’t going to say yes and then be resentful about it later. Because here is the thing. I hate baby showers. I’m sure everyone will have a great day but it’s just not for me.
What a lot of people do is say yes out of pressure (or even expectation) and then feel resentful. Once the date gets closer they cancel at the last minute and don’t show up, often making up a lie to get out of it. While I think saying no did momentarily upset my friend, it’s far better than stringing her on for a month and then pulling out at the last minute.
Having a strong sense of self-worth and saying ‘no thanks’ to things right from the beginning goes a long way to a less stressful life.
Related post – 10 Reasons You Are Saying Yes When You Want to Say No
5. Understanding your self-worth is not based on what you do for a living
Often people base their self-worth on what they do for a living. They base their self-worth on their job. Men can be particularly vulnerable to this way of thinking.
Maybe you are a doctor and that gives you a high sense of self-worth. Maybe you think by doing more intensive studying and becoming a specialist that will increase your self-worth. While I am all for supporting career development, that’s not self-worth, that’s ego. That’s career advancement (which is all good) but it’s not self-worth.
The thing is what if the doctor loses their job due to staff cutbacks or something similar. Does that suddenly make him or her worthless? Definitely not. Unemployed yes. Unworthy no.
Your self-worth is your internal core.
It’s something you have no matter what position you hold in a company. It’s not about how much money you make or how much money you have. You can be a millionaire and still dislike yourself and have low self-worth.
I am currently reading a brilliant book, Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty and it has an excellent chapter on ego (plus a whole bunch of other thought-provoking, action-inducing chapters). I’m obviously not alone in my admiration for this book as it is souring up the Amazon charts with 5 stars!
6. Having more resilience when you go through a difficult time
Having high self-worth doesn’t mean that bad stuff won’t happen in your life. Everyone has their struggles. We all have to deal with challenges and setbacks.
What having high self-esteem and self-worth does mean is that you are likely to have less self-inflicted problems.
In other words, you won’t self-sabotage as much.
When you get hurt you will cry and feel sad but then you get back up again and keep moving forward. When you are feeling better, you think about how you can learn and grow from what happened. You think about any mistakes you made and how not to make the same mistakes again. It might take time to heal, which is fine, but you pick yourself back up. Knowing your worth also gives you the strength to reach out for professional help when you need it.
High self-esteem and self-worth give you the strength to keep pushing forward, even when it’s hard.
Need help building your resilience? The folks over at CreativeLive had the online course for you – How to Be Bold, Resilient and Better Than Ever. Take a look at the course outline to see if it could benefit you.
7. You will be more self-aware
Self-awareness is vitally important.
As I have said before here at Write Change Grow you can’t change a behavior if you aren’t even aware of the behavior in the first place.
Having high self-worth and more to the point the continual work you do on your self-worth will revolve around awareness. All of the books I have read, seminars I’ve watched, or courses I have taken all incorporate this one thing – self-awareness (and then using that awareness to take focused purposeful action).
The thing is if we want to improve our lives we need to get off autopilot. So much of our lives are lived in this space and while it’s very helpful for getting us organized and to work in the morning (because we generally follow a pattern of actions) it’s not very helpful in other parts of our lives.
Take our emotions for example. We have our emotional triggers and when someone pushes that trigger we often act a certain way without even giving it much thought. When we are more aware of those triggers, we can be more equipped in dealing with them.
Related post – Know Your Trigger Words and How to Deal with Them
Struggle with self-doubt? I have an excellent online course for you. How to Break the Habit of Self-Doubt and Build Real Confidence is a course run by the wonderful Mel Robbins on the CreativeLive platform. I took this course myself and it helped me a great deal. You can read my review of the course and how it can benefit you in this post.
8. You live by your values and not someone else’s
When you have low self-worth you tend to take on someone else’s values. You like what they like, put their feelings before your own, and overlook their behavior. We tend to do this when we are younger because let’s face it, we haven’t quite grown into ourselves yet!
At least this is how it happened to me. My first boyfriend was the cool surfer boy who lived around the corner (I could see his bedroom window from my bedroom window). I was an insecure girl who was amazed someone like him could even like me. When he broke up with me about a year or so into our relationship, I was shattered, I thought my world was ending (because I had made him my whole world).
We got back together and got engaged when I was 18. The plan was to get married and have kids. In those days, the man worked and the woman stayed home and looked after the kids.
Yet I wasn’t quite on board with that plan. I wanted to travel. I was obsessed with going to the United States. For years, I’d been reading World Book Encylopedia (remember those?) and putting little scraps of paper in as bookmarks for all the places I wanted to go.
The longer we stayed together the more our values moved further apart. We no longer wanted the same things.
Nearly 7 years after we started dating, I went on holiday to the United States for 2 months and by the time I got back, it was all over. I came home to an empty apartment and not long after that, he was engaged to someone else. It was difficult at the time but looking back it was a blessing because everyone was living their values and not trying to bitterly swallow down someone else’s. Everyone ended up where they needed to be.
Living to someone else’s values will lead to living a life you don’t want and you deserve so much better than that.
Knowing your worth means you take the time to work out what your values are in the first place and then you get busy living them.
9. Not being afraid to be alone
Fear of being alone is a common fear. Whether we like to admit it or not this fear alone, makes us compromise our values, ignore red flags, and tolerate bad behavior. We think that being with someone is better than being alone.
It’s not.
When we adopt a fear of being alone mentality, we are totally undermining how strong and independent we truly are. We are telling ourselves we don’t deserve better.
We are telling ourselves we don’t deserve love and respect (not even from ourselves!)
I remember a male friend I had back in Sydney who was completely miserable with his girlfriend. To be honest, I think they were both miserable but they stayed together for 3 years. My friend would complain for hours on end on a very regular basis about how unhappy he was in the relationship and while I tried to be a good friend at one point I snapped and told him to just leave her already.
But he couldn’t. Not because he loved her and she was an important part of his life but because he could not be alone. He talked constantly about trying to find someone else while they were together because he had to have someone else lined up after her. He couldn’t bear the thought of being by himself.
At the time, I was in my twenties and struggling with my own insecurities and low self-esteem, so I didn’t see clearly what his real problem was. (I saw it but I didn’t fully understand it, is probably more truthful). The problem wasn’t his girlfriend, it was the fact that he didn’t like himself very much. He had little to no self-esteem and was drowning in self-loathing.
I spoke to him years later and he was in a similar situation with another woman. Some of the details were different but the situation was the same, his low self-worth was driving all of his actions. He was looking for a way out and another woman to follow the one he was with. Until he stopped looking outward and finding fault in the women in his life and started looking inward at how he could improve his self-worth, his life wasn’t going to change.
I’m not sure what happened to my friend, he started treating me inappropriately and I made the decision to end that friendship.
The fear of being alone and how we overcome it so we can find peace in our lives is a complex topic and I am currently writing an extensive post on the topic, so stay tuned…
Related post – 12 Things To Remember When You Think You Are Not Good Enough
10. Loving and accepting yourself
Of course, the ultimate benefit of high self-esteem and self-worth is that you love and accept yourself.
Loving and accepting yourself means treating yourself with compassion and respect. You deserve to be kind and caring to yourself. Accepting yourself means that you can love the person you are right now but still strive for improvements in areas that are important to you. It’s about growing as a person.
Having high self-esteem and self-worth is important. Knowing your worth affects all aspects of your life. It affects your relationships, family, career, health, and mental health. Having high self-esteem and self-worth is the foundation of who you are. It’s your core and your compass. Work to strengthen your core for a more peaceful, joyful life.
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