Why You Still Don't Feel Good Enough

Direct thyself, command thyself, follow through day after day after day. When you have congruence that develops a sense of trust and respect in yourself. Being of service to other people will give you a sense of worth that you never imagined. You need a vision again. You need something to align yourself, to pick yourself up for, to aim for, to stretch into. When we think about worth, if it's like not there for people, most people in terms of categories would say, well, worth is a sense of self esteem. I like myself, I care for myself, a sense of self value externally. So self value externally, meaning I have esteem for myself in the way that I show up in the world and how I let people treat me. And there's a sense of self value that I will accept or not accept with other people. I won't let them treat me that way. As an example, because some people have very high self esteem. They feel good about themselves, but they allow people to treat them like trash. So they lack self value. Then another category of worth is often discussed as a sense of mastery of life, or more broadly, competence. Right, I have competence, I know what to do, right? So we have these three big buckets that worth is often thrown into. Right? If we go beyond those buckets, that would be the world of faith that just says everybody is worthy. We were born worthy, worthy of whatever we design, whatever we decide, whatever he intends us for. So if you think about it as maybe, if you want to separate those into four buckets, there's the bucket of how do I feel about myself? There's the bucket of how do I value myself out in the marketplace? How do I allow people to treat me? Then there's the capabilities that I have. Do I believe in myself? Do I have self belief because I've done it or learned it? Competency. And there's that universal, that divine, that sense that we are automatically worthy. Okay, if all those buckets are different definitions or different angles, people have approached worthiness with, I always say, okay, those are nice definitions, those are nice buckets. I'm a coach, tell me what to do, what I like. Okay, what's one surefire way to improve all of those things? You're going to engage the present and live into a certain alignment in the future. How are you going to do that? Specifically, how do you actually change that mindset over a period of time? The first way self talk, you tell yourself, don't just know thyself. A lot of people know thyself, but they do nothing. Command thyself, direct thyself Each day I say to myself, I'm going to direct myself today to live with intention and take the next right action of integrity. I'm gonna live with intention, take the next right action. Take it. So one aspect is commanding myself. That's self talk. The second is follow through on the self talk. Okay, I really do need to like, write out my intentions today, write out my goals today, do the things I said that I would do today that align with my integrity today. Okay, all right. I said I was gonna do it, I did it. I built what is called congruence. And when you have congruence to show up the way that you know that you should and do what you said you were going to do, that develops a sense of trust and respect in yourself. The more you develop that sense of trust and respect in yourself because you are directing yourself, you're commanding yourself and you're following through over and over and over and over again. Then guess what? Then the sense of worth, it just happens. You don't have to think about it. I haven't thought about my sense of self worth in decades. It's just there. It's just there because I do those things, right? Because I feel and sense those things. Because I think, therefore, that I am. But I follow through. So therefore I am competent. And so being competent in the day starts with being conscientious about directing thyself during the day. Okay, that's today. Then as I look out, and this is important, a lot of people lost their worth because they lost their vision. Because even if I show up every day and I'm a good human every day, but I've disconnected from the future, I'm not working to become more, to become more happy, more healthy, more caring, more stable, more action oriented, more for my kids, more for my family, more for my team, more for the world. Not because I'm deficient. Now has nothing to do with efficiency, deficiency or capability. It just has to do with a very simple thing called potential. And that we have so much more potential than we have. And if you can accept that, you go, oh yeah, that means I can become more. There's more potential for me. And you know what? I'm going to stretch then. I'm going to set some goals that are beyond where I am. Even if I land out a little lower, at least I aimed a little higher. Because most people, they have no connection to the future. And if they do have a connection to the future, their future is so small or so set in the actual past that they can't See the future, they forget. They get disconnected. And now it's just such a struggle, you know, it's like every day. Why try? Because I've, I've been so great, Brendan, every single day. But, you know, I don't know. I don't know what I want. You know what you want? I'll tell you what you want. You want bigger goals? There it is. It's like you, you, you need a vision again. You need something to align yourself with for, to pick yourself up, for, to aim for, to stretch into. And it doesn't have to be one thing. It can be different categories of your life. It can be your sense of health, it can be your family, it can be your career. It's okay, keep them different buckets or categories, I don't care. But your job is to align yourself more and more towards those. And as you align yourself towards the best in each of those categories, not being perfect, but actually making good faith efforts to align and, and build into your ideal future. If you sense, please listen. If you sense you are building into your ideal future, the worth just shows up. You don't have to theorize or therapeuticize. I don't know if that's a word. You don't have to do that. It's just there. It's just there. It's there because the self talk and the actions in the moment and the conscientious future building that you are doing, it will just start to happen. It will just start to happen. Just like happiness just starts to happen more in your life. Just like, you know what, when you're trying to train and you're trying to get better in your health and you're running or you're jogging and it feels terrible day after day after day, but you're making yourself run. All of a sudden endurance just starts to improve. You don't have to think about it, it just starts happening. Worth can just start happening. If we live right with integrity and direction and conscientiousness in the moment, now and in the future. Direct thyself, command thyself, follow through day after day after day. Be working towards something, building towards something, get momentum, align more decisions, align more people, align more resources toward that ideal future and you will feel very, very different. That is the mindset of owning, being responsible, owning your worth in a way that you are proud of. Not my definition, not a psychologist definition, not your therapist definition, not your friend or your sister, your brothers, not anybody else on the block. Your home, your value of it, your care for it, your understanding of who you are. And that is a person of high agency, a person dedicated to character development, to becoming more. If you develop your character, if you actively become more, I promise you, those actions alone, that intention and that initiative coupled together will create a different sense of strength and vitality than you've ever felt your entire life. Every day becomes a great day to grow. And because you developed the character into it, you built you into it. A lot of people who achieve great things in life, they operated from what I call the deficiency drive. So they feel either deficient internally or something externally was deficient, and they're rebelling against it. But either way, something was not right or is not right, and they're fighting against it to prove value or to prove them wrong. And if you're always in the fight, there's always a win, there's always a loss. There's always a win, there's always a loss. Sometimes I have to tell my creator friends or my entrepreneur friends who are like, they've created, you know, 17 new things in the last quarter. And they're like, brendan, I don't know why I don't stick to anything. I'm like, well, I can tell you why. And they're like, why? I'm like, you lack acceptance. And this is where we start blowing people's minds with more advanced concepts. They lack acceptance because what happened is they tried a thing, it didn't work out fast enough. They put it in the category of loss, failure, shame. And what do we do with loss, failure and shame? We want to shut it out. We want to kill it. We don't want to sense that and feel it. So we shove it over here. Let's start something new. I might feel better about it. And the dopamine and the novelty kicks in, oh, this is better. I don't have to face this thing. See, we'll never face this thing unless we accept it, grant it grace, and then we can turn it into something right. That's how we continue it on. We can accept our quote unquote failures as lessons, Make a plan and keep it going. And that's how you turn an L to a W. But if you're always striving for new W's and avoiding and abandoning L's, it's why you won't feel worth, because you couldn't transform anything. Does that make sense? When I can learn to transform failure, inadequacy, upset things that didn't go well, and I can transform them into a positive direction, and I can build upon them, and I can Turn a bad into a good, guess what that does to my worth, My sense of value, my sense of competency goes up. It's about us making healthy decisions now. To direct myself now to the next right action of integrities, to align with a better future. Not about what happened to us in the past. Because no matter how far we go in the past, at some point, all roads, all roads lead to either acceptance of it or avoidance of it. And so the ultimate shift in mindset is to take that L to W and just accept. Remember, 90% of it, just let it go. But if there is something there I need to be responsible for, repair or improve or build towards, I gotta make that shift in my mind. This is the power of self acceptance. This is the power of acceptance and awareness broadly in our lives that gives us so much personal power and yes, self worth. The truth is we live in a world in which we do value ourselves on the block. We are social animals whether we like it or not. There is status games. There are challenges and, and obstacles on our path to manifest our own dreams and desires. We gotta deal with people. We gotta deal with people now. Today we live in a world where everyone goes, oh no, those are two different things. You should never let other people determine how you feel about yourself. I'm like, how's that going, mom? When your teenager hates you, that doesn't affect you. And I'm here to tell you it does affect you. I know parents who feel like they have a good relationship with their kids. Their self worth feels a little higher. Our status, our connection, our sense of affection and love does impact the human heart. And I hate that so many tiktokers and Instagram and book writers deny that and just say universally we should feel worth because we live in a social context. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that. And so I want you to share this with you, whether you agree with that or not. Just answer a very simple question. Would you feel better about yourself if you were more competent and capable and influential in dealing with other people, would you feel better? And everybody I've ever met was like, yeah, like, if you could go into a dinner party and feel very comfortable talking with people, starting conversations, laughing, enjoying the night, would you feel better? And everyone's like, yeah, you know, if you could go up on stage and talk to people and feel better about who you were up there and the value of what you were bringing to the audience, would you feel better? Would there be a deeper sense of strength in yourself? And everyone goes yeah, I'm like, well, that is social competency. And I really believe it is an advanced conversation, especially in this world today, where our worth is supposed to be detangled from sociology. So what happens to people when we talk about worth? They tend to have a frame of reference, right? They either want to put it in psychology, they either want to put it in spirituality. But very few people go, oh, let me put it in sociology. Because here's what we know even about human happiness, confidence, worth, and yes, income. Your competence with other people affects all of those. And we should stop pretending that's not true. We should stop pretending that everything is about us as individuals, isolated on some island somewhere, that our capability and competency and fluidity, adaptability and enjoyment with other people, that is a huge part of worth. My personal greatest sense of self worth in my life is I took one of the worst situations in my life, suicidal ideation, feeling that terrible about myself and working myself through it and then transforming it into something where I could talk about it with other people, that I could actually help other people. And it was this huge opening for me because sometimes the things that we've abandoned in our past could be utilized for service in conversation with other people, in leadership with other people, in volunteering with other people, in guiding with other people, in coaching with other people, in mentoring other people, in sharing wisdom with other people. And instead of burying and hiding things or abandoning things, we ask, how can I use the difficulties of life as a strength to help other people? And then a whole new level of social competence comes from that exchange and the capabilities needed to do that. Being of service to other people will give you a sense of worth that you never imagined. And we cannot just hype it up into some type of self esteem. We can't hype it up into just taking agency of the day. We can't like bury it under the idea that just universally we're all granted something. It is that we are asked of something that if you want worth to grow in your life, be of service to other people. And I can tell you, having taught for so long, a lot of people hate when I say that, because remember, people bucket worthiness in different areas. So the people who bucket into a universality of spirituality or universality of the divinity, I believe that should be true. I believe we're all worthy of divine love and redemption. Something I believe in my own personal faith and religion. I actually believe that. But it doesn't mean that we also don't have to earn something internally in our psychology or add value externally with other people. And when we can accept that all those things are true, not one or the other, not categorically, but they're all true. And so we can do our best in each category or under each definition, then it just compounds into a feeling that I cannot possibly describe to you that has been an unfair advantage in my life. I can walk into any room anywhere in the world under any circumstances, and I feel stable, I feel secure, I feel worthy to be there. I feel like I can help even if I don't know the answer. I can start a conversation even if I don't know the resolution. I can ask the question even if I'm not the competent person in the room. I can be the empathetic person needed at just the right time. And that is developed because I decided to be a social person, to build the capabilities of communication to help people.