The Secret to STOP Doubting Yourself
14 Mar 2024 · 21 min
Brendon Burchard breaks self-worth into three types: innate, earned, and shared. He offers a three-lever system: self-compassion through a "compassion card," daily integrity and conduct, and shifting focus to service and connection. Consistent practice increases how often and deeply you feel worthy.
Chapters
Your conduct each day should be of integrity and amplifying the best of who you are. I tell all my clients it's about summoning the best of who you are. Amplifying the best of who. That's how you develop self worth. That's the earned part. Each day, summon the best of who you are. Be a person of integrity, tell the truth, amplify the good parts of you. It will change everything. One of the greatest challenges you will ever have in developing your self worth is you have the wins, you have the successes, you have the joys, you have the good days, but you never integrate them, you never pull it into your heart, you never actually feel the thing. So you had the child, you won the game, you achieved the thing, but you still don't feel it. It's not in your identity yet. So the good things that have happened in life and the good things you've been given in life, it hasn't penetrated yet because you don't have any practices. That pulls it in and develops that sense of strength, that sense of love, that sense of honor, that sense of dignity, that sense of grace that would make you feel good. You gotta take the good days in and you gotta take the difficulties in and you gotta take life in. And so today I hope I can do something for you that's a little different. I come at this topic a little bit differently than many of the other speakers or teachers because I'm a high performance coach and as a high performance coach I look at things with a lot of nuance and my job is to get you to another level in something. That's always my job, right? It's how do I help you achieve longer term success while still maintaining your well being and positive relationships. And I've noticed something missing today that might help kind of click it over for you. So one thing I want to share with is just a framework for worth. And then what I want to show you is give you the levers, like tactical levers that you can do every single day in this area. Because you all know some days you feel good about yourself, like life is good. You like your outfit, you like your presentation, you like the day you kind of win the deal, something happens or goes well with the family and you're feeling it and you're feeling great and you're like, this is awesome, this is life. And then the next day you suck and you're just like, nothing goes right. You can't remember where you put the car keys, you bump into something at the store, you offend Your spouse, and you're like, yesterday I was awesome. Today I suck. Why, and more importantly, why do you feel so bad when that happens? See, the greatest lever in all of self worth we're gonna talk about today is learning to deal with difficult emotions that come up in such a way. You stop the self hate. Your self worth is so much your self talk. Your self worth is so much your self talk. It's what you say to yourself in challenge, in conflict, in difficulty. When someone makes fun of you, when you feel embarrassed, when something's just going wrong. What do you say to yourself? And. And what are the emotions that are cultivated from that thought process? So today, we're gonna give you some levers to overcome that. But here's what I do now. Forgive me. I'm kind of a dork. I took so many notes on this. But I want to share some cards with you today. Cause I'm more like, if you ever came to my studio, I'm like, arts and crafts over here. Anyone else take notes? Like, I got construction paper. I got big note cards. I'm such a dork. So I'm gonna give you a few insights. And forgive me, I don't know if anyone else has done this. I'm throw them in your face a little bit here. Cause I wish I could be there with you, but this might help just a little bit. And I'll share a little bit about my personal story in a moment. But first, I want to give you a framework. I want to help you understand why you're like, yeah, I understand. You know, I'm God's child and I should feel great. I understand. I was born and I was that lucky. You know, that lucky connection. Here I am. Or the universe is great. Or some people are like, hey, you got to work harder or you got to take action. And. And what happens is you hear all this, and worth is still this thing that's floating around. And so what I want to help you understand is worth is not something you have. It is something that is being generated by how you perceive three things. Okay? So there's three kinds of worth. And it's why, like, when you have one of them, you don't feel enough because there might be two that are missing. And you checked me on this. There's three kinds of worth. Oh, wow. That's a big one. That showed up. Hey, that showed up pretty good. Okay. Yeah, I had no idea. That looks great. Okay, good. So there's three kinds of worth. There's innate worth. You've been hearing A lot of people talk about this. You just have worth, you are worthy. Cause you were born. Cause you're a child of God or the universe, because you lucked out in the great sperm wars, here you are, right? It's like, okay, you, there's an innate worth. It's who you are, it's how you feel. It's that you are a human being and you are worthy because of that alone, right? You're a gift. You've been hearing a lot about that type of worth. But a lot of people, they do feel that they have a great faith in God or they feel like innately they have human dignity, human rights. They feel innately inside who they are deep just how they were built, that there's something good inside. And I'd love for you to all just while you're here. I know it's silly and I can't see everybody, but if you could just put your hand on your chest right now and say, there's something good inside, there's something good in here. And sometimes you forget that when there's conflict, there's something good in here. It's innate. It's who you are, it's your moral ethic that you were born with as a good human being. It's here that's innate. Earned worth is a lot about taking action to move through things. Don't just talk about just to think about it because it is a privilege just to think about all day. Am I worthy? Am I good, Am I great? That's innate, but earned, that's the stuff of success. That's the stuff of the hard earned wisdom of life. Where you go out, you get it, you make it happen. I think many people are trying to talk about shared worth. They just might not have had the language. So I thought I'd give it to you. The there's your sense of shared worth, that you're doing things that are worthy with other people. The false conversation and construct that may happen today or in your own mind is that somehow we get to determine entirely our own worth. But I'm here to share with you that as human beings we're social beings and that there's a connection with other people. When there's love, when there's, when there's purpose, when there's mission, when there's contribution, when you're doing things with other people, there's a sense of worth that comes in uniquely from that. For human beings, it's uniquely from that. Like when you know you're building a great family or you're working with your team and you hit that flow. These are three different types of it. Is this helpful to everybody? Which one of these do you have to work on, do you think? Which one of these do you think could be your aha moment today? Which one of these? You're like, okay, I already got that. I feel worthy, Brendon, but I need to do some work. Or you know what, I'm working really hard. I'm earning, I'm growing, I'm developing mastery. But I feel alone. I don't feel like I have a mission or camaraderie with other people. And that's why even though I feel good about myself, something's missing. Shared worth is a lot of what Oprah talked about and Maria Shriver talked about it is that sense of being of service to others, caring for other people, living a life where you're giving compassion. Okay, that's enough for the big chart. But I'm curious, which one of these you need to work on the most? Because there's no way if you don't understand. This is the equation with each of these things is how you feel each day. And for some of you, it's like a funny equation in that, you know, for some of you, innate's more important. You gotta reconnect that you have no self love. Some of you, earned. You're like, I haven't been taking action. And some of you are like, I'm lonely. I need to connect with other people and do something important again. So it's a different. Your equation here is weighted meaning some of you, this is more important or this is more important or this is more important. That's a huge breakthrough for people. Innate worth. Earned worth or shared worth. As soon as you get that, it's like, oh, these are like, I, I can change that balance. And I'm gonna give you three levers to change that balance across all of them. But they'll uniquely tie in. And I think this is important because for me personally, like, I started my journey more of on the earned worth. You know, I innately didn't feel good at all. Anyone out there kind of grew up in a place or get in a time in your life where you didn't feel, feel good about yourself. Like there was actually self loathing I had. You know, if you. So those of you who don't know my story in personal development and what I've done in my career, it started because I was a suicidal young man. I had gone through the breakup with the first woman I ever loved. We Were high school sweethearts. And in college, she went outside the relationship. And because my whole identity was tied up in the relationship, when that relationship fell apart, I fell apart. And I fell into deep, deep despair and anger and frustration and sadness and depression and then suicidal ideation and then suicidal planning because I didn't know how to deal with the fact that I was alone now, that I didn't feel like I was enough. That innately now I didn't like myself because somebody else didn't love me. You ever been there? You don't like yourself because somebody else doesn't love you. They break up with you, and you feel unworthy, you feel unloved, you feel, like, terrible. And that's what happened to me. And it became a desperate situation. And then, unrelated to my suicidal ideation, I was in a car accident. And that car accident was. You know, looking back now, I recognize it as Grace, because this car. I was a passenger in a car going 85 miles an hour around a sharp corner. And the car. As we went around that corner, the car flipped off the road several times. I got knocked out. When I came to, the driver was screaming to get out of the car, and he was terrified. And a big chunk of his head was open, and there was blood everywhere. And he's screaming, get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. And I had to push through the windshield of the car to escape because the door wouldn't open. So I climbed up through the windshield of the car, and I stood up on the hood of this car, and I looked down, and I saw my friend bleeding and screaming. And I looked down, I saw blood coming off of my entire body, all over my shoes and all over my feet. And I felt this terror as a young kid that, oh, my God, I'm about to die. I felt life and energy draining out of my body and the blood pooling on the hood of the car. And I remember looking down just thinking, do I even matter? What was the purpose of this? And as the blood was going off the hood of the car, there was a glint and a sparkle in the hood of the car. And it made me look up, and there was this bright, beautiful moon that night. And seconds later, when I was terror and feeling like I'm going to die, I felt this sense of peace come in. And I knew I was going to be okay. It was like the big guy handed me what I called life's golden ticket. You're okay, kid. You're gonna be all right. And I had my first moment of faith and connection. And I remember when I got that gift, what I felt like was a second chance at life. I remember I literally said to God, I said, I will earn this. I will earn this life. So for me, worth was tied to. I wanna earn this gift of life. Like, life is such a gift. I want to earn it. Thank you, God for giving me breath. Thank you, God for giving me a chance. Thank you, God for being here. Thank you, God for the second. I want to earn it. I want to go live such a good life that I feel like I've earned it. That you feel like I've earned it. That the people around me felt like it was okay that he was here. He mattered, he made a difference, he lived, he loved. There was something I just felt like that earned peace was there. But of course, I had to learn the innate piece and the shared piece. And so I want to give you three levers and maybe you'll write these levers down, because once you can activate these, you'll change because I know that you can earn another level of self worth. But we have to start with the innate side. So your first lever in all of developing more worth, because that's the game today. Today is not about having self worth, it's about generating more self worth, right? It's a spectrum. Some days you have it, some days you don't. We want more days to lean to having more self worth. Right? It's fluid, but we want it to feel more consistent and more powerful. We want you to come from a great place of self worth. It's gonna start with self compassion, which a lot of speakers actually spoke about. But self compassion, let me give you a little simple metaphor for self compassion. Self compassion is like, have you ever watched like a Netflix show and you watched episode one and it sucked, and. But by episode four, you were like, this is my show. And suddenly you were an evangelist for the show. You were telling everybody about the show, like the fourth one, you're like, oh, this is great, you gotta watch this. And then there was like, well, imagine your life for a minute. You're a hundred year old person, you got 100 episodes. Every year is an episode. Not all those episodes are gonna be perfect. Not all those episodes are gonna be great. In fact, most of those episodes are gonna have conflict and difficulty and challenge. The most important thing though is you don't judge the entire life based on one episode. You don't judge the entire series of experiences in your life based on one episode. That episode when you were 15 years old that you're still upset about at 50. You can't be living in an old episode. You're in the 50th episode. You can't keep living your teenage years out in your 40s and 50s and 60s. Your self worth should not be tied to your history. Your self worth is in this series, in this moment, in this episode. And you can generate that with compassion by being kind to yourself, by managing your self talk. As a simple, simple tool for you, I'd love you to create a compassion card. Like literally get a card or a post it. And anytime you feel mad at yourself, angry at yourself, embarrassed, shamed, upset, hurt, write down how you're gonna react. What are you gonna do specifically? So you have that compassion card, like next to your computer or on your fridge. Anytime that bad self talk, you go look at it and you're like, right, let me run this playbook to deal with this so I can connect back to that innate beautiful spirit that's inside. Cause everyone tap it again. It's like, there's goodness in here. There's goodness in here. You, you might screw up, you might have a bad day, but there's goodness in here. And that compassion card will get you to realize, okay, I gotta give myself some compassion. I have to stop being so mean to myself and comparing myself to everybody else. And I have to drop back into this episode, take a few beats, a few breaths, realize there's lots more episodes to come. Expand your horizon line. Have a bigger vision and a longer vision for yourself. You tend not to be so mean to yourself. Cause you're playing the long game. Playing the long game is important. It's self compassion. The second big idea I want to share with you here today is your conduct. Your conduct. I want you to write this one down. Your conduct is the measure of your character. And your character is a huge measure of your self worth. How you show up, you want to have more self worth? I'll say it to you as a coach, because this was important to me and this is important to my clients. If you want to live a worthy life, you have to come from a place of greater integrity. You want the conduct of a high character. In other words, I want you to live a life that's integrity. The more days of integrity, the more strength you develop. How do you develop integrity? Stop lying. Stop lying about what you really think and feel and need and desire in your life. Stop saying I'm fine when you're not fine. Stop lying about little things in your life as you go throughout the day. Maybe you lie about your follower count or you lie in a presentation, or you lie to your spouse and you're like, oh, it's just a little white lie. Your body is recording all of those. Your mind knows that. And part of the hardest thing I have to do as a coach, sometimes I stop people on zoom or on the phone and go, hey, hey, is that the truth? Is that real? And if we can get you in conduct of character, your self worth will be earned. You will earn that self worth. So don't lie so much. Also, stop trying to fix all these limiting beliefs everyone tells you about and stop trying to chase after fixing all the problems you want to, like. Do something great for your conduct. Amplify the goodness. Grab those strengths. Grab those gifts that you got from God and amplify them. Build them up, share them, serve them even more. That's proper conduct. That's coming from the place of your strengths, your gifts, the beauty in you. Amplify that. Turn that up. Sometimes you all have such a spotlight on what's wrong with you. I'm here to tell you, by amplifying what's right with you, you will achieve so much more, but you will feel more. How many people want to feel more at this stage of your life? This is the time to feel more. Your conduct each day should be of integrity and amplifying the best of who you are. I tell all my clients, it's about summoning the best of who you are. Amplifying the best of who. That's how you develop self worth. That's the earned part. Each day, summon the best of who you are. Be. Be a person of integrity. Tell the truth, amplify the good parts of you. It will change everything. And the last piece everyone talked about, conscious alignment. Conscious alignment. Your next level of worth isn't just about you. There's a level of purpose or mission or spiritual alignment. Like, there's another level of consciousness that's not so concerned about you. And we go from the selfie culture into the service culture. We go from selfie, I'm so obsessed about myself. And we go into service caring about other people, living a higher conscious life. A higher conscious life is a higher life of faith or a higher life of purpose or a higher life of conscientiousness. Even if you don't like the faith stuff, right? It's about being more conscious about how you treat other people and being of service to people. These are three levers that you can pull anytime. More self compassion, better conduct and accessing. A higher level of consciousness if you'll do that. And each day when you don't feel worthy, you go, is it because I'm forgetting the innate self worth? I'm beautiful as a child of God already. Is it the earned piece? You're like, oh, I need to develop this skill or I need to get better at this, or is it conscious? I need to connect to something higher than me right now. I need to take the focus off of me and connect to something higher with other people, have a shared purpose with others. You might feel a little different. It might shift you, it might remind you of things. These are levers. Compassion, conduct and conscious alignment. Because I tell my clients all the time, achievement isn't usually your problem. Alignment is getting back in. Alignment of the best of who you are will make you feel even more worthy. And you should do that. I hope you'll go out and earn that level of worth and you can do that every day.