Connor Beaton traces low self-worth to early caregiving, not adult failures. When infants don't get mirrored safety or toddlers get punished for testing boundaries, they learn their needs don't matter. He suggests auditing the small risks you avoid, then taking them deliberately to prove you can handle hard things.
What if I told you that one of the most damaging things to your self worth is not the terrible decisions that you've made, not the way that you talk to yourself, not even the consequences of horrible choices and actions that you've taken in your life, not the regret, not the lack of action or motivation. What if I told you that one of the biggest determining factors is in your sense of self worth had nothing to do with anything that you've actually done? But the truth is that for many of you, you struggle with self worth because of something so much deeper. That's what we're going to explore today. I'm going to lay it out for you and talk about how you can actually begin to rectify and develop this sense of self worth that maybe has eluded you or, or has felt very hard to achieve or attain. So in order to lay this out, I need to tell you a little bit about attachment. Because for most of the men that I've worked with, when we really get down to the brass tacks, when we really get down to what is causing your lack of self worth, sure, there might be some things in your life that you could do better. Maybe you need to clean up your room, as Jordan Peterson says, or you need to take some extra risks, or you need to apply for the job, you need to make a little bit more money, get your body into shape, be more disciplined. All of those things can be true. I'm not negating any of those things. So if that's you, please know that those are things that you can do to develop a little bit more of a sense of self worth. And these things, these moments in your life, can deeply impact and influence your sense of self worth. So I'm going to lay out two very important developmental stages that you will go through in the very beginning of your life. And here I'm using a bunch of different forms of psychology. But there's a good friend of mine, Dewey Freeman, who's been a therapist for a very long time, and he has a developmental model that I think is one of the more and most robust developmental models out there that pulls from a bunch of different developmental psychologies. But for the sake of all of the jargon and the technical details, I'm just going to give you the first two stages. When you're born, 0 to 18 months, you go through a stage of trying to relate to the world. And there really isn't much difference in those first 18 months between mom and you, between your primary caretakers and you. What you experience, they experience. And what they experience, you experience. So there's a lot of mirror neurons forming. Your brain is getting a sense and your nervous system is getting a sense for is my world safe? Is my world okay? Is my environment safe? Is my environment okay? And what a lot of the research shows is that for babies in this stage, there's not much difference between their environment and what they feel and experience. So if your environment growing up when you were an infant was extremely hostile or volatile, or there was a lot of grief and sadness and depression or a tremendous amount of anxiety, that can filter in to a base foundation of how you feel about the world. So there is an individualizing that happens in this stage. And what we call this is the terrible twos, the three major. Right, the terrible threes. And this is generally where you see a kid starting to say, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want to eat that. They're starting to set boundaries. They're starting to express themselves. They're starting to have their own needs, wants, and desires. Now, this is where it can get sticky and tricky. Okay? For many of you, as you went through this stage, you. You will have not only experienced the pushback and the no, that is sort of typical, that happens, right where parents are like, no, you can't do that. No, you can't have that. You can't just eat chocolate for dinner. Like, that's not what you can do. But that's not going to disrupt your sense of self. However many of you who struggle with self worth, what happened in this formative period of your life where you were generating a sense of self? Am I okay? Is what I need okay? Is what I want okay? Is it okay for me to express my needs and my wants? Is it okay for me to say no to the things that I don't want to engage with? Is it safe for me to take certain risks? All of those things will maybe have been met with punishment, with harshness, with. With violence, criticism, hostility, dominance. The last piece of this is being able to start to take healthy risks towards your aims, towards your goals. As you do that, you will start to reconcile with this notion that I'm not worthy of pursuing what I want, need, and desire. What I would encourage you to do is take. Take a kind of stockpiling, an audit, if you will, of what are all the small risks that you are avoiding in your life right now? Maybe there's a conversation, an email. Maybe it's, you know, not asking for the raise. Maybe it's not starting that product that you want to build. Maybe there's a conversation that you know you want to have that's kind of risky in your relationship. And then look at what are all the biggest big risks that you are taking as a result of avoiding all of those small, healthy risks. So take an audit of that. What are the risks that you are avoiding? And then what are the big risks that are really damaging your life and your sense of self? We all require the knowledge of I can do hard things and come out the other side. Okay, I can do hard things with others, but I can also just do hard things for myself and take risks. And that is a signal and a kind of mirror or a sort of looking for. It reinforces that our needs, wants and desires matter. It reinforces that we matter, that we are valuable enough to take a risk for. So that's the final piece, is beginning to take some solid, healthy risks. And you might get this a little wrong at first. You might have to, you know, really trial and error it. But I like to say I failed my way to success. I did not have good self worth growing up. I was sort of the classic, you know, verbally put down, emotionally put down, physically put down, and grew up with a deep, deep disconnection from a sense of self value. All right, see you soon. Bye.
How to Raise Strong, Unshakable Boys in Today's Culture, with Dr. Shefali Tsabary
