I felt inferior inside my friend’s circle for most of my life.
I was the one who was always made fun of, and I felt like a victim.
My anxiety and insecurities made me think that others are living a better life than I am. And it seemed so.
Nobody bothered whether I was present or not. Even if I was present, I was almost invisible, and it didn’t matter to anyone.
This was my life until I took my mental health seriously.
I started meditating and healed myself to the point in my life where I felt happy being alone.
That’s when things started to shift for me. I stopped feeling inferior.
People started loving my energy, and they wanted to spend time with me.
I was able to easily attract a healthy social circle for myself. I naturally became a leader who made decisions in my friend circle.
Deep inner work changed everything for me.
Living in a pedestalized world:
You might feel comfortable being yourself around some people.
But when you meet people who are more confident or have a high social status, you put them on a pedestal.
You get anxious around them and treat them like a celebrity. You get stifled and won’t even have anything to talk.
When you put people above you, they also treat you like a fan and stop respecting you.
This is the case for most people in society:
We were programmed to treat celebrities, politicians, and athletes like they are superhumans and we are below them.
When the truth is they are simply another human being who has developed the courage to follow their heart, while you are stuck inside your head, feeling unworthy of any good.
Feeling invisible:
If you have a sense of unworthiness, you always feel like a background character in social circles.
You won’t have any opinions or values, as you feel like they are not that important.
People will start to make decisions for you, and you just say “Yes” to everything. Even to experiences you hate, just to be included in your circle.
Your posture will look like trying to hide yourself, so you don’t want to take the spotlight and feel the pressure of being seen.
This makes you invisible, and people won’t have an experience of you.
Because of this, they also treat you like you don’t exist. They won’t feel any love or respect for you.
This dynamic makes you feel even more unworthy, and you will repeat this vicious cycle of unworthiness.
Until you finally call it quits on human relationships or heal yourself.
You are not below anyone:
You feel like you are below some people because you have this inferiority pattern going on from childhood.
Most likely, your parents/caretakers didn’t validate or respect your values and opinions, making you feel small.
So you suppressed your voice altogether and took the values and standards of your family/culture to make yourself belong.
The subconscious beliefs installed from these experiences create this “I’m unworthy” dynamic.
But it’s a story you learned. It’s not true.
The truth is you are a unique soul, like everyone, with unique gifts to offer to the world.
If the gifts you have don’t feel useful or appreciated in your family setting, it doesn’t mean you are useless or invaluable.
There will come a time when you meet people who appreciate those gifts and realize your true worth.
For example:
Let’s say you are born into an accountant family and you have this natural gift of creating art.
Your artistic talents won’t be valued in that family. You might even be forced to be good at accounts, like your parents.
You might even be forced to take an accounting major and completely kill your artistic side.
If you were born to an artist family, the story would have been entirely different.
You lose natural gifts like this because your authenticity was not nurtured during your childhood.
No matter how rich or gifted you think the other person is, it doesn’t diminish you.
Your true self-worth comes from within you.
Take up your space:
It’s high time that you take up your space in the world.
Expressing your feelings, values, and standards so clearly that you create a grounded presence that is you.
This will help you attract all the good in relationships and career because you deserve them.
You stop skipping opportunities because of the wrong beliefs that you don’t deserve them.
To get to this place of realizing your true worth, you have to let go of beliefs and suppressed emotions that made you feel small in the first place.
That’s when real shift happens.
Realizing your true self-worth:
Here are a few perspectives and practices that help you realize your true worth and attend to the world from that clean perspective:
Your outcomes don’t define your worth:
You might attach your self-worth to the level of success you create.
This commonly happens if you are born in a family that shows love and appreciation only for your wins.
No matter how far you climb the success ladder in domains like material wealth, job position, societal status, etc., there will always be more to achieve.
And you will always chase self-worth in the next outcome and the next, leaving you more miserable and exhausted.
If you look around, there will always be people who produce less from your viewpoint, but feel good enough.
This should reveal that true self-worth is not attached to the outcome.
A good question to ask yourself and explore is, “How much more should I achieve so that I feel good enough?”
This will break your pattern.
Approval don’t define your worth:
You might be chasing approval from people, thinking that the more approval you get, the more your self-worth increases.
That’s why everybody has a fondness for becoming famous.
The truth is that when your self-worth is so tied to other people’s approval, even a single rejection can take a toll on your worth.
Also, your need for approval only grows bigger, and it’s never enough.
The kid version of you(before societal programming) didn’t chase approval. You didn’t care whether everybody liked you. Yet you feel good enough.
So true self-worth is not attached to how much approval you get.
Detach your worth from control:
You might subconsciously believe that the more control you have over people and situations in your life, the more worthy you feel.
So you micromanage every experience you have, so it doesn’t make you less worthy than you currently are.
With this pattern, you are always at the mercy of other people and situations, even if you think you are under control.
Life is constantly changing and evolving. A small change in the external environment can even feel like a self-worth attack.
In these paradigms, people get lost chasing self-worth all their lives.
These are wrong maps for self-worth. It’s like living with a map of Florida to navigate New York; no matter how hard you try, it never works out.
Let me introduce you to a different paradigm with 2 practices by which you will tap into natural self-worth:
1. Question assumptions:
Start questioning the assumptions you have about yourself:
“I will feel worthy if I make this much.”
“I will feel worthy if I get her approval.”
So on and so forth.
Ask what-if questions:
“What happens if I never make that much?”
“What happens if I never get her approval?”
Stay patient and open-minded with these questions.
It will reveal the truth about how you actually feel about yourself.
Now you can explore that feeling by asking more why questions:
“Why do I feel this way?”
When it reveals an answer, ask another why about the answer.
This will get you to the root cause of low self-worth.
This process will bring you some deep emotions and memories you suppressed.
Once you feel through the emotions, your natural self-worth increases.
This is what we practice in much more depth to heal the subconscious root cause of your anxiety inside my Modern mystic guidance program.
2. Zoom out of your character:
Think of your life like a video game.
No matter how much your character wins or loses in the video game, it doesn’t affect the player.
Similarly, no matter how much wealth and approval your character(ego) accumulates in life, it doesn’t define the worth of your true self(soul).
To connect to the player(soul), who is infinitely worthy, you have to detach yourself from the character(ego).
To practice this detachment, start watching your mind. The one who is watching the mind is you, not what’s being witnessed.
These two practices will help you tap into true self-worth that is natural to you.
Hope you enjoyed the read.
Thank you
Pranav
P.S. Are you tired of trying to heal your anxiety alone? Book a clarity call here to see if I can help you.
My 12-week program helps you heal the subconscious root cause of your anxiety. So you can:
- cultivate a calm-quiet mind.
- free yourself from overthinking and worries.
- unlock social freedom.
