Powerful Women Empowering each other: Being Worthy of Yourself- Part Four

Last evening we had our Powerful Women meeting here in Montreal. For those of you new to our community, I began a Powerful Women meetup here in Montreal, where we physically meet to be empowered and empower others. This Facebook group was then created as a spin off of these meeting to include powerful from around the world.

It’s always amazing to see how a group getting together creates it’s own unique beauty and power. As whoever shows up is extraordinary and we always create an incredibly powerful conversation that contributes to leaving us all empowered.

So last night’s topic was tilted “Be Worthy of Yourself”. It was the first part of a five part series. As are most of the of our topics, this one is huge, and when I began preparing for this topic I realized that it really needed more than one visit. So I broke it up into the following subtopics:

1. Self Understanding: know yourself at a deeper and more profound level
2. Self acceptance: accepting the unacceptable
3. Self Love: acknowledge your true value
4. Self Recognition: begin to define yourself
5. Self Responsibility: being fully responsible for your life, circumstances and challenges

In the meeting on Be Worthy of Yourself: Self Understanding we began by clarifying the true definition of Self Esteem. Self esteem is often interchanged with self worth, when in fact self esteem is defined as confidence in one’s own worth or abilities.
So we could say that, Self Esteem = Self Worth + Self Confidence.

Now what is this exactly? Well self confidence is a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgment. Many of the people we define as successful in this world most probably have a high level of self confidence. That is to say that, they are confident in their abilities, what they can do and what they can achieve. For example, you might be confident in your job, that you can achieve your targets and get good reviews. You could be confident that you are the top recruiter, the most dedicated teacher, the wealthiest entrepreneur, the best networker, the fittest yoga teacher, the fastest marathon runner and so on. This is all about your abilities, what you can do and achieve is about ability, and your trust that you have in your abilities, qualities, and judgment.

Self worth is about your personal perception of your own worth and value. It could be described as your personal belief of what you deserve; it is your judgement and attitude towards yourself. We used this as a reference for our meeting.

High self-esteem possesses the following characteristics:

1. Believing in a set of firmly placed values and principle and being able to defend or assert yourself in the face of opposition to them. If after learning something new, the old value does not fit, there is no difficulty modifying the belief.
2. Being able to make choices, trust your own judgment, and not feel guilty about choices if someone does not agree.
3. Not living in the past or future, not worrying about “what if’s.” Living fully in the present.
4. Believing in your capacity to solve problems, adjust to failures, and ask for assistance.
5. Participating in and enjoy many activities and hobbies.
6. Believing that you are valuable, and that others will enjoy spending time with you.
7. Resisting manipulation by others.
8. Being sensitive to the feelings and needs of others; accept and abide by social norms. (This includes equal respect for all people)
9. Considering yourself self-worthy and equal to others, regardless of differences in finance and personal success.
(Taken from Dr. Audrey Sherman, PsychSkills)

We then dove into our personal query and powerful sharing of self understanding. Why don’t you try it out the exercises yourself right now?
Imagine everything you had was suddenly gone. Everything. Your possessions, career, money, relationships, friendships, accomplishments, physical body/appearance and anything else that is physical and tangible. You suddenly appeared in a parallel universe, with nothing or if you prefer you could imagine how you first appeared in this world.

Once you have this clear image and feeling ask yourself the following:

What am I as just myself?
What do I have that would be of value?
Who am I? Who am I not?
What defines who I am?
What brings me the most passion, fulfillment, and joy?

The responses to these questions were amazing. We uncovered and shared that we are left with an understating that we are at the core contribution, love, responsibility, self expression, openness and curiosity to name a few. Who you are and how you see yourself are keys to understanding your true value. What brings you the most joy, passion, and fulfillment are the things that help you unlock the value you bring to the world. How you feel about yourself after everything has been taken away is essentially the measure of your self-worth.

We went on to understand our weakness and struggles by asking:

Where do I struggle most?
Where do I need to improve?
What fears often hold me back?
What habitual emotions hurt me/hold me back from my greatness? (discomfort, fear, hurt, anger, guilt, frustration, inadequacy, overwhelmed, disappointment, loneliness..)What mistakes do I tend to make?
Where do I tend to consistently let myself down?

We shared that we restrict ourselves from greatness when we come from fear, fear of the unknown, fear of being alone, fear of never achieving, fear of not having enough, fear of not loving or being loved, fear of not enough time, fear of money, fear of the future and so on.
It’s interesting to note that we are more inclined to notice, list and share our weakness, but not our strengths. When in reality, we possess many more strengths than weaknesses. Our next and final area of discussion was on identifying your strengths.

Your strengths are things that:

Help build your self-confidence allow you to move forward with greater self-assurance are only strengths by your own measure (If you’re relying on other people to tell you whether you’re good at something, then that’s not a true strength.)
This self understanding can be discovered by asking:
What abilities do I have? (Enthusiasm, Trustworthiness, Creativity, Discipline, Patience, Respectfulness, Determination, Dedication, Honesty, Versatility…)What am I really good at?What is my potential?
Wow, we are powerful. We are open, responsible, contributing, loving, persistent, resilient, trusting, generous, positive, joyous, caring, compassionate, creative, respectful, curious, open, intuitive, and this just names a few!
Most importantly is our response to the last question:
What is my potential?
You, we are limitless, immeasurable, powerful, extraordinary and magnificent!