Well hello there and welcome to this episode of
The Terri Cole Show that I wanna start with a question. Do you have a tendency to undervalue
your own accomplishments? If someone says, "Oh, you did a great job," are you kind of
like, "It's not so, it's not, it's nothing. I didn't do anything." Or do you use humor
that puts you down? Right? It's sort of like, self-effacing humor where it's almost like you
put yourself down before anyone else can put you down. And the real question is, how do you
feel about your own worthiness? Because that is the topic of this video. So in today's video, I'm
going to be covering why many of us feel unworthy, just in general, in life, raising your
awareness about how you talk to yourself and how you talk about yourself, 'cause
that has everything to do with worthiness, and how to begin to start really
feeling more worthy in your life.
And trust me, it is a valuable pursuit. So before
we get started, if you happen to be new to this channel, please make sure you introduce
yourself in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon so that you get
notified every time we roll out something new, which is every Tuesday and every Thursday.
And since I create all this content for you, I wouldn't want you to miss it. So please
subscribe. I also wanna say thank you for all the questions and all the comments and all of
the participation that we have because it really makes me know that I'm not alone. And hopefully it
makes many of you know that you're not alone. So I love to put a highlight on that. I read all of
your questions and your comments, so thank you.
And this is from Pretty Girl P and this is
under the video, 9 Signs You're in a Codependent Relationship. Pretty Girl P says, "Wow, I used
to do so many of these codependent behaviors. With your book and talk therapy, I am well on
my way to recovery. It feels so good to know that I have actually changed my behavior. Was it
super easy? No, but it has been so rewarding when you can see all that you've accomplished with
boundaries in place. Thank you so much, Terri. I'm so grateful to have found you." Well, Pretty
Girl P, I'm so happy to have been found. Thank you for taking the time to write the comment. It
really warms my heart. I appreciate it. Alright, let's move it on into today's content, shall
we? So what is self-worth? If we were gonna say, what is it? It's an internal sense of being good
enough, of being worthy of love and belonging with others, right? It actually is the sense that
you are enough. That is the feeling. There's a ton of misconceptions though, out there around
worthiness. And many of us feel like we need to earn it or achieve it, right? That you're only as-
you know, when you think about actors, there's all these sayings that like, you're as good as your
last job basically, or you're as good as your last accomplishment. But when we're talking about
worth, actual worth, the truth is that you are inherently worthy simply by virtue of being alive.
Like, that's the truth about your worthiness, is that you are worthy. You don't have to do
anything to be worthy. When you think about kids, right? Do you look at them, do we expect them
to like, cook us dinner or throw us a parade or whatever? We don't. We love them. They don't do
anything. They eat, drink, poop, cost us money. We don't care. And you are that child who is
worthy simply by virtue of being born. So why do we feel unworthy though? Well, part of it is
we weren't raised by- the adults in our lives maybe could not consistently show us love or
care, or maybe they were very critical, right? Another thing is having immature parents.
Like what if you have parents who are emotionally immature, who are in competition with you? I was
just watching the Sylvester Stallone documentary on Netflix called Sly. And his father was in
like total, was totally abusive, physically and horrible, but he also was in competition
with Sylvester his entire life. And as much as he was like happy to take sort of credit for his
accomplishments, he was really threatened by it. And believe it or not, after he wrote Rocky
and was super successful, his father wrote a screenplay and it was called like After Rocky or
something like that, and brought it to Sylvester Stallone's writing partner behind his back. Like
that is a level of cynicism and immaturity and sadism that is beyond. But even if you didn't have
that parent, having immature parents emotionally can make us feel unworthy, right? Because if you
had a parent who was in competition with you, and maybe not to that degree, but who
felt threatened by you, let's say, or who simply could not show up consistently for you,
because that's also what we're talking about.
This can create a lack of self-worth, right? And
you have to really get right now, the adult you, has to understand that there is nothing wrong with
you if your parents or your parental impactors or the adults in your life, whoever raised you, if
they had limitations, if they had their own stuff, that doesn't make you unlovable or unworthy. It
just sucks that that was your experience. But we can build self-worth. And here's the thing,
once we're grown up, it's our job to build it regardless of the ways that our parents failed us.
And all parents are gonna fail you in some way, but neglectful or immature parents, they really
can reinforce the fear that we are unworthy or that we're unworthy of unconditional love,
right? Because this is how we learn is from family of origin most of the time. And you
know, from the adults or the situation that you were raised in, how worthy we are, what
love looks like, what do we need to do?
And a lot of times we need to perform and we
need to add value and we need to do something, which is what I was saying at the top. So what
are indications of having low self-worth? Well, difficulty taking risks, difficulty being brave,
right? Because if you feel okay within yourself, it's easier to be brave. Because you know, hey,
if I fail, I'm gonna be okay. Like ultimately, nobody wants to fail. We don't want to fail. But
when you have decent self-worth, you know that to do anything great, you have to take risks and that
you're probably gonna fail before you succeed. And it's not the end of the world. And I think that
when we have low self-worth, we're more fragile around those things. Again, as I said at the
top, you're only as good as- you think you're only as good as your last whatever it is.
Your last accomplishment, your last accolade, your last job, your last whatever. And it's really
about how people perceive you. There's an external importance on what other people think about you,
especially when you're not sure what you think about you. And this perpetual fear of failure,
right? Because if we're not super solid inside, there is a fear that we are only as good as what
we accomplish or what we do for other people. I find there's a lot of codependency can also be
a part of this experience because when we're not filling up our own bucket or when we don't know
how, or when we don't think we can, we're really looking for validation from the outside, which
can be exhausting. So another thing to look at is how do you talk to yourself? How do you talk
about yourself and how do you talk to yourself?
And in the guide, you guys, I'm gonna include
a whole bunch of questions that you can ask yourself, but it's important to know that,
to really get what is that internal dialogue about? Are you putting yourself down to yourself?
I was talking to one of the beautiful members of my mastermind group and she was talking about when
she was younger, how, you know, there was such a lack of self-worth that she had a friend who would
tell her things like, "Oh, you know, this person said you were beautiful," and it was so far away
from her to think- or that,"You're a nice person," or whatever it is. And she had such a lack of self
worth that she literally thought in her mind, "Oh my God, I'm so pathetic that my friend is making
that up to make me feel better about myself."
But it never entered her mind it could actually
just be true, right? That it could be true that this person said she was a wonderful person
or she was talented or she was beautiful, or whatever it was. Now that is like the depths
of feeling this lack of self-worth. And yet, through the process, through therapy, through
being in a mastermind, through exposing yourself to other people who hold you in high esteem,
especially in intimate gatherings with women, I find that there's something, such a profound
amount of healing that comes from being in a safe and sacred container with other women. And I think
that sometimes it can be challenging to find that, but having it is so... It makes you so brave
because we're all so honest, right? When you're in a container. 'Cause I've been in masterminds and
I also run my own mastermind called Flourish, that when you're with people that you respect, people
that you care about, and you see their humanness as well, there's something so amazing.
It's similar to the way that I talk about my marriage as a soft place to land over and
over again in a hard world. That's actually what a group of non-judgmental, caring, kind,
inspired, ambitious women having your back, what that can do is it becomes a soft place
to land as well. A place to tell the truth, a place to allow your wounds to exist, but
not dominate you. So it isn't just getting over this lack of self-worth, it's learning that
you're worthy with your warts and all. And a lot of times having that reflected back at you from
other people that you respect and care about is so incredibly powerful. So if you get a chance to do
a mastermind with folks like that, actually I've got my mastermind coming up. If you're interested,
terricole.com/flourish. It is a life-changing experience to be in a container for a year with
people that you respect, who have your back.
You wanna talk about being courageous. You talk
about taking risks, you talk about changing the things that aren't working in your life. Yeah,
it is an accelerated course in growth. I love it so much. So another thing to be mindful about
of yourself is, how much of your self-worth is contingent on external events? As we were saying
it's accomplishments, but it's also being in a relationship, not being in a relationship,
having the right kind of friends, having the right kind of house, car, apartment, whatever it
may be, that I think we really have to look at how much of your self-worth are you getting from
those things in your life? Because the problem with that is that if we get our self-worth
from other people or from external events, you know, Wayne Dyer once said to me many years
ago when he was still on this earth, about how there's something so dangerous about giving
people the power of your self-worth, right?
Because when people approve of us and the sun is
shining, oh, it's so beautiful, but now they have the power to take it away from you. And that
really struck me. This is probably, I don't even know, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, and it really
struck me as true that of course with the people we care about, right? We care what they think
of us. But really this is such an inside job. It has to be you, right? Our self-worth can only be
established on our own, right? We can only do it ourselves. So another thing that may happen, and
this may be a symptom of having low self-worth, is having crappy boundaries, right? Having a lot
of self-abandonment. If we are prioritizing other people, because we're not positive, we're
getting our self-worth from the approval of others. This can be what ends up happening
is that we have really porous boundaries, saying yes when we wanna say no.
There's something in my own life, like when you have negative self talk, when you,
as my friend Patricia Moreno would say, stop fighting for your limitations. And it's like, when
I was younger, I had this hangup about my legs, I didn't like my legs, blah, blah, blah. And I
remember after Vic and I got together, he made a positive comment about my legs, about having
great gams or something he said. And I remember I was looking at him like, is this guy making
fun of me? Like I'm seriously- that's how caught up or hung up I was on not liking my legs for
whatever reason. And when I realized that he meant it and that he was being- there was a sincere
compliment, I remember thinking, "Well, I could probably convince him that my legs are gross,
or maybe I could just generously view my legs through that lens of love that this guy has.
And why even waste this time and energy giving a crap about my legs? Like how about just love it
all? How about accept it all? How about you're just fine. If this guy thinks your legs are great
and you're in love with him and you're building a life with him, then why, do you have to hold onto
that limiting belief that there's something wrong with them?" And that really did shift the way that
I felt. There was a whole shift. And then having a husband who's an artist who's drawn me many
different times, and I remember sharing something, and it was a bunch of years ago, I think I
was turning 47 at the time, and he drew this, and it's from the back, but it's like a naked
picture of me. And I shared it on Instagram.
It's more of a cartoon. It wasn't like an actual
real life, still life thing. Anyway, point being, I shared it because actually I thought it
was very flattering and I loved that that's how he viewed my body as well. And some lady was
like, "Wow, you're so brave to share this. Like, so many of us would wanna hide that." And
when she meant 'that,' she meant like my butt, you know what I mean? And I was dying. I was like,
"Oh my God, this lady's trying so hard to give me a compliment. But what she's really saying is that
if she had an ass like mine, she certainly would not be sharing that picture," is what I got from
what she said. And I was laughing, but to myself, I was thinking, "Oh, look how far you've come,
how little you care about what someone you don't know thinks about your body."
I wasn't mad and it didn't offend me, but it also allowed me to see how far I came.
Because what really matters is how I feel about my ass and how my husband feels about my butt and
how I feel about myself, right? It's the whole package. And that is self-worth. And trust me,
that wasn't always there. So I'm not acting like I was born with it, 'cause I wasn't. I've been in
therapy for 30 years, like I've worked really hard at having good self-worth, so I know if I can
do it, you guys can do it as well. So what can we do? These are a couple of steps that you're
gonna take to up your self-worth. For 24 hours, you're going to watch how you talk to yourself.
You're gonna write down anytime that you're having a negative self conversation, you're putting
yourself down. You're calling yourself a bad name. Because when you really think about it, we
would never treat other people the way we treat ourselves. Would you ever talk to a niece that you
loved or your daughter or your son that way? Not in a million years. A lot of times we reserve the
most caustic tone of voice and things that we say for ourselves. So you are gonna write them down
and then you're gonna start to use the rubber band trick where you're putting a hair tie around
your wrist. And whenever you have that thought, that negative self-talk thought, you're gonna
snap the rubber band and you're gonna replace it with something like, "I'm good enough," like,
"I'm worthy as is," or, "I was born worthy." Like, we'll come up with your own affirmation for it,
but we don't wanna just let it stand, right?
Because it's not okay. And the bottom line
is that it continues to scratch away at your self-worth. You're also going to really think
about this whole process as re-parenting, right? If you did not have parents that were
great, and maybe you did, you could still have low self-esteem even with great parents, trust
me. Right? It's not only that, but let's say you didn't have great parental impactors. I want you
to think about this time, give yourself the gift of your own attention. Treat yourself like your
own beloved child because you are right? This is what re-parenting is, is sort of doing for
ourselves what, you know, we kind of become the good parents if we didn't have them. And also I
have the baby photo exercise, which I've given you guys before. But I love it. And if you haven't
done it recently, I would love for you to do it, where you find a picture of yourself as a little
one, and then you put that on your phone.
Have it as as your desktop, right? You just have
it as your screensaver so that every time you see that little face, really feel the feelings of
love, send love to yourself, but also get it. That face- there's no way you look at that face
and think that that kid needs to do something to be worthy. You understand? You have always been
worthy, you were born worthy, and you are worthy right? This very moment. And I feel like that
is a very powerful exercise and I'm giving you a couple of other ideas in the guide. So just go to
terricole.com/guide. One is gonna be an inventory, one is gonna be a sort of downloaded blueprint,
a couple of questions for each of those, for you to really understand like why you feel the
way you do. But also, I hope that this episode is uplifting for you because you can change it.
I promise you it is an inside job and I would- am happy to walk you through it. I don't want you
to wait until the end of your life to realize that you were worthy all along, you were amazing
all along, you could have done what you wanted all along. And if you are interested in being
a part of an incredibly powerful loving group of like-minded, like-hearted women, check
out my mastermind. We start January 16th. Alright? Go to terricole.com/flourish. Okay,
I hope that this added value to your life. I'd love to know what you think about it. So let
me know and as always, take care of you.
