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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.
Let’s dive in to today’s topic, which is the call to take ownership of your worth. It’s really dangerous to put our worthiness in the hands of others. Why do we do that? We’ve all had the experience of doing that at some point, if not lots of points or every point of our life. So why do we do it? Why do we hand over our worthiness to be determined by somebody else?
Well, we’re conditioned from a very young age to get our worthiness from the outside. So we seek approval from our parents, our social circles, our bosses, and on and on it goes. Now if you’ve been a longtime listener, if you think back to Episode 195, and I’m sure you don’t have all the titles memorized, if you do that freaks me out a little bit. But episode 195 was the episode where I did a summary of the Confidence Code, which is a book by Katie Kay and Claire Shipman about the science and art of Self reassurance. And I mentioning this now, because Claire Shipman and Katie Kay worked with a polling firm to learn about the issue of worthiness, or in their words of competence, specifically around with young girls. And they were really disheartened to find out that girls competence drops by 30% between the ages of eight and 14.
Claire Shipman says right until the age of eight, there’s really no difference between girls and boys in competence levels. We were surprised at how quickly and deeply that drops and they go on to explain As girls approach adolescents, their openness to risk and failure becomes really buried under an avalanche of biological and cultural signals, telling them to be careful, value perfection, avoid risks at all costs. And then to make matters worse, parents often and society largely reinforces a lot of these messages. At the same time, that these young girls brains are being flooded with hormones like estrogen, which heightens emotional intelligence, but also curbs risk. And not because there’s anything wrong with us. But because there’s such a premium on us performing well. And I think this is the beginning of where we start to really question our worthiness, because we start to take a hit to our competence levels.
All of this to say, there is a biological component to competence, which I think is really very closely related to worthiness. But there’s also an enormous amount of cultural conditioning, that we have to earn our worth. And many of us, you know, we were all if I’m assuming you’re a woman listening to this Podcast, but we were all young girls, at one point, who grew into adults, desperate for outside validation, because we thought that’s where it was found. And, at some point, many of us maybe not all of us yet, but many of us have started to realize that not only is it exhausting, but it’s also an uphill battle, it’s 100% impossible to get everyone to like you or approve of you or to validate your worthiness. the God’s honest truth is you are the only person who can validate your worth. And that’s why I call this episode a call, to owning your worth.
Here’s why I say you’re the only person who can validate your worth, your thoughts about yourself, are where your sense of worth originates from. And other people’s behavior towards you. Even the things that other people say about you do not really validate your worth, because you’re having thoughts about what people say about you, or about how people behave towards you. So you are the one who ultimately has the power. In validating your worth, because you get to define what other people’s behavior means. For example, you don’t get a job that you applied for. Right?
A lot of people would take that as an opportunity to really marinate in self doubt, and maybe take a huge hit to their self worth. Because they’re making not getting hired mean that there is something wrong with them. And that’s dangerous thinking. It’s also optional thinking. And I say optional. Because you don’t have to make not getting a job mean anything about you. It might mean something about your skill set. It could mean that, you know you just aren’t compatible with that particular company. You could make it mean, well, that job just wasn’t meant for me. So I tell you this because I think it’s so important that we stay hyper aware of what we are making other people’s behavior mean or what we are making what happens In our life, I mean, another example would be going out on a date with a guy that you really like. And then he never calls you back.
Again, such an opportunity to go down a dark rabbit hole of stories about what it means about you as a person. Why you’re not worthy of that person’s affection. And all that’s going to do is make you feel like crap. It is also optional for you to think something like, Well, clearly. That is not the guy for me. There’s something better waiting. This all happened perfectly. Because there’s someone else I’m supposed to meet. But do you hear the difference that there’s something wrong with me is brutal to your sense of worthiness? Versus Wow, there must be something better out there for me, is almost a tribute to your worthiness. So your thoughts about these things are what influence your sense of worth, not the things themselves. And believe me, like that I get if your head’s kind of spinning right now hearing that. I understand, because when I was first learning this as well, I was like, That can’t be true. Life is happening to me. The reason I feel the way I feel is because life is hard. No, I feel the way I feel because I have a thought that life is hard, that I’m not worth something that other things or people are more important than me. You have direct control over both the biological and cultural influences that affect your confidence and definitely your worthiness, your sense of self worth, because you can control what you make things mean. We don’t always like that true that truth. Because sometimes we have to take a really close look at what we are making things mean.
I always use the analogy. It’s like lifting the rug up and looking at all the dirt underneath. We have to take responsibility, we have to take ownership for that. So we can transform it into something that actually serves our worthiness, right serves our sense of worthiness. Ladies, later this month, I am offering a free online masterclass called Women’s Health reimagined, because for decades, health has been sold to women as a number on the scale as a clothing size, or how bikini ready your body is by summer. And then we’re still we’re told that we must follow a list of rules and regulations that worked for someone else’s life to create those outcomes. The problem is health is not a look or an achievement health is a practice of self-leadership. And you don’t become healthy by dismissing your unique individuality. And following one size fits all protocols. There’s a reason why 95% of diets fail. So if you’re ready to ditch diet culture, you should totally come check out this masterclass, you can register by going to Grace & grit.com, forward slash reimagine. And we’re offering the class on three different days at three different times to accommodate different schedules. So just pick the time that works for you. And I’ll see you there.
So you have a prefrontal cortex, which is a beautiful thing, because it allows you to think about your thinking, right? It’s like the most evolved part of your brain. And so I say that this part of your brain can help you both with the biological influences and cultural influences. Because you can use your prefrontal cortex, the next time you’re questioning your worthiness, or you’re lacking confidence, right to just remind yourself that oh, you know, women tend to overthink more than men because we literally have more brain matter in that part of our brain. So just reminding myself of that biological fact, helps me to just decompress. And I don’t have to write a storyline about that, that makes me suffer. And I can use that same prefrontal cortex to manage the conditioning that my culture has happened me. I’m in a mastermind group for my business and one of the gals, the other day was talking about a, you know, kind of a difficult conversation she was having with a client who was really kind of going down this dark hole of being kind of a victim to everything that was happening in her life. And this colleague of mine said, I’m not gonna cosign on that pity party. I loved that, because it makes me think that, you know, you don’t have to cosign on the conditioning of our culture.
When you see it for what it is, which is largely a marketing ploy, you can let it go. And you can choose to believe other things. Just because Instagram, or a magazine or a billboard says that this is how you earn your worth, doesn’t make it true. And that’s your work is to keep peeling back the layers of your belief system. To make sure that it’s in line with how you want to be living. You can manage your mindset, you can parent your brain, you absolutely can learn how to like yourself, and really stepped deeply into a space of fortifying your self worth. And I say that because I spent a good, maybe just shy of 40 years, proving my worth, rather than acknowledging my worth, and Ladies, don’t we do that, right? We prove our worth all the time to the point of dis ease. We’re depleting ourselves. By constantly being in the space of proving our worth. I work with women every day, who, sadly, do not believe that they are worth their own time. Or they think that other things other people are more worthy than they are.
Or they think that they’re only worthy if they act or look a certain way. And worst of all, the hardest thing for me to watch is that when they lack that sense of worthiness, they don’t go after the things that are truly on their heart. They don’t show up as the women that they truly know themselves to be. And all of this is a problem for your health. Because if you don’t think that you’re worthy, you’re never going to make time to take care of yourself, not with any degree of consistency. Or worse yet, if you’re always looking for outside validation, you’re always looking for your worthiness outside of yourself. You might appear to eat well. You might be going to the gym seven days a week, but you’re not doing it for healthy reasons. You’re doing it for the approval of other people, which is never going to lead to health. And only you ever know why you do what you do. So this is why I always say, I don’t really care so much what people are doing. I care a lot more about why they’re doing those things.
Here’s what I know for sure. If you don’t take unrelenting ownership of your worth, you are going to take a lot of misaligned actions. Actions that are not in line with who you want to be or how you want your life to roll. If you don’t take ownership of your own worth, you will put your worth in someone else’s hands you’re gonna have somebody else that job and you will do whatever it takes to be sure that other People find you worthy. So you end up literally hustling for your worth. You do whatever it takes to be liked by other people. So much so that you end up not even liking yourself. Your ability to be a fully expressed authentic human is directly proportional to your ability to be disliked by anyone, but yourself. And I know you don’t like hearing that, because nobody likes being disliked, but you know what we all are. So I’m gonna repeat that one more time, your ability to be a fully expressed authentic human being is directly proportional to your ability to be disliked by anyone but yourself.
And here’s why that’s true. If you are changing who you are to accommodate somebody else, in terms of what they expect from you, but it’s not true to you, you’re not going to be a fully expressed person. You might even get to the point where you don’t even recognize yourself. You don’t even know what your passions and pursuits are. I’ve met lots of those women. We talk about creating whitespace in their schedule, where they can just kind of spend some time with themselves and they panic, like, I don’t even know what to do with myself, because they’re so far disconnected, so far removed from the truth of themselves. Because they’ve been living for everybody but them. You are worthy just the way you are. That is this plain and simple truth. Right here right now without changing a darn thing. You are 100% worthy, you don’t need to earn it. You don’t need to prove it. You don’t need to do anything to fix it. Your worthiness is baked into your humanity. But that’s not good for marketing. Right? That’s the truth.
If we really owned that truth, we wouldn’t be buying into so many crazy things. But marketing preys on our lack of worthiness. Marketing is constantly telling us what we lack. Why we’re less than why we should look a certain way, act a certain way, live a certain way. Love a certain way. Which is madness. None of its true. That’s all just it’s it’s just an illusion. Because it sells. Now when I tell women that they are worthy just the way they are, I’m not gonna lie. A lot of them freak out. And their storylines come out in full force. What I mean by that is when I tell a woman you know, you’re totally worthy just the way you are. We’re going to work on loving and appreciating yourself just as you are.
They think, Oh, God, no, Courtney, because if I love myself and appreciate myself and respect myself, and really own my worthiness, now, I won’t be motivated to do the work. I’ll get lazy. I’m going to be way too comfortable. I won’t create any change. And that’s actually not true. Here’s why. If you truly knew and owned your worth, you would actually lean into a lot of difficult things more easily. Because you recognize that you are an incredibly unique one of a kind Each person that needs to be fully expressed. And I personally believe that is our purpose here to be fully expressed. You know, how sad would it be if like a flower never actually opened its petals. Because it just didn’t think it was worthy. So it never fully expressed itself? Or how sad and tragic would it be if a bird never sang? Because it just always questioned if it was good enough, if it was worthy enough to actually do what it was being called to do.
Or if the sun questioned if, you know, I don’t know if I should come out today. Cuz I, you know, maybe I’m just too bright. Right? Maybe maybe the moon, we should just give the moon more of a chance. The moon does better at that that shining thing. I know that sounds crazy, right. But when we think of those things, it’s like, Well, yeah. All of those things express their full nature, because that is what they are called to do. And so are you, my friend, you are a part of nature. And you are being called to be fully expressed, which you can never be. If you don’t feel you are worthy. I also like to emphasize with my clients, especially those who are arguing that if they really try to, you know, honor and respect and themselves now and step into their worth, they’re not going to take good care of themselves. But logistically that makes no sense. Because think about the things in your life, that you value, that you really see the worth in, you take excellent care of those things.
If you can truly own your worthiness, you are going to be committed to making your life the best it can be, and you are going to be more willing to lean into hard things to make that possible. And I say lean into hard things. And the notion of self discipline always comes up. And I know discipline for a lot of people is kind of a dirty word. But the self discipline that I teach is an extension of knowing your worth of having respect for who and what you are. And for acknowledging how precious it is that you get this one opportunity to express what you are. That’s what self discipline is. self discipline is taking committed action, in devotion to your worthiness.
So let me give me some tangible actions here. Because I know the question comes up, well, Courtney, how do I start practicing or bolstering my sense of worthiness. And I would say that the best place to start is the place that nobody wants to start, which is with self awareness. And I say that nobody wants to start there. Because self awareness doesn’t always feel awesome. When we lift up the rug and kind of look at the truth of what’s underneath, we don’t always like what we find, because we see work. And that’s really what self awareness affords you is the opportunity to see where the cleaning up needs to happen. You could skip it. But I guarantee you will not make the transformation that you truly want. If you skip over self awareness, it just can’t be done. So we start by noticing how we treat ourselves.
Are you someone who is always making other things more important than you work? The kids, your husband, other people’s crises? And here’s what a lot of people say when I say that. Well, Courtney, I’m not going to ignore people when they’re in a crisis, and I hear you, I am not saying ignore your friends and family when they are having genuine problems. Please don’t do that. But what I am saying is some of you and you know who you are, make a habit of indulging in other people’s problems. So you don’t have to address your own. It is a source of buffering. It is a source of distracting yourself from your own work. And again, only you know why you’re doing it. And I always say to to my clients, yeah, of course, if your kid is sick, you’re gonna go pick them up from school. Right? I mean, that’s kind of, it’s the exception to the rule, it doesn’t happen very often.
If you’re someone who every day is seeking out a crisis that needs your attention, I think that requires some radical honesty for why you’re doing that. Another way of kind of noticing how you treat yourself is how often do you make time in your calendar for yourself, to be with yourself, to honor your own needs to pursue your passions? And more important yet? How often do you actually show up for those dates you have with yourself, because this is where most women really falter, they don’t show up. So there’s no follow through. And with no follow through, there’s never any change.
Another way, we can start really tapping into our worthiness and really starting to own it is starting to notice how we talk to ourselves, especially when we screw up, we make mistakes, we fail, we get misaligned. And I know this is probably an overused analogy. But compassion is a very important skill set, right, extending compassion to yourself, learning how to do that is a very important skill set. And one of the ways that we can really quickly understand that is thinking of how we would talk to our best friend or our spouse or our child, if they screwed up. We wouldn’t be a jerk, I hope you wouldn’t be a jerk. You’d be really kind. Is that how you talk to yourself? Because how you talk to yourself says a lot about your sense of worthiness.
We’re really one of my favorite analogies for this is if you think about a puppy, right, you have a new puppy, you put a little collar on its neck and you put it on a leash and the puppy is all over the place, doesn’t know how to walk on a leash, they’re a mess. And you don’t yell at the puppy and tell it what a loser it is. And that it’s never gonna be able to be a good leash Walker. I know some people do. I know there’s some bad pet owners, but that’s not who I’m talking about. I’m talking about people who really love animals. You gently bring the puppy back, right? And you gently correct it. And you gently teach, you know, kind of teach it by giving it treats and trying again, and building a practice of walking on the leash. But that is the antithesis of what we do to ourselves, right. It’s almost like we beat ourselves into submission and expect ourselves to all of a sudden, you know, do the thing consistently. Well, someone yells at me to do something. The last thing I want to do is that thing. And the final thing that I just want to address here is another way to sort of bring awareness to your sense of worthiness is how do you allow other people to treat you?
Some people hear that and say, Well, I don’t allow anybody to treat me certain ways. They just treat me certain ways. I would argue that we teach people how to treat us. If you are someone who never sets boundaries, or you set boundaries, but you constantly let people cross your boundaries, you are teaching people that your boundaries don’t matter. So we do teach people how to treat us. How do you allow other people to treat you? And if you’re someone who’s always telling yourself, Oh, I just don’t want to upset them. You know, I really want to do that thing, but I know it’s gonna be inconvenient to somebody else. You’re making decisions based on everybody else’s response. That is, I would definitely look into your self worth Why are you doing that?
Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the grace grip Podcast. I hope there was something in here that allows you to travel forward with a little bit more ease and grace. And again, if you’re looking for a higher level of support, I would really encourage you to check out our Rumble & Rise membership community. Once again, you can check out that community and all that it entails by heading on over to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. Have a wonderful week and I hope I’ll see you again next time. Take care.
Thank you for listening to the grace and grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.
