If there's one thing you have probably heard over and over again if you are even a tiny bit in the personal development/self-help space, it's some version of “you have to love yourself first” or “what you want will come to you when you feel worthy of it.”  

This begs the question (and I hear it all the time from clients) - how do I feel worthy? If I don't right now feel worthy, how does one even take the first step toward that? 

I gotchu girl. Because I felt the same amount of “okay so NOW WHAT?” but now, being on the other side, I have an answer for you. Whenever I hear this type of question from a woman - how do I feel worthy? How do I feel confident? How do I feel enough? How do I love myself? - I always believe the place to start is

“What in your past experience made you feel like you aren’t enough right now?” 

Who taught you? What did you overhear that you took to heart? At what tender young age, when your brain wasn’t fully developed, did something painful strike you to your core that instilled this knowing that you aren’t lovable, worthy, enough? 

And how can you unlearn that? Rewrite that story? Turn off that channel?

 Here's a way to think about it: 

(Note: the inspiration for the following example is absolutely credit to the writing of Glennon Doyle in her unbelievably poignant book, Untamed)

I want you to imagine yourself as a kid dressed up for Halloween. You’re dressed up as lion - a mane (a headdress/wig situation), a furry coat (a golden onesie), and a tail (a piece of fabric attached to said onesie). When adults ask you what you are, you say, “a lion.” You roar, crawl, run, chase after other animals and creatures of all kinds. No adult argues with you that you’re not a lion, because you have such conviction. Now let’s pretend that you never take this costume off. November 10th rolls around, December 4th, you’re still dressed and when you walk into any room, you’re a lion. Seeing you acting this way, the adults treat you as a lion and don’t question you when you answer “what do you want for dinner?” in the way that a lion would: “a steak.” Over time, you forget a time where you ever believed you were anything other than a lion. You look down at yourself and the thoughts run through your head about your fur and how other people like or don't like your mane. About feeling most comfortable around other lions.

And then January 1st rolls around and something in you starts to dream of being a little girl. A little inkling. Maybe you see little girls playing on the playground or you become friends with one and you love her energy but something in you wonders, can I have that for myself? “But I can’t be a little girl. They don’t have tails or manes. I have both!” The voice speaks up a little louder: “But it’d be so fun and feel so good.” 

You feel trapped and like this dream that, you agree, does sound great, is out of your reach because of your lion-ness. You imagine how fun it would be to feel the ways little girls do, talk and walk and run how they run. You get more frustrated because everybody seems to say to you, “Just believe you are!” "But how?!", you ask yourself. You feel like a lion. How can you just choose to be a girl? 

And then someone says to you,
“when did you learn that you were a lion?” 

And you think and reflect and eventually remember. The day where the costumes were laid out on the bed and this one felt the safest. The least likely to be ridiculed, to be threatening to others. And you slipped on the onesie and the headdress. And eventually it had been going on for so long that you believed it was who you are. You might be sad for the girl who chose her Halloween costume for those reasons, rather than because she really wanted to be a lion and you can understand why she did what she did. And then you return to your thoughts in the moment and look down at yourself - “Oh… I can take off my mane and my fur and my tail. I can set it aside.” Slowly piece by piece you can remember that underneath all your belief in being a lion, you’ve been a little girl all along.

You can’t transform without identifying the costume you are wearing and why you put it on and how it makes you act. But as soon as you identify it as a costume, you unlock the ability to take it off.

In remembering how you learned you were unworthy as you were, you can release those learnings and return to the worthiness you always had underneath. That little girl who whispered to you “there’s more to you than your lion-ness.” 

Tired of letting negative self-talk, people pleasing and overthinking hold you back? I can help.