Rewriting my self-worth: A journey from self-doubt to self-love

As a teenager at high school the most confident people were in a different social class from me.

They were middle class. I didn’t know what class was, to be honest, because it never mattered at primary school (from ages 5-12), but it soon became clear that I had a different background from them, lived in a different kind of estate, had a different accent, and my parents had much less money.

And it seemed to matter. As adults we know that class shouldn’t define our worth. Intellectually, we know we all have the same inherent worth. But to my teenage mind, it did matter.

Not consciously, I must add. It was more like an assumption, like they stand at one end of the room, and I know that my place is at the other end, along with others of my class.

There was a sense to me that they were better than me, more entitled, more deserving of what life had to offer.

There was a guy named Michael who was in some of my classes. He appeared to be the cleverest person in the class. He often spoke up and had an air of confidence and a relaxed self-assuredness that I didn’t possess. 

To my teenage mind, Michael and the others seemed to be what adults talking about self-esteem call ‘enough’. Intellectually, they seemed to have an innate intelligence. I could learn, yes. I could dive in and understand something, absolutely. But it wasn’t the same. 

To me, they had an air of enoughness that was reflected in their presence, confidence, in how they answered in class, and how they conducted themselves in general. 

They spoke in a self-assured way. They casually spoke about current world events. They knew the names of people in the government. They talked about bands they followed, most of which I’d never heard of. They sometimes used words I didn’t understand. They talked about intellectual stuff they watched on TV. And they laughed at stuff I didn’t get. 

Despite my odd success here and there and my fairly decent academic record, I carried a sense of not enough while I was around them.

Michael talked often of his plan to go to university. He had selected Cambridge and spoke of his future like it was inevitable. The others similarly had their top targets in mind. The progression from school to university was a foregone conclusion for them, a core expectation.

Me? University felt way above me, so I never considered it. For a start, my parents could never have afforded it. Only one person in my entire estate had ever gone to university. I set my sights on a youth training scheme (YTS) that was popular at the time. It felt like it was the thing I was supposed to do. My parents didn’t know any better as it’s what everyone in our street did, that or get an apprenticeship or join the armed forces.

Now, for the record, what I’m writing here is not about which path is better for kids because we’re all different. It’s not about whether it’s better to go to university, or do a training course, get a scholarship, an apprenticeship, join the forces, or something else. I’m just recounting my own experiences and thought processes at the time. 

I really had little knowledge of any paths available, to be honest. The YTSs seemed more normal for people like me, that is, people of my social class, because it’s what most people I grew up with did. University felt like it was for people like Michael and his friends, who carried themselves with a completely different air from me.

It was only after my chemistry teacher, Mr Tracey (one of the most inspiring teachers I have ever had) sat me down one day and explained things to me. He said I should go to university. 

He assured me I’d really like it and that I’d do very well. Lots of people like me go to university, he said. I must add that he meant ‘like me’ in a kind and gentle way because he could tell how I thought of myself.

Noticing my shock and resistance to the idea, he said I would qualify for a government grant, a bursary, which would actually amount to more than what the youth training schemes paid. 

A YTS paid £27 a week at the time (this was the late 80s). The full university bursary was about £500 per 12-week term, including getting your fees paid. I did the math. Suddenly, university was an option. It felt attainable. Without that government assistance, I’d never have gone.

And so it was that I went to University. And chemistry was a natural choice for me. I’ll cut a longer story short here because the details aren’t important to the points I wish to make. I came out with a First-Class Honours Degree and a PhD and went on to work in R&D for one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, helping develop drugs for cardiovascular disease and cancer. Then I made a career change, setting out on the path to what I do now – writing books and speaking.

Sounds like a success story. Perhaps. Depends on how you look at it. Self-worth assumptions tend to stick and drag all sorts of difficulties and challenges into our lives, no matter what we do and where we go. We meet the world as we are, at the level we think of ourselves.

Looking back, I realise now that my achievements didn’t change how I felt inside. As Nathaniel Branden wrote in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, “You can’t outperform your level of self-esteem.”

I did a lot of things through those years, and I achieved quite a lot. I coached athletics. I co-founded a charity. I wrote several books. But how I felt on the inside didn’t change. All that ever changed was the context.

Things only changed when I decided to work on self-love (self-esteem). I tend to use these terms interchangeably, but when I say self-love, I mean ‘internal’ self-esteem. There’s external and there’s internal.

External self-esteem is when you derive your sense of worth from successes and achievements and from people having a positive perception of you. The trouble with this is that if something changes on the outside, if you fail at something or people stop liking you, it’s painful and can feel that life is falling apart.

Internal self-esteem, on the other hand (which I mean when I say self-love) is where your sense of worth is not dependent upon external things. You have an inner sense of worthiness and value. And a sense of self-compassion, where you understand that failing sometimes is normal. Internal self-esteem helps buffer you against the normal swings and roundabouts of life.

A game-changer for me was the understanding that there’s a sort of synchronisation between how you feel on the inside and how that shows in the way you hold and move your body. And that it’s a two-way street, or bi-directional, to use the technical term. 

In part, it’s known as the Facial Feedback Hypothesis. Making facial, and bodily, gestures of stress can make you feel stressed. Those of sadness can make you feel sad. But smiling and making other facial and bodily movements of happiness can make you feel better.

I began the practice of holding my body posture in a way that I reckoned I would if I felt that, “I am enough.” I practiced standing with my back straight, my shoulders relaxed, my neck and face relaxed, and breathing steadily and easily. I put a reminder on my phone to remind me every hour or so to check my posture.

My goal was to make an ‘I am enough’ posture a habit and, in so doing, wire it into my brain.

It worked. Over the course of a couple of months of doing this, I made sizeable gains in how I felt on the inside. I felt more confident. I felt better about myself. I was less scared. I felt more optimistic about my life.

I was pleasantly surprised that something so simple could have such a big impact. Although it did take a lot of work. I had to correct how I sat at my desk, teaching myself to sit up straight rather than slouch. I had to get out of the habit of stooping my shoulders when I felt unsure of myself, worried, or was in an unfamiliar place or situation. I had to relentlessly practice relaxing my face and wearing a gentle smile when idling rather than one of uncertainty or a frown.

But these things became easier with practice, and I began to feel better as a consequence.

Of course, there’s more to self-love than this and I don’t wish to state that this is all you ever have to do. We’re all different and we have different backgrounds, different life situations, different experiences that have shaped our feelings and expectations. But it can go some way to changing how you feel.

In my two-year self-love journey (it’s what I eventually came to call that period of my life, and that resulted in me writing my book, I Heart Me: The Science of Self-Love) I also had to learn self-compassion, and that it was OK to be vulnerable, and it helped to see that some of my behaviour patterns were things I’d picked up from my parents. 

And studying the subject of self-love in general helped me unpick some of my ingrained thinking, like the idea that those middle-class kids at school, and by extension anyone with seeming authority as I grew into an adult, were inherently more worthy than me.

But learning how to manage my posture is what got me far enough that I was able to recognise these other things. It’s what got me far enough up the self-love ladder that more beneficial changes became possible.

I hope this is helpful to know and that you find the practice beneficial too. And if you, or someone you know, feels similar to how I felt when I was at school, then I hope the practice can help you, or them, feel a little more self-confidence, self-assured, and contribute towards a greater internal self-esteem.

True self-worth isn’t about where we come from or what we achieve – it’s about how we see ourselves. And that’s something we can change.

I’d like to leave you with one of my favourite self-love quotes. It’s from “The Six-Pillars of Self-Esteem,” by Nathaniel Branden:

“If my aim is to prove I am ‘enough’, the project goes on to infinity—because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable.”

Resources

Here’s some links to my book on learning self-love is called, “I Heart Me: The Science of Self-Love” in case you find it helpful.

I share the science and practice around how to use your posture to help build self-love. I also talk about vulnerability, shame, body image, self-compassion, self-forgiveness, how we pick up patterns from our parents, and I share 28 practices for developing self-love.

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