Who likes being called average? I know that if someone were to say to me after class “Thank you for this average class. You’re such an average teacher” it’s not something I’d feel very happy about. We don’t like being average. We don’t want to be the average husband or average mom or average lawyer or average girlfriend or whatever. We want to be stellar, we want to be amazing, we want to kick ass. We want to come up on top. We want to be the best. Here is the thing though, how can all of us be the best? It’s impossible. And yet, because we have this ideal in our minds to be the best, we revolve our lives around becoming the best. We join an external competition with everyone so we can be...not average. What happens is we begin to insist our own way of doing things and seeing things as the better way of doing things and seeing things; we begin to put others down so they could be average—below average even— and we could be better; we begin to listen to external measures of what it means to be above average and we lose ourselves in pursuit of it. Then we wake up one day and we wonder why we have no sense of inner peace.
The antidote to this is building our self-worth through self-love and self-compassion. It means we accept our human imperfection and we embrace it. When we struggle in our relationship or our family life or our work or career or anything else, we often feel bad, beating ourselves up thinking it should be some other way. And yet, what other way is there? It is perfectly human to have those struggles. We all have them. Name one person who’s had the perfect life who never struggled in any way. There is no one. Our shared human experience is that being human is imperfect. And that’s okay. We learn to see our worth just the same, not based on where we are on a scale we’ve imagined for ourselves, but just because. We accept ourselves as we are, not because we’ve accomplished something and proven something to someone, but just because. We love ourselves just because.
Self-esteem is an external thing that is based on a sort of competition with others; forget about that. It’s a trap. Work on self-worth instead. Because seeing our own value is the only way to make peace with ourselves. It is what will set us free from this matrix of competition and separation. It is what will drive us to be in touch with the most vulnerable part of ourselves that need the most attention.
The antidote to this is building our self-worth through self-love and self-compassion. It means we accept our human imperfection and we embrace it. When we struggle in our relationship or our family life or our work or career or anything else, we often feel bad, beating ourselves up thinking it should be some other way. And yet, what other way is there? It is perfectly human to have those struggles. We all have them. Name one person who’s had the perfect life who never struggled in any way. There is no one. Our shared human experience is that being human is imperfect. And that’s okay. We learn to see our worth just the same, not based on where we are on a scale we’ve imagined for ourselves, but just because. We accept ourselves as we are, not because we’ve accomplished something and proven something to someone, but just because. We love ourselves just because.
Self-esteem is an external thing that is based on a sort of competition with others; forget about that. It’s a trap. Work on self-worth instead. Because seeing our own value is the only way to make peace with ourselves. It is what will set us free from this matrix of competition and separation. It is what will drive us to be in touch with the most vulnerable part of ourselves that need the most attention.
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