How much of your worth is tied to what other people think?

You can look confident on the outside and still quietly question whether you’re good enough. It can look like assuming other people know better than you. Worrying about whether people approve of the decisions you make and the actions you take. Or deciding not to go after something you want because, underneath, you’re not convinced you really deserve it.

I know this because for a long time, I looked outside myself for reassurance that I was good enough. Partners, friends, colleagues, bosses. Their reactions mattered enormously to me, and I regularly wondered if I was living up to what I believed was expected of me.

And when I thought I wasn’t, I judged myself. I spent more time thinking about what was happening around me than asking myself the basic questions: What do I actually want? What makes me happy? That’s one of the problems with low self-worth. Your attention can become so focused on everybody else that you gradually stop treating your own feelings, judgement and needs as important.

And it can start much earlier than we realise. The way we see ourselves develops through our relationships and experiences, particularly when we’re young. Research has found links between family relationships, peer experiences and the development of self-esteem during childhood and adolescence. That doesn’t mean everybody with low self-worth had a terrible childhood or that there must be one big event you can trace it back to. Sometimes it can be much more subtle. You might have learnt that being good, successful, or easy to deal with got you approval. Or maybe you were criticised or compared with other people. Perhaps you felt rejected at some point and made it mean something about you.

Knowing where it came from can be useful, but understanding it intellectually doesn’t necessarily make the feeling disappear. That’s why deeper work might be needed to deal with the feelings and beliefs underneath the behaviour, rather than just telling yourself “I'm good enough”. And that way, you can stop letting old experiences and other people’s opinions decide how you see yourself.