Self-worth & belief

Self-worth is believing that you are good enough and you deserve good things; it’s about not putting yourself at the back of the queue. Self-belief is often drawn from times when you have faced a challenge and overcome it, big or small. It means having confidence in your abilities.

We can shy away from celebrating – or even acknowledging – the things we are good at because we worry it might come across as arrogance. When you have self-belief, you recognise what you can do and what you know, and it gives you the energy to strive to learn about the things you don’t. We have to actively nurture both self-worth and self-belief because they help us to deal with our fears.

Self-acceptance comes with an implicit flip side: that you accept the way things are and you don’t have the power to change them. What we want is clarity and purpose – to see and like ourselves for who we are and to be the best version of that. For example, if you feel you are disorganised, or you can be overly critical, or you aren’t looking after your health properly, you don’t need to accept that as a given if it is making you unhappy.