Valuing Yourself in a Devaluing Society

Few people realize how living in a modern society strips us of our sense of value.  Our value as human beings is incredibly high and we never actually lose it.  But in adjusting to the expectations of modern society we definitely can lose track of our value and come to doubt that we have much value beyond serving as a faceless worker in an impersonal economy, pleasing others at every level and surviving as best we can, always hoping that life will improve but rarely experiencing lasting improvement that feels deeply satisfying.  Even if we’ve managed to get along well with others and to honor authority figures and learn what they want us to learn, something may still feel vaguely missing.

What’s missing in action is a sense of our immense value. Our hearts know deep inside that we’re not experiencing the fully satisfying life we would prefer — and are naturally destined to have if we open ourselves to receive it.  Sometimes we mistakenly believe that having more money, getting a better job or better grades, performing better in sports or another endeavor or having the “perfect” partner would bring us the satisfaction we crave, but not so, not really.  Of course, such improvements in our life would provide us with an increased sense of value for a while.  Yet, we don’t really want our value to be based on how well we perform, please or reap rewards — or upon what others think of us.  In our hearts, we know that we deserve to be valued for who we are, not just for what we do.  We are human “beings” not human “doings.”  We should not have to earn or learn our way to a sense of value.  We should start out with a true sense of our immense value and then keep that sense vigorously alive while we tackle whatever in life we choose to tackle.  If we don’t start out that way, then our choices of what to tackle in life are distorted by our hunger to somehow earn and/or learn our way into being adequately valued.

Being undervalued by others as our modern society teaches us to expect leaves us feeling inadequate, insecure and resentful.  Those negative feelings may be hidden beneath the surface of our awareness yet exist and operate to undermine our self-esteem, self-confidence and willingness to assert our true value and take healthy, appropriate risks necessary to explore and encounter the best life has to offer.  Hidden emotional wounds reinforce our sense of lowered value and inhibit our willingness to take risks that are worth taking.  As others fail to value us we learn to fail to value ourselves and become convinced that our low sense of personal value is accurate, not mistaken at all.  Yet it is always, always mistaken.  We may pass through times when we believe ourselves to lack value but those times are never the ultimate conclusion of our quest to re-establish our value.  We re-establish our value by re-discovering our inherent or natural value while letting go of the beliefs we acquired that have undermined our awareness of our native value.

Reversing the Process of Undervaluing

With my coaching coupled with encouragement from others, you can regain your sense of your true value and base your decisions on that high value instead of on a vague sense of low value.  I will help you to learn more about how to nurture yourself as a valuable person.  Together we will customize steps you can take to develop your own lifestyle of self-valuing.  Reversing the process of being undervalued requires self-discipline on your part.  The Catch-22 is that to even tackle gaining more self-discipline you have to believe in yourself and your higher value at least a little more than you’ve believed under the influence of social messages you’ve absorbed and taken to heart.

If you want to work with me to discover or re-discover how to nurture yourself, you’ll need to trust me to tell you the truth about yourself and about life.  So, if right now you don’t believe that modern society is actually depriving you of a sense of personal value and you are satisfied with how you feel about yourself, then there’s little point in our working together. For us to work together for your benefit, you have to be at least a little dissatisfied with your life as it is right now.  If you do feel discontent with life as you are experiencing it and hope to see changes for the better in your life, let me know.  That’s a goal we can work towards together.  I’ll tell you more about how we work together towards that goal when we talk.  It’s all about helping you feel empowered to take up your own life and cultivate it as a life worth living, enriched with valuable experiences by which your true value is revealed to you.

The materials I rely upon as resources for helping you to find within yourself your own inner voice and empowering flow of synergy are described under The ABCs of Love tab of this website.

© Art Nicol 2021