UNDERSTANDING SELF WORTH | Teach Your Inner Child Its True Value | Inner Child Life Lessons #3

Hi and welcome to this week's Wuwai Wisdom Life Lessons teaching. It's great to be back with you all. This week is part three of our Inner Child Life Lessons series and today we are focusing on teaching our inner child about the principle of self-worth and its own true value. Okay David, so when you're working with your clients on inner child issues, what is the issue that they get stuck on here with regard to self-worth and self-value? I would say this is one of the fundamental or core issues that my clients really find hard to shift and to let go of about their value. Is their value given to them by what other people think or is it something that's innate, that's inherent for them? And so would you say most people believe that they have to earn value, they have to earn worth? What other people think of them or believe about them defines their usefulness, their value, their lovability? And I think yes, Zoe, the answer is yes, I do. And I think this identifies for our listeners who are unsure what we mean by the inner child. Because when we're children, most of the parenting techniques we receive are, if you're a good boy or a good girl, mummy and daddy will like that and they will love you. If you're not good, they will scold you or ignore you or not be so kind to you. And so the inner child part of our mind sees this as very much black-white, yes-no, good-bad, right-wrong. And so it believes that it has to earn this value, this validation, this love and this compassion from other people. It's something that's out there like a carrot dangling in front of them and they have to go out and reach it. So if that's the kind of origin point, the starting point for what we believe, and of course when we're children, it's quite natural to draw those conclusions. But I would also say, David, as we grow up, our society, our culture, the media encourages that very same viewpoint in terms of our value, our worth, our status, how good we are, are we achieving, are we not achieving, are we looking a certain way, are we not looking a certain way. So if our inner child is born, the psyche part of us is born when we're in our younger years, there is so much evidence as we're growing up to provide a confirmation bias to those beliefs. That's right, Alex. It goes right from that childhood beginning we're with our parents, to school, to teachers, we have to be good, we have to conform through our teenage years, to trying to reach standards, other people's standards in our exams, etc, etc, finding our first partners and our first loves, getting our first jobs. It's almost as though we have to keep on striving to justify our worth and value. And this is where the confusion arises from the society idea of worth and value, and our spiritual worth and value. And this distinction is real and important, that you have intrinsic, innate worth and value, that no one can take away from you. It's impossible. No one can take their, your worth away. If their opinion is that you're not good enough, or something wrong with you, at the end of the day, that is just their opinion. It doesn't affect your worth and your innate value. Okay, David, so are you saying that that part of our mind, our inner child needs to almost completely reject everything it's learned about looking externally for to know how good it is, to reject what society says, culture says, friend, the importance of friends, family, it kind of seems a bit extreme, an extreme ask? And that's a really good question, Alex, because it hits at the heart of what we call the emotional pendulum, where we see it either has to be A or Z, it has to be good or bad, it has to be the two extremes. And I'm certainly not suggesting that you should reject anything at all. What I am suggesting is you widen your perception. And you stop looking at this very vital, profound issue, through the eyes of a six, seven, eight year old child. To understand, yes, it is kind of nice to get people to like you and to appreciate you and to appreciate your work or whatever. That's pleasant. But that doesn't define you. You don't need that. That isn't the idea for me of validation of giving a value. All they're doing is giving their opinion of you. I don't know how somebody's opinion of you is better than your opinion of yourself or your work. It's just an opinion. So on all of these inner child issues, what we're doing is emotional education is widening the perception. So you see the whole picture, they may not like you, that one person may not like you. That really doesn't affect your worth and value. That's just their opinion. Yeah. And of course, as you said, if someone's giving an opinion of your work or, I don't know, something you've done or not done, that is not an opinion of the wholeness of you. And also, as you said, their opinion is affected by their knowledge, their emotional, let's for a better word, baggage, their background, their experience, their judgment, which is inevitably tainted. So it's almost nonsensical for us to wholeheartedly embrace the constant input of other people's opinions of us. And I guess we need to point that out to our inner child, how it's just, it isn't, it's nonsensical and doing ourselves a disservice. Well, that's what I would call in our model, re-parenting and re-educating the inner child. Because if you don't understand this and really think about this teaching, what I notice with my clients, let's use an example. They have 10 friends and family and nine or eight of them really like them and find great enjoyment with them. But two of them don't like them and reject them and they will focus on the two, the one, two, three. They will focus on the ones who have a negative opinion and they will not see the whole picture. So the inner child mind is very kind of focused on what it wants. The inner child wants everyone to love them, everyone to put them on a high pedestal. They want everybody, they never want any criticism, any comparing, any judgmental statement. They want everything to be wonderful and rosy. And that's the inner child mind. But the problem is that's not the reality of the world that we live in. And this is what then creates the red light feelings that we call anxiety, stress, social stress, running away, hiding, avoiding. And this is why it happens is because of this core understanding. This is why this is so important. I mean, David, I know you teach the adage, what other people think of me as none of my business and that we should, rather than look externally for feedback, validation as to how we're progressing, we should look internally for validation and self-referral feedback. But a common issue that people say or that the inner child resistance to this is very much like, when I refer internally, it doesn't feel as powerful. It doesn't feel as satisfying if I congratulate myself rather than receiving congratulations or validation from other people. When I try to encourage myself positively, it doesn't feel as good as getting positive strokes and encouragement from other people. How do we break this issue? How do we break it down and resolve it? Well, thank you, Alex. And I hope people listening to that heard the words that Alex had to say when she was describing the inner child. It doesn't feel, it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel. And so the inner child to kind of carry over their point will have to use the feeling word. So when I agree with you, I think one of the most powerful teachings is what others think of you is none of your business, none of your business, because everyone will have a different aspect, thought, belief about you. As you quite rightly say, based on their knowledge, based on their inconsistencies, based on their imbalances and their misalignments, really what matters is what you think, believe about you. And as Alex has just demonstrated, if you jump to your feelings, this is where you confuse yourself. Again, the fundamental teaching, you are the creator of your feelings. When you use them, in the example that Alex has just said, you're not thinking about your thoughts, you're just describing, I feel, I feel, I feel, instead of going back to what I think. So in the example that Alex has just given, if a client said that to me, I'd be saying, well, what do you think? And they would say something like, well, it's more important what other people think, it's more important what society thinks. And then we're on the golden thread. Why is it more important? Why is it more important to you? And that really is the crux of this matter. Do you believe that value of a human being, of a spiritual being? Do you really believe that's hierarchical? Do you believe that some people are born with more value than other people? Do you believe it's a roulette game where some people are touched with more value and some people are not? This is a real issue. Just two weeks ago, I was working with a client, and she was putting this analogy over to me, that she is the only person. Now, this is a highly intelligent woman. But you see, when it comes down to beliefs and emotions, this is the scenario she put to me. I am the only person in the world that's born without value. Now, that was her core belief. Now, we have to work on that core belief, because that has to be fundamentally wrong. But if you start from that core belief, like the dominoes falling, then the rest of your beliefs are built on that wrong, inaccurate, misaligned core belief. And this is why this teaching for the inner child, I would say it's one of the most powerful teachings that you have innate. It's a gift from the universe. Everyone has the same gift, whether you're born in a family of millionaires in the West, or whether you're born in the Sahara Desert. A human being has the same intrinsic value. And so, David, are you saying that if we manage to do this inner work, and we fully embrace the idea that we have this value, our opinion matters more than other people's opinions of us, because we know ourselves more intimately, that once we change those core beliefs, we do the inner child work, so the inner child accepts that, then the feelings we get when we self-refer, rather than looking externally for feedback, will be more powerful, more positive. Because the issue is people naturally gravitate towards the feelings. It's almost like we are magnetized to what feels good. We do what feels good. And at the moment, the inner child may be running this thing whereby when I get positive feedback from other people, it feels really good. When I look within for feedback, it kind of feels flat. But if we can reverse that by teaching the inner child the truth about our own value and worth, then we all of a sudden have positive green light feelings of joy, inner peace, inner knowing, contentment, satisfaction, excitement, when we begin to self-refer, rather than looking for that drug from other people. Well, this is the core of the teaching, Alex. If you base your life on your emotions, if you are just making your judgments on what you feel, you are saying what you are not responsible for your feelings. The feelings just come to you. Other people give you feelings. You are the victim of your feelings. Where do those feelings come from? And this really is the teaching, the reparenting. We have to understand that we create those feelings. In previous videos, we call it 1, 2, 3, or A, B, C. A is your beliefs and your thoughts. B is the feelings, the consequences of those thoughts and beliefs. C is the actions you take. I want you to consider taking the actions from what you really believe to be your truth, your honesty, and your integrity. Here's something else that our clients often say to me. Other people know me better than I know myself. Think about that statement. Other people, members of my family, know me better than I know myself. This addresses one of the things that you said. How can anyone know you better than you? You have a relationship with yourself from the moment you come on to this beautiful planet and to the moment you leave. How can somebody know you better seeing these fundamental misalignments in your core beliefs that really you have to readdress and rebalance, not your emotions? This is really the core of teachings. If you do what Alex in her demonstration, oh, I feel, oh, when somebody pleases me, I feel so good. It's because your belief is what they think is more important. I think, David, that point about knowing yourself is very relevant here, though, because if we've spent our whole life running this inner child belief that to know myself, to know my value, to know my worth, to know if I'm on the right track, I have to look externally. Not only are we looking externally for feedback, but we are being very performative. We are performing and we are molding ourselves and our identity in such a way, in a subtle way, in a drip, drip, drip way to get those strokes, to get that positive feedback. There is a kind of self-manipulation going on. What we find is over a period of years or decades that because we have been very performative, we've performed a role in order to get positive strokes. At whatever point in time we come to do this work with our inner selves, with our inner child, we've lost touch with who we are, or we've never actually fully touched base with who we are. We don't actually know ourselves. It can seem like cutting off the oxygen supply of feedback from external sources makes sense for the reasons you've discussed, but that then we are left in this, I guess, no man's land of, okay, so who am I now? What is my worth? What am I good at? What do I value? What is my identity? For a lot of people, they can reach well into adulthood and be stuck with those questions. So you've mentioned a lot of things there, Alex. I'll try and take apart what you've talked about. Well, first of all, the idea that the oxygen supply is coming from other people is really, as you said, is nonsensical. You're not getting any oxygen supply from someone else, because when somebody does give you that stroke and that pat on the back and tells and give you that somehow that you consider his value, then you dismiss that immediately and you start looking for somebody who doesn't. So actually what you're doing, you're always going to the lowest common denominator. You're always going to the person that you think doesn't value you, doesn't approve of you. You're always trying to prove to them that you are worthy. And so I don't think it gives you oxygen. I think it's the opposite. I think it takes oxygen away from you, takes your chi energy, takes your motivation, because you're chasing the carrot. And so when you said it feels empty, when you stop that game, I believe it gives you in that space that you're calling emptiness. I'm quite happy in that space, that stillness, that quietness. I love the Taoist teaching that in the middle of a tornado, there is this quiet space. And, you know, we should spend a little bit more time in this quiet space of reflection. We should really drop our shoulders and take a breath and really consider where do we get value from? What is value? Why do we consider even someone like our mother, our father, our family, why do we believe that they have somehow inherited a fortune of value, which they're going to dispense to us when we really know that they're struggling with their issues, different issues to us. And I think that space that you are talking about, rather than being something that you should avoid, I think it's something you should sit in. And that's why I like this idea of what I would call a meditation, a time of reflection, a time to see either we all have value, or no one has value. This is not something that is given to us. There's not a value tree that we go to and pick a handful of value. And I've used this analogy in many videos, but I think it's so important. If you've ever been lucky enough to be at a birth in the delivery room, or you've given birth to your own child, when that child is picked up in front of you, no one ever says, quick, can you give this baby some value? You'd be thought of as insensitive, as ridiculous. That baby has value. And you are that baby. No one can come and take a handful of value away from you, even if they give you the worst criticism in the world. It's just their opinion. They're not touching your value. Your value is something totally different. And this is why this teaching is fundamental to the inner child work. Wonderful. Thank you, David. I will also put links in the show notes to several other long form teachings we've done on self-value, self-belief, and self-love that will help you with this topic. Please do tune in next week when we'll be discussing the final part of our inner child life lesson series, which is on Wu Wei, and how your inner child must embrace the concept of flowing with life. I really, really hope that you have enjoyed this teaching. Please do let us know, and perhaps share it with someone else who you think it may also help. David works every week with clients all over the world via Zoom video call. And if you'd like to learn more about David's consultations, do check out the link in the show notes for those as well. And finally, please don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We produce new long form teachings every Saturday, as well as two midweek short snippets of wisdom for you to enjoy. So do subscribe. We look forward to sharing with you again very soon. Bye bye.