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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge!  There are five primary needs that everyone has in common: The need for security, the need for connection, the need to be autonomous, the need to feel competent, and the need to feel worthy. Each of these needs is a core part of human nature. Today we will address the final need, the need to feel worthy.

I believe the need to feel worthy is the most predominantly debilitating requirement in today’s society. It is also the desire that is least often addressed or satisfied.

One Thing To Think About
It’s probable you encountered conditional acceptance as a child. As you matured, you learned that you would be accepted if you followed the rules of those you sought acceptance from. When you were accepted by the people in each of these environments, you learned that you were okay. Each time you experienced rejection or were punished, you learned that a part of you was not acceptable. This process taught you that you were only conditionally worthy. If you received enough of these messages throughout your life, which is quite common, your belief in your deservingness likely needs to be improved upon.

In reality, you are perfect, just as you are. Every situation you’ve lived through has made you the person you are today, and there is purpose to your experience. While it’s true there is room for improvement in all of our lives, the most damaging thoughts you can buy into are those that tell you that you’re broken and must fix yourself. That’s just not true. You are not broken and, while we can all benefit from self-improvement and self-care, there is nothing about you that needs to be fixed.

One Question To Answer
I repeat, You are perfect, just as you are. Are you able to accept that statement, or do you resist it? How do you rate your effectiveness at the following worth-building activities?

• Invest in Self-Care. The best thing you can do for your family, friends, colleagues, and community is take great care of you. When you are at your best, you can give your best. When you invest in taking great care of yourself, you show your mind, body, heart, and soul how valuable you are. This directly meets your need to feel worthy.
• Live Up to Your Potential. Your potential is limitless. You can make contributions to this world that no one else can make. If you don’t make them, the world will never see them. The more fully you allow yourself to come into your own, the more fully your need to feel worthy will be met.
• Speak Up for Yourself. The manner in which you allow others to interact with you directly impacts your feelings of worth and deservingness. Require that others speak to you with respect. In instances when you encounter someone who is not treating you appropriately, let him or her know that you’re not okay with his or her behavior. Every time you stand up for yourself, you’re meeting your need for worthiness.
• Keep the Commitments You Make to Yourself. Your feelings of worth are directly affected by your level of self-trust. You must have the ability to rely on your own word, or you will constantly question your own value and deservingness. Every time you meet a commitment to yourself, you increase your feelings of worth and deservingness. Every time you fail to meet a commitment, you undermine these very needs.

One Challenge To Take

1. Define the method you’ve adopted to satisfy your need for competence.

2. Identify at least one empowering and one disempowering behavior related to this need.

3. Consider how you might make the disempowering strategy more positive. How could you shift your approach while still meeting your need?

4. Commit to integrating this improvement into your life.

Until next time, take care!
Kim

“Why compare yourself with others?  No one in the entire world can do a better job of being you than you.”  Anonymous

Now I was never a big fan of bearded, burly pitchman Billy Mays but I was familiar with him.  He was the guy hawking multiple household products like OxyiClean and What Odor? and highlighted on Discovery Channel.   When he died suddenly at age 50 of a heart attack in late June I was surprised.  Then autopsy results came back this week revealing cocaine use as a contributing factor along with several other pain and anti-anxiety drugs. 

I found myself taken aback.  Why would a man who seemingly had it all together – he was a celebrity, a pop icon, for heavens sake – take drugs? 

This is not an anti-drug message, nor am I collaborating with the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.  While I think their work is good and important and I enjoy many of their public service announcements (PSAs), this message is about something different.  I want to send an ANTI-COMPARISON psa.

Why was I surprised to hear about Mays’ drug use?  Because I thought, at some level, that as a celeb he was above all that.  Sure we hear about rampant drug use among the rich and famous, but somehow I assumed, unconsciously, that here was a guy – an important guy because he had his own TV show – who was so confident, so accomplished that he wouldn’t feel the kind of anxiety and stress to drive him to drugs and meds.

I’m speaking the obvious when I say we’ve become a celebrity-worshipping world.  But it’s one thing to keep track of or follow the lives of someone who is living a life we might want to be living, it’s another thing to assume they’re better and we’re less.

We forget, I believe, that they’re normal human beings, with normal human feelings and reactions.  I couldn’t tell you why they had greater successes than others – luck? Chance? A clearer vision and belief in themselves?

But what I can say is when we compare ourselves to them their successes become our failures. 

I hear far too many of us comparing ourselves to others.  We compare ourselves to Hollywood stars, bestselling authors, and noted speakers, as well as to the woman in the next cubicle who gets a promotion or the mom down the street who lost her baby weight in only 6 weeks.  The list doesn’t stop there. 

This month’s terrific MAP is designed to help us tap more into our passion – the ‘fire in our belly’ as a member of my Compass coaching group so aptly described it.  With passion we can find greater happiness and soar to new heights.  Yet, when we compare ourselves to others for any reason, in any way, it’s like throwing a huge bucket of water on the fire and putting it out immediately.

In the process of comparison we diminish ourselves and our gifts.  We denigrate our own worth and end up cutting off the very thing – our passion -  that is making us successful now in our own right, and could, if looking to attain success on a grander scale, support us in making that happen in the future.  

It takes courage to love and accept our self exactly as we are.  To know that valuing our own unique talents allows us to be even more successful in whatever way we define that.  It takes courage to step away from comparison and appreciate our own accomplishments in their own right.

Be courageous!

Warmly,  Megan

Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge!  Time management is a subject that many women struggle with. In the Remodel Your Reality program, there are four rules to effective and empowering time management: Be Authentic, Place Yourself on Your List, Know Your Own Worth, and Say Goodbye to Takers.

One Thing To Think About
You will succeed or fail at time management based on your willingness to consistently invest your time in support of the priorities you’ve established. This becomes possible when you remove requests and commitments that fall outside of your priority structure. In short, this means you’re going to have to get very good at saying the dreaded “n” word—no.

One Question To Answer
Do you have trouble saying no to others? Due to the desire to avoid disappointing others and their aversion to feeling uncomfortable, many women do. To preserve your time for things that matter to you, you must be willing to experience temporary discomfort. This requires dedication to the focused management of your schedule and calls for you to develop the courage to risk upsetting or disappointing others.

One Challenge To Take
Integrate the Four Rules of Time Management into your daily life. Use them as a guide star to give you direction and keep you on the track you want to take.

1. Be Authentic – Your priority list must reflect what you authentically hold in esteem versus what you believe should be important to you. Be honest when creating your priority blueprint. It can serve you, acting as a compass to support you in making decisions about where to invest your time and energy. If you don’t define your list based on your truth, you will be living someone else’s. I know you don’t want that reality or you wouldn’t be reading this book. Creating a list based on what you believe is expected of you, or out of fear about what others might think of you, is a recipe for stress and failure.
2. Place Yourself on Your List – When you commit to taking care of yourself, you become more powerfully able to take care of everyone else in your life. While you may feel an initial resistance to placing yourself on your own list, believing it would be selfish to do so, I strongly encourage you to invest in taking care of you. When you do, you will be able to give more to every area of your life. I challenge you to take care of yourself at least as well as you take care of everyone else!
3. Know Your Own Worth – If you don’t believe you’re worthy of acceptance and friendship, you will try to earn your way into both. The fear of unworthiness is at the root of many unproductive behaviors, such as accepting invitations you aren’t interested in, agreeing to requests that don’t compliment your priorities, and taking on responsibilities that detract from your own well-being. The disease to please may not kill you, but it will significantly detract from the quality of your life.
4. Say Goodbye to Takers – If you’ve been living as a pleaser, there are undoubtedly takers around you. A taker is a person who uses your time, energy, money, and resources without giving anything back in return. I liken these individuals to parasites, and they will begin to disappear when you start saying no. Make a commitment to stand your ground and invest yourself in only those requests that meet your priorities or interest you. Prepare yourself in advance to decline invitations or requests that don’t. Anticipate the inevitable shedding of the takers in your life and celebrate the opening you’re creating for a higher quality of person to enter in their place.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

There is no doubt that we live in a throw-away society today.  Everywhere we look, we embrace the “out with the old, and in with the new” philosophy.  Something breaks nowadays, and we don’t even think about calling the repairman – it’s somehow just easier to buy a new one.  Even larger items, like cars, are replaced with abandon after only a few years.

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