The Heroik Hour Episode 8 –

How to Supercharge Your Self Worth DRAFT 2

 

Hey There, and welcome to the Heroik Hour, the podcast where we discuss and bring together Technology Leadership and Culture giving you a little Heroik TLC to get mission ready for life. I’m your host, Nicholas McGill , Chief Experience Officer for Heroik Media. Thanks for joining us on episode 8.

 

I’ve talked about bringing your own bravery in past episodes, and after getting feedback from listeners, some questions come up about where that ability to confidently, bravely, and boldly take on new areas and projects with lots of unknowns and uncertainty comes from and how to cultivate it. It’s a regular requirement of my job, and a skill that I overlook or take for granted.

Yet having a solid grasp of your self worth and confidently taking on the unknown is an absolutely essential life skill that many don’t learn. And it is a skill that will serve you in every aspect life, to help you know when, how and why to stand up for yourself, to ask for more, to demand what you need, to fight for what you’re worth, and know what you’re willing to walk away from. In general, this ability, this confidence or bravery allows you to

command value and respect in everything that you do in work, and life and all the interactions and relationships woven in between.

In order to lead, build, learn and grow, to be Heroik and mission ready for life, it takes an unshakeable faith and self confidence- that all stems from a firm sense of self worth. So in this episode I’m going to talk about how to supercharge your self worth so you can continue to build your confidence and courage to be Heroik and advance yourself everyday.

Before we get into it – I want to share this. This Podcast is sponsored by my company Heroik Media – and we build and implement growth strategies from thought to profit. So if you like what you hear, if it aligns with your culture, and you’re looking to build a growth engine or start intrapreneurship initiatives inside your organization, or just need to figure out new ways to light a fire under the asses of your team, please send your boss, friends, colleagues and HR manager to heroik.org -that’s HEROIK -and that’s our corporate site where you can book a Heroik transformative talk for your team, schedule a collaboraitve whiteboard session or talk growth with your team across three dimensions of technology leadership and culture.  Again that’s over at heroik.org, you can also find links at our culture site getheroik.com

So, how do you build an unshakeable faith and confidence in yourself?

How can you elevate your sense of self worth?

Let’s start with self confidence.

To me confidence is really a measurement of strength of your character than anything. Strength can be found in several areas within anyone brave enough to look for it. Just the act of searching for strength will make you stronger. Get in the focused habit of mapping out and connecting with your strengths, and you can replace the habit of looking for things to make yourself feel weaker. I find strength in knowledge, the knowledge of the subject matter, skills, and mastery. I also a lot of strength in self knowledge or self awareness.

This all starts with authenticity – if you are real with yourself, if you can be comfortably, uncomfortable and smile and laugh at who you are, where you are, with what you have in this moment, You can confidently do any number of things.

If you can cherish your strengths and weaknesses in equal measure, it will be much harder for people to get you down. If you can laugh at yourself, and how silly or foolish you can be, you can be profoundly more resilient. If you can be vulnerable and honest up front, you’ve decreased the fear and anxiety factor by 10x.

If you can admit what you do not know, and quickly tap into your growth mindset, and be a master learner, an explorer, a curious mind, you are automatically in a better position to make clearer decisions and develop better ideas. There is tremendous power in this kind of honesty, authenticity and vulnerability personally and professionally.

All of this allows you  to set reasonable expectations between you and the rest of the world and focus on enjoying the moment.

How do you get there?

Let go of allowing other people to define you and your value as a human being. People are not objective, and have their biases, and love to judge you based on things that are completely out of your control. Systemically filter out the junk frameworks and value systems that allow other people to really define your worth. Be very skeptical of social normative values.

Social normative values – are those that are relative to the group you’re with, one team’s definition of ethical behavior or integrity, may be obscene or offensive behavior to another group. You need to have an independent standard, that you yourself are the only judge and jury on, in terms of deciding and seeing how you’re measuring up.

It’s not enough to abandon using other people’s standards. You need to live up to your own. Become a judge of your own character, and hold yourself to a standard. You also need to know the difference between a standard and an aspiration, otherwise you’ll get lost in the habit of beating yourself up and being too hard on yourself for not being perfect.

The other part of the first question was how do you develop an unshakeable faith in yourself? Well, I can’t say that it’s unshakeable, at times, I struggle like everyone else.

But I know my strengths, I know my capabilities, I’m aware of the abundance of opportunities in the world I live in, and I have a deep belief that come what may, I will figure out what I need to do next.

I’m also afraid – I don’t want to lose what I’ve built, or get lost on my path, and that fear drives me to taking corrective actions, putting up signposts, creating metrics to ensure I don’t fall off the mountain, or half to start over.

You need to build a personal culture platform of one.

Our culture is so toxic these days, that I felt I had to strip it down to it’s bare bones and go through all the parts and decide what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to throw out. I run everything through the Heroik Golden Filter – Cultivate That Which Serves You And Hit The Eject Button on That Which Does Not. To me this is a very personal process. What serves me, fuels my fire, my passion, my drive, my performance, may be entirely unique from what serves other people, even friends and loved ones. You need to take time to define your values, valued behaviors, and your own code, your own culture. You can borrow from others, and curate it if you wish, or you can steal mine, I’ll let you borrow Heroik culture, it can be a placeholder for you until you define your own or just enjoy being part of a tribe that can hold you accountable.

Rituals, habits and artifacts, tangible things are all keys to healthy culture and you need them to sustain you.

You need ways to regularly remind yourself of the path that came before, so that you can summon the courage to take the next step. Surely you’ve built momentum in your life. After all, you’re alive, which means you’ve survived something, you’ve lived through something in order to be here now, wanting what you want, and thinking and planning and taking actions to go and get it.

I keep a victory board, a cork board of every race, mud run, and all the important achievements in my life. Sometimes I’m trying something new, and the artifacts and talismans of my victories are only meaningful to me. It can be a note on an envelope, a ticket stub, or a name badge from a conference you went to, not knowing if you were going to land a gig from it or have to live out of your car. I pay attention to the little victories, and recognize the little momentums building up. The more of these embers you look for and count, the greater the flame and faith that you have in yourself.

Also, Map out in advance how your strengths can be applied to achieve the goals. Not everything is clear cut. Not every problem is mapped clearly or perfectly to your skillset. If you know your strengths and weaknesses really well, you can recognize relationships, form analogies and metaphors to apply one set of knowledge to different and new areas. This helps you become multidisciplinary, useful in more than one department or scenario. It also teaches you how to think and learn and look for patterns, and playbooks. Tried and tired tactics in one industry are innovative moves when applied to others. I know this. I also know that most people haven’t had the experiences that I’ve had across many different industries, and even if they did, their take aways or insights are usually different than my own. I find comfort in knowing this is highly likely, because I know and am willing to bet, that I can add a lot of value to the new project.

1. So, know your strengths weaknesses.
2. Be content laughing at yourself and admitting what you don’t know, and let that guide your exploration.
3. Start building your own culture, your own rituals that reinforce your confidence. Start a victory board.
4. Then map out how your skills or strengths might be applied to help achieve the goals of the project.
5. Look for patterns, similarities, overlap, and remember that your takeaways from previous experiences likely give you a unique perspective and different insights on the challenges and how to address them.
6. Your strength and confidence in these skills, like any muscle, will continue to improve with increased work under stress.

So what habits and tips will increase your sense of self worth

1. START. Simply Sending yourself down a path of self-improvement is a helpful by itself. Decide to start. Whether it’s a diet, an exercise routine, a book, a conference,  or subscribing to this podcast, just by seeking a path, you’ll see things improve. Problems and suffering  tend to arise  and persist when we procrastinate and excuse or allow ourselves to stray from our goals. I read books, take programs, watch documentaries, invent things to do to connect with my wife, and so on.
2. Clean up your psychological surroundings. Think of the things and content that feed the negative thoughts and consider reducing or eliminating them. Start filtering the negative influences that make you doubt yourself, or doubt the opportunities in the world, or think of your goals as inaccessible. Few people filter the videos, music, shows and news they consume, and it weighs on their thoughts, feelings and operating attitudes.
3. Put fun and relaxation on your schedule. Treat them as you would your most important business meeting. Block out the time and don’t let life interfere. Understand the effects these activities have. They re-invigorate you. They bring you more energy and excitement. They bring you back to life. Honor yourself. Rest. Don’t do any work / physical or mental one day a week. Choose a sacred day to recharge your batteries and rejuvenate your spirit.
4. Monitor your internal chatter. Note when and where your thoughts begin to send you to a place of distress and anxiety. If it’s the vibe of the place address that too. If you were triggered, map out why  you were triggered.
5. Confront your negative self talk with realistic and positive opportunities to act. Consciously make course corrections away from the thoughts that bring procrastination, distress, and anxiety.
6. Take complete ownership of that which is completely under your control and influence including your beliefs, your attitudes, your actions, and extend it to your environment. You have a lot of the influence over these factors that are producing the results you’re seeing in your life right now. For most people, this will require stepping up your game in huge ways.
7. Have courage and invest in self-respect. Having self- respect sometimes means taking a seemingly simple and subtle stand and say  No. No thanks. None for me. I Won’t do that. I had to this losing weight, in a food driven culture and constantly say no. You should be able to use the power of your yes and your no effectively. It is also an act of self respect to advocate for the things you want and say yes. Yes I’d love to take you to dinner sometimes. Yes I’d love to learn how to rock climb.
8. Remind yourself of your goals when you have to interrupt temptations and old patterns e.g.  “No. I won’t have another piece of cake. I care about my figure and health and am working hard to improve it.”

For many, this isn’t the first time you’ve heard this message, yet you still fail to own the very thing that would solve so many problems and bring you new and better opportunities. If you believe you are the victim of circumstance than you will be. If you believe you’re a big fish in a small pond, then you will be. If you believe you are Heroik, you will be. Get out there, Ignore the haters, and build, live and enjoy The Great Life you were born for. Be Heroik and don’t stop hustling until you’re where you want to be.

That’s all I’ve got for this episode, thank you so much for listening, be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already, and check out all our past shows more great articles at getheroik.com – let’s rock out.

The Hidden Track After Party

Favorite podcast hack – fast forward 2x – it’s like teaching yourself to speed read. If you missed something rewind and play it back slower. It’s great, it’s a time saver. And you begin to notice how crappy the 7 minute podcasts tend to be.