Finally Understanding What Self Worth Means for You and How to Improve Your Sense of Self Worth

In this episode, Sarah and Mike Comparetto are back at it. Mike, a licensed therapist, and Sarah, a trauma and anxiety coach, demystify the subject of self-worth. Much of the information available on this subject is somewhat vague, however, Mike and Sarah detail exactly how lack of self-worth shows up in our lives. Some examples include putting pressure on yourself not to make a mistake, second-guessing your financial status, and disappointment in your physical abilities. Sarah and Mike also explain why lack of self-worth develops when you are a children and how you can rebuild your sense of self-worth. You are not going to want to miss this episode!

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Sarah's video course on Youtube 
Sarah's Worthiness Exercises

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Important links:
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This episode is a meditation for beginners, and mindfulness for beginners resource. Intermediate and advanced meditators will also benefit. The Aware Mind produces content that supports stress reduction, anxiety relief, better concentration and focus, and trauma healing.

The Aware Mind is produced by TSD Mindfulness, a virtual meditation center, offering mindfulness classes, certifications and private coaching for people with past trauma, anxiety and depression disorders, business leaders, and people who work in the helping professions (i.e. counselors, healers and yoga and meditation teachers).

Transcript

I'm Sarah Vallely, professional coach. I help people overcome anxiety, heal from past trauma, improve their relationships, and maintain better work life balance. Welcome to the show. Our topic today is self worth. It's always a popular topic, so I always like to make sure I circle back to self worth. I have Mike Camperetto, with us today.

He's been on here several times. We love having him on the show. Mike Camperetto is a licensed therapist and the owner of Strive On Counseling here in Asheville. Welcome back to the show, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me back. Of course. What is self worth? Self worth is an internal sense of feeling good enough, feeling whole, not feeling lacking.

And what's important about this is that it is unconditional, meaning no event nor person can take it away from you. So when you really Lean into what is your self worth. This is something unconditional. It can't be taken away from you. It is inherent, which has to do with your character. It's intrinsic.

It's part of your essential nature. And when we talk about self worth, the other terms that often come up in that conversation are self esteem and self confidence. Self esteem and Usually self confidence are situational and conditional, meaning I'm good because I'm good at something that's that's conditional.

It's contingent on something. And you may have remembered in the past 10 years ago, five years ago, there was so much talk about self esteem, teaching self esteem in schools. You might not hear that as much lately, and that's because there has been some controversy over the self esteem movement, and one of the reasons is there is some research that shows that self esteem techniques actually in the end really aren't that helpful, and there's a lot behind that.

But what one is. That they found that people with high self esteem can also be pretty mean, right? So you have like mean people who have this self esteem, so it's not really the end point. And self esteem is usually applied to particular areas of your life. And self worth is really all encompassing. And self confidence.

It's usually is about a certain ability. So what are some of the things that we might misassociate our self worth with? So this is such the learning point, I believe, when I work with my clients and myself is, you know, what am I thinking is what my worth is dependent on, which is actually, it. Incorrect. So miss associating your self worth with accomplishments.

I'm worthy because I've made these accomplishments. Miss associating your self worth with your body, the way you look and getting everything right. We often associated being worthy with getting it all right, not making any mistakes.  And also our emotion of being happy. We often misassociate our worthiness with I'm happy.

So I'm worthy. If I'm sad, I'm not as worthy. That's absolutely not true. Or just as worthy when we have some difficult emotions. The goal is. And this is where I kind of get onto the radical end here. The goal is, is that our self worth is associated with our existence. That we exist. We live, we breathe, we exist.

However, that can be a stretch. Because sometimes we can think, Oh, well, Hitler existed. Is he worthy? And that can be a stretch. Another way we can think about it is thinking about those inherent qualities that are not contingent on anything. When I talk to my clients, I say, what is it that on your deathbed, you still know is true about you and really makes you feel worthy?

Maybe your kindness, your kind heart. You still have that on your deathbed. Your curiosity. Curiosity about the world, your ability to lean into your emotions. So that's my spiel about self worth, but Mike, I'd love to hear your opinions. Yeah, I don't think what you said is that radical. I think it can be seen as radical if you misunderstand it.

Like you're saying, if you say, oh, well, Hitler was perfectly worthy. Well, no, but all humans have the potential to actualize their self worth. A really awesome concept from Internal Family Systems, IFS, which some of your listeners might already be familiar with. In the IFS system, we have multiple parts that make up who we are.

Deep beneath all those parts is what's called our core self. And the core self has certain attributes. Calm, confident, curious, centered, creative, playful, adventurous, and stable. I feel like if you're able to get in touch with your core self, your core values, Exist there as well. So if you're in touch with your core self and your core values, I see no reason why you should not have inherent worth just for existing, just for being.

So much of the world, it seems, has become a little dehumanizing, and I think part of understanding self worth is bringing the humanity back into it. You can still be imperfect, And have worth because you're human and we value human life, or at least we say we do. We don't always act like it. One of the things I most like to do with self worth is first get a gauge for where somebody's at regarding their self worth.

And one of the activities I do to get there is create sort of like a pie chart. It could even be a bullet list, but I think the visual form of a pie chart works nicely. I will try to collaborate with the client and say, what makes up your self worth? I'm glad you made this distinction between self worth and self esteem.

I think it's easy to let those things bleed into each other. And when I do this exercise, you will often see that. Somebody will put on the list of what makes up their self worth, my looks, my job. There's nothing wrong with those things, but what we have to understand is If you've got a pie chart and 90 percent of that pie chart is something conditional, like how well you perform at your job or how subjectively attractive you are to other people, that's a very shaky sense of self worth.

These conditional things do not dictate whether or not you are worthy. When we look at that pie chart, 9 times out of 10, what I'll find with People who are struggling with their sense of self worth is they're putting way too much emphasis on these conditional things They're putting way too much emphasis even sometimes on things.

They can't control a family. I was born into or my status or something like that the way we want to start to shift that is by Examining, okay, is that working for you? By hinging your self worth on your job performance, or your status, or your attractiveness, is that actually working for you? And, of course, after discussing it, most of the time people will realize it's not.

And that's where we start to dive into these other things. Can we enlarge this thing? Tiny sliver of the pie that you're maybe currently only giving 2 percent to, but that you have identified, which is your core values, or your level of empathy, or your relationship to your spiritual life. And can we start emphasizing those and paying more attention to those?

That's where we start to get into that world of, okay, now we're starting to understand self worth and starting to understand where you're misattributing your self worth. Yeah, it's like we are so enmeshed in our psyche that we don't even know what we're associating our self worth with. We don't know what we're doing in that sense.

And so that's why I love the pie chart, because that's what that does, is it brings it out into the open so you can see it and you can see, oh, this is what I'm doing. And then you can work from there. That's excellent. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about. The core values something that came up for me when you were talking about that is often my clients will say, Oh, I feel so guilty about this.

I feel so guilty about that. And then I will explain. Well, guilt means we went against one of our core values. What is the core value that you went against? And they usually will struggle to find it. And I said, it sounds like it's, I have to be a perfect mother 100 percent of the time, you know, and then we talked through that and realize it's not really a core value.

So, but I'd love to hear a little bit more about how the values. Absolutely. You referenced something earlier, which is, let's say you're a hundred years old and somebody's throwing you a birthday party and they're giving you a toast and reflecting on a hundred years of your life. And they're saying, this person lived by this principle and they were always this type of person.

And they stood for this and they were like this. You're listening to them talk about these qualities that you've possessed and exemplified and you're feeling fulfilled and satisfied and proud and as if your life has had meaning. Those are your core values. Those are the qualities and attributes that on a very deep core level resonate with you and make you feel fulfilled and purpose driven and satisfied.

Some random examples of this off the top of my head are. Kindness, compassion, mindfulness, adventure, freedom. And like you said, when we're out of alignment with our core values, our sense of self worth tends to suffer. The good news is we can control that. We can try to live more in line with our core values.

Core values can be aspirational. You might say kindness is a core value of mine, but I don't really feel like I've been a very kind person lately. You know, maybe you've been going through a lot or life has been very stressful. That's fine. You can realign with that core value and aspire to live up to it.

And the great thing about this is it's not black and white. These are not commandments. These are not hard and fast rules. You always do your best to align and connect with these core values. And if, if you do that, you will have a greater sense of self worth. Yeah, those core values are so important and that's, that's Such part of our evolutionary experience, you know, personally evolving is identifying what those values are and identifying which are truly ours, which we truly want to have, and letting go some of the values we've internalized through our culture and through our parents and upbringing.

So important. Why do we get to this point? point where we are lacking self worth, and one of the ways that I think that happens is through trauma. We experience trauma in our childhood, and what happens is our logical brain, I mean, this is just human nature, we have to rationalize it. When anything happens, we have to rationalize it.

We have to figure out why did this happen? We have to make sense of it. The problem is Trauma never makes sense. There's no logical, rational reason why you endure trauma as a child. Our brain rationalizes it anyway, and so when you rationalize something that really doesn't have a rational reason, you end up creating a lie.

You end up creating something that's false. And often what the brain goes to is, it's about me. It's my fault. I got abused because I'm not a very good person. I mean, that's a child perception of being traumatized. You know, this is because I, I'm not good enough. And so that's one of the reasons that we get into this sense of having lack of self worth and.

You know, those of us who have endured trauma, we, we often struggle with that more than somebody who hasn't. And the term for that is internalization. We internalize what happened. So we decide that we are lesser than, and then we have this decision that we're lesser than, and then more things start happening in our lives.

And then we just, we decide, well, that happened because we're lesser than. So it's really this like domino effect.  So yeah, Mike, I'd love to hear your thoughts on where does this come from? How does this develop this, this lack of self worth? Yeah, trauma is a big one. And the thing that I think a lot of people might misunderstand about trauma is they assume it has to be something more extreme, uh, or obvious.

You gave the example of being abused as a child. That is obviously trauma, but any painful event. that still impacts us to this day could be considered some form of trauma. You know, in the world of therapy, we have what we call big T trauma and little T trauma. Big T trauma are the more obvious ones.

Little T trauma can either be recurring events, almost like, you know, that saying death by a thousand cuts. Like, let's say every day your parents are giving you subtle indications that, you know, they don't think you're good enough. That's trauma. It's just not a singular event that's happening over time.

Or, little t trauma can be a singular event that is maybe a little bit less severe than what we would typically think of as trauma, but still has an impact on our nervous system, our sense of self. Sense of self is one of the defining characteristics of trauma. This is where self worth is so intertwined with trauma because by definition if we are Traumatized by an event it impacts how we view ourselves in relationship to the world and one of the ways in which that Manifests is through what we call core beliefs not to be confused with core values Core https: otter.

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experiences we had in childhood. And they tend to come in the form of I am statements. I am worthless would be an obvious one. I am unlovable. I am unlikable. I am, um, inadequate. I am, um, bad. These are all examples of core beliefs that might come about based on a big T or a little T trauma. And so a lot of people.

Don't realize they carry these core beliefs because they operate on a subconscious level. So the first thing we have to do is try to bring them into consciousness, try to figure out what do I believe about myself? And one of the ways you could do that is by paying attention to  Because that gives you a window into what you're believing.

So this is where mindfulness can become really helpful. If you're practicing mindfulness of thoughts, and you're noticing thoughts like, Boy, I really screwed up at work today. Or, uh, I can never do anything right. Those are clues as to what you might be thinking. be believing about yourself. And so you might ask yourself, Oh, okay, well if I'm thinking that, what does it feel like I believe?

And you might realize, Oh, I believe that I'm incapable. Or I believe that I'm bad. If you do have trauma, especially big T trauma, One of the ways to treat that is with a type of therapy called EMDR. It's a type of therapy that links your core beliefs to your traumatic memories and attempts to reprocess those traumatic memories so that you can have a more positive belief about yourself.

Other ways to deal with this, though, if you're not going to seek out EMDR, and this is something you could do by yourself or, you know, with a coach or a therapist, is start to look at what the evidence in front of you says. If you believe you're incapable, you are going to have a cognitive bias. Towards the information that confirms what you already believe, because we all have cognitive bias.

So if you believe you're incapable, everything you do, you're going to see that evidence. You're going to go, yeah, well, today my boss at work didn't accept the idea that I had. My friend canceled plans with me last weekend. What about all the evidence that supports that you are capable? You're probably experiencing that evidence, but just not paying attention to it.

And it can be everything from as little as you got to work on time, that is evidence that you're capable, to as large as, oh, you've got a master's degree, or you've been holding down a job for however long, or you've been in a healthy relationship for a decade. Those are all pieces of evidence that you might be overlooking, and if you start to pay attention to that evidence, you can start to change that core belief and start to have a greater sense of self worth.

Yeah, and I think there's a huge connection to this, to having anxiety. So, when I start working with someone and they have anxiety, which is the majority of my clients, There's different things driving the anxiety, but two of the real common ones are fear, like just straight up fear of certain things, and there's techniques for, for healing that fear.

But another very common reason for anxiety is lack of self worth. The pressure that you feel when you lack self worth, it just, you never feel like you can relax because you feel like you're. Always having to do more, do better to make up for lack, which of course is not true. And it's exhausting and it causes all kinds of anxiety.

You never feel like you can rest. And I know Mike, that you are just rolling out a free course on anxiety. So I'd love to hear your thoughts about how the self worth connects with the troubles of anxiety. Yeah, a lot of this stuff overlaps. I, myself, have spent most of my life with generalized anxiety disorder, and that thing that you just described, I have certainly experienced.

It has a lot to do with your relationship to self and your relationship to the world. And when you constantly feel like nothing you can ever do is good enough, because maybe that's what teachers or parents or whoever told you or implied to you, you're gonna be anxious because it feels threatening. I mean, what is anxiety but your internal threat detection system?

If the threat that it is detecting is you're going to fail because you're not doing enough. or your life is going to fall apart because you're not staying on top of all your chores or whatever that threat that it is detecting is, you're going to be in a state of anxiety. This all relates to each other in almost a feedback loop.

If you work on your core beliefs, then those things will get better. But you can also Work on these things and it helps your core beliefs. Mindfulness is a really helpful tool and in my own life has been probably the most helpful tool with anxiety.  If you can learn to just sit and say, yeah, this is how I feel.

I feel imperfect. I feel Not good enough. And nurture those feelings, and sit with those feelings, and let those feelings express themselves, you can learn that A, those feelings will pass, B, you don't have to compensate for those feelings by going out and trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize or something, and learn to be okay with yourself as you are.

That Not only helps with your self worth, but it also helps with your anxiety because it no longer feels as threatening when you start to say, I can actually just be okay like this. I can learn to sit with these feelings and not have to act on them and those feelings don't have to control my behavior.

A lot of it also comes down to behavior. One of my favorite meditation teachers, his name is Gil Fronsdale. He one time said in one of his talks, just to be alive is enough to me. That's such a beautiful sentiment and it's kind of driving force behind my meditation practices. That's the state I'm always trying to cultivate.

And most of the time I fail. And I want to be clear about that. And, you know, to anybody who's also trying to cultivate a similar state in their meditation practice or mindfulness practice, it's not about achieving the state. It's about continually practicing for that state. And every once in a while we have that little moment where we feel content and peaceful and just to be alive is enough.

I don't have to do anything. I don't have to achieve anything. It's enough. Yeah. I love that. And I'm glad you brought up that emotional aspect. I think that's so important. And one of the ways I see that is I see that when we lack self worth, it really does bring up a lot of difficult emotions. And so if we don't have the support to be able to process through those emotions to be able to sit with them in a healthy way.

It just makes the anxiety feel so horrible. And that's another reason that people have a lot of anxiety is they just have these difficult emotions that they can't really handle. And they usually don't. They're not aware of that because usually the only thing that they feel is I have anxiety or I don't have anxiety, but really underneath that is all these different emotions of impurity and helplessness, you know, feeling neglected and rejected and things like that.

So, yeah, so important to be able to sit with those emotions in it. Healthy way and as far as this idea of all you need to do is to be alive This is a personal story, but I'd love to share it here in this moment three years ago I got a very bad concussion and I couldn't work for five months. It was a really really bad time Bad blow to my head, my neck, and it's typical when you have a bad concussion that you get into such a depression that you have feelings and thoughts about suicide.

It, um, that, that happens and, and that's what happened to me. And this is a little bit of a woo woo part, but I was just, you know, completely broken down on the floor, just, you know, having a terrible episode. And I just heard. All you have to do is stay alive. Like that is your only job right now. That's all you have to do.

And I can't believe the amount of pressure that took off. And it just put me into such a better perspective. And I just remember thinking I can do that. I don't think I can do anything else right now, but I can keep myself alive. And so that's such a good reminder to go back to.  So you had mentioned Mike about mindfulness a few times and yes, this is a mindfulness podcast.

I love having Mike on the show because he does have a background in mindfulness. He does practice acceptance and commitment therapy, which is so much based in mindfulness. And I've been teaching mindfulness for 20 years.  Coaching practice is based in mindfulness. So let's talk about the role of mindfulness here.

So mindfulness helps us put this process and what I mean by process, this awareness of our self devaluing, our thinking, thoughts that are associated with lack of self worth, our core beliefs, as you were talking about. And so the mindfulness helps us slow down to see that happening, to hear that happening, to know that's happening. 

Also, the mindfulness helps us take a step back so we don't have to identify. As much with these thoughts of I'm not good enough. It's my fault. I'm not any good unless I get everything right. All these things, the mindfulness teaches us that, you know, that's just a phenomenon of the brain. It's just popping out these thoughts.

They don't need to be true. We can also be mindful of how. This self devaluing feels in our body because it doesn't feel good if we can take a pause and notice You know the tension that we feel in our neck the tightness in our gut all these feelings that come up when we're in our Lack of self worth we really can see what an effect this is having on our body and on our day, what a negative effect it's having.

And so that's kind of, it can be a wake up call. Like I really need to address this because this is not feeling good in my body. And also I think the mindfulness work can help you get closer to some of that deep pain that is associated with your trauma, which processing through that pain is also. Going to really help you overcome and move into having more self worth, more, more of a sense of self worth.

What do you think, Mike? What are some ways that mindfulness can be helpful? Just to expand on one thing you mentioned, feeling this in your body is, is such a powerful way to heal that this is something that for most of my life. Kind of overlooked. I started going to therapy for my anxiety in like third grade.

For the longest time, it was always, okay, well, fix what's going on in your head. It wasn't until I was early 20s or something, I started learning about more somatic therapies and more, as I was getting deeper into my meditation practice, learning how to pay attention to the body. That was kind of a seminal moment in my journey with anxiety because I realized there is this.

Whole thing I was missing, which is that emotions are primarily felt in the body. We have a cognitive sense of emotions, but really, they are experienced in the body. So when you start paying attention to the body, and you pay attention to the way those emotions are expressing themselves in the body, and you make space for them, and you allow them to express themselves, what you're essentially doing is processing, in some cases, years of pent up emotions that have just, This is a weird way to put it, but asking to be felt.

These emotions have been asking to be felt ever since the events that initiated them. If you find yourself going back to painful events of your childhood, where a parent or a caretaker or a teacher or a loved one said something that really impacted you or did something that really harmed you, and you can, you know, Sit with those emotions as they arise in the body.

You start healing from those events. It starts to lighten the load of those things. Yeah, the challenge is, is that a lot of people don't really know how to do that. Right? It's not that it's complicated. It's just, it's not something that we've been taught as children. You know, when we're five years old, no one, well, maybe some, some kids these days.

But a typical person, you're not taught. And at this young age to sit down and just really take a moment to feel what is that anger? What does that frustration feel like in your body? What does that sadness feel like? Like we never, most of us never had that opportunity. So, so important. And if you can find a good therapist, coach someone to help guide you through that process.

So, so worth it. Uh, and also self compassion. So mindfulness and self compassion are often coupled together and there's different reasons for that. One of them, I believe, is when we become more mindful, we start to actually see This like negativity within our psyche, which we really need to follow that up with self compassion because it's really hard to really just sit in here.

Some of these negative things we're saying about ourself. So self compassion when it comes to. Lack of self worth corrects that faulty thinking is one thing that it does, right? When we have this lack of self worth, we have this incorrect, negative thinking about ourself and that self compassion just dead on, directly reverse that.

And it does take dedication. So there's an exercise that I like to do with my clients. Called, um, I call it the worthiness exercise, and it's my personal belief that when we take some time to sit and meditate, almost every single thought that pops up into our psyche actually can be tracked back to lack of self worth.

Almost every thought that comes up while we're meditating is rooted in lack of self worth. So here are some examples. I hope I don't forget this, right? When we sit down and meditate, that's usually one of the first things like, ah, I don't want to forget this, right? I believe we can track that back to self worth, meaning I'm not worthy unless I remember to do this.

I'm not worthy unless I do this. That's part of what makes me worthy is that I'm going to get all that stuff done. The exercise is, and even if you're not a meditator, just taking 10 minutes, five minutes sitting down. Noticing what thoughts are popping in and if one of them is I can't forget to do this and immediately following up with what I call a worthiness response.

I'm worthy even if I forget to do this thing, right? So you're immediately correcting that lack of worthiness. Another thing that might happen while we're taking that 10 minutes of meditation is, Oh, I'm so tired. I wish I wasn't so tired. Okay. We can track that back to I'm only worthy when I'm awake and I'm energized.

When I'm tired, I'm not as worthy. So right there, addressing that. I am worthy even when I feel tired. Another example might be, I don't like how my body feels. I feel bloated or something about your physical body. I'm getting old. I'm feeling an ache here. I definitely rooted in lack of self worth. I'm worthy even though I have imperfections.

It does take some practice and being able to notice what you're thinking is that might take a couple weeks to move into that if you haven't meditated before, but so worth it. This exercise has really turned so many things around for my clients and I do it personally. It's one of the most effective.

Quickest, efficient way to turn yourself worth around. So yeah, Mike, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, on self compassion and how we can really use self compassion to help us move us into higher self worth. Well, when I hear that exercise that you just shared, the first thing that pops into my mind is how a lot of self worth is about lack of acceptance.

If you have a negative sense of self worth, you might not be very accepting of your imperfections, or you might be not accepting the sensations that are arising in your body. You might be not accepting the natural process of aging. That's just a little addendum to what you were saying about acceptance, in my opinion, is such a key practice for life.

And I think a lot of lack of self worth. Also comes down to a lack of acceptance, self acceptance, and just accepting the ups and downs of life and, you know, not personalizing everything that happens. But when it comes to self compassion, one thing that I've noticed with probably every single client I've ever had is that There's this tendency that people have to have a double standard for themselves.

If one of your friends comes to you and says, Oh boy, I missed a work deadline today, and I'm kind of afraid that I could lose my job or something. You wouldn't turn to them and go. Wow, you're a worthless piece of garbage. Some people actually talk to themselves like that when something like that happens.

Why are we holding ourselves to a standard that we would never hold any other human being to? Why are we talking to ourselves in a language and in a tone that we would never think of speaking to another human being like? That's something that I think is also worth trying to observe in your own experience and be aware of.

The words and the tone that you use when talking to yourself, self compassion, if you really want to simplify it, it comes down to compassion. Just means caring, caring about yourself, caring about your own suffering and your own pain and your own experiences. If you're not talking to yourself in a caring way, then that is something you could work on and you could, at first, it might feel very stilted.

It most certainly feel difficult. Think about, okay, if this was my best friend, or if this was my own kid, how would I talk to them? And try to talk to yourself in that kind of voice. Self talk is huge. It has such an impact on our happiness level. I mean, I think there's studies out there that say that self talk has more of an impact on your level of happiness than the events in your life.

So it's, it's, it's huge. So important to be able to harness that and move that into a more positive, supportive type of talk. Yeah. And one other thing I wanted to mention. about self worth and addressing our self worth is to be mindful when something positive happens in your life. When you achieve a certain goal, maybe you're recognized at work for something in particular and it just feels really good.

I invite you to notice those times and say to yourself, yes, this is wonderful. This is something to celebrate. But this accomplishment is not associated with my self worth. I'm not any more worthy because I've met this goal, because I'm getting this recognition. So it needs to happen on both ends, in my opinion.

Not meaning to not celebrate those achievements, but to really be real with yourself. Just to tack on quickly to your last point, I gotta throw some Buddhism in here. One of the core teachings of Buddhism is that the root cause of all of our suffering is clinging and aversion. The example you just gave is a prime example of why we should not cling, because it's amazing to celebrate an accomplishment and to, to take in all of the good of an accomplishment, and we should do that, and most people probably don't do that enough.

But how we do it is very important. If we do it in a way that then sets up a dynamic in our brain, Okay, well I'm not gonna feel happy again until I get another accomplishment that's equal to that one, then we're setting ourself up for suffering. If instead we are appreciating that accomplishment with a non attached, non clinging attitude, this is wonderful.

In this moment, and the joy and pleasure of this accomplishment will also pass. Like you said, it doesn't define me either way. That is the healthy attitude that we want to cultivate. For sure, because we might get a promotion and then we might get laid off. And so if we set it up that, Oh, I'm worthy because I got this promotion.

Then when you get laid off, you're like, Well, then I'm not worthy anymore. It's, it's, it's. Just it doesn't work. Uh, well, Mike, it's always wonderful to have you here on the show. Please share with us how people can get a hold of you and what, um, what announcements you might have for the audience. Yeah.

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited because I just created a whole new course about anxiety and it's a totally free course. You can find it on my website at striveon. me slash anxiety course. So that's strive on dot M E. Slash anxiety course. Um, it's totally free. I recorded some video modules where I go through various tools and techniques that you can use, so it's not just an informational course.

It's a practice course where I give you exercises to do. You can practice those exercises and then come back to the next module and learn the next set of exercises. And these are the same. Tools and exercises that I've used in my own life with my own anxiety and also in my clinical practice with my client.

Well, thank you, Mike. I'm sure it's an amazing course and I hope the listeners really go and check it out. I will put the link in the show notes. Thanks again, Mike. Awesome, thank you. The Aware Mind Podcast is A TSD Mindfulness production. Please check out our show notes for upcoming events and links to additional resources.

Please visit our website@tsdmind.org.