How to Build Self-Worth

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Rejection is Scary

I don’t know how many times I got rejected asking a girl out.

I admit it, that line is a bit of a lie. If I tried, I could probably count it on two hands—which I find pretty sad. I hardly ever asked anyone out because my ego was too big.

‘Wait what!?’ you may be thinking right now, ‘If you had a big ego, wouldn’t you ask girls out all the time? How does that make sense?’

Yes, I had a big ego, but that doesn’t mean I was confident. Those are two completely different things. They’re opposites, in fact—the bigger your ego, the lower your confidence, and vice versa.

A big ego may simply show up in different ways. For some people, it makes them arrogant and narcissistic. For others, it makes them shy and meek. In any case, a big ego is over-occupied with controlling the outside world to force certain outcomes and protect you from pain. It’s a trap.

We all sense that the braggart and the coward have no confidence. They derive their sense of self-worth from external things that allow them to cling to a delusional self-concept. Their actions—or lack thereof—are all about them and what they get out of it. It’s a futile game they play and it’s a game that’s, frankly, utterly stupid because it couldn’t possibly work.

True confidence is derived from the inside. It’s something that cannot be taken from you. You move through the world with ease. You operate from a state of abundance which allows you to put your actions in service of something greater.

But let’s take it from the top: What is the ego and how can it grow to a harmful size?

Ego is the Enemy

Your ego is your concept of self that helps you relate to the outside world. It includes your name, your age, height, the number in your bank account, and basically everything you could possibly put on a ridiculously over-stuffed CV.

Since the ego’s job is to define relations, comparison to the outside world is a, if not the, central feature of the ego. Thus, the more it compares, the bigger it gets—which can have devastating consequences.

According to my ego, I am Felix to the outside world. When Felix wants to produce a video with another person who’s known to the outside world as Holly, their egos are highly useful. They help them organise.

They agree it’s Holly’s job to write the first draft of the outline for the next class. Felix revises it, they both record the video together—having separate parts in it—before Felix edits the footage and schedules the finished video for publication.

Our egos tell us what’s our job and what’s not our job. It constraints us within an outside structure. This constraint isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We create it intentionally to support us to do what we want to do. The constraint allows us to act effectively.

Picked apart like this, it sounds pretty silly. Like fish trying to make sense of the water they’re swimming in. But without our egos telling us how we relate to one another and the rest of our environment, we wouldn’t be able to interact with the world at all.

The ego is a practical tool you have, but it is not who you are at your core.

Everything the ego entails is based on something you see, hear, smell, or somehow experience. Since all aspects of the ego are objects of your experience, they cannot be the subject that experiences them. This means their totality, the ego, is different from you.

Whether the ego serves you well or makes you suffer, depends on your ability to wield it—just as any other tool.

One of the ego’s main jobs is protecting your mind from pain. Again, it does this via comparison. The girl you just asked out rejected you? ‘Come on, she wasn’t that cute anyway.’ The ego uses comparison to make yourself look better in your own eyes to reduce the pain of failure.

It might also convince you to never ask the girl out in the first place by telling you that you’re not good enough for her. It protects you from the possible feeling of rejection by making yourself feel small. You feel small, but the ego itself is BIG because it compares too much.

Too many constraints prevent you from acting effectively. The ego keeps you trapped for your own protection.

The ego is also a horrible tool for building self-worth. Since the only thing it does is compare, it can only create a sense of self-worth based on outside accomplishments or failures. But outside success is fickle, it can be taken away from you at any time. It’s a more than unstable foundation.

There are people who like our videos today, but tomorrow they might all be gone. I have no control in that matter whatsoever. If my self-worth depends on likes, any kind of likes, it’s a recipe for anxiety and disaster.

The way out of this trap lies beyond the ego and its comparisons.

Learn to Surrender

The way out of the ego’s grip is an attitude of surrender.

The ego wants to protect you from the outside world to spare you pain in the moment. It desperately tries to control the outcomes by stacking the cards in your favour.

You can’t get rejected if you didn’t ask in the first place. You want admiration? Do something impressive, or maybe better cheat, to make sure you get it. The ego is only looking at the outside world, so that’s what it’s trying to control.

This attitude is futile because it is in no way aligned with reality. You hardly control anything in this world. Stop being delusional about it. You are focusing your energy on the wrong things.

You don’t control if the girl is going to say ‘yes.’ You don’t control if they give you the job. You don’t control if they admire you.

In truth, you never accomplish anything—at least not on your own. Your accomplishments do not solely rely on you. Yes, you contribute. But so does the outside world. You ask her out, she says yes. You apply, they hire you.

You have no right to the fruits of your labour. You only own the labour.

While this thought may sound scary, the flip side offers relief. As you don’t own your accomplishments, you neither own your failures. The outside world always contributes to things going wrong too—and you don’t control anything outside yourself.

You only control your responses and your action. So focus on those and surrender to whatever happens next. Be open and accept it.

This is the path to building a healthy and reliable sense of self-worth. It needs to come from the inside. It needs to have a foundation that no one can destroy or take away from you. Whatever outside success the ego is tracking cannot give you that.

Building Confidence

Your sense of self-worth exists on a spectrum from outside-based to inside-based; in other words, from having a big ego to genuine confidence. Moving along his spectrum entails two things: dissolving the ego and building confidence.

You have an ego, but you are not your ego. This is the crucial insight you need to dissolve it.

Your ego is who you are to the outside world. It is very easy to identify with that, to assume you are the sum of your failures and accomplishments, and all the other characteristics that could be ascribed to you.

But all those things cannot be you since you’re the one experiencing them. You know you didn’t get that job you wanted so badly three years ago. You know you won that trophy in the annual movie & TV quiz last week. You know how tall you are and how much money you make. You are the one who knows. Everything else are the things that you know and, therefore, different from you.

This may sound self-evident. It may also sound royally confusing. But this is how you dissolve the ego. By knowing it’s not you.

You can notice when the ego is at work. You can notice when it compares and makes you feel small or big. You can notice when the ego is trying to protect you because you feel threatened. This mere act of noticing, or being aware, is your way out.

The more aware you are of the comparisons the ego makes, the less you do it.

By noticing the ego’s actions, you take away its power over you. You become aware that the constraints it puts up are not real. You learn to disregard the inner walls that keep you trapped.

This might take discomfort or even a level pain in the moment, but like the ego, these are just things. They aren’t you. You can accept the pain, do what needs to be done, and it will lead you to less pain later down the road.

Another method for dissolving the ego is more straightforward: spend more time in nature.

Why? Because there’s nothing relevant to compare yourself to. Your ego doesn’t care about the sky and the trees and whatever else is crawling through the bush. There is no competition. Being in nature is not about success. As long as you leave your phone at home and don’t post a bunch of selfies—you can just be.

In addition to consciously dissolving the ego, you’ll want to build confidence.

I define confidence as the ability to face uncertainty—and yes, I stole this definition from Dr K. How you build confidence is baked into its definition. The more uncertainty you face in life, the more confident you will become.

But be mindful of the ego’s tricks. It’s going to force the level of uncertainty down by stacking the cards in your favour.

The ego might make you shower that girl you like with inappropriate amounts of attention and even gifts to give her the feeling that she owes you a date. It does that because it cannot bear the possibility of failure. Instead of accepting this unavoidable pain, it opts for controlling the uncontrollable. I already said it and I say it again—this is stupid.

I hate to break it to you: in the end, confidence is built through surviving failure.

If you know you failed in the past and survived, you also know that you will survive the next uncertain situation. You can meet that situation with calm and composure. True confidence is the feeling of ‘whatever happens, it will be fine.’ Ironically, this attitude makes outside success more likely because it allows you to get out of your own way.

Defined like that, confidence is self-worth that truly comes from the inside. It’s not built on outside comparison. It’s not reliant upon anyone’s opinion. It’s not based on temporary success. No one can take away from you that you failed in the past and survived. You simply know—not just theoretically, but on a deep experiential level.

With confidence, you won’t struggle to control something you couldn’t possibly control. There’s no need because you know you’ll survive again. This frees up the energy to focus on the things you can control: your actions and responses.

I found love when I truly didn’t care what would happen next. I just thought, ‘I really like that beautiful Kiwi girl. It’d be nice if she became my friend—and if not, that’s okay.’ As it turned out, she wanted to be my friend too.

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