My Self Worth Portfolio
It's nothing like a financial portfolio
☝️To record this essay, I put on my sexiest voice. I hope you appreciate the effort and the chance to rest your eyes while you listen.
This essay is part of an unplanned trilogy. My hope is that each stands on its own, but if you’d like to start at the beginning, check out the first essay:
The failings of success
As my friend Codin described his role with the company he worked for, and the team that reported to him, the lights of Manhattan skyscrapers winked in the background. They could see me shrinking a little.
“Congratulations on all your success,” I said. “What an interesting swap our lives have made.”
“How do you mean?” Codin asked.
“It’s been almost a decade since I left my very successful career in the fitness industry, and I have yet to be successful again.”
“There are many ways to think about success, Damon. You’re happily married, living an enviable life abroad.”
Six years later, I’m still grappling with his poignant observation. Success is measurable in many ways, but I suspect metrics are not the way. Further complicating matters, the moment we ascribe metrics to self-worth, we set ourselves up for disappointment. Metrics always move in the wrong direction eventually.
The hard aspect to see in all of this isn’t the metrics themselves or how they move. It’s the stories we tell ourselves, and how we attach our sense of self to those stories.
Similar to how headlines can seduce investors, our stories can inflate and deflate our perception of self-worth in unrealistic but believable ways.
These perceptions are based on stories that are not empirically true, but still worthy of consideration.
Potential investments
If the value of self is quantifiable, then we’d be wise to keep a diverse portfolio of self-worth investments. A few categories come to mind.
Relationships
Embodied Integrity
Community Systems
Inner Work
What’s interesting about these is how the presence of other people amplifies each one. None of these is as valuable without the presence of others.
As such, Relationships are a good place to start.
As I’ve mentioned, my role as a good spouse ranks high for me when thinking about my worth. If we had children, they would be another reflection of that worth. We could also include friends and one’s community in this category. There’s a rich opportunity to discover worth from just this one investment.
It’s less about the quantity of connections, although that can matter somewhat, and more about the quality of those connections. For me, it’s about what they are getting out of time spent with me that gives this investment more weight.
Embodied Integrity is a weird one. This is what I mean by that.
In short, it’s this human experience of a body. One’s health practice usually makes the top of the list. Strength and grit probably make the list, too.
As a measure of self-worth, for me, it’s how I manage my health and how those choices positively impact others. At fifty, I can run circles around most 25-year-olds. That’s not pride. It’s just what’s true about the way I seem to be wired, which has more to do with the circumstances of my birth. If anything, I’m grateful.
Community Systems isn’t a repeat of relationships. It’s about the feeder system to our connections. It’s also where we serve, mentor, and find belonging.
It’s obvious at this point: Other people matter as reflections of our worth. What we bring to others is the fuel for what we can feel reflected from those very people. No people? No reflection.
We need a source. It could be a religious community. For me, it’s the local beach volleyball community my wife and I have built. It’s my men’s group, Tolomen, and the local Taco BrosDay meetup.
This one can be tougher for many of us. After childhood, many of us struggle to make and keep friends. Building communities isn’t for everyone. Joining them can be equally nerve-wracking. It’s tough, sure, but cultivating one’s community is just as important as it is tough.
As tough as community systems are, Inner Work may be even harder. I’m not just talking about meditation, prayer, and breath work. I mean the space where we discover meaning and purpose. I don’t mean to shock you, but meaning and purpose are always about other people.
A quick note about trauma: For folks dragging more serious forms of trauma into adulthood, inner work without assistance can be a non-starter. Going in? It can mean pain for those of us in this category. If the challenge of building a community system feels like asking someone to the prom, Inner Work can feel like volunteering to burn from the inside out for those who struggle.
Once, I invited a client who was struggling with anxiety to shift her attention below the neck. Even the thought of moving her attention to her body felt like white-hot fire. She couldn’t even fathom it. There was simply too much pain associated with her body, and I wasn’t able to help her navigate that challenge.
The right coach or, more likely, the right therapist can be useful for such situations.
My purpose is to connect deeply with individuals so that we can solve problems together. This is what came of years of meditation, tons of reflection, and some hard work in purpose discovery.
There are more categories than I’ve listed, I’m sure. These are just the investments where I’m noticing my highest returns. Despite that truth, I still notice a kind of story-forming subroutine running in the background.
Many of these stories can be addressed through Inner Work, but I’m skeptical that anyone lives above their stories all the time.
Even the historic Buddha had intrusive thoughts.
The stories we tell
Narratives get a bad rap these days, like we’re doing something wrong when creating a narrative. I would argue it’s all narrative. Everything that matters to us does so because of the story it tells us about who we are and how we fit into the world.
There are many ways narratives can become problematic, but the one that relates to self-worth is what the Buddhists call attachment. For Buddhists, any form of attachment is unwise. This is so because everything that has the power to rise will also die, including the stories we tell ourselves.
As I keep claiming, self is one of these stories.
It’s one we’re telling ourselves, one we’re constantly editing. Like any story, how we tell that story matters. So does the way in which we hold it. Hold to it lightly, and the story can seem unimportant. Hold too tightly, and changes can feel like death.
Change, the Buddhists will remind us, is as certain as taxes.
Two examples, both around embodied integrity, starting first with how we hold stories, and then how we tell the story. These share so much territory, they are nearly the same concept.
How we hold narratives
This past weekend, a friend lobbied over pancakes that bodyweight scales are worthless and should not be used. I’ve heard this argument before from another woman. I hypothesize that for women in the West, the scale is a figurative and literal arbiter of worth, albeit in reverse. Lower number = higher worth.
There is too much attachment to that number as “self,” and the daily reminder that all one’s efforts are not producing the desired results is a reminder of diminishing self-worth, plus an ongoing failure to improve it
Men tend to see that scale as data, like a bank balance. It’s not representative of all the moving parts in the background. One would be unwise to spend all that money without considering the full scope of pending transactions. Ironically, for men, the bank balance has a commensurate attachment to self.
How we tell stories
For me, there are two stories I can tell myself right now. In one, I’m nearly 51 years old, and falling apart. In the other, I’m a fighter, battling for my freedom.
A year ago, one of my cervical discs collapsed. I lost a lot of strength and, for a time, independence. Through it all, I kept my movement practice. With surgery, perseverance, and time, I regained much of what I lost, physically.
But my movement practice is more principally about the brain for me.
My North Star in the gym is brain chemistry. My movement practice keeps the darkness away. It makes me a more valuable resource to the people in my life.
If my story is only about the performance of this body, then I am losing self-worth. If it’s a story about how I show up in the relationships that matter the most to me, and how I model a wise path to those who know me and care, then my self-worth has just gone up.
Sometimes winning looks like battling. Sometimes, battling feels like losing. That feeling can make it hard to soldier on. It can feel like a kick in the stones of our self-worth.
This is where it can be so useful to have a friend—or a therapist or a coach—who can listen and reflect back what they see happening. Pulling just a little equity from our Relationships investment, it can be skillful to get that outside-in perspective.
There may be another way to look at this.
Unlike financial investments, we can revise the stories about our self-worth portfolio. We can tell the story in a way that’s more accurate about what’s true.
The Invitation
From my friend Codin’s perspective, I was missing the forest for the trees of my own success story. Consequently, I was failing to see my own self-worth story, too.
My wife and I had unshackled ourselves from the golden handcuffs of our cushy careers. We’d liberated ourselves into the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Caribbean beaches of Mexico.
Most critically, we were something valuable to each other.
To someone still in the hustle, that could all look so exhilarating, if not terrifying. What it wouldn’t look like is a failure of success or self-worth.
What I invite you to consider, dear reader, is also what I’m inviting myself to do by writing this essay.
It’s not that we abandon success metrics entirely as a source for self-worth, but that we always remember that it’s all a story. We can rewrite those stories in a way that financial portfolios can’t be rewritten.
We can remind ourselves, or with the help of someone else, of all the ways we’re positively impacting others. We can rewrite the story we’re telling ourselves.
Thanks for reading.
~Damon
Hey, man.
The men’s group I facilitate, Tolomen, has room for more men. We’re mostly deep thinkers, but we do plenty of laughing along the way. It’s a therapy-free men’s group for men suspicious of men’s groups. And it’s damn cheap at $30/month.
If you didn’t catch the essay that inspired this one, I invite you to read that as well. It’s okay that you’re reading them out of order.
Your friend Codin sounds like a gift - May we all be blessed with a Codin in our lives.
Someone who can see our success story when we're too close to it. We're often the worst editors of our own narratives. I am that for sure, Damon.
An angle that becomes increasingly foregrounded for me in the conversation about self-worth and how we develop narratives around their sources is the role of culture and technology.
Culture, being the ever-present backdrop of experience that informs us of norms with which we can orient our behaviors. Technology, mostly in the form these days of algorithmically-driven platforms that incentivize our attention staying attuned to them.
We're swimming in these seas that we can't see like the fish that can't see the water they are always in. Culture is more a battleground these days than they used to be in the States, and technology platforms fragment and feed us stories that bombard our baser psychological structures with constant narratives about where we SHOULD attach our senses of worth.
I think it's wise to begin again, looking within, and looking directly at each other in our real, physical eyes to see how we matter to each other. There self-worth can be found in spades.