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Are you worthy?

Posted on by philipdodson

We live in a world where our worthiness is constantly challenged and, we as individuals, are always questioning this in our heads. The society has created this challenge for all of us.

Worthiness

What is our worthiness based on? Not just by society, but how do we internally justify our worthiness?

This whole thing of feeling worthy is such a big thing and it has such a huge impact on our lives.

I am reading a book at the moment called ‘The Happiness Advantage’ by Shawn Achor. He talks about the fact that society wrongly believes that ‘success leads to happiness’. Where all of his and others research points to the fact that is ‘happiness leads to success’

Success is measure in many different ways, but typically success is always measured by numbers or how big something is or by achievement. This then leads to deciding whether or not we are worthy, whether or not we are a success.

So how many followers you have on Twitter, friends on Facebook, how many ‘likes’ your Instagram #selfie got. Then we’ll look at the title on your business card, how many A* GCSE’s you got, how big the car is, the size of your house, the labels you wear and the list goes on. The achievements that you can rack up and what you have done.

These will be the measures that others use to judge us by and then we can add on all the internal things that we will add ourselves, driven by our fear of what others think of us.

So we’ll compare our pay with others or wealth in general and then determine just how worthy we are or not.

This is serious stuff, as it will effect our sense of self-worth, our self confidence and will ultimately lead to judging ourselves against others. This will create this false truth that others are more important, or better, or more worthy of something because of it.

We have all been guilty of thinking that a ‘successful’ wealthy business person is more important or better than us. Or someone who society has told us to judge as being more handsome/beautiful is a better and more worthy person.

Our society is so infected with this damaging way of measuring success or failure, worthiness or not. It is having a huge impact on peoples mental and physical well-being.

The fact is that it is all a load of bullshit. We are all human beings, we are all as good and worthy as anyone else. The size of your salary, wealth, car, house, tits, the labels you wear, the number of followers, or any other achievement based measure is all irrelevant.

These shallow measures are a curse on our whole society and it is time to stop supporting this system and time to stay true to your values.

The fact is there is no right or wrong in life, after all, if there was the definitive rule book or manual for life, then Amazon would be selling it by the millions of copies.

Society imposes these measures on us and we don’t have to accept them. We need to stop caring about what others think, how others judge us does not matter.

As Brene Brown says in her book ‘Daring Greatly’, we are already worthy. No amount of stuff, achievements etc will make us any more worthy than someone else.

We need to start off with sorting our own minds and we need to start telling ourselves that we are worthy and we are equal to others. Then we need to stop judging others and we need to start viewing everyone else as another worthy human being.

Then we need to stop measuring our ‘success’ by these shallow things. We need to realise that success is a personal thing, where there is no right or wrong. We can define our own measure of what success is.

After all at the end of our lives, we will not look back on the stuff we owned, or the number of followers we had, or how big our salary was. We will look back on the legacy that we are leaving, the impact that we have had on others, the people we’ve met and the moments that we’ve had with them.

It is about being happy, building the life that we want and creating something that we leave behind. We all need to make our own personal difference.

So next time you look at your payslip or the number of friends you have on Facebook, realise none of that matters, it can’t improve your happiness and you are already a worthy human being. Chase your dreams and build your own life that makes you happy.

Let’s get 2015 started

Posted on by philipdodson

You might have looked at the title and thought, has this bloke lost the plot, it’s February 5th not January 5th!!!

We’ll I have to admit I’ve had better starts to a year to be honest. 2nd week of January, my knee swelled up like a football, the redness, the pain….yes I knew immediately it was a gout attack. Now for those who’ve never suffered from gout, imagine a really, really, really nasty pain and then times that by 10. It is without doubt the most miserable thing I’ve ever experienced. I have not had a bad attack for many years, as I have been careful and tried to cure it through changes in diet etc etc.

Unfortunately, without realising it, I have not been looking after myself, so it’s all self-inflicted. Anyway after a week or so of being laid up with a very swollen sore knee, it decide to move into my foot and toe too. So another week of being laid up followed.

Thankfully, I have some good people in my network and people helped covering the business. So Last week of January arrived and on the Monday I hobbled back to work.

Then the next bit of the nightmare start to 2015 arrived, in shape of a phone call from my Mum in France to tell me that my Dad had passed away at lunchtime, thankfully in his sleep and without pain.

He had been unwell for sometime, so while it wasn’t a shock, but even so it still is very upsetting.

By the way I’ll get to the point in a minute and I am not writing this so that you feel sorry for me.

So the last few days have been spent still recovering from the dreaded gout and sorting out all the stuff with the family and taking time to grieve about my father.

So Tuesday, I finally got back to the hub and back to working a ‘normal’ day again.

The point of all of this is, that bad things happen in life, thankfully no where near as often as we fear and anticipate and it is how we react to them is so important.

It will obviously take a while to heal from the loss of a parent or someone very close, but it is also for me a motivator too. What I mean by that is that losing a parent brings into focus your own life, as a parent myself, and it makes me realise in the natural order I am next. Therefore, it is time to really focus on getting on with my life and get on with doing all the things that I want to achieve.

The other thing in all of this is that you can either wallow in the bad things or just say that these things happen, you can’t control them, just accept and then get on. We can all choose what mood or attitude to have when things go wrong.

So I am super positive about 2015, I know that my gout will go away soon, I know that I have to get back on the focus on my health and looking after myself. I am determined, which I know my father would have wanted, to use his passing as a motivator to me to push myself and get on with life.

My father died at age 86, he had a great life, he was mainly happy, always able to laugh and not take life too seriously. He didn’t suffer and he spent his last Christmas together with all his family and grand children. He didn’t chase material things and money, he focused on the important things in life. Even in his final days he still was able to laugh and joke, including his pleasure of persuading the hospital to let him have some beers.

So whatever, you are up against, it will pass and we all get just that one opportunity to make it happen, don’t be an extra in your own film, step out of the shadows and become the star.