How do you separate your self esteem and value from your work? As in, not spiraling into “I’m a terrible and stupid person” every time something isn’t handled perfectly.

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The best way is to build a meaningful life outside of work. When your work consumes you, your identity gets entirely wrapped up in it.

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Im sure someone will give a compelling love yourself for you pitch - if that does it for you ignore this. Dont even read it! If it doesnt, here's how i think about it.

So you're right, while you have some vague moral worth we all share or whatever, your self worth comes from what you do, how you act, your skills, capacity, traits, interestingness. Self esteem is return on investment and the investment is your life. You, the investor, want a lot of good ROI relative to risk, like any investor.

When you do one thing a ton, it's easy to make it a huge amount of your self esteem portfolio. You're putting 90% of your waking time into work so work becomes 90% of your portfolio and that makes your portfolio high risk. When work you has a bum week you're in the doldrums. Work you has a bad quarter? Crisis. The answer, as always, is DIVERSIFY.

Sit down and put work aside. What do you like about yourself? You're gonna want to get that up to 50-60% of your self esteem pie ideally, but it's not there yet. That's fine. Find ten things you like about yourself that arent related to work that each can make up a little sliver of the pie, a couple percent. Verbs are better than adjectives but take what you can get. Do you date? Do you exercise? Do you read good books? Do you have a hobby? Are you a welcome regular at a venue or bar? This is not the time to be choosy, brainstorm anything you like about you no matter how small.

Now you're going to want to choose some of those and build them up. Invest time and energy in them. Find or meet people who appreciate them. Take them to the next level. If one feels tapped, you're getting all you can from it, put the excess energy into something else. You dont need one big thing, you need the sum of everything else to outweigh work in your mind.

You're a fund manager in yourself! It's finance and fun! Good luck!

likesmart

Repeat this mantra when you screw up:

I will take only the lesson that is merited from this.

So....

-no spiraling
-no catastrophizing
-no judgments about your self worth

Just...don't make the same mistake AND think about how you can put in place a better process so the same mistake does not occur again.


Focus your emotional energy on learning and improvement, not on beating yourself up.

likesmart

I don’t

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