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Our internal sense of being good enough and worthy of love and belonging is one of the strong traits that can heavily influence our life trajectory and how we handle challenging situations. My guest today is an expert who focuses on helping people discover their self-worth and be their own heroes. Dr. Adia Gooden is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in treating people of color through individual group and couples therapy. Her TEDx talk on cultivating unconditional self-worth has gained over 70,0000 views. Throughout today’s episode, we dive into what self-worth is, how it relates to overcoming mental health challenges, and what we can do to develop our self-worth and ultimately be our own heroes.
Show Notes
Unconditional Self-worth – When Adia was a child, she had struggled with social interactions, and that made her try to be perfect in many aspects, and it ultimately made her feel unworthy. Later in life, Adia realized that many people are trying to prove their worth with achievements, which made them struggle with self-worth. We talk about the story of Adia coming to this realization about unconditional self-worth.
Self-esteem and Self-worth – Adia talks about how these two concepts differ from each other, how they affect our lives and our feelings.
Depression and Self-worth – Depression is one of the leading causes of disability, and low self-worth is one of the factors that work as a catalyst to depression. Adia talks about how low self-worth contributes to depression and how to reduce the impact of low self-worth.
The Four Practices – Adia recommends four practices that help us improve our self-worth. We dive deep into each of these practices and how we can implement them in our lives.
Being our own Hero – When our life struggles sometimes lead us to feel unworthy about ourselves, we tend to get caught up in a victim mentality. We dive into Adia's concept of being our own hero, which helps us get out of that victim mentality and empower ourselves.
Contact Dr. Adia Gooden
Website: dradiagooden.com
TEDx Talk: ted.com/talks/adia_gooden_cultivating_unconditional_self_worth
Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unconditionally-worthy-podcast/id1551723745
Mentioned in the episode
WHO fact sheet on Depression: www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression
Bobbi's Takeaways
I hope that you could feel and hear her passionate enthusiasm in that conversation. She shared so many great pieces of wisdom, and I had to challenge myself to narrow it down to my three insights for thriving. Here they are;
Take off the backpack that we sometimes carry with us over things that we've done in the past. And sometimes those things are decades in the past, but set the backpack down and unpack it, and really look at it with fresh and compassionate eyes. If your best friend were carrying that backpack around, and he or she shared it with you, what sort of compassion would you bring to that conversation? And don't you deserve that same level of compassion that you would give to a friend?
Related to the first one. But we can learn to carry the wisdom with us into the future, and not the pain and the burden, the choices and the experiences that we had when we were younger might not be the choices that we would make today. But they have given us our current wisdom. So learn from it, and carry that with us. The four practices of unconditional self-worth, number one, forgive yourself. And clearly, this can sometimes be challenging. That's why I really encourage you to check out dr ideas, course, and her ebook, but forgive yourself for self-acceptance. And this doesn't mean that we don't want to grow or that we don't want to continue to develop. But like she said, we can do that without making it a condition of loving ourselves.
Be there for yourself. And it makes me sad when she noted that sometimes we could abandon ourselves in those moments when times get tough. And that's probably the moment when we absolutely need ourselves the most to show up.
Connect to supportive people. Think about those people who give you love and support, and I love how she said it. It's not like we're outsourcing our love to those people, right, we still have to give ourselves love, but we can accept the love from them. And conversely, if we are unfortunate enough to have those people in our lives that don't give us that kind of support. That's okay, but maybe we don't share our dreams with them or our goals. And if it gets if it's toxic to her point, then, of course, you know setting boundaries is key to that.
