What are the signs that my self-worth is conditional?

Yes. Food noise is diet mentality rebranded. It’s the constant mental chatter about what to eat, how much, and what’s forbidden — a signal the body sends in response to food restriction.
Intuitive eating practitioners have coached this for decades under different names: diet mentality, the food police, food obsession. The experience is identical. Only the terminology changed with the rise of GLP-1 medications.

[00:00:03] Welcome to, it’s Beyond the Food Podcast, my sisters. I’m your host, Stephanie Dodier, and today we’re gonna talk about conditional self-worth versus unconditional self worth, and I’m currently traveling right now to buy us. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you’re probably seeing a different background.

[00:00:24] And last weekend I went to All Inclusive Resort, which had been over 15 years, I hadn’t been to one. So it’s quite the experience and it was very interesting to watch myself move through the abundance of food, the all inclusive drinks and the food, and being someone that recovered from 25 years of food restriction to control my weight.

[00:00:57] And 10 years now in the space of intuitive eating, and I wanna say about four years now, what I consider to be normal eater. Which I want to clarify for anyone listening to this intuitive eating is a process, right? It’s a process to recover normal eating behavior. And the end process of intuitive eating is back to normal eating.

[00:01:27] And I’d been there for four years and going to all-inclusive resort, which I had never been to as a normal eater is fascinating to watch my experience and being able to eat when I’m hungry and also when I’m not hungry, and make choices of food because I wanted to try new food that felt appealing to me and eating past fullness and the spirit of abundance and group that we were in and being okay with it.

[00:02:01] And not being aware in the moment that I was okay with it. But instead, when I came back home after the day at the resort, our pass ended at 5:00 PM and catching myself saying to my friend, like, I’m bloated. And I tapped stomach in front of her and saying, I’m bloated because I ate too much and I started giggling and laughing about it, and it’s only when I went back to my room, I’m like, oh my God. Like I naturally innately did not feel shame for eating past fullness. I was totally okay of making fun of myself being bloated and not attaching overeating, eating past full, feeling bloated with my worth. And this what inspired me, this podcast episode here because I now have unconditional self-worth, and that’s what I wanna talk to you about it.

[00:03:02] So let’s get right into it. Before I get to, what’s the difference between conditional self-worth and unconditional self-worth? I wanna make a note on the difference between self-esteem and self-worth. So self-esteem is your evaluation of yourself based on your ability, your achievement, your quality and that can leads to confidence. And it’s your own self regard on these ability, that’s your self esteem now.

[00:03:31] Self-worth is a deep seated belief that you are innately valuable as a human and you are deserving of love, of wellbeing, of respect that you feel quote in common language good enough, regardless of the external circumstance of your achievement, of your ability, of your mistake, of your failure, no matter what happened externally, you quote unquote, feel good enough.

[00:04:16] And I can already sense some of you’s like, Ooh there’s a shiver that went through your bones because probably like I was, it’s not something that you feel that you think you have, because many times you have the thought, oh my God, I’m not good enough, or I’m not doing well enough, or my body is not good enough. I’m eating not good enough. And for me, I was in the state of unconditional self worth up to probably my forty three, forty four birthday when I really started to rebuilt an unconditional self work. It was very intentional. I had to like sit myself using self coaching tools, using thought work, doing the body image work to rebuild and in it sense of self work.

[00:05:20] And I’ll share with you later in the podcast how you can do this. But how do we get to a place where we are in a state of unconditional self-worth?

[00:05:34] And I’ll give, I’ll use myself as an example just for the sake of moving through this. When I was in a state of unconditional self-worth, I attached myself worth. I evaluated, I regarded, when I looked at my worth. I looked at my body size. My body size was the qualifier for it was if I felt quote unquote good enough. And that was probably from the age of 12 to 14 years old to my early forties, and then it became in my twenties and my thirties, it became how much money I made, how big my house was, and what kind of car I had, and my career achievement that is like all these metrics outside of me to evaluate my self worth, my value into this world.

[00:06:30] That was Stephanie 1.0. And how did I get there? In part was through social conditioning. Social conditioning is the process that as a society, we have to train our people, our individual, in order for them to adopt behaviors, belief attitude that makes them blend in to the society, to the culture, to the group.

[00:07:06] So for example of that very simple example is saying thank you, saying thank you, like, and if you have children or you’ve been around children, right? The little toddlers, we have to train them to say thank you when they receive something. Or when somebody sneeze, we say, sorry. And you can even go further into gender based social conditioning, where the boys are getting blue things and the girls are getting pink things.

[00:07:38] We can go even further to say when the boys are socially conditioned, we condition them in a patriarchal society to feel powerful. And one of the thing we tell them is don’t cry. That’s gonna make you look weak. And then to us women, we say, be polite. Follow the rules. Don’t disturb. Do things perfectly. Be there for other people. And in my niche, one of the main element of social conditioning we have to unwind is beauty is your value and you look beautiful through the size of your body. And in the current society format that we are in, it’s thinness, but 150 years ago it would’ve been being fat, but it happens that right now, the beauty standard art in this and your role is to be compliant to those beauty standard, no matter how much effort it takes.

[00:08:44] That’s what will determine your work. Either you achieve the beauty standard or the amount of effort you deploy to achieve those beauty standards.

[00:08:54] So in fact, as women, as people socialize, as women, we are thought to earn our worth based on external things. We are thought to find our worth externally. We are not thought to create it organically or we are not thought that all human beings are born innately worthy. So most human being spend most of their adult life chasing their worth, and based on their social conditioning, they chase different things.

[00:09:38] So I’m gonna narrow the scope of this podcast episode to women because that’s my audience, and we’re gonna look at what does it look like to have conditional self-worth. So I’ll start us back to the body image, right? The example of you, of myself. So thinness, youthfulness, fashionable, following trends. So if you’re chasing or half chase thinness, or if you are afraid of gaining weight, or if you’re afraid of having wrinkle and you feel shame and you use your resources your time.

[00:10:18] To do activity to control the size of your body, or you invest your money in things that will prevent or eliminate flaws and wrinkles and or if you are depriving yourself of doing certain things because you don’t look a certain way, that would be conditional self-worth, and you are investing your time, your resources to do things in order to chase that self-worth.

[00:10:49] If we think about health, for an example, if you attach your word to your health status or your performance of certain health behavior, it will lead you to spend enormous amount of money on supplements or investing in testing of certain health metrics. Not because you choose to, but because you think you have to. Or most simplified part of your life is if you find yourself sick and you’re worth it attached to your health, you may quote unquote, push true because being sick means that you are less than or that something’s wrong with you.

[00:11:49] Now if we compound attaching your self worth to the way your body looks and health, if you’re someone who has both external element to qualify your self worth, it may compound one another. So for an example, if your self worth is attached to your body size and you are not as thin as you quote should be, and you are also pursuing health, not by choice, but by thinking, well, at least if I can’t control the size of my body, I’m gonna be as healthy as I can. I’m gonna prove to the world that I am worthy by being externally performative on all the health habits and the health metrics.

[00:12:26] So I do not appear on top of being fat, being unhealthy. Does that resonate with you? Because for many people in my audience, that’s a very big thing, right? Because when we have conditioned ourself that our worth is conditional and that we need to find things externally and we can’t find it somewhere else, we very often attach it to something else. And we have now a large number of metrics that we need to perform under in order to attempt even to feel slightly good enough.

[00:13:00] I talked about my career earlier. But another way that can show up for you is you, if you are at the mercy of your boss, evaluation of you, or you’re constantly doing things to manage your superiors opinion of you, you make decision even in your personal life to do things, to invest more time at work. So that people who are in control of your career have a good opinion of you.

[00:13:31] Let’s talk about business because I have a lot of health professional who have their own business. If the result of your business make you feel shame and perhaps even makes you feel on and off in your business, like you’re showing up in your business and you don’t show up in your business. If you’re on social media, you’re on social media, you’re off social media, like it’s not regular flow, it’s likely because one of the metric for you is your business result.

[00:14:00] Another example is aging. So I turned 50. One, I don’t even know my number 51. And many, many people when they know my age are like, oh my God. And you’re still pursuing your dream to travel the world because in people’s mind, when you get older right. It is not quote unquote okay or acceptable for you to still pursue what you wanna do or you’re too old to do this. Like you’re the whole this like I live in a house right now with a bunch of other digital nomad and I’m way older than everyone else. And if my word was attached to my age, I would be going through constant mental drama of being twice the age of some of my roommates here. ’cause I have a roommate that’s 25 years old and I’m 51. And many people would not do the lifestyle that I’m doing because it would be constantly reflected to them that they’re quote hold.

[00:15:12] Another example I didn’t cite when we were talking about body image, but I know it’s relevant to many, is the gaining weight, right? Let’s imagine that you have been at a body size that’s fairly regular your whole life, and then you hit menopause, and then you start gaining weight, and then you say things like, I felt so much more confident before menopause, before me gaining weight. Unbeknown to you, you may not have been in a larger body before menopause, but your worth was conditional to you continuing to be thin, right? So when people gain weight and they say, I lost my confidence, that is a fundamental signs that their worth is conditional.

[00:16:04] How do we determine if our worth is conditional? Or is unconditional. I’m gonna give you some sign here. So we talked about weight loss. We talked about weight. If you have those thoughts about your weight, if you’re afraid of gaining weight, a lot of folks I know that will resonate with a lot of you are thining on the edge of weight, neutral health behavior, and intuitive eating, but they’re resisting because they’re afraid of gaining weight.

[00:16:37] Your worth is conditional, right? That’s a fundamental sign of it. And if you feel that anxiety, which is totally normal. Because again, women are socially conditioned to attach their work externally and you’re constantly feeling anxious. But however you are learning the intuitive eating process or you are doing the body image work, if you’re not working alongside to body neutrality and yourself or that anxiety will constantly be with you, and I’ll come back for all of you that are health professional or coaches listening to this. In the next segment I’ll talk about why it is so important for you to have the skillset to do this work, right? The self worth, the relearning, how to create organic self-worth with your clients. So just hold on for a minute here. I wanna get through that section of the signs of conditional self-worth.

[00:17:42] So any type of performance driven value that you feel worthy only when achieving this or that, or working hard or being productive, an inability to rest. If you’re struggling with resting and you struggle to relax to quote unquote do nothing. That’s another cardinal signs of conditional self-worth perfectionism, or the opposite, the fear of failure where you set yourself some completely unrealistic standards because you wanna avoid feeling the shame and feeling unworthy.

[00:18:12] Constant comparison. That’s another sign that I see all the time with my client. And again, that can be in many different circumstances. It is body comparison, that it is eating, behavior comparison, business comparison, career comparison, house comparison, car comparison, how much money you have versus your friends. That’s again, a sign of conditional self-worth.

[00:18:44] Now, how do we change this? Right, because when we talk about wellbeing and health, I just wanna do a slight component. I did a reel a few days ago around the last podcast episode in fact was about body positivity and my thoughts on why body positivity. It was time for the movement, the hashtag body positivity, where it was about personal development to end because it leads us to a place where we’re not addressing health and wellbeing. That includes, in this case, self-worth work. So we leave people overperforming external health-promoting behavior and not working on what caused a lot of mental and emotional disturbance that creates the stress, that creates the anxiety, that creates the guilt, the shame, yeah, we’re going to the gym three times a week and, and we’re eating fruits and vegetable, but we’re constantly feeling anxious because we’re not feeling good enough and we fall into pattern of perfectionism.

[00:19:57] Both of these works of the health promoting behavior and the self-work work needs to be done alongside to each other. So earlier when I mentioned if you are a health professional, it’s important that you have the skillset to assess both and to clearly be able to explain that to your client and lead them into the way of rebuilding their self work and evaluating their self-worth, and even their self-esteem organically.

[00:20:32] So what does that look like to rebuild that self-worth? The number one thing where we need to start is unlearning social conditioning based on your intersectionality and every client in front of you will have a different identity and different metric for their self word. And if you’re someone listening to this doing personal work, your identities, your race, your gender, your social status, your economical background, where you live, your culture. All that will lead you to have very specific external metric for that forms your conditional self worth. And we need to look at that. We need to understand social conditioning. You need to investigate your individual external metric that got you to this place of having conditional self-worth. And then we need to change the belief system, change that social conditioning. And for me, in my world, that’s cognitive behavior coaching. That’s thought work, that self-coaching that will help you change the belief that because you’re a woman, your worth is attached to your beauty or your ability to meet the beauty standards.

[00:21:53] The other magical ingredient that needs to be in your recipe of rebuilding your self-worth organically is self-acceptance. So this is where the intersection with body image is unnegotiable. As a woman in a western patriarchal society, if you continue to attach your word to your beauty it will forever land you in a place of conditional self worth because you will not be able to accept yourself because your body doesn’t meet the standards.

[00:22:31] So self-acceptance is critical. Self-compassion. That’s how we rebuild. That’s why every time you have a thought in your brain tells you, oh my God, you’re not good enough. It’s not about fighting that thought. It’s about meeting that thought with acceptance and with compassion. And then the last piece to me is alignment of your behavior and your action with your personal value.

[00:23:02] So this is a stage where we’re actually embodying having innate self-worth and unconditional self-worth, and we take action as such. So if you’re a coach or a provider with this, you need to understand this and you need to be able to bring that in into your coaching.

[00:23:19] Otherwise, you may encourage unconsciously your client to maintain conditional self-worth. Classic example of this is if you are coaching women and you are supporting them, encouraging them in their weight loss goal in an effort to feel good enough, or I know for me as a nutritionist, I, for three years of my career, I massively negatively impacted my client because I taught that we needed to have quote unquote perfect eating right, and we needed to eat only real food, right? I build the external validation from a health and nutrition perspective with my client by setting the standard as the professional and the leader in this part of their life and.

[00:24:14] When you learn the skills to do this, you obviously help your client rebuild intrinsic innate self-worth and teach them the skill to constantly maintain an organic self-worth. You end up doing work with your client so profoundly at such a deep level the transformation that your client get when they work with you is life changing? It is life changing because you provide such a level of transformation. ’cause you’re literally teaching them to have unconditional software. No matter what happens to them, no matter what the universe throws at them, they’re gonna feel good enough. And you end up working with client longer and you end up charging more because of the level of transformation you’re providing your client.

[00:25:11] What can you do for your next step? If you’re listening to this and it’s your first time in my world and you’re not familiar with thought work, with self coaching, with even body image, go through the last maybe a hundred episode find, podcast 441 where I talk about a concept that I teach, which is the Good girl trauma that’s gonna help you understand socialization even more and really put some words to things you are experiencing in your life. Podcast 442 is another good one where I talk about reframing body image thoughts. It’s very specific to the world of body image, but that the teaching can be applied to anything.

[00:26:00] And I wanna give you, again, from a free perspective, I wanna give you a quick and dirty way of the next step for you beyond just listening to podcast episode, investigate as I mentioned earlier, your current external lever metrics of, self-worth, and then the journey will have to include some intentional thinking. One of my favorite thought is all human beings are born innately worthy. And for me, I added a, a tag at the end of that. When I started my journey of building innate self-worth I added the following. All human being are born innately worthy at any body size, because for me, one of my biggest metric of self-worth was the size of my body.

[00:26:52] So at the beginning, I tagged that along to that intentional thought. Now, what’s really important to understand is we need to put that intentional thought on a thought ladder. This is something that I teach within my program because when you have unconditional self-worth and you’re beginning this work thinking that you are unconditionally worthy, innately worthy, it’s very traumatizing to your nervous system. It’s like, ugh. We go through a process of rejection. So we need to titrate that thought through a thought ladder process.

[00:27:51] If you wanna do this work and you’re ready to invest in this work, the place for you to start would be the groundwork, which is the Beyond the Food Method foundational work. You’ll find the link into the show note for this, and that’s the baseline work where we teach the fundamental skills and do the baseline work. If you wanna take that to the next level. That would be the non diet coaching certification, where we take those skill set to the level where you can become a professional and lead other people into this work. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next podcast.

[00:28:10] If this resonates with you, the next step is the groundwork, my Beyond the Food Foundational Program for Health Professional, ready to go beyond the food and rethink how they approach nutrition eating and health behavior starting with themselves. You can go to www.stephaniedodier.com/groundwork and join us now.