Confessions of Self Worth – Part 2
www.TheRenaissanceMom.com
Hey!
Thanks for coming back. It's great to see you again!
Have you started your '30 Days to Renaissance' journey yet? See the sidebar to sign up.
You never know your full impact.
When I was in one of my college law courses, we talked about ‘intervening negligence’. The scenario was that a cat on a window ledge knocked over a flower pot, which plummeted some 10 stories to the ground below, where it shattered, a bicycle then blew a tire and caused a chain reaction-type series of events that eventually led to a 3-car pileup and a death.
The question was, who was ultimately at fault?
I’m not going to tell you the answer (partly, because I can’t remember) – it doesn’t matter anyway. What I remember from that scenario is exactly what I mentioned at the head of this post: You can never fully know your impact.
Some chance encounter by a cat somewhere left a guy dead. I’m sure that his family didn’t expect that. And I’m sure that no one could have predicted the outcomes – or the potential outcomes.
Others have referred to this as the “butterfly effect” – a chaos theorem about how the beating of a butterfly’s wing on one continent has the potential to change the weather elsewhere. It’s an interesting theory that is more relevant to human behavior than we might think.
For example, the other day, I got an email that put me in an incredibly good mood. It caused me to send a tweet to the person that sent the email. At the same time, that person was engaged in a not-so-groovy convo with someone intent on attacking him. It wasn’t until AFTER my tweet that I saw this discussion blazing. In retrospect, I’m sure he thought I was sending him good vibes in light of the flame war that was going on, but in reality I wasn’t.
Does that make the good vibes any less valuable? No. In fact, he might have thought them MORE valuable, given the context (that I knew nothing about).
It’s about what we value. In the moment that we find value in it.
That smile, frown, wink, glare or other innuendo you send out into the world can have any kind of value to the person that is on the receiving end of it.
And we can NEVER know how far our impact is felt.
We have a few of choices:
1. Choose the lowest possible value.
2. Choose the best possible value.
3. Chose something along the spectrum between the two.
As business owners, we justify the bulk of our value as humans in the work that we do – our ‘tangible’ contribution to the workaday world.
This is such horrifying shame.
It’s why people end up talking about who they are in terms of the work they do, rather than the life they live and how they contribute to society.
It’s why moms feel guilty about not being a better mom when they scold their children in front of their parenting peers, and even more guilty about having to carve time out of their work schedule to tend to those children with Dr. appointments, soccer games, and back to school shopping.
Instead, why not choose the higher end of the spectrum?
Instead of assuming that what we do (or more to the point, who we are) has little impact in the world, why not decide that we are creatures of significance?
Why not attribute to ourselves the value we rightfully deserve? We may not ever know that the smile we gave to the officer this morning put him in a better mood. We may not know that his better mood kept him from writing a ticket to a speeder, and instead just gave him a warning. We may never know that the warning kept that speeder from getting angry with his kids when he got home.
Or not.
But why not just live that way?
So instead, let’s give ourselves more credit for the good things we do and stop knocking ourselves around when we’re not quite hitting the mark. This isn’t a license to get lazy- since we as hardworking entrepreneurial moms rarely get a day off in the first place!
But let’s stop questioning our value and just ASSUME that we make a difference. We are important, significant, and NEEDED to keep our businesses, our lives, and our families running like a well-oiled machine….
…because we ARE. We DO make a difference. Every snotty nose you wipe is one less bout of pink eye. Every business meeting is food in the mouths of our kids, and clothes on their back – and the co-pays or deductibles for those doctor visits. Every new client makes it easier to take a day off later. Every day off makes it less stressful to tackle those big client projects when we return.
We are important, significant, and NEEDED to keep our businesses, our lives and our families running like a well-oiled machine.
As parents, we sometimes don’t realize HOW important we are until some 20 years after the kids are birthed. I remember growing up thinking that my Mom was so uncool, and didn’t have a clue – as I’m sure most kids do. I also remember fighting with her constantly. It wasn’t a great childhood. But when I ‘grew up’ I got a clue myself.
I’ve often said that when I moved to Utah, that 1752 mile distance was the best thing to come between me and Mom. It gave me the space I needed to figure out who I was, and how to be a parent to my own kid. I was able to embrace my own self-worth, and stand on my own a bit. When I came back to Michigan, kid in tow, I remember sharing with my Mom how grateful I was that she raised me to be so independent.
Now I miss her differently and have a different kind of gratitude. She’s been dead for a couple of years now, and I miss the opportunity to get a second opinion from ‘Dr. Mom’ or have an extra set of hands when the kids are sick. That’s a gratitude she’ll never know.
This past year, I’ve changed my approach. I’ve decided instead that I need to ASSUME my kids will be grateful and live my life that way. It’s not a matter of being arrogant. It’s actually an inspiration to me to hold me more accountable in the ways I am a Mom and business owner.
Because I may never know for sure what lessons my kids will take away, why assume it’s the bad stuff? Especially since my definition of ‘bad’ may not even jibe with theirs.
The result? I’ve stopped worrying so much about whether or not I’m a bad mom, or a bad business owner. I can look more ‘logically’ at business situations and get stuff handled. I can also stop worrying about being ‘too emotional’ with my kids. Kids want us to be emotional, to sometimes dote, to sometimes kiss their boo-boo’s, to sometimes just sit and have a good cry with them.
There’s nothing wrong with either, and it’s helped me to find my own balance between the two. And by assuming I have value, others do too. Which ties back directly to our lesson from Part 1: If you don’t believe you have value, how will anyone else?
The next step is to stop worrying about how other people value you (or don’t), and value yourself, regardless. One feeds the other.
And remember Dr. Seuss: ‘Those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.’
Or something like that.
I just work here.