Finding self-worth

Its 5AM and my brain is buzzing with thoughts. My fight or flight regime is in full spin, cortisol by the roof and my body is chained by the warmth blanket of overnight sleep. I kinda feel turned on but deep inside I can feel that something is wrong. I have been here. The moment I will get out of the bed, I ll start to get exhausted, bit by bit. Not immediately but soon after the reality will hit me in the face. What woke me up? A billion things I wanna do, I wanna be, I wanna make, I wanna build. This anxiety of fighting with time is secretly exhausting all my power reserves. It is not obvious at the first sight. It seems like energy but actually I am burning it from the wrong source. I keep asking myself. Why I want this? Why I have to keep chasing the endless things I wanna be? Why I constantly thrive to be better every day? Can’t I just rest and not feel guilty for doing so? Deep down I am aware it is actually huge insecurity that is driving my thrive for excellence. Is it bad? Once your over-reach certain point, it is more harmful than helpful. Because this sneaky bitch, this feel of insecurity that has ignited my drive many years ago, is actually killing my body inside now. As the day goes by, my digestion gets worse, my cravings for sugar and junk food increase and only thing I have left at the end of the day is tired body and depleted will that has been resisting all the body temptations all day. I am exhausted yet not satisfied. Although I have completed everything I wanted, my inner voice, my internal judge always reminds me that I could have done more. I could have been more. I know, that something is wrong and I have to change it, but I do not know how. I go to bed, tired as hell and I know, that the burning excitement in the morning is fake. Fake that keeps burning my batteries to the bone until there is nothing left. I have to start facing those insecurities that relentlessly keep me going otherwise in years ahead, there wont be much left.

But how?

I have recently realised that I have very unhealthy relationship with myself. Something I have discovered a year ago, but took me another year to decipher what it actually means and what I can do about it. In my retrospectives and through conversations with my dear friend, we have discovered that I considered myself as someone who has no talent. That most of my adult life I have convinced myself that the only thing I have is hard work. And as long as I will work hard, I deserve that love of that internal voice, the judge. Now I know that it is total bullshit, that I fuc*ing awesome in several domains but I had to convince that judge to think that too. This “work hard” pattern has been imprinted in my mind by the patterns formed in my childhood. Both my mother and my father, although they did their best and I love them, installed in me couple of unhealthy patterns that drove most my adult life and got me where I am. They never meant to harm me, but they are humans too with all their flaws and insecurities taken from their childhood. One of those patterns is a pattern from my father. Something he kept repeating every time I have underperformed in tennis. Here is the translated quote:

“With this approach, you will never achieve greatness”

Every time I hear this, I still feel strong emotion. He meant you must work hard, otherwise you will be nothing in life. But is this really true? I mean we all have to work hard, but what if my childish brain translated that there is no other way than hard work. All day, every day. And if I don’t do that, I don’t deserve love. Of course it is one of many patterns I am now working on, but honestly over the years I have learned, that 80/20 is much better principle :). That working smart, with joy and fun, creatively, finding path of least resistance, is much better than working hard like a field horse. It is phrases like these that formed relationship with myself and gave the enormous power to my internal judge. I now know, that the principle my father was trying to teach me had a good merit, but was poorly interpreted. Now it is up to me to go and convince my mind, that this principle is false. By inner engineering I am on a good path to fix that. It will take a while but I can already feel, that I am on a good path of finding my own self-worth.