Because You are Worth It

- BY NEHA

Have you ever thought, ‘If only I could get this job, I would be happy’ or ‘I will be happy when I get married to my sweetheart’ or ‘I will be happy if I clear the entrance exam this year’ or ‘I can’t tell you how happy I will be if I get the opportunity to work in New York’?

It is great to have dreams and goals in life. In fact, we all must have one, if not several. Something that makes us look forward to the future with excited anticipation and stokes the fire within us to work towards what we desire.

However, ultimately what we all want in life is to be ‘HAPPY’. Happiness is in reality our fundamental goal. Therefore, given how imperative happiness is to us, is it prudent to make it conditional and dependent on the achievement of something in life?

What if you do not get that job or do not get married to that one person you have set your heart on or are unable to get a good rank in the exam? Does this mean you are doomed to be unhappy and resign yourself to a life full of despondency?

Notable novelist C.S. Lewis once said, “Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”

Before I proceed further, let me be clear on one thing - I am neither advocating complacency nor implying that achievement of your desires is immaterial. Instead, what I am trying to say is that you must work towards what you want but from a positive standpoint, not from a ‘I need this to happen or my life will be wrecked’ attitude.

In my own experiences I have observed that people, who were the least emotionally attached to the outcome of a particular event or relationship in their lives, were not only the ones who invariably got what they really desired but were also the ones who were truly aware of their self-worth. The knew that even if things currently in their lives did not exactly shape up in the way they want them to, they will still be fine, because they considered themselves worthy of all the good things in life and one failure or disappointment did not have the power to define the limits of their worthiness, in any which way whatsoever.

I have been very competitive all throughout, right from my schooling days. I disliked seeing anyone get better grades than me or secure a higher rank than me. Basically, I always sulked if someone outdid me. This same competitiveness continued in me when I started working. I just had to have the best-written report in the team. While my competitive attitude made me learn from my mistakes (after I got past my negative knee-jerk reaction and sulking) and improve on them whenever I felt that my work had not been up to scratch, it started affecting my emotional well-being. I would be happy if what I did turned out to be the best, but in the event my work turned out to be mediocre, I would feel low for several days and drive myself crazy thinking about all the things I could have done but didn’t do. The long and short of it is that the quality of my academic and later professional performance was inextricably linked to how worthwhile I thought I was.

Most of us have heard or read that happiness should stem from within us and not be dependent on externalities that we have little or no control over. I too had read this statement a myriad times in the past but always passed it over as philosophical mumbo-jumbo. However, certain experiences (the kinds that leave you in that weird powerless place in life where you wish you were in-charge of your feelings) made me want to test the veracity of this often advocated preaching. And you know what, it works! When I consciously decided to be happy irrespective of what was happening around me or in the least, not let seemingly negative incidents pull me down, I started feeling a whole lot better. What’s more, by not getting perturbed about the unwanted events, I started getting better insights on how to improve them. Perhaps the insights on how to ameliorate a bad situation were always there, they were just pretty damn hazy to me earlier.

In reality, it is never truly that job/person/rank/promotion we are after. What we are after, what we truly desire, is that ‘feeling’ - the feeling of being ‘WORTHY’. It is when we feel kind of unworthy, incomplete and broken inside, that we desperately start looking for outside events to validate our worth and thereby strongly attach our overall sense of worthiness to the outcome of such events. When we truly realize and acknowledge our self-worth, failures of any kind no longer shatter us.

So, rather than wanting something in order to experience worthiness, why not simply start believing and feeling we are worthy NOW – worthy of love, worthy of success, worthy of everything great life has to offer. Not only does this put us in the driving seat by making us in-charge of our own happiness, it helps us approach life and the not-so-pleasant experiences we all encounter, in a manner where we gain such amazing insights, not only regarding the situation at hand but also into ourselves.

In my own personal experience, the easiest way to feel good and know that the Universe thinks I am worthy of happiness is by being grateful. Consciously and deliberately expressing gratitude for what I have been blessed with and continue to be blessed with, made me realize of all the wonderful things I have in my life currently, which in course of time I had begun to take for granted.

Is my life perfect now? No. In fact, far from it. But am I fretting over the imperfect bits? Not at all, because I trust that everything will pan out nicely. In the meantime, I continue being grateful for all that I have been blessed with and deliberately look out for all the little blessings that I receive on a daily basis (we all do, it’s just a matter of being open to acknowledging the tiny little blessings and not brushing them off as no big deal).

Make being grateful a part of your daily routine. Express gratitude for every small thing that makes you feel even a teensy bit nice, no matter how mundane it seems to you (like getting a 5% discount on a movie ticket or reaching home on time to watch your favorite show or getting no traffic jams on the road, etc). You do not have to shout out ‘THANK YOU’ from the rooftop (you may if you really want to), just mentally acknowledging and feeling grateful for what happened shall suffice.

I am not a big fan of advertisements. I generally switch channels if an advert comes up or simply mute the volume. While I understand it is because of the advertisements that I am watching a particular show on television, I generally find majority of them uninteresting and their catchphrases quite inane. However, there is one product marketing tagline, which I am sure all of you have heard, that perfectly sums up this entire post. So next time you are feeling down and out, remember the tagline of a famous cosmetic brand – “you are worth it!”