The Work-Worth Pattern: How to Stop Tying Your Value to Your Work

Most high achievers are completely exhausted, but taking a vacation or working fewer hours never actually solves the problem. That's because burnout isn't just physical tiredness—it's what happens when your entire self-worth is tied to your daily productivity.

In this episode, I break down the "Work-Worth Pattern," why we get hooked on performance , and my own story of using stimulants and overwork to run from myself until my life completely blew up.

What you'll get from this one:

• Why conventional self-care hacks fail to fix a performance-based identity 
• The hidden roots behind why you feel guilty the moment you stop working 
• Three questions to ask yourself to start separating your human value from your job title

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, why do so many of us struggle with tying our self-worth to our productivity or our sense of self to our job performance? Well, I have a lot of theories behind it. In this episode, we're going to be breaking down why I think this happens. We're going to be breaking down the number one pattern that I see as a result of doing this. Going to break down how it showed up for me in my life, and then give you some practical tips of how you can start breaking free from this pattern if it's something you're experiencing. What is the work worth pattern? The work worth pattern, from my perspective, is a pattern that shows up when you have learned unconsciously to tie your value as a human being to your job performance, to your productivity, to something outside of you. Okay, and this is really common. And how this shows up depends on the area of life that it's showing up in. The way it shows up in your relationships is maybe it's hard for you to be present at home. Typically, you can't be where your feet are. So even if you're physically somewhere, mentally you're working. This is really common for high achievers and CEOs and people in executive level positions. Maybe it's hard for you to just hang out with people for the sake of hanging out with them. Maybe you feel like you always have to be doing something productive. It's hard for you to create space for friends and important relationships in your life, family members, because you feel like if you're not working, then you're falling behind. Maybe you have some issues with being open and receiving compliments from people you love. It's hard for you to feel emotional or to hold space for emotions. And maybe you just feel kind of distant and separated from life. And for health, this area of life, it's gonna show up in similar ways, but different. It's gonna show up you feeling guilty in your body when you're not working. You're gonna feel dysregulated. Maybe you're gonna feel burned out, exhausted, drained. You're gonna maybe feel like you're trudging through mud. Um, maybe you're gonna feel like things that are good for your health aren't a priority, like basic habits like going to bed on time. Maybe you're mindlessly scrolling on your phone, maybe you indulge in a lot of substances like alcohol or marijuana or caffeine. You know that you're excessively consuming things that are helping you avoid certain emotions. If that's showing up for you, then this pattern is definitely relevant in that area of life for you. And then mentally, really, it's it's pretty simple how this shows up. There's just constant self-criticism. You're constantly dealing with a voice in your head that's making you feel like you have to be a machine and produce, produce, produce in order for you to earn joy and luxury and rest. Okay, so regardless of how this is showing up for you, there is a way that you can shift this and change this. However, it's important to talk about where this really comes from. So, as you can probably guess, a lot of it comes from our childhood. Okay, from the time we're zero, from the time we're seven, we're a sponge for unconscious belief systems. Those belief systems form our perspective of ourselves and the world around us. I want you to imagine if you had to wear glasses and you had the wrong prescription, right? Even though the stuff behind the lens has always been there, if you don't have the right percep prescription, you're not going to see things clearly. Okay, that's kind of what happens whenever we form beliefs about ourselves and about the world that aren't necessarily true. Okay, so we're just been we've been stumbling around through life, not knowing that we can change our prescription, that we can change the glasses. Okay, so if you have this work worth pattern, that means that the way that you view yourself in the world is skewed. And it's not your fault. Before you have the capacity to make different decisions, you learn from your parents, from society, that your worth as a human being is tied to what you do. And that's just not true. Social media doesn't help with this. While social media is great for things like this, where I can talk to you guys and share my heart and help make sure you're not making the same mistakes I did. It's also easy for us to compare ourselves and for us to constantly be looking at the highlight reels of other people's lives and feeling like we're behind. I feel like social media causes a lot of FOMO, fear of missing out. That's where it comes from is external conditioning. And what happens is when we gain these beliefs about ourselves that cause us to think that our value comes from what we do, that manifests as the behaviors that we talked a lot about before, like people pleasing, avoiding, overachieving, these things that cause us to abandon ourselves because we think that once we achieve a certain amount of things, we're gonna feel good about ourselves. And that's the number one trap right there, is thinking that once we accomplish a certain amount of things, we're finally gonna be settled and happy with ourselves. That is a lie, and that is what I call destination disease. Essentially, this pattern develops when your brain confuses external validation with internal safety. When your brain starts to connect the dots of if other things validate me, if I'm validated by my job title, the amount of money I make, the love from other people, then I can finally feel safe. So it's an if-then mentality. If I do this, then I feel a certain way. That's the root cause. Also, there's a psychological reason for this too. It feels good when we accomplish stuff, it releases dopamine. Dopamine is our reward system in our brain. It's what makes us feel pleasure, it makes us feel good about ourselves, and that stuff can get addicting. We can become addicted to success and validation. And for me, the work worth pattern showed up because I grew up in two separate households. One household was helicopter parents, they watched my every move, they made me feel guilty when I was resting. I had a stepmom who constantly overworked herself, and both my sides of my family just really had a hard time making money. So no matter which household I was at, I learned that it wasn't really safe to be still and it wasn't safe to not be doing anything. And on the other side, my parents were just kind of neglectful. They didn't really pay much attention to me, and I would act out and do things so I could get their validation and get their love. How it evolved even more so from that, fast forward to when I was 19, I joined the Marine Corps. And the Marine Corps and the military in general, but I would say especially the Marine Corps, essentially conditions you that you are a machine and you are a machine that is meant to fulfill a certain mission. And if you do not fulfill a certain mission, you are a failure. They teach you to value the purpose and the mission over yourself and your emotional well-being. And so that just added more fuel to the fire of me already believing I wasn't good enough. And I also went in a company at the same time, I started working for this company that had very much so a hustle and grime mentality. They rewarded their employees for burning themselves out. They were very much so hustle bros. And don't get me wrong, there's great things about the company too, but it was just a perfect storm of the military, my career, all of it. And I rode that wave for a really long time. For those of you who haven't heard my story, it turned into workaholism, an addiction to Vivans and Adderall and stimulants, and eventually completely burning out, losing everything at 25 years old. The first time that I realized I was really doing this was, I believe it was 2019. I had just moved to Rhode Island to open up, not open up, to rehab a set of stores that was known as the district of no return, because every time somebody would go out to try to fix the district, they would quit, they'd get fired, something bad would happen. And being a young, I think at that point, 22-year-old kid, I was determined to prove people wrong, right? Using that energy of proving myself. So I went out there and I successfully rehabbed these stores after a year of grinding myself to the dirt, but I just was completely gassed at the end of it. And I didn't feel like I had any will to keep going. And I also ended up getting a tattoo of the company that I was working for just so I wouldn't quit. Because in my mind, quitting was worse than death because I tied so much of myself to how well I did with my job. Me quitting was worse than dying. I know that's dramatic. Anyway, that's what happened to me. And so I realized that I really expected myself to be this cog in the machine, and I really expected myself to just be one-dimensional. I expected that my whole existence was revolved around being good at my job. And that's just so not the case. And so if you're somebody right now who is really good at your job, you're competent at it, and you feel like that's the only value that you have to offer the world, this is your wake-up call. It's bullshit and it's not true. Your value comes from so much more than your job performance. Okay, and I'm gonna give you some practical steps right now to help you with untangling your identity from your job. All right, so in order to start uncoupling your identity from your job performance, I want you to ask yourself these three questions. Question number one is what do I care about when no one is watching me and no one praises me? The reason why this is important is because if all of your actions are based off of other people expecting something from you or watching you, that's coming from a place of validation. It's not coming from a place of actual purpose and drive within yourself. And then two, what do I value that has nothing to do with my career or my income? What do I value that has nothing to do with external things? And what is one thing that I can start doing for myself that reinforces that I don't have to always be productive to be valuable? Maybe that can be re-taking up an old hobby that you used to enjoy. For me, it's been playing video games lately. It's been awesome. Shout out to my anime fans. I've been playing Dragon Ball Z. So, anyway, those are three easy things you can do. And the trap here, don't do this because you want to improve yourself. One of the biggest lies of the self-improvement industry and the hustle and culture industry is we do this stuff because we're inherently broken. We have to fix ourselves. That's actually going to make the work worth pattern get even stronger because that's coming from a place of shame. Okay, it's self-realization, not self-improvement. That's what this podcast is about. And I will say, too, as you're asking yourself these questions, you can intellectually understand these things, but I really want you to focus on experiencing emotions fully. Okay. If you're somebody who has the work worth pattern, just know a lot of the reason why you have it is because there's emotions that have been wanting to come to the surface that we're using work as a way to numb and substances as a way to numb. And so if you start to really feel things, I encourage you to embrace those emotions, to imagine yourself sinking into your body so that you can fully process it, so that you can really start loosing the grip on this pattern. Your emotions aren't going to kill you. If anything, you're going to feel so much better if you allow yourself to sink into them. In summary, to wrap this up, your value has never been conditional. Your value comes from just being who you are. And then what you do is a side effect of that. Don't let society, your parents, your friends, anybody tell you that you're less valuable because you haven't accomplished something. And my ask for you is if this episode resonated with you, I guarantee there's someone in your life that needs to hear it, share it with a friend, a coworker, whoever you think it's going to impact today. I appreciate you tuning in. And as always, you deserve to stop surviving and start living. If you want to bring a conversation like this to your business, inquire about my speaking services at build-your-power.com slash contact. My mission is to help mid-sized companies prevent burnout and strengthen their people's capacity. And one of the main ways I love doing that is coming in and inspiring your team. Again, go to build your dash power.com slash contact.