90: Silence Your Inner Critic with Dr. Adia Gooden

Why is it so important to build a healthy relationship with yourself to get out of the habits of perfectionism and self doubt?

Today on The Bold Life, Dr. Adia Gooden explains how to embrace your unconditional self worth to make a better you.

Dr. Adia is a licenced clinical psychology, earning her bachelor’s degree at Stanford University and her Ph. D in clinical community psychology from DePaul University. Dr. Adia is a sought-after speaker who gives talks on unconditional self worth, imposter syndrome, and black women and mental health.

Her TEDx Talk, “Cultivating Unconditional Self Worth” has over 800 000 views and she runs online courses designed to help people build healthy relationships with themselves and embrace their unconditional self worth.

More About Dr. Adia

Dr. Adia started on the journey of exploring self worth based on her own experiences as well as the experiences of her clients.

On her own journey, Dr. Adia shares how she used perfectionism, overworking, academic achievement, and professional achievement to prove her worth. After defending her dissertation at the end of her doctorate she expected to feel a sense of worthiness and achievement, but it was still missing.

This caused her to turn inwards and explore other ways to feel worthy, since focusing on achievements wasn’t working.

Dr. Adia also saw clients who were struggling with the similar challenge. During her time treating students at the third ranked university in the country, she saw a lot of overachieving, brilliant students struggling with worthiness.

She realized there were so many others like her struggling with this challenge and made it her goal to help people get out of the habit of using external markers to prove that they’re worthy. Instead, she wanted to take them on a self worth journey to help them be grounded in the fact they are unconditionality worthy.

What is unconditional self worth?

Dr. Adia defines it as the belief that you deserve to be alive, to be loved and cared for, and to take up space, just because you’re human and deserve it.

Not because you’ve done something magical, or your relationship status, or your salary, or whatever. Just because you’re human.

Unconditional self worth is different from self esteem, Dr. Adia explains, because self esteem is based on an external “thing” – skills, talents, abilities. Things we can achieve.

For this reason, it’s possible to have high self esteem and low self worth. You can have all of the academic accolades or climb the promotion ladder at work… and still feel unworthy. The feeling of who you are at the core isn’t worthy of all the greatness, so you need to continue to get accomplishments to feel okay.

Self worth is how you relate to yourself. It’s more internally oriented.

How do you see yourself?
How do you show up for yourself?

How do you take care of yourself?
How do you treat yourself?

When you’re oriented towards proving your worth, you usually go overboard. Doing a good job, keeping everything together, and work, work, work because your self worth feels at stake. There’s a lot of anxiety that goes into the thing that you’re staking your self worth on.

When you love yourself unconditionally, you can work and still do a good job, but then you can let it rest. You can take a break and step away because the pressure to prove your worth isn’t driving your tendency to overwork and burn yourself out.

Value is attached to perfectionism

Perfectionism can be so painful! It can get you in a cycle of feeling like you’re never good enough and sucks the joy out of doing anything because of all pressure you put on yourself.

This usually results in one of two things (or a cycle of both):

You procrastinate and never do it which means you eventually call yourself lazy and beat yourself up for avoiding it.

You overwork and work constantly to the point of burnout and exhaustion.

To live in that space of feeling like nothing you ever do is good enough because it’s not perfect can be very painful. Instead, Dr. Adia explains that it can be helpful to shift from focusing on trying to do things perfectly to instead asking yourself what is your intention.

How can I make this meaningful without it having to be perfect?

Having grounding in an intention or a value, it can be so helpful to break the cycle of perfectionism defining you and your success.

Would you say these things to a child?

This perspective shift is crucial.

Get your thoughts out. Whether it’s saying it or writing it, getting your thoughts and really taking a look at how much pressure you put on yourself can change the way you approach perfectionism.

It might make you realize you don’t actually believe in the pressures you’re putting on yourself.

If saying it to a child would be mean, or unhelpful, or simply just too outrageous… why would you say it to yourself?

Why do we get in this perfectionism cycle…and how do we get out?

We live in a society that bases your worth on external things.

How you look

The job you have
The car you drive
The money you have
Your relationship status

We’re surrounded by messages of what we’re supposed to be so that we are valuable.

We live in a world that promotes a zero sum orientation – I win and you lose, or you win and I lose. Inherently, this means competition. This might sound crazy… but there can be a tie!

The fix - Start with self-compassion. It can be so powerful because it’s about shifting the way you show up for yourself and how you treat yourself. Tune into yourself and check in.

The next step in common humanity. Understanding that this is the human experience! It’s more than normal to make mistakes, to feel down, and then to pick yourself back up. Normalize that there isn’t anything wrong with you if you’re having a huma experience!

This is human, and that’s okay! You’re not the first – and won’t be the last – to make a mistake!

The step after is self-kindness. Can you speak to yourself as you would a child? Offer yourself comfort and love around not having to be perfect!

Dr. Adia’s book recommendation

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. He’s one of Dr. Adia’s favourite spiritual teachers. He talks about being in the present and being more than doing. The main message is that life is about presence more than just doing things. It’s spiritual but not religious and Dr. Adia recommends it!