149 | Net Worth vs. Self-Worth

Many lawyers allow their financial situation to dictate how they see themselves. But this is a mistake.

Although your self-worth can impact your net worth, your net worth does not determine anything about your self-worth. When you can learn to separate the two, you’ll have more success with your finances.

In this episode, let’s talk about what your net worth is, what self-worth is, and why keeping them separate is best for your finances.

• your net worth and your money in general
• your self-worth
• what happens when we tie our self-worth to our net worth
• how your self-worth impacts your net worth
• the importance of not allowing your net worth to define how you view your self-worth

Episode 141: Your Money Self-Concept

If you’re ready to learn the mindset and strategies to master your money, let’s schedule a call.

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. So today, we are talking about your net worth versus your self worth. So the technical definition of net worth is your assets minus your liabilities. So to calculate your net worth, you would take the value of everything you own, like your house, your car, your bank accounts, your investment accounts, any of that kind of stuff, minus all of your debts. But in our conversation today, we’re not only talking about that specific definition, I want to talk about money in general and the tendency we have to tie our money, our financial situation, to our self worth. Alright, so let’s talk about self worth. Your self worth is all about your thoughts about yourself and the way you value yourself. According to Google, and the Oxford English Dictionary, it is another word for self esteem. So it’s similar to self concept, which we talked about back in episode 141. In that episode, we were talking about your money self concept. So we specifically looked at the way you think about yourself and how you see yourself as related to your ability to manage your money. self worth, though, is about the way you see yourself overall, not just as related to money. So the issue with these two concepts, these two ideas of net worth and self worth is we often allow our net worth or we use our net worth our financial situation, to dictate our self worth, we see ourselves differently based on differences in our financial situation. So we have a lot of thoughts about money, and where we should be at different points in our lives based on our societal conditioning, and the things that we see in the media and all of that we’ve got these ideas like debt being bad. So if we have debt, then we’re bad. That’s an example of us tying our self worth to our financial situation, or you’ve got the obsession with making six figures in our society, like once I get to six figures, then I’ll be better. We use money as this measure of our self worth. And we will look at it as a way to compare ourselves and our worth with other people and their worth. And it can be a really dangerous game when you get into this comparison situation, because different people have different circumstances in their lives. And those different circumstances in their lives lead to different financial circumstances as well. So often when we’re making these comparisons is not even an apples to apples comparison. The thing is, your self worth has nothing to do with your net worth or your finances, you are infinitely worthy just because you’re alive. And there’s nothing you can do to make yourself more or less worthy. Your net worth your financial situation, it’s something that you can change, you can build it you can improve upon it. But it doesn’t mean that once you build upon it, you improve upon it, that you are now going to be more worthy. Although your self worth is not defined by your financial situation, it can have a big impact on your money. So we talked a little about that in the money self concept episode about how when you view yourself negatively the most often, it leads to negative things with your finances. So even if you’re able to power through and do the quote right things with your money, when you have that negative view of yourself, you will likely end up sabotaging the progress that you’ve been able to make or you don’t even get started in the first place. A lot of times when we have a negative self view of ourselves as related to our finances, it leads to us avoiding our finances altogether, which of course does not lead to you achieving the goals that you have. Some other examples that come to mind with how your self worth can impact your money are things like you know if you feel bad about yourself You have this low self worth, and you beat yourself up all the time and then you spend money to try to feel better. And I say try their very intentionally, because any relief that you get from feeling bad when you’re just spending money to kind of cover over it is always going to be temporary. Another way that it comes up is in the workplace, you may be more hesitant to ask for raises or to fight for a bonus, or a promotion or things like that. Or on the personal front, you might be reluctant to say no, when someone asks you for money, even if you don’t have it. And then if you are using your financial situation to determine your self worth, you end up having these negative results in your finances, these negative things that happen within your finances. And now you use those to feel bad about yourself, and to beat yourself up and to view yourself more negatively right to have that lower self worth. And now the lower self worth leads to more negative things happening in your finances. And then it becomes this cycle unless you break it. And the way that you break it is you separate your self worth from your net worth. Yes, your self worth can impact your finances. But your self worth does not have to be defined by your finances. You can feel good about yourself. Even if you have debt, even if you spend more than you make, even if you file for bankruptcy, even if you’ve got credit card debt or student loans. Even if whatever financial circumstances you have that you view as bad, you can feel good about yourself regardless of what’s happening with your finances. There is a lot more to you than whatever is happening with your finances. There’s a lot more to life than whatever is happening with your finances. Your money is only one part of your life, it’s not your entire life. So when you can learn to separate your self worth from your net worth or whatever is happening with your finances. It leads to you actually being able to improve your finances more because you’re not falling into that cycle of having negative things happening with your finances, and then viewing yourself negatively and then leading to you causing more negative things to happen in your finances. So I will help you stop defining your self worth and your life by your financial situation. When we work together, you learn to use money as a tool to see it in that way and to stop allowing it to take up so much of your brain space. All you have to do is sign up for your free consultation at rho thomas.com/call so we can get started. All right, that is it for this week’s episode. Come connect with me over on social media. You can find me most often on LinkedIn, rho, Thomas, and Instagram at I am rho Thomas. Subscribe to the show and leave a review both of which helped more people to find it. And please take a second think of a friend or two who could use this information and share the episode with them. As we close out friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently week after week. You’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.