Know Your Worth 💞

How to Believe In Yourself and Your Work

Feb 14, 2025

Happy Valentine’s Day readers & subscribers. Sending you love, joy, and peace today and always.

pink and red roses on clear glass vase — You are beautiful and worthy. Photo by Element5 Digital

On this day that’s focused on the heart, we’re focusing on boosting our confidence, intuition, and love of self.

As HSPs, we tend to downplay our abilities, insights, feelings, and needs. In my own experience, it wasn’t until I was a young adult that it even occurred to me to set boundaries, voice my displeasure, or insist that friends or family go with something that suited me instead of constantly deferring to their wants.

Indeed, many Highly Sensitive People define themselves as “people pleasers.” Here are a few examples of how that manifests:

A desire to head to the beach instead of the museum is stuffed down to please our friends.
A brilliant creative idea isn’t uttered at work so that our colleagues won’t feel threatened.
Our 100% certainty about a friend’s new date isn’t uttered because we don’t want to rock the boat — or we gaslight ourselves into thinking we don’t really know.

My comment on a recent post by The Human Project

As creative types and entrepreneurs, it’s critically important that we define our abilities & shine a light on ourselves and our talents in an authentic way. Note: this isn’t solely about those of us who neurodiverse; most people, whether HSP or not, end up learning lessons the hard way.

Valuing Your Work as an HSP Creative

As you can see in the screenshot above, one way that HSP’s may be more susceptible to hard lessons, is by NOT doing what we know is true as outlined above. In more detail, these are some of the ways that downplaying our talents may end up kicking us in the shin:

A client relationship goes bad because we ignored the red flag or our intuition that told us it would not be a good situation.
We receive a late payment because we convince ourselves that we’re not worth the fee, we don’t want to rock the boat, or we’re afraid of confrontation.
We take abuse from a client when it’s not warranted. (Caveat: we are not perfect and clients should be able to voice their displeasure in our work or process — as long as it’s done in a respectful way.)

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In many cases, we know exactly what we should do or say but we let our emotions, people pleasing, or fear take over. I’m here to tell you that you need to practice self love and self confidence AKA “fake it ‘til you make it”. I promise you: This practice will eventually convert itself into true and authentic confidence. Give it a try.

Finally, in the spirit of love and giving, I want to present you with a few HSP-friendly Substack articles and channels that hit me in the feels. I hope you enjoy them.