Since I was the 16 years old I’ve been building a business as part of my daily life. That’s twenty years of business building. Over the past ten years I have also been a professionally paid public speaker presenting keynotes at conferences and corporate events around the world.

These two things have carried a lot of my personal self worth.

The past 6 months have forced me to reflect on where my self worth comes from and what happens when I can’t feed it in the ways that I have become used to.

Obviously speaking at conferences has completely changed and initially disappeared almost entirely. So I crossed that off my list of ego-feeding tasks.

Then in January I exited a business that I had been building for two years and decided refocus my work on writing my next book and helping people build side hustles through my online courses and content. So that meant that I wasn’t really building a business for the first time in my adult life.

The two main sources of my self worth have evaporated in the space of half a year.

I didn’t realise it at the time but about three months into this new life I had sunk into a slight depression. Mostly the depression had to do with being locked in a one bedroom apartment under the brutal South African lockdown laws but when I discussed it with my psychologist (over Zoom initially) he helped me understand that everything that once made me feel a sense of value was gone from my life.

This got me thinking about how we value ourselves and where we derive our self worth from. More often than not you are gaining your self worth from something that you haven’t spent much time choosing, it just happens. Your house and how big it is, your car and how expensive it is, your kids and how well they perform compared to other kids, how good looking your partner might be, how smart people think you are, how many social media likes and followers you have and on and on the list goes. These are all things that feed our ego and impact our self worth.

With no business and no stage in my immediate future I have had to seriously reevaluate where my self worth comes from and if I like it that way.

I don’t have a clear answer yet, unfortunately, but I do want to keep asking myself if I am happy with the things that I value and how they make me feel.