Separating Achievement from Self-Worth

As a skater, the best moment during a competition isn’t when you find out you’ve won.

It isn’t when you’re standing on the podium hearing your national anthem or when you look out to the crowd and see a standing ovation.

Don’t get me wrong, these moments are wonderful. They feel amazing, satisfying, incredibly rewarding.

But the best moment, the moment your mind returns to decades later, is right after you’ve finished a clean program.

This is the moment immediately following the last note of your music, before you can register the roar of the crowd, before the anticipation of your marks and potential placement can creep in. All the training, all the nerves, all the “what ifs?” are behind you. This moment lasts a second—sometimes two. In an arena full of people, this moment is completely private and fleeting.

You feel so content. You feel so complete. You feel so proud of yourself.

We often think athletic achievement is defined by awards won, records broken and medals earned. After retiring as an athlete, we may spend decades chasing new achievements, trying to prove ourselves through external means. Striving for medals and podium finishes may now be replaced with chasing a GPA, a new relationship, an offer, a contract, a promotion or the number of followers that confirms you’re influential.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting these things. We need goals; they give us direction, purpose and meaning. But a problem arrives when we look to an external outcome to tell us our worth.

When this happens, we may find ourselves on a never-ending search for satisfaction. We may find ourselves never feeling quite good enough despite our many accomplishments.

Why is this?

External outcomes are unstable because things outside of us (the award, the person choosing us, the job offer) are subject to changing standards, circumstances and other people's judgments. If we’re leaving something as fundamental as our worth to external factors, we're placing something incredibly important in the hands of something we can never fully control.

For those of us who grew up in judged sports, where our results relied on the subjectivity of others’ opinions, our perception of ourselves—and our worthiness—can slowly start to be filtered through how others perceive us.

When we receive positive feedback, our self-worth soars; negative feedback can lead us down a shame spiral, as we desperately try to “fix” what we believe is wrong with us. Over time, we can attach our positive beliefs about ourselves to something we have absolutely no control over: the judgment of others.

And in doing so, we may become so focused on what the outcome says about us that we lose sight of what connects us to ourselves: what we value and who we became on the way to our goals.

If we’ve spent most of our lives using external means to assess our worthiness, it can be challenging to detach our worth from external outcomes. When we make this shift, it may feel uncomfortable—even “wrong.” Just because it feels “wrong” or like our own validation isn’t enough, it doesn’t mean it’s true; it means we’re learning a new way of thinking and relating to ourselves. Because learning anything new takes time and repetition, we want to consistently practice validating ourselves through self-recognition and acknowledging intrinsic rewards.

For example, if we’re searching for a new job, rather than waiting until we receive an offer to believe we’re worthy of being chosen, we want to deliberately acknowledge how we showed up for and chose ourselves during the process. Maybe this means acknowledging the tools we used to cope with the anxiety of the interview process, our vulnerability while networking and our willingness to go after what we want despite the discomfort we may feel.

Or if we decide to run a marathon, we want to intentionally acknowledge the times we pushed past self-doubt to finish a training session, believed in ourselves to make it up the final hill and listened to our body’s need for rest and care.

When our focus is only on an external finish line, we tend to minimize or completely miss these moments. We withhold self-acknowledgment until the journey is complete and then wonder why the accomplishment doesn't feel as satisfying as we expected and our self-esteem feels non-existent.

By savoring and acknowledging who we are becoming and the many intrinsic victories on the road to the achievement, the attachment to the external outcome softens. We still want the goal, but we don’t need the final accomplishment to feel complete, worthy and whole. Instead, we are consistently recognizing our worth along the way, so the outcome becomes a wonderful bonus that never carries the pressure of defining us.

The moment after the music ends following a clean program is so rewarding because it’s a private moment. Only you know what it took to get yourself there, the difficult practices you showed up for, the many run-throughs you pushed through, the anxiety and self-doubt you overcame. This moment is special because it’s yours; no one and nothing outside your control has defined it. And many years later, after medals become rusty and titles are replaced, that moment sticks because it’s one you built. It’s something you always carry within.

The content on this blog is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy. The content does not replace a therapeutic relationship with a licensed mental health professional.