What if the things you chase to prove your worth are keeping you in bondage?

A disclaimer before I start: plenty of people live their careers, families, communities, and friendships from a place of peace and joy. If that's you, this may not apply. I'm writing it mostly as a sermon to myself.

In his book Living Fearless, Jamie Winship describes three phases of identity:

1. You're living in a false identity and you're unaware of it.
2. You're aware of it, but you're still living from that place.
3. You've moved into living from your true identity. You no longer believe any amount of your significance or importance comes from what you have, what you do, or what people think of you.

I can relate to all three.

Being liked

For as long as I can remember, I've looked for ways to feel significant and to appear significant. I developed little nuanced strategies for it.

In middle school and high school, my strategy was to be liked and popular, and to make sure my peers approved of me. That's one of the things that led me into drug and alcohol abuse and, eventually, addiction. By 21 I had lost my license for two and a half years, collected multiple arrests and citations, and was facing the possibility of prison time.

Fortunately, I found God and my faith, and my life was set on a new trajectory. Interestingly enough, though, my belief system about myself must not have changed much. All through my 20s, I was still chasing the approval of my peers and still wanted to be liked and significant in their eyes.

The ladder on the wrong building

I had moved on from drugs and alcohol, but I replaced them with a new source of approval: what I did in my career and what I had. Said differently, the wealth goals I was trying to hit.

And I hit them. On the other side I found an emptiness, as if I'd leaned my ladder against the wrong building, climbed to the top, and discovered it was cold and lonely up there. (I wrote more about that season in Is This All There Is?)

Through trips to Haiti and serving people in the developing world, I learned what generosity looked like, and God challenged me to start giving more. Slowly but surely, I found freedom from getting my worth out of what I had.

A visible industry

In my 30s, though, I must still have believed I wasn't good enough or significant unless other people liked me and approved of me. I found myself still trying to feel significant through what I did in my career. Real estate is a visible industry, and that visibility made this kind of bondage all the harder to break free from.

In my mid-30s I had what I'd call a crisis. I came face to face with a deep fear of public speaking and walked through it with a therapist. (That story is in The Fear That Wasn't About Public Speaking.) She helped me find moments in my childhood where I came to believe I wasn't good enough. As we walked through my developing years, I saw that I'd started seeking ways to feel good enough by gaining other people's approval, and that this had been driving so many of my decisions, my whole life.

Looking back, that was me moving from the first phase of identity to the second. I was finally aware of the false belief, but I was still living from it.

Exchanging the lies for the truth

In the years that followed, I worked to exchange the lies that had cemented in me over 30 years for the truth: my identity and self-worth aren't based on what I have, what I do, or what people think of me. They aren't even based on the impact I'll have on this world. When it comes to my value, all of that is irrelevant.

As I moved into my 40s, I believe I started living more and more from a place of freedom from the bondage that had haunted me for so many years. I stopped seeking and needing validation from others, from what I had, from what I did, and from being needed. I entered into a much better version of myself.

I'm not pushing this on you, I'm just sharing what has helped me. Having faith that my worth and identity come from God's eternal love for me has been an incredibly helpful truth, because it can't be taken away, regardless of what's going on in the world or in my own circumstances.

Let me explain. One day a group of people can think I'm significant and amazing, and the next day they can be disappointed in me and not think anything of me at all. That doesn't change anything about me. The only person who changed in that equation is them.

As I hold on to that belief, or dare I call it a truth, I've found I don't need to perform, strive, control, perfect, self-promote, or self-protect. I can trust instead. I find myself living in the present moment, planting seeds and watering them, and trusting the outcomes to a much higher power than me. Since I took that burden off my own shoulders and gave it to Him, I've felt a lightness, freedom, and peace that I didn't have in the first half of my life.