Elevating the Human Experience

Chapter 7Obstacles to Self-Love and Self-Worth

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

—Marcus Aurelius

Now that we have talked about how to start out on the path of self-love, it is important to address the likely obstacles along the way that make knowing your loving self-worth, particularly at work, so hard. If the journey were easy, being human would also be easy. If you are anything like me, it used to feel lame even to say the words, “I love myself.” Lame and overly self-interested.

What would you think if you asked a colleague how her weekend was and she responded, “It was good. We took the kids swimming at the lake. And I spent some much-needed time learning how to love myself”? It would be awkward, so we simply do not talk about it, and we definitely do not bring up the state of our mental health at work. The language of loving yourself has a strange taboo quality to it, and yet we act out our love deficit in the workplace every day.

The Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius offers inspiration. Several thousand years ago he wrote in his private journals, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Drawing inspiration from Stoicism, Ryan Holiday aptly titled his contemporary book The Obstacle Is the Way. Similarly, my friend and neighbor Thomas Moore wrote in his classic book Care of the Soul, “Observing what the soul is doing and hearing what it is saying is a way of going ...