One of my first jobs that I can remember was pouring milk for pigs. I believe I was paid 75 cents an hour to take the old milk or almost old milk and pour it into 5 gallon buckets and then pour that into the trough for the pigs.
The space where I worked was cool and somewhat dark, but I remember feeling rather peaceful doing the work and enjoyed earning some money.
What haunts me though is the milk itself! For the most part the milk had just expired or was about to expire, so pouring it was not a traumatic experience. Until one day I poured this container of chocolate milk and it came out in chunks and smelled expired! I do not recall ever having a desire to drink chocolate milk after that experience.
I don’t drink milk personally because I don’t really like it. On a rare occasion I will have it with a homemade chocolate chip cookie, but for me that’s the only acceptable reason to drink milk.
Milk for me is an ingredient or tool, not a beverage. I do put it in my coffee, but the ratio needs to be just so. I have learned this week during a conversation with a friend that this makes me “selective.” I love that concept! That we are selective about what we drink, eat or choose to accept in our lives!
For a long time I accepted a lot of things in life, including the idea that I was “picky” and couldn’t possibly be my dad’s kid because I disliked raisins (murdered grapes) or the texture of cooked lumpy oatmeal or sometimes drinkable oatmeal. Either way I was out of the oatmeal game!
Something else I accepted was my perceived idea that I wasn’t valuable. That I didn’t meet some invisible standard of worth. Therefore, I was not considered worthy and didn’t value myself enough to become selective enough about what I would accept or tolerate.
Certain painful events over the course of my life forced me to start looking at this issue of low self- worth. Once I began to understand that I had inherent value, that I was worthy of being treated well, the Lioness awoke. I quietly began to make decisions based on my inherent value, selecting how I would be treated. Choosing to remove toxic people from my life. Stepping away from situations that no longer served me in a positive way.
What I know now is that we are all inherently valuable! We are worthy of respect and deserve to be treated well! We also can choose to change our future, because our past doesn’t need to dictate what we choose from this point forward.
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