Know Your Worth

I know, I know. You're already thinking "hey you already had this picture in a post" and sure I did, but it still has a lot of meaning to me and more meanings than just one. This meaning is about knowing how much you are worth.

This is something that I think society has absolutely smashed and it's getting worse and worse. Of course, especially for women, there's more of a women's movement about being comfortable with yourself and being more confident. Though, I see hypocrisy in our system when we come out with more media that is negative, media that is self-indulging, media that can create anxiety, and media that creates bad mental habits. I fall into this, always feeling that I need to be on top, I need to be on top of my game, and if I were to ever fail, then I'd trip and fall and I wouldn't be able to get back up again. This just isn't how it is though, we are all human and we make mistakes. It is life and we must accept this. No one is perfect.

I remember in archery, back in high school, when I kept getting better and better. I'd go to competitions and I would be confident about my shooting and sometimes I wouldn't do so well, but sometimes I would do really well and I came on top with some really good scores. The flaw, though, was that I was completely dependent on everyone else. I only knew this confidence because I always had a coach behind me to tell me how well I was doing (not like this is a bad thing, I love positive feedback from my coaches) and I always had someone to fix my equipment when something went wrong. I never needed to tell myself that I was doing well, because I always had someone else telling me.

When I went to college, everything changed. I no longer had someone always telling me how well or how bad I was shooting and I didn't always have someone there to fix my equipment when it broke. This led me to shoot worse, because even though I had people supporting me, it was nothing like back in high school. This then led me to get target panic (when an archer essentially has a fear of failing and will try and over control their shot process). Of course, everything went downhill from there and it wasn't everyone else's fault, it was only mine for not having my own confidence in my own shot process to get me through everything.

Then this year I was talking to my boyfriend, an archery alumnus from the team, and he had mentioned that maybe archery just wasn't my thing compared to everyone else. That maybe I had greater talents in other places and archery might just not be one of those things. I thought about this and although filming comes much more naturally to me, it just didn't feel right to say it. I had committed nine years of my life to the sport of archery, and if archery weren't something important to me, then I would have quit years ago. So then he told me that I was an experienced archer. He had me remember back in high school when I was shooting well and he told me that I am the same exact person now, I just need to find that confidence again. I had the abilities to do everything I wanted; my head was just getting in the way of everything. I thought about this long and hard.

This year, although I switched from the compound class to the bowhunter class (best decision I ever made) I am putting up better scores just because of that thought. Nothing in me ever changed. It was my head getting in the way of my abilities. My head telling myself that I wasn't good, that maybe at that moment I was doing good, but I was waiting for the ball to drop, or that I had just completely lost my abilities all together. These were crippling thoughts. Through the year I have been gaining and gaining more confidence in myself, coming from myself. I see my improvements in my scores and I just gain more and more confidence. Never have I ever shot a 300 (a perfect score) in my bowhunter set up and a lot of times what was holding me back in compound was my head telling me that I was close to achieving it and then of course, by overthinking I'd miss by a couple points.

Of course the target above is also not a 300, but it is a 299. The highest score that I have probably shot in the past two or three years, because of my brain lapse in my confidence. I have been averaging around 294 or 295 and then I pop out that 299 score, just because I had the confidence that day where I told myself that I knew I could do better than the 294 that is pictured on the right. This only proves that I have everything I need to be great, all I have to do is just do it and the 300 will come in no time.

So the point that I am making is to always have confidence in yourself. Positive feedback or even negative feedback from others are good motivators to achieve more and do better things, but they should never be the sole reason why you go out and do something. That should be completely up to you. You need to know your own worth. I used to get down on myself and I would struggle to see how I would ever get good again and then I would look at my trophies that I have received, which entirely fill two book shelves, and I always remind myself that if I have all of this evidence proving that I can do it, then why did I did I ever doubt myself in the first place?

Now if you don't have something to look back on to see your past achievements, look inside of you. If it is something that you need to practice to have confidence, then practice, practice, practice. This is the only way to really gain your own true confidence. If you can replicate it then that creates even more confidence and if you can do it in practice then you can do it anywhere. If it is something that you can't practice, then look inside yourself. See what exactly is pulling you towards this. Where is you determination? What is it that you absolutely love? Why are you here in the first place? Where do you want this to take you? Realize your passions and your dreams and use those to fuel your success forward. Create your own confidence in yourself and create your own strength so that no matter where you go, no matter who you are with, you are always equipped for success--like armor-- and you know exactly what you are worth.



Side note---(obviously you should never have a price tag on yourself, because no one is ever worth any amount of money, everyone is precious and immeasurable in their own way, but I always like to mention that something I say in my head is that I am only ever worth as much as my dreams and my goals-- and then where those take me. If my goals are limited, then the end amount of my success will never be as worth as much as dreaming big and accomplishing big things. Even if I don't accomplish everything I dream, I know that with dreaming big at least I can accomplish more than never dreaming at all.

On this target you can see the very center circle is called "the x." It is essentially the closest to the middle of the target and it is worth 10 points; this is normally used to track how many times an archer has hit the center of the target. The next ring out from the x is the ten ring, which is obviously worth ten points as well. Now if an archer is to only think about hitting the x, and they hit every x possible, then that means that they have scored a perfect score. Even if they were to slightly miss and only hit a 10, they would still reach a perfect score, because the x and the 10 ring are both the same amount of points. Now if the archer were to think about trying to hit the ten (because all 10s would also equal a perfect score), then if they ever missed the slightest bit from the ten ring then they would hit the nine point portion of the target and would no longer have a perfect score, as displayed in the target above. So you see, if you dream big and you can narrow your goals down to exactly what you want, then you can achieve great things. Like, for instance, if you wanted to shoot a perfect score, all you would have to do is aim for the x and you would have more of an opportunity to get that perfect score.

Let's say it was your big goal to go to the Olympics, then all you would have to do is focus on accomplishing your goals at the trial events and you would be there. If you only focused on one trial competition at a time and put tons of pressure on yourself for that only one competition, you probably would not be able to do as well as you could, because you wouldn't have your end game in mind. You wouldn't have that determination driving you towards your success.

My big dream goal is to become a free-lance videographer, so what am I doing? I'm currently working in the field to build up my resume, and I will probably work for a company for a long while, so I know exactly what I am doing so years and years and years into the future, I will have the confidence someday to be able to go off on my own and create my own business. If I only focused on the job that I have at hand and never thought of anything beyond it or making more of it, then I would never improve, I would never become better, and I would stay at the exact same skill level as I am now. Know your worth, know where you want to go, and then use that so that there can be success in your future)!