What a Waste of My Time

“All my life I thought something was wrong with me… What a waste.” That single line, spoken at the very end of a life, has a way of stopping you cold. I read it in Tara Brach’s work on radical acceptance, and it immediately made me look at the places where I still treat my anxiety, doubt, and self-criticism like proof that I’m broken.

We talk about unworthiness as a trance: a low-grade background hum that can run for years until you barely notice it’s there. Like a fan in a quiet room, the noise becomes normal, and you start to believe that’s just what being alive feels like. I unpack how this “something is wrong with me” story shows up in everyday moments, why it can block action and confidence, and why it’s not a personality flaw you’re stuck with.

The reframe I want you to try is practical and freeing: unworthiness is a bug in your system, not evidence of who you are. From there, we get concrete. I share a simple interruption practice to help you notice the hum without fighting it, plus a short two to three minute calm-abiding breath practice that trains focus and helps interrupt old programming. I also mention a guided meditation I’m posting on my website and linking in the show notes.

If this lands, take a minute to sit with it or journal before you rush to the next thing. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find Fierce Encouragement. What’s one place you notice the unworthiness hum showing up this week?

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Transcript

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Welcome And Why This Podcast

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey everybody. This is Mark. This is Fierce Encouragement. And a quick check-in for those who might be new. Well, I created this podcast, and it's really based around human stories, uh, people that have struggled, um, that sour self-talk, that I guess that poor self-image that can often soak uh come up so often in our lives, whether it's at work, whether it's with our family and friends, or whether it's just not feeling super secure about who we are. So I want to share tools, and I have shared tools, uh, and I want to connect with you and talk about these things, how we can feel better using everything from cognitive science and studies, even back to the ancient practices and prayer and wisdom and even simple things, kind of like journaling and just listening to positive information, something we can try, like putting positive stuff into action. Today I really wanted to dive into a story that I heard this week that really made me pause and consider my own journey, and especially as time feels like it's flying by. Now, this story was about a woman I read about who was on her deathbed. And she shared, well, it's interesting, I'll get into it later, but she did something in those last moments of dying or living before her death that is something that was really impactful for me in thinking about it. So this episode is about something she kind of named out loud in that moment. And I think it's a thing that a lot of us carry or try to pull through life, and instead of just saying it out loud and kind of dealing with it. But let's get into the episode.

The Deathbed Sentence That Changed Everything

SPEAKER_00 1:49

So I've been reading Tara Brock's work on um radical acceptance, wonderful book from many years ago. And I'm on a chapter that she wrote on unworthiness. And honestly, it's something that I feel like I keep chewing on mentally this week because I see it a lot in myself. I see it in the dozens of conversations I get to have every week. And I also, I guess it's just one of those sore spots that we have that we kind of ignore or think that we don't have control over it. Unworthiness. Like, what does that mean to you? So, in this story that I read from Tara Brock's wonderful book, it was about a woman who whose mom got ill and was passing away slowly, and she was very sick towards the end, of course. And as she was close to the end, the woman uh that her daughter visited often. And in fact, she was there constantly towards the end. And in this story, she talked about how she would sit with her for hours and even sit next to her and read her spiritual text and pray and meditate next to her. She even talked about in this story how she reached out and held her mother's hand and just kept telling her that she loved her out loud, even though her mother was mostly catatonic during a lot of this time, especially towards the end, and she was really unresponsive. But then there was one point in her dying process. One morning, uh, just before dawn, the daughter said her mother woke up and looked her dead in the eye for a minute or two, blinked her eyes open, and she said something out loud. She said, You know, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. And then her mom shook her head slightly, kinda like she was saying one more thing under her breath. What a waste. And then in the story, the mother slipped back into her coma and she passed away a few hours later.

The Fear That Something Is Wrong

SPEAKER_00 4:12

This gives me goosebumps and it lands heavy because it reminds me of sometimes that story I can get in my head about something is wrong with me. I can't do this. Why is this so hard? Why is it so hard to go out and do speaking events for me? Why do I get down on myself so much? I think it is in part like afraid of what others will think of me, and thinking that something is fundamentally wrong with me. And so it'll just make me pause and not take action. But there is um a call here kind of from within when we notice, well, when somebody passes away, and in this beautiful story, we can take that beautiful richness from it, you know. All my life I thought something was wrong with me. And this lady knew that that was bull crap at the end. And how can we slow down and maybe put our hand on our heart, or just slow down and give ourselves a quiet prayer, or even treat ourselves in this next moment or these next few minutes, as you would a dear friend or a young child that you deeply cared about? Maybe it's a breath, maybe it's some short personal reflections, or maybe it's just catching yourself when you get off balance. We don't need to think less of ourselves, but just think less about ourselves. And really, in a sense, be compassionate with ourselves. There's nothing wrong with you, fundamentally. Here's something that kind of stretches out as we expand or look at that story, like this idea that something's wrong with us. And this is what kind of really pulls me in in a deeper way or one layer deeper. This m her mother, she lived a whole life with this. Maybe decades, and maybe her whole darn life, and really underneath the living, underneath the day-to-day actions, was this low, quiet hum of unworthiness. Um, this inner energy or this conviction when she got really honest that she thought something was wrong with her. Now, Tara Brock uses the word trance, an unworthiness trance. And I think this word is really good. I was like, how do I change this word? You can't. It's a trance, it's uh a downward spiral where the numbing or the shutting

Unworthiness Trance And The Fan Metaphor

SPEAKER_00 7:05

down kind of puts us into um a low energy, and it almost happens on autopilot. Don't think of it as not having a single bad thought. And it's not really just one rough day, but it's this low constant frequency or vibration or hum that's kind of running in the background of an entire lifetime. So it's kind of like white noise, maybe. Um, maybe it's something when we stop noticing it and we understand that we've been hearing it for a long time. I'm reminded of um a story from a meditation retreat that I heard a teacher share once. They were all sitting in a room for a few days. It was very quiet, long periods of meditation. And of course, there was the noise outside the room, you know, some of the um traffic or whatnot, if there was something nearby. But there was also a fan on in the room that was spinning and kind of keeping them cool. But at one point, a few days into the meditation retreat, somebody shut off the fan and it just created this huge open gap and kind of like an oh crap feeling. All these meditators reflected that once that kind of dependency or that background hum of the fan went off, there was this open space, and you realized it was kind of happening the whole time, but you didn't know it. And I think that's the part that gets me, or that's part's pulling me in. It's almost like building up our tolerance to that difficult self-talk or rushing past our success really quickly. Oh, yeah, I do that. That's easy for me. In a way, we can build up a tolerance to this. And a tolerance means almost an adaptation where we expect it, whether it's good or bad. And I think, in a sense, at first it's well, when we start first start to overdo it or underdo it, there's this fog that can kind of come over us, and it's obvious, like we feel down and out. You feel, you feel that first intoxicating uh thing from a bad day. But as you feel it more and more, and through the days and weeks and even years, I think we adapt to a type of fogginess or haziness in our lives, in our thinking, that is. And we might even stop noticing that the difficult things are present. Instead, we just start to think that that's what it's like to be uh awake and you know, living life. We expect that that's what life is like. And again, some of us spend decades, weeks, months, maybe whole years just thinking how this is this is how it is now, that there's no way out of it. Thinking that low-grade hum of unworthiness or that trance of unworthiness is just who we are personally. That's who we are. I don't well, I don't think. I I know it's not a person personality flaw. In fact, Tara Brock also agrees this is a trance that we get caught in. And the fact is this these trances, they can be interrupted, and you can grow. So this hum, this or even this racing mind, and even this excuse that comes up in my mind, quote unquote, I don't have time for this, unquote. I do my that to myself every week, every month, and I have to pull back from that energy. I have to pull back and in a sense slow down, make true what is true for me. And I guess plug it in to kind of the deeper purpose. Remembering that it's not valuable to be stuck in thinking that there's something wrong with you. It is not a valuable place to rent property at or to buy property at in defending all your deficiencies. That doesn't mean we don't address them, but it doesn't mean we need to stay there and constantly berate ourselves or think less of ourself and get into an unworthiness trance. Furthermore, and I want to say this as powerfully and clearly and cleanly and apparently as I can, because I think this kind of summarizes the chewy caramel nugget center of this episode. The sense

A Bug In Your Mental Code

SPEAKER_00 12:05

of unworthiness that we have or might have or might not even be addressing, it isn't a personal flaw. It is not evidence that something is actually intrinsically wrong with you. I think a good way to shift that, transform that, is to just know that it's a bug in your system. It's a bug in that pattern of your mind. It's a bug in the sense that you adapted to this thinking when things got tough or when you had to defend yourself. And it was probably, you know, it probably occurred early. It occurs all for uh for all of us early in different environments. It's not always one thing. It could be a cumulative effort, you know, crappy teachers, crappy bosses. But, you know, I think it also occurs for reasons that maybe made sense at the time. There's a part of us that is defending ourselves and keeping us safe. You do what you're told because, you know, well, you know, when you're in school, you can't be the one to uh shake it up too much. And literally this kind of auto-programming in so many ways about thinking less of ourselves has been running on autopilot for a very long time, or it's activated at certain points that we're on we go unconscious and get into that trance. That's a completely different thing than saying this is a character defect. There's fundament something fundamentally wrong with you. Instead of that, we can find the bug in the code, we can find the incorrect code, we can look at the protocols or the thinking patterns and instead fix it. That flaw you think you're stuck with. I want you to start treating this just like a bug in your code or just a scheduling misalignment. Because that's what really helps us change and helps us do what's important next. We have to change our attitude or our energy or vibration around what I suppose how we talk to ourselves about it. Don't beat yourself up about that bug. Don't beat yourself up or shame yourself into working correctly. That never works. And literally, when we start to find this pathway more and more and we look at it clearly, we get some help, we write about it, we learn, we start to interrupt ourselves when that old outdated code comes online. So here's something practical, and it's not a fix, it's this sense of an interruption.

The Simple Interruption Practice

SPEAKER_00 14:41

So a few times today, this week, I want you to just notice the hum. Notice that trance that you might go into, that unworthiness trance. And don't fight it. It comes up in us in different ways. It might be anger, it might be kind of um being a people pleaser, it might be berating yourself, it could be a lot of things. It could be fear, it could be doubt, it could be hesitation. But literally find out where you notice that unworthiness hum coming online. Don't fight it, don't argue with it, just notice it's there. The way you might notice that background music at the grocery store, or even uh, I guess it's that fan in the meditation room, right? Let's pretend we just kind of turn off that fan. What are you feeling? So you might literally say to yourself something out loud at this time in this interruption to say quietly, hey, there it is. There's the home, there's the trance. And that's it. That's the whole practice to start this ball rolling. The more you do that over the next few days, you're actually not trying to silence it in one sitting or in one moment. We're not trying to drown this voice in one moment. We don't even want to drown it. We do want to wake up to the fact that it is there at all. So we're just uh elevating our awareness and mindfulness about when it goes online. And I find this with clients and people I get to connect with, and a lot of times in myself, most of us don't take the time to slow down and name it. Some of us have never named it, and this is a really difficult exercise. I applaud you and aim for one more time this today. Write this down, put it into practice. We will not change unless we change the activities we do around our thinking, obviously our exercise and movement, or the way we're connecting with people. And so instead of just knowing about it, live inside it, practice this. I think driving is one of those things for me. So I'm not sure if that's something where you can interrupt maybe that reflexive auto pattern. But if you get frustrated driving, what a great time to just catch yourself and interrupt yourself. Notice that hum of anxiety in the background. I've noticed this the last few weeks, having uh been given the joy of helping my younger son learn how to drive the past couple months. So, yeah, use where you might have a sore spot, interrupt it, and just feel that background hum. And

Two Minute Calm Abiding Breathwork

SPEAKER_00 17:24

if you want to go kind of one layer deeper, one step deeper, and I do this practically nearly every coaching session I have, especially with new people. Here's a short practice. So two to three minutes, set your timer on your watch or put a timer on your computer, or just count your breaths. It takes about five breaths for one minute, nice little short breaths, or I'm sorry, nice long breaths. But give yourself 15 to 20 breaths and do that once or three times a day. So we start by relaxing the body for the first minute. We notice where we're holding tension, maybe in the jaw, shoulders, or their hands, and we let ourselves just soften a little bit. And we settle down our inner speech, settle our mind along with it. And then we come to the breath. So we start with the body, then we move to the breath, the second B. And we try not to control it too much. We just want to observe the breath. When the mind starts to wander off of looking at the breath and feeling the breath, and it will. We just gently bring it back. Almost think of this like balancing on a bike or on a horse. We just have to kind of correct a little bit and get our momentum going. Five, uh, a few breaths, ten breaths, fifteen breaths. We don't need to be perfect, but we do need to be responsive in a sense, not forcing our mind like you know, rigid and hard. But just try balancing a little bit, balancing on the breath. Just stay with it. And we could just start with a small area of focus too, as a practice. If our brain is active, our mind is active, just start with that sensation right at the edge of the nostrils, the rise and fall of the breath, feeling it come on and out. Or maybe it's our chest, just focusing on our chest or our belly, nice small areas. And as we settle and we use that strict focus or that tiny focus, that will let our awareness widen naturally. And this is called calm abiding. It's an old ancient practice, and it still works today. Why? Because, well, it gives your mind a job. It trains your focus instead of kind of bouncing around. It helps you stay on kind of on point, so to speak. And it also lets us interrupt old programming that's stuck on autopilot, like that unworthiness trance. And I'll tell you what, I will throw just a free um guided meditation onto this. It's on my website, so I'll put it in the show notes. Check that out if you dislike a guided version of this. And take the time to practice this. The more you practice this, the more your relationships, your business, your work, even your exercise, it all improves. Why? Because when we work on that core focus, that core presence with ourselves and slowing down, we actually shift the way we show up in big moments. Think of it as mind training. Five minutes a day of mind training is very, very valuable. Brick by brick, we build up that habit or that that size of that wall. So that's what I want to leave you with today.

Worthiness Is Not Conditional

SPEAKER_00 20:43

And I really want to reinforce this. You are worthy. This isn't because you've earned anything. It's not conditional. It's not even because you're here trying to fix yourself, quote unquote. Even in your struggling, in your flawed, very human state, there's nothing actually been done to you or by you or anything at all that reduces your worth. Now, you might uh have a struggle against that in the moment, and that's worthy of paying attention to because your worthiness is not how that works. It's non-conditional. It was never up for negotiation in the first place. And what you're dealing with is a system issue. It is not a personal defect. So please stop beating yourself up uh for having that background hum or that some of that unworthiness uh lingering back there. We all start by noticing it, and you do it a few times today. And that's really the whole assignment I'd love to leave you with, the whole work. So thank you for being here. Again, my name is Mark. If this story and this podcast landed in any type of way for you, um, please, I just ask that you sit with it, maybe journal with it, or just write down a couple notes before just moving on and rushing into your day. And if you're in a season of life where that uh unworthiness uh trance is particularly loud or that hum is kind of overtaking you, um, you might be carrying something too much, even a quiet sense of something wrong with you. Well, I just want to let you know that you're not alone and that is not the truth about who you really are. And if a conversation might help, there's a link in the show notes. Zero pitching, no sales, just an honest conversation about it and what's actually going on underneath everything. Thank you for listening. Until next time, keep fiercely encouraging yourself and especially those around you. I hope you have a great day, a great evening, wherever you're at. Take care. Bye bye.