Feeling Unworthy? This Question Moves You Right Out of That Funk

Discover one key question to move you out of the muck of wondering whether you’re worthy and toward living a fun and fulfilling life.

It’s shocking how often the topic of worthiness comes up in business masterminds with high-achieving women.

More astounding is that the more a woman has achieved, the more she seems to question her worth.

Yet it’s a bizarrely relatable topic for most ambitious women:

• There’s the question of can I keep it up? when it comes to achievements.

• There’s the worry that they only like me because I’m smart/degreed/have a title/earn a lot.

• And then there’s always that niggling little thorn in the back of the mind that asks, “Who am I without my accomplishments?”

Friends, there’s loads to say on this topic. For today, though, I want to share an unusual approach to upending this loopy, unpleasant thinking with a single question that can put a stop to all the worry and angst.

The Magical Query

I was absolutely a doubter when I first heard this. Then I tried it, and it worked.

The single, magical question you need to ask yourself to break free from the harrowing funk of unworthiness is this:

What great thing is going to happen to me today?

But before you write it off as too easy, too Pollyanna, and not enough of a challenge, hear me out.

For a lot of socio-cultural and biological reasons we’ll explore another day, high-achieving women tend to live on alert. It usually happens after the awards, accolades, promotion, and raise. That’s when your brain starts scanning for danger and personal defects to make sure you don’t fall off the high beam of success.

So asking, “What great thing is going to happen to me today?” works because it flips your brain from the omni-present mode of danger-scanning to instead looking for evidence that good things are happening in your life. Really, it prompts you to find proof that you are, in fact, someone to whom good things happen.

The question effectively interrupts that shame-y, self-critical loop so many of us find ourselves caught in (usually by the end of the day and again at 3 AM, if you’re like me).

It holds the same power as looking inward for your strengths instead of focusing on your flaws. But to be frank, those inner strengths are harder to pin down than it is to look outward for good things happening to you.

This question also activates a sort of confirmation-bias flip: instead of noting all the things you got wrong over the last week, your attention starts catching small positives and wins you’d otherwise overlook.

And then slowly, lightly, your internal story about yourself and your worthiness begins to shift.

Here’s what that looked like when I tried it.

Flaw focused: I forgot to send that birthday text, picked my kid up late, missed the parents’ meeting, canceled my workout, and had to extend a deadline again…

Small-positives focused: My friend dropped off flowers, my kid voluntarily made dinner, my client sent a bonus, that cashier complimented my smile.

What’s different about this approach is that in the second line of thinking, I wasn’t looking for things I did right. I wasn’t trying to flip my thinking with a tit for tat, failure for success kind of balance.

Instead, I was looking outward, assessing the way the world showed up for me. Peculiarly, it made me feel great.

How This Shifts Unworthiness

Consider that unworthiness is often a form of internalized shame. It’s the full-baked equivalent of thinking there’s something wrong with you, and you don’t deserve good things like power, wealth, and influence. (Just so we’re clear, though, you do deserve those things.)

That kind of sludgy thinking becomes a sort of trance over time, or an automatic mindset. Like your go-to way of being.

But a future-oriented, open-ended question pokes holes in that trance by suggesting that you are a person of worthiness. Because if great things can happen to you, then you must be deserving of success and connection and goodness.

When you do this over time, asking yourself the question every day and then gradually collecting evidence that great things do happen to you on a regular basis, your previously up-in-arms brain shifts from the sour belief of “I’m not worthy” to something simpler. Something kinder. Something that makes you smile when you crawl into bed.

Why It’s So Potent for Driven Women

This flip works particularly well for high-achieving women. They tend to be disproportionately caught in a web of perfectionism, chronic self-doubt, and what I call “never-enoughism” — even when their track record emanates competence.

If your default self-evaluation questions are, “What did I do wrong? Where am I behind? How can I prove myself today?” then you’re stuck in a constant loop of analysis that handily reinforces unworthiness.

But, asking “What great thing is going to happen to me today?” shifts that rotten, evaluative focus from self-performance and fixing over to receiving and allowing.

And when it comes to high-achieving women, receiving and allowing are probably the two most underused skills.

It’s also delightfully low-stakes. It’s not asking you to believe you’re amazing. It’s not a forced positive statement like “I am lovable” or “I am enough.” (There’s a time and place for affirmations—personally, I love ’em—but sometimes they can make you feel worse because your clever mind starts arguing with them and finds ways to prove them wrong.)

This question simply asks you to consider that something non-terrible might happen today. That’s a lot easier to entertain. It doesn’t trigger inner resistance.

Making This Joy-Tweak Part of Your Day

If you ask the question at all, you’re winning. But to optimize its value (because that’s going to be the most satisfying, right?), ask it early in the day. Ask before emails and reports and metrics start pushing your brain into doer-mode (the opposite of receiver-mode).

Then, as the day presses on, deliberately look for any potential answers—teeny or huge—and mentally note, “Hey! That’s one of those great things!” This trains your attention to spot evidence of great things happening around you.

If you want to deepen the effect it has on your high-achieving self, you might occasionally tweak the question to ask,

“What great thing is going to happen for me today that has nothing to do with how productive I am?”

or “What great thing is going to happen when I let myself be imperfect?”

Try it and see. Over time, these little nuggets of great things will grow into a mountain of evidence that shows you are perfectly worthy and wonderful just as you are, in your imperfect, completely human, very capable, high-achieving state.

I’d love to hear how this experiment plays out for you—please share in the comments below.

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