Read the full transcript of Kim Otteby’s talk titled “Do You Know Your Self-Worth?” at TEDxLusaka 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Illusion of Self-Worth
How’s your self-worth? If zero is no self-worth and 10 is off the charts, amazing self-worth, where would you be? If you were to ask me a few years ago, I would have told you that my self-worth is just fine. After all, I was successful. I had grown a company in an industry that didn’t exist previously. I was confident. I was courageous even. I set these big goals and I’d go after them. Surely, you can’t do all of that unless you have great self-worth, right? Wrong. Turns out, my self-worth was pretty much non-existent. I had no self-worth. I just didn’t know it.
Deep down, I wasn’t sure whether I was enough. You see, we all have a fundamental primary question that we ask ourselves. This drives our decisions. It drives our actions. It drives our behaviors. This is usually a very deep, unconscious inquiry. My fundamental question pretty much from the day I was born was, “Am I enough?” Am I enough? I wasn’t sure. In order to be valuable, in order to justify my existence, in order to be worthy, I had to be enough. That became my mission, to go out and prove to the world that I was enough, that I deserve to be here, that I was worthy of this existence, and ultimately, that I was worthy of love.
If you take a moment to be completely honest with yourself, you will probably recognize that one of the deepest fears that we have as human beings is not being loved. So in my mind, proving that I was enough, this became a matter of survival.
The Pursuit of Perfection
So how did I go about doing that?
Well, I went out in the world and I started to do, and then I did some more. I was the kid in school, always with the top grades. If there was a test, I would get up at 4 a.m. in the morning just so I would have two hours of extra study time in. I strived to get into one of the top universities in the world, and when I did that, I strived to get a top, high-paying job, and so it continued. To prove my worth, I had to go out there and do, achieve, be successful. My worth wasn’t given, it wasn’t innate, it had to be proved, and not just once, but again and again and again. The work was never done.
Terrified of the potential that I may not be enough, I also tried to be perfect. That was always my aim, and everything I did, I tried to be perfect. Not just one area of my life, like every area of my life. The perfect job, the perfect relationship, be the perfect mother, organize the perfect birthday party, have the perfect body, deliver the perfect presentation. You get the picture. I would set these incredibly high standards for myself, and if I didn’t quite reach it, I would be disappointed.
Have you ever done that? Where you’ve set a goal, and maybe you didn’t quite reach it, you felt perhaps that you failed? We have a tendency to do this, but I went a step further. I went from, “I failed,” to, “I am a failure,” internalizing it, proving, reinforcing, again, that, “Kim, you’re not enough.” But perfectionism is actually the lowest standard that we can have, simply for the fact that it is unattainable. We are setting ourselves up for failure, because it doesn’t matter how hard you work, or how much effort you put in, something can always be better, so I wore my perfectionism like a mask. My perfectionism hid my imperfections.
The Consequences of Perfectionism
This has real consequences. I mean, for instance, if you’re always trying to be perfect, you can’t reveal who you truly are. That’s simply too risky. You can’t just be you, because what if someone were to find out that you’re not actually enough, that you’re, in fact, not worthy? And as a result of all this pressure, I ended up developing a severe eating disorder, something that took me over 10 years to overcome, including spending three months in an intensive residential addictions clinic.
The bottom line is this, as long as you believe that you are not enough, you cannot have self-worth. They cannot coexist. They are polar extremes, opposite sides of the spectrum. Now, I desperately wanted to feel worthy, but as long as I held on to the belief that I was not enough, this was simply impossible. So I try to compensate. I try to fill up my bucket of self-worth by doing, and doing, and doing, and by trying to be perfect, but that is a bucket that can never be filled, simply for the fact that it had this gaping big hole at the bottom, so whatever self-worth I was putting in there would just continuously be seeping out, and that hole, that was the belief, “I’m not enough.”
Confidence vs. Self-Worth
But I had confidence. I had self-esteem even. How is that even possible if I didn’t have self-worth? We have a tendency to confuse confidence and self-worth. It’s a common mistake. I don’t know, have you ever thought of the difference? Confidence is all about what you show on the outside. It’s about what you can do, your skills, your abilities, your talents. Self-worth is all about how you feel on the inside. It’s about who you are, your value as a person, regardless of what you can do or what you have achieved.
Confidence is dependent on external circumstances, what’s going on on the outside, and because of that, it can be taken away in an instant. For instance, when my business was doing well, I felt pretty good about myself, but when COVID hit and my business started to fail and started losing a lot of money, my confidence started to dwindle. Yet self-worth has nothing to do with what’s going on on the outside. Self-worth is all about your inner value, not the value that other people from the outside place on you. No, your innate value. The fact that you are worthy simply because you are here. You are worthy because you exist. If you weren’t worthy, you wouldn’t exist, yet here you are, you exist, you’re worthy, and you don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to be anything, you don’t have to achieve anything. You are worthy right here, right now, in this moment, and you have always been worthy and you will always be worthy. Nothing and no one can ever take that away from you because it just is.
The Truth About Self-Worth
So how do we get to that point? How do we get to that point of self-worth? Well, firstly, it is not a scale of zero to ten. That was a little bit of a trick question, so I apologize for that. It’s always a ten. It is always a hundred percent. You can’t be 50% worthy because either you exist or you don’t. And the fact that you’re sitting in these chairs here today, I think we can safely assume that you exist. And therefore, by definition, you are 100% fully worthy.
The problem is, we don’t see it. We are blinded by the belief that we are not enough, not good enough in some way. I’m not pretty enough. Not smart enough. I’m not rich enough. I’m not funny enough. I’m not successful enough. I’m not enough. And this belief prevents us from seeing the truth. Self-worth is simply a realization. It is a recognition of who we truly are. It is a knowing.
I have spent pretty much my whole life on a journey trying to find, uncover, believe in, and finally know my worth because it is very different to understand something intellectually compared to know it in your core with every fiber of your being that it is truth with a capital T. If one of you were to right now shout out to me, “Hey, Kim, I hate your green hair,” you know what? I’d be completely okay with that because I know my hair. My hair ain’t green. In the same way, I know my worth. It doesn’t matter what anyone says or anyone thinks or if my business fails or if I make a complete fool of myself on this stage here today, it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t impact my worth. I know my hair ain’t green.
I used to hide all the things that I thought were unacceptable, ugly, less than. I thought only the good parts are worthy. And I will never forget the moment that I realized that the good in this world, it can’t exist without the bad. The beautiful cannot exist without the ugly. The clever cannot exist without the ignorant. Love cannot exist without fear. There is a duality with everything that we encounter, two sides of the same coin. For you to know one, you must know its opposite. The candle burns brightest in the dark. And so it is within me. That duality exists within me. And I must accept the whole of who I am.
And it’s only when I recognize all the things that I don’t like about myself that I can fully recognize all the beautiful qualities and the gifts that I also possess. Without recognizing the bad, I cannot recognize and fully honor the good. What is good and bad anyway? These are just labels that we put on things. Nothing is inherently good or inherently bad. It just is. And everything is within me. I am the whole, the totality. And that includes every part of me, not just the good parts, every part, the whole. This, this is self-worth.
Stepping Into Greatness
I no longer have to go out and prove my worth. I don’t have to go out there and do, do, do. I don’t have to achieve. I don’t have to hide behind a mask of perfectionism. I don’t have to fill my bucket. My bucket is already full. I used to do. But you know what? I am a human being. The only thing I really have to do is just breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe and be me.
When we recognize our worth, that is when we step into our greatness. That is when we align and connect with our authentic power. That is when we can finally realize our full, true potential. I am worthy and so are you. The only question remaining is, do you know it or do you think your hair is green? I don’t. I don’t.
