Cyndee Goldstein, The Worth Warrior (TWW), specializes in helping women and girls find their way back to self-worth, self-acceptance and self-confidence. She supports women on this journey through her coaching, motivational speaking, online courses and inspirational products and daily journals. Cyndee is passionate about helping women and girls find their true worth and learn to live their life as their true self, unapologetically. She loves working with women and specializes in helping those who are struggling with their self-worth and identity because they have a mixed-race heritage and don’t feel accepted. Her new course, “Breaking up with Self-Doubt” is launching online 2023.
Cyndee, why is it so important to you to help women and girls with their self-worth?
As women, we tend to lose our self-worth very easily. I’d like to be that voice that helps women and girls realize that they’re worthy of all things— they’re worthy of anything that they want or need in life! I’m passionate about this because I’ve gone on this journey. I went from feeling completely worthless to restoring my self-esteem and knowing I am worthy of wonderful things in life!
About 13 years ago, I was in a bad relationship, and that relationship literally took everything from me. It took all my money, my bank account was overdrawn, my credit cards were maxed out, my credit was in the toilet. And, my relationship didn’t work out. When it ended, what was taken from me was my self-worth. I literally felt like I’d been diminished into nothing. For a while, I was in survival mode. Slowly, I started by finding ways to help myself dig out of that hole. Little by little I started doing affirmations and trying to build my self-worth up a little bit.
I didn’t even know who I was. I didn’t know what kind of music I liked. I didn’t know the things I liked to do because everything I’d been doing in my life back then was tied to my relationship. It was all about him and what he liked to do or what he wanted to do.
13 years later, today, I like myself, I love myself and who I am now, but that took a lot of work. I want everybody to experience that!
Why do you care so much about helping young girls by teaching them about self-worth and self-acceptance?
I think that if we can get to girls and teach them about their self-worth early, then they can grow into adults with confidence and good self-esteem. And I want them to realize early that life isn’t that serious and, we get to be who we want to be, unapologetically. I’m especially passionate about helping those people who are struggling with their self-worth because they are of mixed race.
I have a gaggle of nieces and nephews and probably 90% of them are mixed with something that’s other than white. I watch them struggle with their identity, trying to find whether they’re one thing or another. They feel like they are stuck between two worlds – they’re not white enough for this or they’re not enough black for that. I’ve watched how it diminishes their self-worth.
I try to be the aunt that says, “Hey, you are worthy of all things” and makes them feel special. We do affirmations together and we spend time together. I make them listen to songs they don’t like to listen to that are inspiring.
I want to help girls who are struggling with an identity crisis; everybody deserves to have good self-worth and to be able to feel good about themselves. When you’re stuck between two worlds, what does that look like to accept who you are and know that you’re special no matter what? Our uniqueness is our superpower. Really.
Why is self-worth so important to you?
It’s important to me because I know that you can’t live a happy life with no self-worth. 13 years ago, my life was miserable. Everything was negative, and bad. Everything was happening to me. As I gained self-worth, I realized that things don’t happen to me, they happen for me. It might not look exactly how I thought it was going to look, but it always was for the benefit of me. When I go back and look at situations in my life later, in retrospect, things that I thought were “the end of the world” ended up being the best thing.
When my relationship ended, I thought it was the end of the world, but really, fuck that guy. Whatever. He was not worth my time, at the end of the day. I wasted time worrying about that.
But it was a lesson.
Worth is so important to me because I think it’s the basis of creating a happy life. When you get worth back after having lost it, and when you have self-worth, you realize that happiness is a choice. With self-worth, I get to choose to be happy every day, and I get to be happy every day no matter what’s going on around me. But, with no self-worth or no self-esteem, my days were just misery. I chose misery every day. It’s just easier to do that when you are not thinking about yourself first. Today, I choose self-worth and self-acceptance for myself, and it is what I teach women and girls to have or how to recover that sense of self if it’s been lost.
