This is a tran­scrip­tion of a journal entry writ­ten on 13th July 2009

Dur­ing the last few days I have been pon­der­ing about some­thing I want to change in my life. I’ve become keenly aware of an import­ant motiv­a­tional factor and source of self-​worth on which I’ve been rely­ing since I was very young. I refer to my desire to be seen in a good light by oth­ers, to receive praise, recog­ni­tion, adu­la­tion etc. I have been aware of this for a long time, but only now do I begin to see that this has no place in my life.

One of my earli­est memor­ies of self-​awareness and intro­spec­tion is when I was 4 or maybe 5, and I wished I could be pop­u­lar like the sing­ers and act­ors on TV, or wish­ing I could fly like Super­man, so that I could impress my peers. I remem­ber singing all the time, ima­gin­ing people around me admir­ing and prais­ing me. Some­times, my exten­ded fam­ily would praise me, and this often enough that, to this day, I still sing mostly to impress people.

I also remem­ber telling jokes all the time at school. I didn’t do it to make people happy or to com­fort or cheer them up. I did it mainly because it made me feel good that people thought I had a good sense of humour.

Through­out my entire life I have struggled with this inner battle with what I thought was simply pride. I talked to myself con­stantly (inwardly) about my need to be humble, to do things for the right reas­ons etc. Cog­nit­ively I know that, by focus­ing on praise and recog­ni­tion when I per­form any­thing artistic, I am miss­ing out on the pleas­ure and hap­pi­ness of the per­form­ance itself, of the full expres­sion of my inner feel­ings through my per­form­ance, and, espe­cially, the expres­sion of my grat­it­ude to my Heav­enly Father for my gifts.

Nowhere in my life is this issue brought more keenly and fre­quently to my atten­tion than each Sunday morn­ing at Church, where I join the con­greg­a­tion in singing «hymns of praise» to my God. I very rarely pay any atten­tion to the words of the hymns! I am con­stantly on the lookout for oppor­tun­it­ies to impress oth­ers with my voice, and... I hate it! I hate that part of me that seeks to receive praise instead of giv­ing it. Some­times I have the oppor­tun­ity to play the organ or the piano to accom­pany the con­greg­a­tion, and the tempta­tion to play to impress is much lower. I’m bet­ter able to focus on provid­ing wor­ship­ful, dig­ni­fied music in order to bring a good spirit to the meet­ing. When I sing, how­ever, I’m not yet able to do that, and I look for­ward to the day when I can over­come this weakness.

I’ve also noticed that I seek sources of self-​worth in the wrong places. This may actu­ally be a more cor­rect descrip­tion of the prob­lem I described above, which I used to simply call pride.

I real­ised this recently, over a period of time of about a year, while work­ing with the online com­munity of Moodle (an online learn­ing plat­form). I am often jok­ing around in my con­ver­sa­tions with other developers (an echo of my school years), try­ing to attract (or extract!) praise from my col­leagues etc.

In a recent con­ver­sa­tion with one of these co-​workers, Penny Leach, I dis­cussed my fre­quent feel­ings of inad­equacy, my impres­sions of being a «fraud» in the midst of so many tal­en­ted and know­ledge­able people, a feel­ing with which she identified.

My reas­on­ing leads to a con­clu­sion which motiv­ates my desire to change: I DON’T NEED praise from men or women to know my worth! I am a son of God, with all his divine attrib­utes within me! I know my ori­gins, my pur­pose, my des­tin­a­tion, so why do I need affirm­a­tion of my mor­tal worth from other mor­tals, when I have con­firm­a­tion of my eternal worth from God himself?

I am con­vinced that, with con­stant remind­ers of this concept, I can slowly let go of the habits and atti­tudes that have made me unduly depend­ent on the wrong sources of self-​worth. I will be able to sing praises to God without wor­ry­ing that oth­ers can hear me or not (and like what they hear!). I will do things only for the right reas­ons, not just par­tially for some of the right reasons.