Why Self-Worth Predicts Your Income More Than Your SAT Score Does, with Marisa Franco

Paula Pant (0:00)

Your self-worth is a bigger predictor of your income than your SAT scores. Low self-worth can block promotions, block job offers, and even lead to you sabotaging your own portfolio right before you hit a big goal, like FI., like financial independence. Joining us today to talk about the science of self-worth is psychologist Dr. Marisa Franco. She's a professor at the University of Maryland and the author of a book called Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship, acronym double-I, FIRE. Today's episode focuses on that very first letter F, financial psychology.

If you've ever found yourself sabotaging your own big goals or moving the goalpost once you finally got there, or if you've ever conflated your net worth with your self-worth, you'll probably benefit from this conversation. Here she is, Dr. Marisa Franco.

Welcome, Marisa.

Marisa Franco (1:07)

Hi. I'm so happy to be back, Paula.

Paula Pant (1:09)

Of course. Thank you for joining us. Marisa, what is worth?

Marisa Franco (1:15)

This is a more complicated question than I thought.

Paula Pant (1:19)

Yeah.

Marisa Franco (1:20)

So to figure out how I wanted to define worth, I looked into the research on self-esteem.

When it comes to people with high self-esteem, who say they feel good about themselves and they're worthy, there's really two different profiles.

I call them the good and the bad twin of self-esteem. One, the good twin of high self-esteem, they treat people well, they're very compassionate, they have the best relationships, they're kind versus the bad twin or people with high self-esteem who actually are very hostile and antagonistic towards others and report the worst relationships, worse than people with low self-esteem. And so when I read that, I was like, oh wow, like I really need to understand what's going on here because otherwise, if I'm pushing people to have this sort of egoistic high self-esteem where they treat everyone poorly and they treat everyone else like they're inferior, the stakes are everyone you love or love, the stakes are all of your relationships. So I was trying to define worth in a way that would push people to want the good twin kind of self-esteem. And I was talking to a colleague about it, Beth, and I would say she has like the good kind of high self-esteem, and she said to me, you know, when I feel defensive or hostile like the bad twin high self-esteem, it's because I feel shame and somebody's touching on that shame. And in that moment, I realized it's not that the good twin of high self-esteem, these people have high self-esteem, have thriving relationships. It's not that they don't feel defensive or hostile, but they acknowledge those feelings and we can only regulate the feelings that we acknowledge. So, I wanted to develop a definition of worth that was based off of the practice of acknowledging everything that you're feeling in a way that feels safe and grounded. And so, there's two specific practices within that, sensitivity, which is recognizing everything you're feeling, even the small emotions, and responsiveness, which is using that as information to guide you. And so, it's that continuous practice of treating our feelings as if they matter, that culminates in us generally having a high sense of self-worth.

Paula Pant (3:21)

Wow. Okay. There's a lot in there. Yeah. So, let's break this all down. But when you talk about sensitivity and responsiveness, would it be accurate to say that that is feeling and doing?

Marisa Franco (3:32)

Yeah, exactly. That's a great way of putting it. Use that for the next one.

Great.

Paula Pant (3:40)

I want to dig further into the feeling and doing. But before we get there, one thing that I noticed immediately about your answer is there is a distinction between self-worth and self-esteem. Exactly. Oftentimes, at least in common colloquial nomenclature, those are terms that we often use interchangeably.

Marisa Franco (3:57)

Exactly. You can have high self-esteem where you say that you feel good about yourself, and you say you're worthy, and you say you're a person of value, but low self-worth because you're compartmentalizing, ignoring all of your feelings, all of your shame, any feelings of weakness, any feelings of vulnerability, and that's that profile, the sort of bad twin of self-esteem because when anyone reminds them of all those feelings that they pushed away by them getting constructive feedback per se, that's when all of those cumulative feelings that they never really process come out and they get aggressive and hostile towards other people, irritable towards people very easily, those people with low self-worth and high self-esteem.