Jennifer Breheny Wallace

don't want to invite people into their lives when they're going through something hard.

But there's research that I love called the beautiful mess effect, which is the idea that we often overestimate how much people will appreciate us opening up to them.

that opening up, revealing a bit of our struggle to others actually makes us look more authentic and it actually brings people closer to us.

So if you're feeling like you don't matter, ask yourself, do you have one or two or three people in your life who know you for who you are deep inside?

And if you don't, think about ways that you can start to invite those people into your life.

That's exactly right.

I mean, mattering is not some sort of trophy that we win and we put up on our shelves.

It is fluid.

And there are moments in life when we feel almost like we matter too much.

I

you can feel like you matter way too much.

But that too is not a true sense of mattering.

That is almost a false sense of mattering.

True mattering is about feeling valued and adding value to others, but also feeling valued and adding value to ourselves.

So in those moments when either I feel like I matter too much, or maybe I'm not feeling like I matter at all,

One thing you can start to do to turn that around is to really focus on mattering to yourself in small ways.

So I'll talk about it from the perspective of a busy parent.

I am the parent of three children.

And I often felt like it was my job to meet everybody else's needs.

And if there was time left at the end of the day, maybe I could meet a need of my own.