Jamie Kern Lima sold her company, IT Cosmetics, for $1.2 billion to L’Oréal. The sale made Jamie the first female CEO of a L’Oréal brand. Safe to say, she made a pretty penny. She'd made it. At least that’s what everyone thought. In reality, Jamie says she didn't have an ounce of self-worth to make her feel like she deserved any of it.
In this episode of 9 to 5ish, Jamie shares:
Why befriending Oprah deepened her understanding of feeling “enough”
How she distinguishes between self-confidence and self-worth
Her struggles with work addiction and how it affected her relationship with her family
The story of learning to quiet self-doubt and learning to trust herself with her new book, Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life
PS: 9 to 5ish is going on summer vacation. We'll be back in your feed in September.
On How Her Own Self-Doubt Manifests
Jamie: Most of my life, I did not believe I was enough. I had those feelings like, “Oh, I think I'm destined for greatness too.” So that's in our soul, our knowing, our gut. My mind really talked me out of it. “Oh, but you're not enough in this way and you're not this enough. You don't come from the right family. And you really don't have any connections. And you're not really that funny or maybe even that smart…or your body's not right” or this or that…and before you know it, it’s like we're talking ourselves out of the person that we're born to be. We're sitting on the sidelines of life.
On Why Achieving Things Doesn’t Equate to Self-Worth
Jamie: A lot of us work so, so, so hard. If we finally get the thing, we arrive at it and we're happy for a minute and then we're like, “Why do I still feel like something's missing?” or like it's not enough, or I’m still not enough. Then we try to solve it by working harder for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. What happens in that process of us achieving all these goals or building a big company or selling it for a billion dollars, or any of the other things is you build a lot of confidence. You're growing and all those things are amazing, but none of them build self worth, which is different. This is probably one of the biggest defining moments of my life. Our self confidence is how we assess our skills and abilities, our willingness to try and go for it. How much of the world's definition of success that we think we have if we're winning or losing at any moment. Our self confidence is fragile. It's super, super fragile. But our self-worth is the deep internal knowing and belief we're worthy of love and belonging exactly as we are, not as we achieve, not as our past mistakes or failures and our self-worth becomes our ceiling.
On Why She Sold the Business to Protect Herself
Jamie:I actually didn't trust myself to not keep doing hundred hour weeks forever. We were both super addicted to work…I don't think people ever really talk about this, but work addiction is also like any other form of addiction in that it can be numbing, it can separate you from you. You know a lot of people celebrate busyness and celebrate the “Oh, you're so busy and you're working so hard.” And I think that I fell into that for a very long time. And so for me, even as a mom, there were times Carly and Danielle…I was very aware that I would rather work than be with my family. And I was like, “Oh, I'm repeating this.” You know what I mean? I'm very aware that's how I feel, but I also am aware that is not how I want to feel.
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