I’ve been thinking lately about the connection between the value we see in ourselves and the voices we allow to speak into our lives. The way we receive people’s words — especially when those words are condescending or belittling — usually says less about the person talking and more about how we’ve come to view our own worth.

When someone speaks down to you and you let it stand, one of two things is generally true. Either you’ve quietly started to believe you’re worth less than you are, or you’ve grown secure enough in who you are that you can recognize the brokenness behind their words and stay in the room anyway — not as a doormat, but as a help. Those two postures can look identical from the outside. Inside, they could not be more different. One is erosion. The other is a grounded strength that holds its dignity with one hand and offers compassion with the other.

Here’s a musician’s way to think about it. Before an orchestra plays a note, everyone tunes to the same reference pitch. Nobody tunes to whichever instrument happens to be loudest. But that’s exactly what many of us do with our sense of worth — we tune ourselves to the loudest voice in the room, or the most recent one, or the one that stung the most on a day we were already tired. Loud is not the same as true. If you tune to a voice that’s flat, you’ll play flat all night and wonder why nothing sounds right.

And there’s a trade underneath all of this that deserves an honest look. Every one of us hands something over in exchange for affirmation. The question is what. When the words “you matter” or “you’re beautiful” or “you’re impressive” come back to us, what did we pay to hear them? Sometimes the answer is nothing — the affirmation was free, given in love, and it builds something in us. But sometimes we’ve traded a piece of what’s internal for something external, performed a version of ourselves to win applause the real version never gets to keep. Affirmation that costs you your authenticity is a loan, not a gift. It always comes due.

In my work in medicine I’ve sat with a lot of people doing the arithmetic of their lives, and I’ve noticed something: the voices that end up mattering are almost never the loud ones. They’re the ones that told the truth in love — the ones that saw something in them before they could see it themselves. Hardly anyone, looking back, wishes they’d given their critics more airtime.

I believe our worth was settled long before any audience showed up — that we carry an image we didn’t create and can’t forfeit, and that no voice in any room has the authority to revoke it. You may see the ground of it differently than I do. But either way, the practical question lands in the same place: worth that’s rooted somewhere deeper than the room you’re standing in doesn’t rise and fall with the room.

So maybe this week is a good time for an audit. Which voices have you handed a microphone? Which ones earned it, and which ones just grabbed it? Is there a voice you’ve been tuning to for years that has never once been true? And what have you been trading for the affirmation you chase most?

I’m not going to answer those for you — they’re not mine to answer. Sit with them honestly and think it through for yourself. The voice that matters most in that conversation isn’t mine anyway.

— Reggie