Self worth and self esteem aren’t the same thing. In this Grit Diaries episode, Deborah Weed shares how a three-year health crisis and a single metaphor rewired her understanding of her own value.
Self worth and self esteem look the same from the outside, but they’re built on completely different ground. Deborah Weed spent over a decade at Citibank climbing the corporate ladder, chasing bigger titles and higher stakes. She was successful by every measure that mattered at the time. She was also never at ease.
Then a mysterious illness left her bedridden for three years. Doctors couldn’t name it. She couldn’t lift her head. During those three years of isolation and hemorrhaging, she stumbled on a story about a 1943 copper penny worth a million dollars. That story cracked something open.
If a penny everyone overlooks could have hidden value, what about her? What about the parts of herself she’d been taught to hide or prove away? She began writing. She wrote The Luckiest Penny. She created Paisley’s Fashion Forest, a musical about a porcupine who gives away her quills one by one. She built the Quills Up movement to help women reclaim their power.
This episode isn’t about illness or inspiration. It’s about the difference between self esteem (what you do) and self worth (who you are), and why that difference is everything. It’s about what happens when a heart-centered person finally gives themselves permission to stop performing for a brain-focused world. Deborah talks about disappointment as chemistry, not failure. About how a single moment of connection can reshape your entire life. About what you discover when you stop climbing and start listening.
Deborah Weed is a US-based creative and advocate who spent over a decade in corporate leadership at Citibank before a three-year health crisis forced her to rebuild her life. She now runs the Quills Up movement and has written a children’s book and musical, Paisley’s Fashion Forest, exploring how we give away our power piece by piece.
🕒 CHAPTERS:
00:00 The Citibank years
03:15 Why she built a corporate mask
05:11 The illusion of self-esteem
08:48 The difference between self-esteem and self-worth
10:21 Three years bedridden and alone
12:06 What the crisis revealed
13:25 The penny that changed everything
18:03 Paisley and the quills
21:51 Building toward Broadway
25:43 Her father’s wisdom on disappointment
29:56 What keeps bubbling back up
30:43 Closing and gratitude
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Welcome.
We’re glad you found your way here.
Kintsugi Heroes was created from a simple belief: every person has a story worth sharing, and sometimes the story we need to hear arrives exactly when we need it most.
Our name comes from the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold. Rather than hiding the cracks, they are honoured as part of the object’s history. We believe people are much the same. The experiences that challenge us, break us, shape us, and help us grow are often the very things that connect us to one another.
This channel is home to honest conversations about resilience, hope, grief, recovery, courage, love, and what it means to keep moving forward when life doesn’t go to plan.
Here you’ll find six podcast series, each sharing stories through a different lens:
• Kintsugi Heroes, hosted by John Milham
• Animals & Us, hosted by Natalie Stockdale
• Grit Diaries: From Grit to Grace, hosted by Simone Allan and Maryan Bova
• From There to Here, hosted by Emma Bellamy-Dodd
• Golden Threads: Stories of Disability & Resilience
• Pride in Stories, hosted by John Dwyer (launching 31 July 2026)
Every story shared here is offered with the hope that it helps someone feel a little less alone. A little more understood. A little more connected.
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We help people tell the stories they need to share so others can discover the story they need to hear.
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