Episode 53: How to Love Yourself for Real

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it but every result in your life is 100% because of the thoughts you think, and that my friends is 100% awesome.

Hello podcast universe! Welcome to episode fifty-three of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price and hey we made it to May, only to find out that nothing has changed. I don't know how your world looks, but mine looks exactly the same. And my brain is having a hard time loving what is, right?

If anything, this experience is just giving me much more empathy for the ancient Israelites who fled Egypt, right? And like every day I wake up and I'm like "Yup...We're still in the wilderness. Yup mana for breakfast again." And my brain is ready to see salvation, it's ready to see something different, it's ready for the miracle. And so, I am working hard every day to redirect these thoughts which just seem like the truth, but which are in fact optional, and I'm redirecting them to the thought that I am living in the miracle. The wilderness, the manna, they are in fact the miracle.

So, give yourself some grace if your brain is arguing about the worthiness or the enough ness of this miracle as well. Your brain is programmed to find problems, and right now that is a pretty easy job.

Your brain is doing its job, and it is so good at it, so don't beat yourself up for it. Just recognize that you always have a choice, even here, to think about it, to think about your life any way that you want. And that choice isn't good or bad, it's just going to give you a different experience, and it's all teaching you. You are doing awesome, I promise you.

02:22
And if your current experience is not the one you want to be having, I am here to help you see everything differently, and help you examine, and evaluate, the thoughts that are creating your life. I truly believe that there is no more powerful skill, than to be able to look at your own thoughts, and recognize the reality that they are creating for you. It's the key to getting any other experience you want to have in your life.

I know that it feels like it's up to other people, and their choices, that it's up to the circumstances in the world that are totally outside of your control, but I promise you that it isn't. Your reality is created by you, by what you think, and when you really understand that, you have the key to the universe, and I don't say that to give you something to beat yourself up about. Like "I don't love my experience, and it's all my fault!"

I say it because I want you to know that if you want something different it is 100 percent available to you. You can create it, and you don't have to wait for other people to change, or life to change in any way. You have everything inside of you right now to get the life you want, and if you're ready to have this skill, and this power in your life you can sign up for a free coaching consultation and I'll show exactly what it's like to work with me, and how changing your thoughts will change your life.

Okay! So, today I have a podcast that I have been thinking about for a while and I hope that it will come together here for both of us in a powerful way. I have been thinking about how we love ourselves and why that is so important. And I know that, that's kind of a bold statement, right? That you can in fact love yourself, and that when you do, it will change everything. I want you to know that when you learn how to love yourself, it's going to create a huge shift in your life, and allow everything else to just fall into place.

And I know right away that you might have some resistance to this idea. We aren't taught to love ourselves, and in fact I think especially for Christians we are taught to always think of others first, and not to think of ourselves at all. And so, our instinct is to kind of disregard or be skeptical of anything that says we should love ourselves.

But I actually think that loving yourself is the most selfless act you can do because, once you love yourself, then you can finally stop thinking about yourself, and worrying about yourself, and worrying about your worth, right?

04:51
Before you love yourself, you're always worried about what other people think of you. Before you love yourself, you are always criticizing yourself, and thinking about how you did it wrong, and how you failed, and this again puts all of the attention on you. I believe that loving ourselves allows us to put down the ego, and to not think about ourselves at all. And then, we are free to focus on others in the purest way possible, because we are no longer worried about us.

So, I started thinking about this because recently, I have been working with my coach on my beliefs about my business, about myself as a business person. And as we have worked all these new goals, a lot of my fears have come back up, my self-doubt has arisen over, and over again. And my coach offered me the idea of what she called "Radical self-support."

So, one day as we were working on my thoughts about myself, and my ability to create the business that I want, she asked me "What would you think about your goal if you had your own back to a delusional level?" Right. Like if you just supported yourself radically. She said, "What would you think for example, about your podcast if you loved your work, and yourself, and what you've created to such a radical level, that there was no room left for any self-doubt, like you were just like delusionally in love with your podcast and your work?"

And I realized as she asked me that question that those thoughts were options, those thoughts that the work that I was doing was amazing were just as available to me as the self-doubt. I just hadn't chosen them, the self-doubt seemed like the obvious choice, the self-doubt seemed like the logical, wise, prudent choice, right? It seemed like the safe choice, like if I'm being smart, I'm going to choose self-doubt, right?

But in that moment, when she asked me this question I could see that the thoughts that were creating the self-doubt weren't the only choice. Like for the first time I was like "Oh, that's not the only choice. I could think something else." And maybe I thought, they aren't even the best choice, maybe self-doubt isn't the best choice after all. And I think on some level, this is the same for all of us.

We think the self-hate, and the self-loathing, and the self-doubt, and the self-depreciation, we think all of that is very helpful. Or at least our brain does, it thinks that if we know that we are lacking, and that we just aren't good enough, if we know that we're terrible, then we can do something, and fix it. Before we get kicked out of the tribe, and die. But it turns out that all of that is unnecessary.

I'm going to tell you something now, there isn't even a tribe. We aren't going to be left on the outside of the group to be picked off by predators. There are no predators! None of that is going to happen. Our primitive brain is totally misinformed, and so what I want to offer you instead, is the idea that it is time instead to love yourself. It's time to have your own back to a radical level. It's time to draw a line in the sand, and say "Enough! I'm done hating myself, I'm done questioning my worth, and my adequacy all the time!"

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So, I want you to remember some things that I have told you before. First every feeling is created by a thought, if we want to feel love even for ourselves, we have to think the thoughts that create it. We kind of think that loving ourselves is contingent on something else, on something outside of us. The approval of other people, or it's contingent on us finally getting our act together, and being a person who is worthy of loving. We think we can love ourselves when we stop disappointing ourselves, and we finally be the person that we know we can be, when we reach our potential, then we can love ourselves.

But this isn't what creates love, action doesn't create love. Action doesn't create any feeling, thoughts create feelings. And maybe you are sick to death of hearing me say that, but this is the key to loving yourself, not action, not getting your act together, not shaping up and flying right. It is controlling, and directing the thoughts that you think about you, and it's never going to just happen to you.

You create love for yourself by what you think about yourself, and you get to decide what to think, and that will allow you to either love yourself or hate yourself. What I'm telling you is that it is a decision, and an act of the mind, a choice that you make in your own brain. It's not like some magical event that hopefully is going to happen someday when you finally prove yourself worthy of it.

And so, the first thing I want to offer you is the power of deciding that from now on you are only going to love yourself. You are going to have your own back. My coach had me make a list right at the top of the page she had me write, "Thoughts I'm Going to Throw Away Forever." She told me that her list was called "Thoughts That are Ridiculous use of My Time." These are the thoughts that serve no purpose in our life, other than to make us feel bad, and protect us against a potential removal from a tribe that doesn't exist.

You've already pointed out this is not a threat, our brain just thinks it is. I made a list of thoughts that I was going to throw away forever, right? These are the thoughts that say, "You're doing wrong, and you aren't doing enough, or you're never gonna make it." These are all the thoughts that tell you how you failed, or how you ruined everything, or how much you hate this certain thing about you. All those thoughts that go on the list, and what I want you to notice about these thoughts is that they use up so much of your time, and so much of your energy. They leave you depleted, and defeated, they make you feel terrible, and they don't produce any powerful emotion or actions. And at the same time they are creating a significantly worse relationship with yourself. And, what I want to tell you is they are also 100 percent optional, you do not have to think them.

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Now, you might be saying "Well that's all well and good April, but I just can't stop them, they just come." These thoughts always come back, and here's the powerful thing that I want to offer you with this list. I know the thoughts come back right, they always do that its part of the human condition. These self- doubting thoughts are going to come back because you have a human brain, but now you know them for what they are. They belong on a list of thoughts that we're going to throw away forever, right? They belong on the list of thoughts that are a ridiculous waste of time. You know them for what they are, they are thoughts that you have now thrown away, and when they come up they will remind you "Oh now we think something else instead." So, for me when those thoughts come up, right now, I have simply replaced all of them with the thought, I love myself.

And when my brain says, "I'm doing it wrong, and I'm never going to be enough," I remember that these are thoughts I have thrown away forever, and I think, I love myself. I'm okay with being 100 percent awesome. I love myself.

So, that's the first thing you decide, that you are going to love yourself. You draw a line in the sand, you decide that you're going to love yourself, and that it's no longer useful, or helpful, or even an option to hate yourself, and then make a list of the thoughts that you used to beat yourself up.

You can put a title on the list thoughts to throw away forever, and when they show up in your head again, they will remind you, like an indicator light on your brain's dashboard that you've decided to think something else instead. You've decided to replace that thought with something else like, I love myself. Choose a thought that you want to think instead, every time one of these thoughts reappears in your life.

So, maybe I should have ended with that one, because that's the only one you really need in order to love yourself, but I do have a few more things that I hope will help you as you go to love yourself fully and completely. So, to kind of build on the idea of drawing a line in the sand where we commit to loving ourselves, I want to explore for just a minute our resistance to this idea. We often think that we need this "self-doubt" that it's useful in some way, that it keeps us humble, and I think this is really a misuse of humility. I think that we should never see ourselves above another, but that does not mean that we have to be less than others. In so many ways we treat ourselves infinitely worse than we ever treat other people.

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We say things to ourselves that we would never say to another person, let alone someone who is close to us, or someone that we spend a lot of time with, or someone that we wanted to have a great relationship with. We would never say those things, so I want to remind you of the idea that our brain loves to be right. Our brain has thoughts, and beliefs, and then it looks out into the world, and matches the world to those thoughts. It seeks evidence to prove all of those thoughts, and beliefs correct, that's how our brain feels safe and secure and protective. It wants to know that it's right, and wants to know that the world is lining up with all of its thoughts.

And so, when we have a negative thought, a thought of self-doubt, or self-loathing, then our brain looks for evidence to back it up. And what I want you to see is that when we doubt ourselves, and then we try to go after our goals, or do things in the world, in order to do those things we have to enter into a battle with ourselves, to prove ourselves wrong about our beliefs.

On the other hand when we choose self-support, and believe in ourselves, and our own capacity, and then we choose to go after a goal, then our brain is challenged to prove ourselves right.

And the brain is so good at proving itself right. We want to prove all these positive things right, instead of looking for more and more evidence that all these negative things that we've always thought are true. I want you to give your brain a positive job, I want you to give it something amazing to do. Make it prove yourself support right. So that's the second thought I want to give you, your brain loves to be right, and find evidence that it is right.

So, when you think positive self-supporting loving thoughts about yourself then it can go to work proving those things right. It's kind of like when I told you I decided to believe that I was an awesome Bishop's wife, right? I just decided to believe that about myself, and then I put my brain to work finding evidence for it. Or like when I decided to believe that I was a soft place to land, when I believe these things about myself I find more and more evidence that this is who I am. And then I also produce more and more evidence of this is who I am, by the way that I act, and my brain can then use that as evidence and put it in the file that says, yes I am a soft place to land.

So, the way that my coach explains this is she says that the whole reason that we practice radical self-support is because what we think about ourselves determines what we do. What we think about ourselves changes what we do. We love ourselves and have our own back because when we support ourselves, then we rise up to prove ourselves right. I rise to prove I'm an awesome Bishop's wife, I rise to prove I'm a soft place to land, we rise to prove whatever story we are thinking about ourselves. We rise to prove our brain right.

Okay so, that leads us into the next idea that I want to talk to you about when you have thoughts about yourself. You are in a sense creating a story about yourself and if you are telling a story about yourself, I want you to tell a good one.

Okay so, what do I mean by this? So many times we have thoughts, or stories about ourselves, and the way that we did things, in the way that we should have done things, and then we hurt ourselves with those thoughts and stories. So, a couple of weeks ago, Brooke Castillo sent out an email, and there was a line in it that caught my attention, and I have been thinking about it ever since, and I want to just kind of talk about it, because I think it can be instructive for all of us.

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So at the beginning of March the Life Coach School had scheduled a business workshop conference in Dallas and this was just as the coronavirus was kind of hitting full force and people were starting to realize that this was going to be way more serious than we thought. And things were starting to cancel, the NBA canceled that week, and then colleges started canceling in-person classes, and the Life Coach School said "Don't worry we're still going to have the conference. Come. Don't change your travel plans. Just come. It's still on." So, on a Thursday morning I got on a plane to go to Dallas and the conference was still on, and when I got off that plane in Dallas two and a half hours later the conference had been canceled. This is like a really rapidly changing situation, and it changed for me while I was on that flight.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Brooke Castillo wrote an email offering to reimburse people for their travel, or to donate that same amount to the crisis fund. And she wrote something in this email that caught my attention. She wrote "Dear friends, Ah hindsight, it's all so clear now. I wish I would've canceled the business workshop earlier." And then she wrote "This thought hurt me for many weeks."

Now, notice you can see in this email she has some regret, right? Regret that she didn't know then, what she knows now, regret that she had done it differently, regret that she had canceled earlier and somehow made it better for people by doing it differently. You can hear the regret in her words, and notice what she says "I wish I would have canceled earlier." That's the regret, and then she says, "This thought hurt me for many weeks." She used that regret to hurt herself for many weeks, and what I want you to notice is that it didn't change the outcome.

It didn't change the fact that I flew to Dallas that morning, the thought that hurt her did not change one thing. The thought that hurt her, only hurt her now.

The reason I tell you this story, and point this out is because I see this so much in my own life and in my clients lives. We have these thoughts that we should have done it differently, that we should have been different in some way, that we should have been better in so many ways. And those thoughts, and the story that we tell about ourselves, doesn't ever change anything. It just hurts us, and it only hurts us, it just stays there, and hurts us. It repairs nothing, it changes nothing, it only causes pain. "This thought hurt me for many weeks."

I want you to think about that for a minute. I want you to get still, and I want you to get kind of reverent with yourself, and ask yourself "What thought am I hurting myself with? What thought have I been hurting myself for several years with? What story am I holding onto in order to punish myself, and hurt myself and beat myself with?"

20:35
We all have them, I had one for years about how I was a terrible mother, and my kids deserved so much better. This thought hurt me for many years, and what I want to point out is that it changed nothing about the experience I was creating as a mother. It hurt me, and it prevented me from showing up in the way I wanted to in my children's lives. I want you to rewrite the story you are telling and make yourself the hero, and you're like "Holy Cow. I can't do that. I'm not the hero, I'm the villain."

I want you to know that if you continue to tell the story like that, the story won't change. And in fact nothing will change, but you will continue to hurt yourself with it and that will serve no one. Retell the story about how there was no one better than you to make the decisions, and do the things you did.

Retell the story about how even when you didn't know better, you did your best, and that you always tried to make the right decision even when you had no idea what you were doing, and you never stop trying.

I tell myself this story that I was the exact imperfect mother that my children needed. Who better than me to mess it up in the exact ways that I did, and give my children the exact experience they needed? Who better than me to give it my all, even when I was scared, and sick, and broken, and hating myself? Who better than me, when I didn't know any better?

The story I tell is that I was in every way the mother I needed to be then, in all my imperfection, and I never stopped trying now in all my imperfection. Retell your story, whatever it is so that you don't continue to hurt yourself. It doesn't serve anyone, and it prevents you from loving all of you. All of the awesome, and all of the mess, and knowing that all of it is exactly as it should be.

The next idea that goes along with this, is the idea of forgiving yourself. Now, I'm going to talk about this in a way that you might not have heard before, and your brain might want to reject it right out of the gate, but I just want you to kind of open a space for it, and let it sit with you for a while. Why don't you kind of try it on? It's just the thought, but it made a huge difference for me, and it might make a huge one for you as well.

So, a lot of people will talk about forgiving ourselves, learning to forgive yourself and I don't deny that there can be some great value in doing that. But I want you to take it one step further by offering you the idea that my coach, Brooke Castillo, offered me. So she explained that when we say, we forgive someone, we automatically create the condition that the other person did something wrong, and that we then offer our forgiveness for that.

23:30
If we forgive ourselves, we automatically assume that we have done it wrong, and now that thing needs to be made right. Right? Or forgotten about. And she said that she has found peace by assuming that no wrong was ever done, that whoever wronged her had been doing their best, and had done it exactly like they were supposed to, and that there was no need for forgiveness because nothing had gone wrong in the first place.

Now, I know that that might be kind of hard to accept, but I want you to just consider the idea that all the things you have done quote unquote "wrong in your life." I want you to consider what it would be like not to need to forgive yourself for those things at all. To understand that in those moments you were doing the very best you knew how to do. That you had done it right with the capacity, and the knowledge, and the information you had. You had done exactly as you should have, and learned the things that you now know. That without making the mistake you wouldn't be who you are, and in fact, all the choices that you have made were necessary to be who, and what you are now.

What would it be like to assume that you are having the exact experience you're supposed to have? What would it be like to love yourself for doing your human experience exactly as you have, so that you can be who, and what you are now? What would it be like to stop condemning yourself for the life you were always going to have, for the life you were always meant to have, for the experiences you always needed to have, and to learn from?

I want to offer you that, you can't do it wrong, and if that's the case, then there's nothing to forgive. There is just only you with the life you have had, and the experiences you have had, waiting to be loved. It doesn't mean that I'm abdicating responsibility for the life I have created, in fact it's the opposite. It means that I take full responsibility for the life I have created, but I don't condemn myself for it, I don't hate myself for it. I take full responsibility, and then love myself for it. See myself, and all my choices, and my life with utter compassion. I did what I did, because that's what I knew to do, and I love myself for it.

When we make mistakes we tell ourselves that it wasn't supposed to be that way, that we should have done better, that we should have done it differently, but Byron Katie challenges that, and asks "How do we know you should have done it the way you did because you did?"

And I know that sometimes people want to argue with this, and they say "Well that's just the easy way out." That saying "You should have done it the way you did," is just giving you an out. But I want you to know that it doesn't release us from responsibility, it just allows us to stop arguing with reality, to stop arguing with what actually was right, to stop arguing with what actually is, and then move on. Like I can't be a higher, better, version of myself if I'm busy arguing with what was, with who I was. You should have done it like you did, and now what? What do you want to do now?

The last idea I want to talk about is an idea that I got from Kamal Ravikant, and he wrote a book called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. And he talked about this powerful idea that when you love yourself, you start to tolerate less of what doesn't serve you. So he says that when we truly and deeply love ourselves, we don't accept so much garbage, especially from ourselves.

Meaning that when you love yourself, you require more of yourself, you require more from the way you think, and talk about yourself. You require more from the way you live your life, and the way you reach your potential, you require more from you, and you stop making excuses because you love yourself. He says, "Loving yourself allows you to meet the highest version of you."

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So, what I find in myself, and in my clients, is that we notice that we aren't doing the things in our life that we want to be doing. We aren't showing up in the way we want to. And we use this as another thing, and another way to hate ourselves, and then we start shooting ourselves to death. We tell ourselves in so many ways, we should, we should, we should, we should. And I think that what is so insidious about the word "should" is that it sounds so noble, right? It sounds like we really understand all the things that are wrong about us, and we know what we should be doing instead.

But instead of allowing us to take responsibility of those things that we want to be doing in our lives, instead we give ourselves the out by saying "should" it's like, instead of taking responsibility, and doing it differently, we just beat ourselves up. We should. And should, never creates an emotion that drives action, should create shame, and that just causes us to hide.

When we love ourselves, we don't allow ourselves to beat ourselves up, and from this compassionate place we can look honestly about the life we are living.

We can look with honesty, and non-judgment about the way we are acting. We can look at the things we are doing, and we can look at the things that we are not doing. And then from a place of non-judgment, we can look at the thoughts that are creating those actions or inactions. We notice, I'm not acting because of what I'm thinking, and then we can ask ourselves what do I want to think instead? And we do this from curiosity rather than condemnation, we decide from a place of love what we want to do instead of a place of should. We decide how we want to feel, what we want to do, and what we're going to think to get there.

So, T.S. Eliot wrote a play called "The Elder Statesman" and in there, there's a passage that a friend recently shared with me that I think is so beautiful, and it really describes this so well. So Eliot wrote,

"What is this self-inside us,
this silent observer,
severe and speechless critic,
who can terrorize us,
and urge us onto futile activity,
and in the end judge us still more severely for the errors
into which his own reproaches drove us."

Eliot is saying, inside each of us is this critic telling us all the "shoulds" making us crazy, urging us that we should be doing all these things, and doing it better, and making us try, and work, and spin, and grasp, for that elusive enoughness that we're all looking for.

And then, whatever action we take, that same critic judges those actions, and says that we did it all wrong, and we tried to do too much, and it was all a bad job. The answer is not to do more, the answer is not to "should" ourselves to death.

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The answer is to quiet the voice, to quiet the critic, to recognize that that critic, that should voice, will never create any positive, long term action or change in our life. Your power is to notice the thoughts creating the action, or inaction in your life. And if it starts with "should" it's not gonna get you where you want to be.

If the thought contains self-loathing or dissatisfaction with who we are, it's not going to propel you to positive action. The thoughts you choose to think, create your feelings, and those fuel all of your actions. So, we need to choose them carefully, the way you think about yourself and your life truly matters.

So, I had an experience with this just this week, so I was sad and disappointed for a number of reasons, because of the current Coronavirus, some things that me, and my kids have been looking forward to for a long time are not going to be happening. And so, I have been disappointed about that, and I was talking to David about it, and he was of course happy, and positive, and not visibly disappointed in any way that I could tell.

And I had thought that like "I'm just a negative person, I have a bad attitude, and I should be more like him." And what I want you to see is what happened as I thought, "I should be different," and "I should be feeling different. I should be more like him." That created a feeling of anger inside me, I felt mad, I felt mad at myself, I felt mad at David for being better than me in every way, and then I beat myself up, and I gave him the silent treatment. So, being mad at myself was not going to propel me into positive action, "shoulding" myself "I should be like him," was not going to propel me into positive action.

I needed to drop my judgment of myself, and get curious about what I was thinking in order to show up differently in my life. So, if I love myself in that moment instead of criticizing myself for my feelings, then I can be curious. Why am I sad, and disappointed? Oh because I'm thinking I missed out, and when I think I missed out, I feel disappointed. That's 100 percent okay! Do I want to keep thinking that I missed out for now? Yes I do. And I'm not going to criticize myself for that.

And when I refuse to criticize myself for my feelings, it means I don't have to be mad at me for what I'm thinking, and I don't have to be mad at David for thinking something differently. When I refuse to hate myself for my feelings, or judge myself for my feelings, then I can just love me, and I can love him. It opens all of that up to me. So I love the question that Kamal Ravikant asks, he says that loving yourself can change all of your behaviors.

And he uses this question to do that, he asked himself "If I love myself truly, and deeply, what what I do?" So, in every situation that he goes into he asks himself "If I love myself truly and deeply what would I do?"

So, I'm going to think about this for a minute, when I eat, when I exercise, when I spend money, when I talk to my children, when I greet my husband, when I have an opportunity to serve others, notice what changes when you ask "If I love myself truly and deeply, what would I do?" It brings our higher self online, the one that deserves to be treated in the best way you know how, because you love yourself.

34:12
This is why what you think about yourself, and your life matters because it changes all of the actions in your life toward yourself, and others. When we feel love, we act differently, and that's why I say loving ourselves is the least selfish thing we can do. These painful hateful stories, and thoughts that your brain wants to hold on to so tightly are not serving you.

And the answer is to love yourself. All of you draw a line in the sand. Kamal Ravikant calls it "Making a vow to yourself." I invite you to make one to love yourself right now, and for the rest of your life. Your life will only get better when you do. The way you love yourself will determine what you do in your life. And it will determine the degree to which you can love others. And that my friends is 100% awesome!

I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!