#56: Do You Love Yourself?
You may have found that the journey to really loving yourself can take time. There are so many ways that we can easily put shame and blame on ourselves for every little thing, or even look outside of ourselves for love. In today’s episode I’m sharing my experiences with really taking time to be kind to yourself and love yourself more deeply. Sending you an extra hug today!
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Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to change from within. I'm your host, Mary Clavieres. This podcast is here to help you find ways to become more aligned with the highest expression of yourself whatever that may look like in your life.
Today, I wanted to talk to you about loving yourself deeply. This is something that I personally think is overlooked a lot, or that we don't take time to really reflect on and think about, especially as it relates to ourselves.
A lot of the time we look to other people, and we think about how much we love them how much they love us. But we don't really look at how much we love ourselves. So that's something that I'm inviting you to think about today to, to reflect on and really sit with. Because at the end of the day, I really believe all the work, all the experiences all the other relationships we have, they actually begin with how we feel about ourselves on the inside, and how much we love ourselves. And it might sound a little strange or a little sappy, I don't know, it's also maybe a little different to talk about considering most of my work is with executives and business owners, on running their business and leading teams and all of those things. But I actually really believe that it ties into all of that pretty strongly. Because how we show up for others is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves and how we show up for ourselves.
Some things that you might think about are:
How do you react to things?
Do you give yourself time to nurture yourself?
Do you say positive things to yourself?
I've gone through a lot of periods where I beat myself up a lot. I say a lot of negative things. I feel ashamed, I feel frustrated or embarrassed. And then I just blame myself and I say, Well, why did I do that? Or, geez, I could have done better on this. Or if I had only tried that. There's so many different ways that it can show up. But it's those little voices that you try to knock yourself down with? Well, you don't even try because a lot of the times you might not even be realizing that you're doing it. But that is what happens is that you end up knocking yourself down and keeping yourself small and finding reasons and excuses why you're not lovable enough. And it's shown up quite a few times recently in conversations with clients, and also in conversations with friends about how they treat themselves. And I thought, Okay, this is really, really something to talk about, because it can show up in so many different ways. And definitely a lot with our close relationships, or even at work. So I know, it may seem like a stretch, because I talk about okay, working with executives and leaders and business owners. But actually, when we're in are not self and when we're not loving ourselves and taking care of ourselves, we can act out and act differently with others. So it really does have a trickle effect on so many other things. It trickles down to who else is in your orbit, and that you're speaking with and interacting with and all of those things. So if you can, if you're willing to explore it a little bit, I'd like you to think about how you react in situations, and what is your go to response do you? Do you think about how you could have or should have or would have done something differently? The minute that it happens, or you kind of beat yourself up for a mistake and you say, oh my goodness, I can't believe how I did that to myself, so on and so forth.
If you're doing those kinds of things, you may want to look at it and explore it more and take note of what thoughts are coming up what responses are coming up and find ways to change those responses.
What can you swap it out with?
How can you stop yourself?
How can you catch yourself in the moment when you're saying oh man, I really could have done that differently. What was I thinking?
And can you rephrase it? Or can you bring another perspective to it too?
Can you maybe say, Okay, I was doing the best that I could in that situation, or I worked on that or I gave that input based on what I knew at the time.
I've said this before. I'm pretty sure I said it on the podcast, how I taught my husband at one point, I taught him the phrase, hindsight is 2020, because he doesn't know that phrase. And it really is like that we can see after something passes, we can see all the different ways that oh, we could have done this better. And oh, we're so sure of ourselves. Now, how could we do that mistake in the past? And really, that doesn't serve anyone or anything? So how can you replace that? Somehow, rewire a part of yourself practice rewiring, so that you can think about, alright, I did as best as I could in that situation. I'm going to learn from it. And I'm going to move on. And I will do things differently next time. How can you do more of that? Because that will have a ripple effect for you in your relationships, how you treat yourself on the inside first is so important. And I was I went for a walk today. And I was thinking about this and really, okay, I still, I still do it, right? We can all fall into these things sometimes. So it's definitely not about being perfect with it. But it's about recognizing how far how far you can go, how much you can improve, and change and shifts that and I recognize that today. And I said, Oh, wow, I, I made this mistake. And I didn't beat myself up inside to the point where I was just, you know, disgusted and frustrated with myself. And that's a win, you know, and it surprised me. And also, it just felt like, jeez, there's so many ways that this shows up for people. And whether it's at work, or at home, or you know, your internal speaking to yourself. And, yeah, it just feels like a lot of the time people talk about self love. And you can think about okay, yeah, self love. Let me do all these activities, which definitely, I'm totally down for the activities, you know, taking what you need, going for the walks, doing the meditation, or taking a five minute break, recharging your battery, somehow all of those things are super, super, super important. And you can also take a look at what you're thinking about where your thoughts go and how you treat yourself.
I had a conversation with a friend recently that is struggling with some self care will say she's, she's having a hard time with putting her needs first and really taking care of herself to the point where sometimes she gets close to burning out. And one day, she decided that she was going to pretend that she was me. Okay, it might be weird for me to explain it and try to explain it. So she would say to herself, well, what would Mary do in this instance? And I'm not saying this at all, as has listened to me all the time or anything like that? No, definitely not. But she knows that I go to bed at a pretty decent time. And that I take my walks every day and that I do some of these things very routinely, to take care of myself. So sometimes when she was thinking about doing work at 11pm Not kidding. She would say, Well, what would Mary do instead? Okay, I don't think Mary would do that. So I'm going to try to go to bed earlier today. And now it's a joke for us. And I know she's, while she's probably listening to this, she's probably going to listen to this at some point. So it'd be really funny for her. But really, whatever it takes, so that did, and it does help her sometimes to think about it in a different way.
Because actually, a lot of the times we care for other people and we treat other people with a lot more love than the love that we give to ourselves. And that's actually a pretty good example of it. So do whatever it takes. It's an example of do whatever it takes to help you to remind yourself that you are also important and the work that you are doing is important. And taking care of yourself is really important. And really, it's necessary. It's necessary if you want to do the work you came here to do if you want to be the business owner or the leader or the parent or whatever, you know, fill in the blank, the professional athlete, I don't know I'm picking all these things. Whatever it is that you came here to do. You're not going to get as far as you can. If you don't love yourself. You really aren't. Or at least you won't get there the same way it won't feel as good. You won't feel as good, something will feel off. So that's my thing to ponder for today, the inquiry, the thing to be curious about is how much do you love yourself? Do you love yourself? How much do you love yourself? Do you remind yourself that you love yourself? I learned.
I learned this brain body exercise a few weeks ago, to share with my children. And it was around when something is really hard, and you're having a challenging time to put your arms, cross your arms over your chest and kind of hold on to your shoulders on either side. And give yourself a hug. And tell yourself that you love yourself. Tell yourself, I love myself, you give yourself a hug. And you say, I love myself and say it over and over and over however many times you need to. And I showed this to my daughters. And then a few days later, one of them was going through something hard. And actually she did it. She put her arms crossed her arms over her chest. And she said I love myself. And I said yes, yes, yes. Yes, exactly. It's so so important. And so we still need the reminders from time to time. But it's really important to be aware of that and find the ways that you can remind yourself, find the ways that you can connect deeper down and find the ways that you can navigate your life with more love for yourself. Because at the end of the day, the person that you have throughout your whole life is you. You are the one that you stay with, you know, relationships come and go family members, all the things, but really, you have yourself so how are you loving yourself today? How can you love yourself more?
And how can it be part of your perspective? part of your everyday thinking part of your everyday treatment of yourself? It's just it's a non issue. It's a non negotiable. Yes, I love myself. I love myself to the max and I treat myself with care.
So okay, I hope that's helpful for you in some way. Hope it resonates. I hope it gives you something to think about and be curious about. And like I said in invite yourself to explore it further. Thank you so much for being here.
As always, if you'd like to leave a rating or review or share this episode with a friend that needs to hear it, please feel free to do so. It really means the world to me. It helps the podcast be seen and heard by more people. So I appreciate your efforts. Thank you so, so much for tuning in. And I'll talk to you next week.
