00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 179, "Being Kind to Yourself." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Well hello there, welcome to the podcast today. So happy to have you with me. We are just breaking into the holiday season here in the United States, and I think throughout most of the world, and it's a great time. It's gotten really cold here in Utah and that's not my favorite part about the holidays at all. But one thing I do love about the holiday season is just this space of connection that we have with other people. I love that so many of our traditions in the holidays are based around other people and strengthening relationships and having people that we love in our lives. And I love that the work that I do, and that I share with you, helps us understand how to have better connection and how to stop being less judge-y and how to start being more accepting. I love that aspect of what I teach because that's what changes relationships is this space of stepping back, stopping, trying to control all the other people, learning to just control ourselves and learn how to be happy with how I'm showing up and let everybody else figure out their own stuff. It's such a brilliant, brilliant space to be in and I'm really grateful to be able to share this information with you and help you move into a better space as well. 

01:45 

Alright. So today, my friends, we are on episode 179, being kind to yourself. So this is an interesting thing about the self talk in our head. Often times we think that if we are harsh with ourselves that it will motivate ourselves. If we just say, "oh come on, you can do it better than that." That kind of tone of voice, that kind of underlying idea behind what we're saying, this thing of "you're not good enough, you can't do this, you're being stupid, you're not handling this very well, you're not being smart." We think that that's going to motivate us to get us in a place. And it may motivate a short term, but long term it is really detrimental to us and it actually does the opposite long term of motivating us. 

02:39 

So I'm going to give you an example that I've been using with a lot of my clients lately. I want you to imagine a four year old sitting at the dinner table and this four year old spills their glass of milk and it goes all over the table. And one of the parents just loses it and starts yelling at the child telling them how stupid they are, how clumsy they are, "how in the world could you do that? You know better than to put your milk there. You know, don't set it by the edge of the table," and just get all over their case. This four year old, how do they respond? They probably start crying. They probably start shutting down, they start closing down, and the parent gets all upset, but this child has started to shut down. 

03:29 

Alright, so let's say the next night at dinner, the same child spills another glass of milk and the parent responds the same way. Again, like, "oh my gosh, the second time, can you believe this? Why would you do that? Why don't you put your milk where I told you to? Why aren't you getting this together? Why are you so clumsy? You're like the most clumsy child I've ever seen," right? And they just go on and berate this child. Again, that child is just going to shut down, they're going to start crying, they're going to withdraw, and not engage with the parent. So let's say it happens a third night in a row, the child spills that milk. And probably even before the parent can really start screaming, that child is going to burst into tears and run out of the room, probably go to their bedroom and hide in the closet. And shut down. Emotionally, they're going to shut down, they're going to put up all these walls of protection that just say, "leave me alone, don't touch me, I'm scared." And that's the place that this little child gets into. 

04:38 

And I want you to imagine then that let's change the scenarios. The child spills a glass of milk, but instead of getting all over the child and berating them and telling them how stupid and how clumsy they are, the parent instead says, "oh, sweetheart. I'm so sorry. Let's hurry and get that cleaned up. It's okay. It's okay. Don't worry about it. Mistakes happen. Let's just clean it up." And we go get a towel and we we take care of it. Then we just pour the child another glass of milk and we just go on 

with dinner. Okay, so let's say the second night the child spills a glass of milk and the parent again just says "oh sweetheart Oh, that's got to be so frustrating for you. I'm so sorry. Let's get it cleaned up, shall we? It's okay, we all make mistakes. It  happens. Sometimes I spill my milk and it's alright. It's alright. We'll just get it cleaned up and let's get you some more milk." Okay, so that child is met with kindness rather than harshness. So the third night that child spills a glass of milk, that child is probably not going to burst into tears. That child is probably not going to run in the other room and hide. That child will probably move into a space where they say, "oh, no, I made a mistake. Let's get the towel." Right? And they move into that space of, "well, let's fix it. Let's take care of it. Let's let's do what needs to happen here." And in that case, it builds trust between the parent and the child. Whereas in the previous example, it broke down all of that. And the child became fearful of the parent and resentful of the parent. 

06:25 

So what I want us to understand with this example is that this is what we do to ourselves sometimes. We speak to ourselves as though we are a young child who has spilled milk. Because I want us to realize that we are constantly creating and building a relationship with ourselves. We are constantly connecting with ourselves. We are building the relationship of what we want to be. And so how we talk to ourselves is part of what creates that relationship. And when we do something and we speak harshly to ourselves, it's like our spirit, the inner part of us, gets hurt, gets scared, goes into protective mode. And I just imagine my spirit running to a corner and hiding when I'm unkind to myself. And when I'm kind to myself, I imagine my spirit staying engaged, staying connected, and and working through the problems. 

07:33 

So when we feel pushed and cajoled by other people, we naturally want to rebel. Just a person thing, a human thing, right? We want to push against people who are pushing us. We want to create that opposition. And there may be situations where we may comply short term because we know that that person is going to be miserable to deal with if we don't, but resentment is created. And when we do this to ourselves, we start creating resentment towards ourselves and resentment crowds out all of the love and kindness that we could feel in our heart. It crowds it out and our heart just becomes full of resentment. And when we resent someone, in this case ourselves, we then start to rebel against that someone or against ourselves. And we will start to unconsciously self-sabotage and maybe even move into some passive aggressive behavior with ourselves. Isn't it interesting to think about doing this with ourselves? That how we push against ourselves. 

08:43 

And so when we do this, we break down the relationship we have with ourselves just as if we spoke to someone else that way. If you are in a leadership position and you speak that way to the people underneath you, it does not build trust. It breaks down the relationship. If we're constantly yelling and screaming and being negative with the people that are under us, it does not create love and kindness. It creates a safe space. It creates a place where that employee is wanting to go hide in a corner, protect themselves, you know, shut down. So just as with the child, connection and growth only come in a safe space. And so when we're here, we're talking about being kind to ourselves. We have to learn to create that safe space for ourselves by being kind toward ourselves because the safe space is a place of exploration, rather than a place of protection. I'm going to hide. I'm going to pull back. A safe space creates a space for that child who spilled the milk to go, "oops, made a mistake. Let me clean it up. Let me fix it." Okay? When we create that for us, it's a space of exploration and we can start asking questions like, "huh, why do I respond that way? I wonder what thoughts created those feelings. How is this behavior impacting my life and the lives of those people I love?" Whereas that unsafe space is a place of hiding and protecting. It's a place where we close off seeing and hearing new things and entertaining new ideas. 

10:29 

For example, let's say you're working to eat healthier and you go to a party and you don't eat healthy or you overeat and you start to beat yourself down on the way home from the party. You're just talking bad to yourself, "oh my gosh. I can't believe I ate all that stuff. I'm so worthless. I don't have any self-control." We start to feel shame and we start to feel embarrassment and we want to hide. We don't feel safe getting curious because it feels as though we are a horrible person. And that's the thing about shame. Shame is thinking that I am bad to my core, right? Like I am a bad person, not that my behaviors are bad, but that I am bad and shame thrives in darkness in the unspoken. And so shame doesn't want to talk about it. It's not going to explore it. It's not going to look for different ways to do things. So we go into protective mode because it's not safe to look at it. It's not safe to explore. We just want to protect, right? Our brain just wants to protect ourselves. 

11:34 

So instead, if we are kind to ourselves, we have a very different experience. We will start off with kind acknowledgement, right? We see that we made a mistake. It's not like we're oblivious and we're not pretending like we don't make mistakes.  But we also understand that that mistake is not the end of the world, that we're human, that of course we're going to make mistakes. So we may say things like, "you know what, it's okay. It's not a big deal. It was one night at a party. I can just start again starting right now." Okay? So one thing that helps me is we may even want to adopt, like, a loving name for ourselves, like love or lovey or sweet, sweetie or sweetheart, right? And we may say something like, "ah, sweetie, it's okay. It's hard to 

always eat the way that we want to." And this is the thing. Our gut reaction is to say that this is letting us get away with things. Like, yeah, I'm just, I'm just making excuses for myself. I'm letting myself get away with things. But what we're really doing when we speak kindly to ourselves is creating a safe space for us to be humans, for us to make mistakes. And in this space, we can start to move into curiosity. 

12:50 

So instead of beating ourselves down for eating too much, we would say things like, "huh, I wonder why I ate so much at the party last night. What was I feeling that had me reaching for food that I really didn't want or that I didn't really plan on eating? Did I feel pressure from other people or myself? Did I feel insecure? Did I feel nervous? Did I feel lonely? Huh." And then if we can identify that, we can say, "what thoughts created these feelings? What was I thinking? Maybe I was thinking that it's rude to not eat the food at the party. Or maybe I don't want to answer people's questions about why I'm not eating. Or I don't know anybody here and eating eases my nerves of having to go up and talk to people. Or I'm all by myself and everybody else seems to be with someone. So food gives me like something to engage with rather than just standing here." But putting these thoughts in a thought model, we realize that our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings create our actions. So once we figure out our thoughts, then we can start to take a look at them and we can explore them a little bit more. But we can't even get to this place of exploration without kindness because beating ourselves down shuts us down. 

14:07 

Moving into the next page, the next best version of our self can only be done from a space of acceptance and kindness. Our worth does not change because we overate at a party or because we don't stick to our eating plan or because we intentionally say something unkind. Our worth always stays the same. We are always of great worth. And accepting this one great truth that our worth is always the same, it doesn't fluctuate, will make an amazing impact in your life. So if you are generally unkind to yourself, then we can't just let it go. 

14:49 

How do we start shifting into being kind? First of all, it starts with awareness, because we cannot change what we don't see needs to be changed. And we have to start listening to our thoughts. Mostly these kinds of thoughts, like beating ourselves down and saying, "oh my gosh, I'm so stupid. I'm so clumsily. Why can't I have more self control? Why can't I..." whatever. Mostly these kinds of thoughts happen so quickly and so unconsciously that we aren't even aware of them. And they're running in the background in our primitive brain and they're creating all of these models and all of these behaviors and all of these things that we're doing and we're completely unaware of them. So the first thing we really want to start to do is to do is to start paying attention, start listening to what you're saying to yourself, start figuring out what you say, what words you're using. And when you catch yourself being harsh and unkind, we want to use that as an opportunity to move into kindness. "So I don't have any self control" becomes "actually it's okay that I overrate at the party. That's going to happen sometimes. I can just start again today right now." Something like "I'm so stupid. How could I say that?" becomes, "actually I'm not stupid. I just wasn't fully engaged. I wasn't paying attention as closely as, as I would like to. I can fix this. I can go apologize." 

16:21 

So what we're looking for here is not a 180 degree change. We don't want to go from "I'm still so stupid. I'm so clumsy," to "I'm the most graceful princess on the planet." Right? That's not going to work. Our brain's not going to believe that. What we want to do is just nudge that destructive thought a little bit. We want to let our primitive brain know that we're in charge and we're not going to talk to ourselves like that anymore. We're going to be kind from now on. So we would say things like, "of course I'm not gonna figure it out today." And things like, "it's okay sweetie, I'll figure it out. It's totally fine." Kindness, my friends. Talk to yourself like you are so in love with you. Talk to yourself with so much grace for being a human. And again, we're not trying to look for huge, huge changes here. We just want to nudge when we hear our brain say, "oh my gosh, I'm so stupid." We just want to say actually, "I'm not talking to myself that way anymore. I'm actually not stupid. I'm actually pretty smart. I just made a mistake here. It's okay." And kind of nudge our brain back in the direction that we want it to go. We want to create that safe space that makes it possible to explore and figure things out. We don't want to create a a space where we feel like we have to go into protective mode. A safe space because only in this space will we have the ahas that will propel us forward, that will move us forward in life, that will help us to start becoming the next best version of  ourselves. And that's what this work is all about. 

18:09 

So start listening to your self talks, really start paying attention. Are you talking to yourself the way that you want to talk to yourself, the way that you would talk to someone that you love? Start paying attention and then start nudging your brain more in the direction that you want to go. Start correcting your brain, because everything our brain tells us is not true. Our brain makes up a lot of stuff and, and we just have to call it on it and we just have to say, "whoa, that's a thought that's not good. I don't like that thought. That thought is not serving me. That thought is not kind. I'm choosing to be kind to myself," and then move forward from that space. Okay? This is an amazing, amazing piece of us learning to grow up into our true selves. If we're going to get to our true selves, we have to be kind. This is fabulous stuff. So that's what I want you to focus on this week, my friends. Listen to yourself, listen to yourself talk. And when you find yourself being a little bit harsh, call yourself out, bring your brain to a place where you want it to go and choose to create that safe space where you can then explore what happened and get curious about what happened rather than just shutting down and going in protective mode. Okay? 

19:37 

Alright. If you would like to talk to me about some one-on-one coaching, you can go to my website tanyahale.com. You can book a free 30 minute consult. We can talk about how coaching can help you, what I can help you achieve, and the mindset that I can help you move into, and help you make...some of you are making some tough decisions out there, and you're doing some difficult things and you're in relationships that you just don't know how to fix, you don't have to move them forward, you don't know how to get out of the patterns of behavior that you're in. This is what I help you with, my friends. So take an opportunity to go to tanyahale.com, book that free consult and let's chat and let's discuss how coaching can help you to start to experience life the way that you want to experience. Okay, that's gonna do it. I wish you all the best and I will talk to you later. Bye. 

20:38 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!