00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 260, "Your Lovability and Your Love Ability." 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. 

00:23 

Alright. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. So glad to have you here today. Hey, really quickly, if you have not left me a review, will you please take just a couple of minutes to get on either Apple or Spotify and leave me a review? I would appreciate that. What that does is it works into the algorithms that allow other people to find this content who are interested in the same kind of stuff. So though you may be a little bit nervous and you're not really a sharer and you're not one who would copy the link to this and send it to a friend and say, "wow, this was great. I just thought you would like listening to this," just writing a quick review is a great way to share it because other people that you don't know will find it and it's a great way to help this information get out to other people. 

01:10 

I have to tell you that I just am so blown away by what this content has done for my life and the kind of person that I am able to be now but just was not even an option for me before because I didn't know so many things and I didn't connect with the emotional maturity that this content creates for us. And I just love sharing it. I love sharing the information that has changed my life so much and I get enough notes from some of y'all that just let me know that you appreciate it as well. And my numbers are good in the sense that I go, "okay, I've got a lot of people listening and a lot of people growing and learning and progressing," and I'm really happy to be able to do that and to put this content out in the future into the world and to contribute to the world in this way, in a way that's really, really meaningful for me. So that being said, write a review if you will please, I would really, really appreciate it. 

02:10 

Okay, so today I think you're gonna love this. I finished writing this and I was like, "oh, I'm so in love with this content." So today we're gonna be talking about your lovability, one word, and your love ability, two words. So this is just such a great topic. And I think in all the work that I've done over the seven and a half years since my divorce, the work that I have done on love has been the most significant work in my life. So kind of as a precursor, you don't have to have listened to this other podcast, but at some point go back and listen to podcast number 92, or I did a replay number 206. So 92 or 206, it's called "Clean Love." And go back and listen to it. And even if you listened to it back in the day, I would suggest going back and taking a look at it again. And it will change how you view love and how you're showing up in your own love. 

03:09 

It's the concept that really shifted things for me so much. And the reason that my love work has been so significant for me is because I feel that it has shifted my perspective the most. I feel that it has helped me to step deeper into my Christianity the most and I feel that it has changed my heart the most. Learning to love better has changed me at the very core of who I am. 

And as I have learned to love more cleanly, with that clean love that we talk about in those other podcasts, I more easily show up in alignment with my values with the person that I really want to be. 

03:54 

So today we're going to start out by talking about our lovability, the one word version, lovability. Lovaability would be defined as "the ability to be loved." So how do we determine a person's lovability? So we might find ourselves saying things like, "oh, that person is just so hard to love." But are they really? Let's question that thought because most likely there are other people in the world who find that same person very easy to love. So who's right? Well, here's the thing that I want us to understand. Lovability fits in the same category as our worth, or our value as humans. Everyone is lovable. Everyone has the same lovability. We've often just been trained through hearing other people say things like "she's just so lovable." And so we think that they make themselves lovable. And yet what makes a person seem lovable to us? It is our thoughts about that person, nothing more, nothing less. Our thoughts determine whether we find a person lovable or not. 

05:11 

For example, some people listen to this podcast and think, "oh, she's just so lovable. How she says things and how she talks,so lovable." Other people listen to an episode or two and they think, "look, she's so annoying. How she says things, how she talks, so annoying." Okay? Both are listening to the exact same recording, but their thoughts create their feelings of love or annoyance. And every person's thoughts are created by a conglomerate of all the experiences and biases and ideas and opinions and values and their background knowledge...all of that plays into what we choose to think. Maybe the person who finds me annoying knows someone who has the same style of intonation or word choices me and they've had some challenging experiences with that person. And so I bring up when they hear my voice, it sounds like the other person and they go, "ugh, that's just too much," right? Or maybe the person who finds me lovable finds that they really connect to my life experiences in the way that I share things. So regardless, neither of those opinions have anything to do with whether I'm lovable or not. And whether I'm lovable or not has nothing to do with what I do. I absolutely am lovable regardless and nothing can change that. And so it is with you. Absolutely lovable. And so it is with every other person on the earth. 

06:47 

There are far too many of us, however, who grew up feeling unlovable because of how people around us treated us. So because of parents or somebody else in our lives, because they weren't able to really love and accept us as we were, we interpreted that and we internalized it as our problem, not theirs. "I was unlovable." We came to believe that they didn't love us because of a problem with us, because we were unlovable, when in reality, the problem lied with them. They were incapable of loving something altogether different. Just because someone is incapable of loving you, that doesn't mean you're unlovable. The problem doesn't lie with you. It lies with them. I know that after my divorce, I went through a time where I literally thought that I was unlovable. I thought that nobody would ever be able to love me. And it's took me a while to realize that, "oh, like this other person's lack of ability to love me says nothing about me. It says everything about them." So our ability to be loved, to be lovable is never ending and never changing. Now you may be easier for some people to love because of personality characteristics or similar opinions or points of views. But again, that has everything to do with the other person's perceptions and not your inherent lovability. 

08:26 

Okay, so now we're going to talk about our love ability, two words. Okay, our ability to love. When we find someone difficult to love, the struggle doesn't lie with them. It lies with us. It's not their lovability. It's our love ability, or our ability to love, because we can choose to love anyone that we choose to love. Byron Katie, an author who's written some amazing stuff, she has this quote that really started the shift for me in learning to love better. And the phrase that she loved to use was, "I love you and there's nothing you can do about it." We get to choose to love anybody we want to regardless of how they show up or even whether they want us to love them. I think for so much of my life I believed that my ability to love someone was determined by them, by how they acted when in reality they don't determine my ability to love at all. I do, because love is a choice, it's a decision that we make. And whether it's unconscious or conscious, it is a choice. When we realize this truth, everything can start to shift for us. We begin to understand that we don't have to live with anger and hatred or disgust or resentment for anyone. We can choose instead to love. 

10:13 

And remember, feelings don't just come from thin air. In some instances there can be some trauma responses where our body reacts with feelings without a thought first, but generally our feelings come from our thoughts. We create the feeling of love by what we choose to think. When we are struggling to love, we will find that very often we are in judgment of the other person for some reason or another. We're not allowing them the space of grace to be themselves without us choosing to judge them. We think they shouldn't be acting the way they are or they shouldn't be saying the things that they say. Notice the "should." The "should" is always a signal that we're judging, right? We might be judging their appearance or their intellect and yet all of those things have nothing to do with them only how we are choosing to think about them. And this is where we can increase our awareness that love doesn't come from outside of us. Rather, it comes from inside of us. We create the love with our thoughts. When someone loves, me that feeling doesn't jump out of their body and into mine. They can't give me a hug and make me feel their love. I can feel their arms around me. I can feel their body up against mine and I can have thoughts about that. But when a person hugs me, the love they feel doesn't ooze from their body into mine. 

11:50 

What happens is that the love in their feeling line shows up in their action line as loving behaviors such as a hug. Then I take those behaviors that are now in my circumstance line, okay, other actions, things from the action line of other people go into my circumstance line. So I will take those in my circumstance line and I will have a thought about those behaviors. So if someone's giving me a hug, that's just in my circumstance line. What I would put there is: someone put their arms around me and pulled me close to them and held me for a minute. That would be a hug, right? So that's just my circumstance. But if I think, "oh, he is just so amazing and so sweet," I'm more likely to create the feeling of love. If however, I think, "oh, he's such a player," I won't create the feeling of love, but rather I will create annoyance or disdain.And the other side of the equation works as well. When I feel love for someone, it shows up in my action line. It doesn't jump from my body to theirs. It shows up in my action line with certain behaviors and then those behaviors become the other person's circumstance line and then they can take those actions and have whatever thought they want about them to create their own feeling. 

13:17 

So here are some things about love that I want all of us to remember. First, learning to love better is a skill. It's a skill. I mean, we're not, we're not born with this capacity, really. We have to learn how to show up loving. It's something that we have to intentionally practice if we're going to get good at it. Okay. So my brain's kind of thinking that maybe toddlers, I mean, maybe that there's a lot of innate loving behaviors, but I think as we grow, a lot of those behaviors, our primitive brain, starts to take over in protection and all these kinds of things and we lose a lot of that. But if at this stage in our lives, middle age, if we're going to learn how to love better, it's not just going to distill upon us like dew. It's not just going to settle down from the heavens onto our shoulders. It is something we have to intentionally practice if we're going to get good at it. And when we can learn to love those people around us who are more difficult for us to love, then we increase our love ability. 

14:32 

Think about the people in your lives that are difficult to love. You may have a specific child or you may have a person in your church congregation or you may have a neighbor or something. When we can learn to love those people, then we get better at the skill of loving. If we can get rid of all the difficult people in our lives and only keep the ones who are easy to love, we would not learn to love better because that doesn't push us, it doesn't challenge us, it doesn't increase our ability to love. If we only love the people who are easy, we're not getting better at loving. The challenge is to learn how to love the people who are difficult to love. 

15:17 

So here's another second point that I want us to understand about our ability to love, is that it starts with loving ourselves first. Now, I know many of you all just got really uncomfortable with that. Like this space of, "oh, I don't love myself" or "it's wrong to love myself" or whatever, right? But let's talk about it. It's the truth. Here's how it works. Loving ourselves is the baseline of our overall ability to love. In Brene Brown's work that she does, and the research that she has done, she makes this point that we cannot love somebody more than we love ourselves. So the hard truth of it is that when we love, when the love we have for ourselves is say a two out of 10, our capacity to love others is limited to a two out of 10. That's a hard truth sometimes to hear, if I'm holding myself in disdain and withholding love for myself, I am doing the same thing to other people. I am not even capable because it always starts with us. Because here's the thing. If I can only understand loving myself at a two, I can't even comprehend there's a three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. It doesn't even, it doesn't even compute in my brain that there is more to that because this is all I know. Okay. Here's the fascinating part. If you are only loving at a two out of 10, you probably don't even know it because again, it's all you know. You're doing the absolute best you can at a two. It's not like you're intentionally holding back, but if we are not learning how to love ourselves better, we are also withholding more and greater love that we can give to other people and that we can receive from other people. Because even if someone is offering me a seven out of 10 love, my brain can only comprehend a two out of 10 love. Is this making sense? I have a podcast early on, I think in the double digits, called "The Law of The Lid," where I talk about this. Go back and listen to that one if you want to, like, wrap your head around this a little bit more. When we start to increase the love for ourselves, we also increase our capacity to love others more. And then we can start to experience love at a three. And then our brain gets blown just a little bit. And we feel as though we're experiencing love completely different because guess what? We are. 

18:11 

So I thought it was interesting that just yesterday, my husband was looking at some of our first texts when we first met from like a year and a half ago. And the question that I had asked him in the text thread was what were some of his greatest successes in life? And he had responded that he had learned to love deeply. And he's like, that's fascinating that I said that like a year and a half ago. And I said, "why is that so interesting? Like what's going on?" And he's responded that his capacity to love now was so much deeper. And he didn't even know that this type of love was an option for him back then. And so the love that he has been able to move into because his self-love has increased is allowing him to experience love at a deeper level. And so if you're only loving at a two or a three or a four, it's not like you know that you're missing out. Sometimes it might feel a little bit empty and we don't really understand why, but we don't really know. So realize that stepping into a deeper capacity and a love skill level starts with loving yourself. 

19:23 

That's one reason why I always stress here and with my clients to give yourself a lot of love and compassion and grace when you fall short of what you would hope to accomplish. Because the more you love yourself, the more you can love others. And when we struggle to love ourselves, that will very often show up in dysfunctional behaviors like people-pleasing and manipulation. Here's why. When we don't love ourselves, we will work really, really hard to earn love from other people thinking that we can increase our lovability. And we will seek to compensate our lack of self-love by filling those holes with love from other people. And that often shows up with people-pleasing or manipulating behaviors. We will do things for others hoping that it will make them love us. Which doesn't work, by the way. We will make passive aggressive comments or engage in passive aggressive behaviors in order to force the other person's hand into showing us some love. And we can feel so desperate to feel love that we sometimes get a little crazy. 

20:42 

If you remember, I don't know how long ago it was, I shared the experience with my previous husband and my birthday dinner and it was on Super Bowl Sunday that we were having it and I was just feeling so unloved. And so I made my own dinner out of spite, not out of love for myself because I loved myself and wanted to have a good dinner. I made it out of spite because I wanted everybody to feel bad that I had to make my own dinner. And then I made the dinner ready to eat in the middle of the Super Bowl knowing darn well that the three men in the household were not going to want to come up and eat it, but ooh I was gonna dig in. Right? And then I could say "see, nobody loves me because if you loved me you would turn off the Super Bowl and come celebrate my birthday dinner," right? So I got super super crazy. I was so desperate to feel loved. I mean, it was a birthday, right? It would have been nice but they weren't gonna show up that way and so it was important for me to learn to have my own back and not make my birthday dinner to make them feel guilty. It was to make my own birthday dinner because, gosh, I just love a really good meal and I'm going to treat myself. I love myself enough to make myself a beautiful birthday dinner. 

22:06 

Sometimes we feel desperate because we don't feel love, but that doesn't come from other people...we have to create it for ourselves when we fill up our own love jar first. We don't need anybody else to add to it, to make us feel loved and good. So at this point, when others do add to our love jar, it's amazing and it can overflow into this incredible abundance in our lives. 

But here's the point: we don't need others to fill our love jar for us. Okay, so we don't need others to fill our love jar for us. We're not dependent on other people to do things for us to feel good. And because of messages we received when we were young, many of us have this mistaken belief that if we love ourselves, we will be arrogant and conceited and we will treat people poorly. Not true; the exact opposite is true. Because "loving ourselves" and "arrogance" are two very different things. Loving ourselves is just that: loving and appreciating and accepting who we are. Saying, "dang, I'm really good at this, I love this, I'm great at loving people, I'm great at forgiving people, I'm great at being aware of other people's needs and I love to help other people." Like, we can just love ourselves for the good person that we are. 

23:37 

Arrogance, on the other hand, is about one-upping ourselves, thinking that we are better than other people, putting ourselves in a place of superiority. When we're arrogant, it can be really difficult to love others because we always feel like we need to put them down in order to stay on top. Arrogance actually comes from a place of not loving ourselves. It comes from a place of insecurity about love. Okay? So it's as though we can only feel good about ourselves when we're superior to others. We don't love ourselves enough to feel confident showing up as us. Our love for ourselves is so shallow that we feel like we need other people to feel it. Either "give me, give me, give me, give me," or "put you down, push you down, push you down" so that I can feel like I'm on top. When we love ourselves, we realize that all of the people are worthy of love and we don't need to compare ourselves to others in order to feel good about ourselves. We create this amazing space of loving ourselves and being able to love others because remember, when I love myself at a three, I can love others at a three. When I love myself at a five, I can love others at a five and I can receive love at a five. This is a really important thing. Oftentimes, we're at a two loving ourselves and we feel shallow. We feel like, "oh, people don't love me." They can be offering love at an eight. But if I can only comprehend love at a two, I'm going to be feeling that lack even though it's available to me. It's so fascinating, isn't it, that our ability to love others and be loved by others is dictated by our ability to love ourselves? 

25:39 

Again, that podcast is called "The Law of The Lid." If you want to go back and find that one, I don't know the number off the top of my head. So here's another thing I really want us to make sure we're clear on on the idea of love. It's that increasing our love skill, increasing our ability to love, we do that for us, not for other people in our lives. Remember we talked about how the love from your body doesn't magically jump into the other person's body? When you feel love, you are the one feeling it. It's entirely in your body. You are the beneficiary of the love that you feel. And the more you learn to love, the better you will feel all the time in your life. If you think about it so often when you feel you are struggling to feel good emotionally, it's because you are not feeling love. You're not feeling it for yourself and you're not feeling it for others. So increasing our ability to love increases our being able to feel better emotionally more often. 

26:46 

Now, this doesn't mean that tough things are not going to happen in our life. It just means that we don't add on the extra difficulty of loving ourselves or loving others during those tough experiences. We're all going to have tough things come up. That's a struggle and it's tough and it's supposed to be and sometimes we get to take a breather. So for example, when someone does something that is hurtful to us, it can be super easy to withdraw our love, thinking we need to protect ourselves or because we may think that they don't deserve our love or because we think that we're not deserving of their love. But in the context of our discussion today, withdrawing our love is one of the more painful things we can do. Because it always feels better to love than to not love. When we withdraw, our brain starts getting freaked out about how we don't want to get walked all over and taken advantage of. Now, of course, we don't and we shouldn't. But to protect ourselves from abuse, we don't have to hate. We don't have to become resentful or spiteful or revengeful. We can still choose to love and put some really great boundaries in place. That's what they're there for...not to punish the other person. Boundaries are not to punish the other person. Boundaries are there to protect ourselves. So loving someone and having good boundaries in a potentially harmful situation, we will say things like, "I love you and I don't want to be married to you anymore," "I love our family and I'm not going to go to the family reunion this summer," "I love you and I will leave if you continue to call me names." 

28:44 

In situations where we feel as though we don't want to love someone, it can be super helpful to ask ourselves, "well, why? Why don't I want to love them? What do I think that not loving is going to accomplish?" Maybe protection. Maybe we think not loving is going to protect us. Well, we can protect ourselves with appropriate boundaries and still feel the amazingness 

of love. Do we think it's going to accomplish giving us more power? Think about this. Feeling anger or hatred or resentment actually strips us of our power because these types of feelings show up in our action line with us behaving in ways that we don't love, that we later feel ashamed for. So not loving actually strips us of our power. Do we think that not loving shows our strength? Actually, it takes a lot more strength to be able to stay in love and set appropriate boundaries. We may feel very justified moving into anger or hatred or resentment, and I'm not even going to say that you're not justified. The actions of the other person may really be super sketchy. What I'm saying is that it doesn't feel good to go there and it doesn't help us move along the path to becoming more the person we want to be. 

30:14 

Learning how to be in these tough situations and stay in love is one of the most important skills we can create in our life because when we withdraw love, we are actually choosing not to forgive. Not forgiving is an absence of love. And it's an absence of love for the other person and an absence of love for ourselves. When we choose not to forgive, we are actually declaring a choice not to love ourselves, not to free ourselves from the hurt feelings, but rather to stay in the bondage of pain. 

30:53 

Because just like love, forgiveness is not for the other person, it's for us. And in that context of not forgiving, we may find ourselves saying things like, "you are the reason that I love less. It's your fault I'm not loving," when in actuality, that's not true at all. This person who you are finding difficult to love is the very person who is giving you an opportunity to learn how to love more. Because loving the most difficult person increases your ability to love. These are the times we need to add more love, and not less. These are the times it's super important to double down on managing our minds and finding thoughts and reasons to love. Again with appropriate boundaries when necessary, but stepping into love. 

31:52 

If we can love when it's really, really hard, we increase our ability to love. And this means that we have to love ourselves first in order to feel better. And these are the times though, these difficult, difficult times to love, that our love ability moves from a two to a three or from a four to a five or from a seven to an eight. If we didn't have people in our lives who pushed our ability to love, we would not increase our love ability, our ability to love. So no more blaming others when you struggle to love them. See it instead as an opportunity for you to learn to be more compassionate and loving to yourself so that you can be more compassionate and loving towards them, so that you can increase your own ability to love and to feel love from others. This is another place where it can be so easy to go into victim mode and blame the other person for not loving us or for not being lovable. When in reality, it all comes down to us learning to take responsibility for being the hero in our own story and choosing to love all the people...and first and foremost, loving ourselves. 

33:16 

I love growing up, don't you? My daughter teases me about that phrase all the time, but I do. I love growing up. I love learning these concepts and figuring out how to apply these concepts. I love the person that I am becoming, the more that I implement these and make these part of who I am. All right, my friends, you struggling to love? You have somebody that you're really, really struggling with? I can help you with that. Go to tanyahale.com. You can book a free 30-minute consult where we can talk about how I can help you learn how to love better. How I can help increase your awareness around where you're not loving, why you're not loving and help you learn to overcome that. If you have somebody tough in your life, I promise you, you can struggle with them for the next 20 years. But if you work with me, in a matter of months we can help you clean that up so you don't have to struggle for 20 years. You can clean it up and you can move into this place of feeling better. 

34:23 

This coaching is fabulous. It has done that for me more times than I can count. I generally see my coach on a weekly basis because it helps keep my brain cleared up of all the crap that gets built up in there. Helps me to see things more clearly. And I know that I progress more quickly when I'm working with my coach. Such a brilliant, brilliant thing. Okay. Um, that's going to do it today. I hope that there was something in there that you just went, "whoa, that just shifted everything for me," because I'll tell you what, while I was preparing it and writing, there were some things that completely shifted for me. And I was like, "whoa, I get that piece deeper than I ever have." Okay, my friends, have a great, great week. Get out there and love. Love yourself. Increase your ability to love others. Choose love over all the other things. You will feel better. Have a great week and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

35:27 

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: s 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!