00:00 

Hey there. Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 336, "Sense of Self and our Spirituality." 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. 

00:22 

Alright. Hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. So glad to have you here and I am glad to be here too. I hope that you are starting to get a sense of how vital this sense of self is to our engagement in life, to our being able to feel confident and good about ourselves and in our ability to have healthy relationships with other people. And today we're going to talk about how to have these healthier relationship with God and how our sense of self will impact our spirituality. 

00:54 

Before we jump in though, I have a couple of things I just want to mention. One, if you have not left me a review on Apple or Spotify, those are really the only two that allow reviews, will you please take just a few minutes as a Christmas gift to me to go in and leave me a review? This really is the best way to share this information with other people except for actually you just sending them a text message or something with a link. But other people who are going to look for this kind of information, good reviews are the best way to help other people find them. So if you will please take just a few minutes, go on to Apple or Spotify, or both if you have access to both, and leave me a review, I would really, really appreciate it. I feel so incredibly strong about this content that I share because I've seen how powerful it is in my own life, I see how powerful it is in the lives of my clients and I want other people to be able to access this free content and understand to live better, healthier, happier lives. 

02:06 

Also, these are not up on my website yet, but I want you to put this in your head. Starting in the new year, Wednesday nights I am going to be doing two classes. One is going to be called "Mindset Reset." And that is going back to the basics of the work that I do. We're gonna go back to the thought model. We're going to work through our circumstances, our thoughts, our feelings, our actions. We're gonna talk about how all these fit together. How do we manage our minds? How do we move ourselves into being able to create what we want to create? It's gonna be really great. 

02:41 

And then the very next hour of the evening, I'm going to be doing another class called "Relationship Reset." Now this one can be for couples or it can be for people who are not in a couple. If your partner or spouse is not interested in it, or if you don't have a partner or spouse, but you want to understand basic concepts about how to have better a better, stronger, healthier relationship. It would be great for couples. It will also be great for singles. So if you are interested in either of those, put those on your calendar starting Wednesday nights on, is it the ninth? I don't remember. I don't have it written down right in front of me right now, but starting the second Wednesday of the new year, we're going to be doing those and they're just, they're both going to be really, really great. 

03:26 

I would love to have you join me. I would love to have those classes fill up. Everybody that's taken these classes just is blown away by how much value you get for your money as far as the discussions that we have, the content that I give you to listen to and prepare with. It is just so helpful in growing yourself more into a person who understands these concepts and can integrate these concepts into your life. So check those out. And like I said, they're not on my website yet, but they will be within the next week or so. 

04:00 

Alright. So let's jump in today. This is week six of talking about our sense of self and the impact that it has on our lives. And today we're going to dig into our spirituality and the connection to our beliefs of ourselves. So as a quick review, our sense of self is our own perception of who we are. It includes our self judgments, what we think we are worthy or unworthy of receiving, how valuable we feel as a human, how we view our strengths and weaknesses and our skills and attributes, and whether we see ourselves as a good person or a bad person. It also incorporates our capacity to offer ourselves grace for our humanity and how we talk to ourselves in our heads. Do we have the ability to embrace that we are doing the best we know how? Or do we beat ourselves down for not knowing better or showing up better? Do we think we are inherently an evil, mean person or someone who is stupid and thoughtless? Or are we able to see ourselves as a human who does their best, but that sometimes our best is pretty rotten? 

05:05 

This overall view of and understanding of ourselves is all part of our sense of self. And the reason this matters so much is that this sense of self is foundational to everything we experience in our lives. It is the lens through which we see and interpret everything that happens to us. I imagine it as being a bubble that surrounds us. It is always with us. It affects everything we touch and see and interact with. There isn't anything that we do or that happens in our lives that is not viewed through the lens, or through this bubble, of our sense of self. When we have a struggling sense of self, a very negative self-concept, everything is viewed from the place of us not being enough, not adding value to the world, not being good enough or worthy enough for great and amazing things. And we can see how that shows up in our interactions with other people. We're insecure. We seek for validation. We make their struggles about us. We hijack other people's experiences to draw attention to ourselves so that we can feel we are getting the attention we need to feel as though others are pumping up our ego balloon. We need them to do that for us to feel good. 

06:20 

Conversely, when we have a strong sense of self, a positive self concept, everything is viewed from the place of us being enough, of adding value to the world, of being good enough and worth enough for great and amazing things. And this shows up in our relationships as us being able to be present with others, have them share experiences and even struggles with us. And we don't take it personal. We don't get offended. And we can understand that their struggle is about them, not about us. 

06:51 

So the last few weeks we've talked about how our sense of self impacts our dating, our marriages, and our parenting. And today we're diving into how it impacts our spirituality or our relationship with God. So I'm sharing this client story with permission, just FYI. So a bit ago I was doing some work with a client and he was struggling. He was talking about his continual resistance to church and and his relationship with God. 

07:19 

He mentioned that most of his life he has gone to church but struggled so much with it because he would spend so much of the time feeling shame around his unworthiness, feeling as though he didn't belong there because of his struggle and believing that he was as good as the other people there. He always had struggled with his spirituality, his relationship to God, because he has generally had the belief that God couldn't and didn't love him because he was so flawed. And this has kept him at arm's distance to God. Generally feeling as though he was less than other people. For much of his life, this resistance to spirituality and to God has impacted his marriage, his confidence, his feelings of self-worth, and his relationships with his children. It has been a huge, lifelong struggle, and I know that this client isn't alone in this. 

08:11 

So let's dive a little bit deeper today into how a healthy, strong sense of self can help you feel more connected spiritually, and also how a reflected, underdeveloped sense of self can keep you from connecting to God and your spirituality. When we have the belief that we are not good enough, or that our worth is not as great as other people's, we are in a space of a struggling sense of self. And how does this impact our spirituality? Well, just like my client, he felt that it isolated him, that it created a place where he didn't belong. He spent years believing that God didn't love him, and that God was disappointed in him, and it caused him to separate himself out from God. So, a struggling sense of self will feel unworthy of God's love, unworthy of God's approval, and it will make it more and more difficult to approach God in any capacity. 

09:09 

Do you remember when your teenager would accuse you of not loving them? When nothing was farther from the truth, but their insecurity, their viewpoint, made it difficult for them to access your love. Your love was right there, waiting for them, but they couldn't see it, they couldn't feel it, because they didn't believe it was there, they didn't believe that they were worthy of it. So much like that, when we have a struggling sense of self, even though God's love is there and available to us, we struggle to feel it. We can't access it because we can't see past our own inability to love ourselves. A reflective sense of self is always looking for others to approve of them, to let them know that they are okay and even worthy of other people's love, but because we struggle to access love from within ourselves, we also struggle to accept that others can love us. Within this struggle also lies our relationship with God. We will have a hard time seeing and accepting God's love for us as well. 

10:18 

So putting that in a thought model, if I think God doesn't love me, my feelings could be sad, disconnected, lonely, maybe even angry, and from those types of feelings I will create actions such as emotional withdrawal. I will stop trying. I will start turning away. I will push away. If our goal is to have a deeper spirituality, which I would define as having a connection with God, a sense of the divine, a feeling that our spirit connects with God, then we can see how having a reflective or underdeveloped sense of self will make it really difficult to create that deeper spirituality. 

11:01 

I 100% believe that God's love for us is always there. It never wavers. It always has been there, and it always will be. But just as the teenager can't experience our love even when it's there, we can't always experience God's love even when it's there, when we have a reflected sense of self. And agency plays such a part in this process. Just as I can't take away my teenager's agency and make them feel my love for them, God also won't take away our agency to make us feel His love for us. We get to choose whether or not to open ourselves up to His love. So where an underdeveloped sense of self will move in the arena of thoughts such as, "God doesn't love me, God doesn't approve of me, I'm not good enough to be loved by God," a strong sense of self will have thoughts such as, "I'm worthy of God's love. I know God loves me. I don't have to be perfect for God to love me. God may be human, so of course I'm not going to get it right all of the time." 

12:08 

One of the most amazing things that I see with a strong sense of self is the ability to offer grace to others and to ourselves, because a strong sense of self is at peace with their humanity, with their flaws and weaknesses, with their faults and their failings. This person understands that our human wholeness is both good and bad, both strong and weak, and that this doesn't in any way impact our worth as a human. It's all part of the package. It's all part of what we need to be able to grow and progress. 

12:43 

I love that in the book of Ether, in the Book of Mormon, that Moroni says, "I give unto men weakness that they may be humble, and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me." God gave us, as humans, weaknesses. Why? So that we could learn to be humble, and in that humility, learn to accept the grace of God. God's grace is always available to us, regardless of where we are in life and the path that we have taken thus far to get there. And yet so many of us don't have the ability to wrap ourselves up in God's grace and feel at peace. We don't know how to accept the grace of God. 

13:28 

So how do we do that? I believe that one of the most powerful ways to accept God's grace is to first be able to offer grace to ourselves. When I can offer myself grace for my human frailties and weaknesses, I believe that I am also accepting and embracing God's grace for my human frailties and weaknesses. And what does it take to be able to offer myself grace? My belief is that I can only offer myself as much grace as my sense of self will allow. And a reflective sense of self is generally incapable of offering themselves grace because of the inherent belief that they are not good enough, that they are internally flawed, that they don't deserve to be treated with kindness because of those flaws. 

14:17 

So a struggling sense of self holds us back from a deeper spirituality because of the inability to allow ourselves the grace to be able to receive God's grace. It is there. It is waiting for us. But we have to use our agency to accept it and embrace it in our lives. A struggling sense of self does not feel worthy of having it. It does not feel that it deserves God's grace. So it does not reach out and seek for it. Whereas a strong sense of self sees ourselves as worthy and deserving of God's grace because we embrace that God created us to be humans, flaws, warts, and all. We understand that our weaknesses and failings don't make us undeserving of God's love. They actually help us to step into the love of God. We can love us and God can love us in this flawed space of humanity. 

15:18 

Another interesting aspect of sense of self and our spirituality that I have been considering is this space of having confidence in ourselves. Often, especially for women, I think confidence gets a bad rap. Somewhere along the way we miss the memo that confidence and arrogance are not the same thing. So let's define the two so we can be clear. Confidence is the space where we have a strong sense of self. We know that we are a good person, albeit a person who also has flaws. We know that our intentions are good, that our heart is good, and we have the confidence that we will be able to handle whatever comes our way, even if it's really difficult. 

15:57 

Confidence is believing in ourselves even when we don't show up particularly well, because we know that our heart was in the right place and we get to work cleaning up the mess we made, offering ourselves a lot of grace for our humanity along the way. It is also being able to trust ourselves and our abilities to accomplish what we want, knowing we have the drive, the determination, and the perseverance to take care of what we need and want to. Confidence means that we have a sense of control in our lives, that we feel that we are in control of our lives and we don't need anyone else to do things for us in order to feel empowered and strong and capable. 

16:41 

Arrogance might have some of those qualities, of knowing that we are great and capable, but it turns from confidence to arrogance when we start comparing ourselves to others, when we put ourselves in a one-up place. Arrogance is really grounded in a reflected sense of self because it relies on a comparison to other people, of looking to others to pump up our ego balloon. And arrogance doesn't serve us or the world. When I'm confident, I will say, "I love the podcasts I put out. I know the concepts help a lot of people, and I'm just so proud of myself for showing up, for preparing them every week, for doing the work with myself to learn and grow so I can share this with the world." Arrogance would say, "oh, my podcasts are so much better than so-and-so's," and then continue to put mine in a one-up place to criticize and compare. 

17:41 

Where confidence comes from a strong sense of self, arrogance comes from a weak sense of self, a reflected sense of self. And so many of us are so afraid of being arrogant that we actually then swing to the other end of the pendulum, which would be self-degradation, this self-flagellation that says we're never good enough. We'll never measure up, that we're not worthy of God's love. We don't deserve His grace like other people do. In fact, we often believe that we are the one person on the earth who doesn't deserve God's love. We are the lone unicorn. Notice again, we are in a space of comparison, but instead of going into one-up like arrogance does, we go into the one-down. Both arrogance and self-degradation are destructive and dysfunctional. Both of them keep us from being able to connect with God. 

18:40 

A strong sense of self, however, displays confidence and a sense of I'm a great person, even when we know of our flaws and our failings. It's not that we turn a blind eye to them. It's that we know they don't define us, that they are just a piece of our whole, that our whole is ultimately good and that those things are necessary to actually move us in the direction we need to go. 

19:06 

So how does this impact our spirituality? As with any other relationship, when we can approach God from a place of confidence, a place where we trust in His love and acceptance, a place where we know we are worthy and deserving of His love and guidance, then we are in a space to be able to see and feel His love and guidance. We're able to open ourselves up to spiritual nudges and also trust that those nudges are coming from God. We are able to draw upon the strength and power within us to do tough and scary things that we feel prompted to do because we know we have the capacity to do hard things. We don't get in this spin cycle of wondering if we can really do what we feel prompted to do. We have the faith in God and in ourselves to know that if God asks us to do it, that we will have the capacity to figure it out and do it. And moving through faith in this way develops an even stronger love and trust for God and a greater ability to accept His love. 

20:08 

Another area that a struggling sense of self can impact our spirituality is church. Now, I know that church and spirituality are not the same, but I also acknowledge that many of us, myself included, find church to be a helpful place to reconnect and realign with my spirituality on a regular basis. But here's the tough thing about church: it's filled with humans. And humans, by definition, are super flawed and bring a lot of issues to the table. I've heard church described before as not a sanctuary for the super-spiritual, but rather a hospital for the terribly ill. When we have a struggling sense of self, we will show up at church expecting everyone else to pump up our ego balloon. We will want everyone to notice us, to come up to us and welcome us and include us, to make us feel special and important. In fact, it's possible that part of the reason we go to church is to have others draw us in, to pump us up. And this can be a tough expectation when everyone else there is a  flawed human who is also up to their eyeballs in challenges and trials and distracted by their own wants and needs. 

21:23 

I know that after my divorce, this would have been a terrible idea. People, being the humans they were, were uncomfortable with my divorce. They didn't know what to say. They didn't know how to interact. They weren't sure if they should be on my team or if they should be on my previous spouse's team. So they did what we as humans are great at doing...they avoided it all together by sometimes avoiding me. They avoided their own discomfort by staying away from what would bring them discomfort, which was an interaction with me. And that makes perfect sense, knowing what we know about humans. So if I had gone to church with a struggling sense of self, expecting others to pump up my ego, I would have found myself feeling very lonely, feeling isolated, being easily offended and not feeling like I belonged. 

22:14 

Going to church with a fairly strong sense of self, I could know that the responses and reactions of other people had nothing to do with me. It had everything to do with them. I didn't need the other people at church to make me feel like I belonged because I already believed that I did. So I could walk into a church dinner and not wait to be invited to sit with someone, but instead go and find a table and sit down, engaging conversation. I could choose to approach others and show interest in them because I didn't feel I needed to wait for others to notice me and make me feel welcomed. 

22:53 

Now, I know that every congregation has its own flavor, that there will sometimes be some people that we connect with more easily, and sometimes it can be tough when we struggle to find our people there. But whereas a struggling sense of self will blame everyone else for not making them feel welcomed and accepted, a strong sense of self will take responsibility for reaching out to others and making them feel welcomed, for making ourselves feel as though we belong there as well. A reflective sense of self is looking to others to pump up their balloon, for others to come up and introduce themselves, for others to invite them to sit with them. They will more easily get offended because others aren't caring for them in the way that they think they should. 

23:40 

A strong sense of self, on the other hand, will not go to church expecting others to take care of them. They don't get easily offended, they won't blame others, but rather will take responsibility for making sure that they feel as though they belong. They're okay going to church with other flawed humans and don't have expectations that others will pump up their ego balloons. It can feel tricky, because often we go to church thinking that everyone should be Christ-like and focused on helping and seeing others, and often that's just not the case. In an ideal world it would be, but we don't live in an ideal world, and it's important to remember that everyone there is human. Everyone there has their own insecurities and weaknesses, and many of us humans struggle with our sense of self. 

24:34 

Imagine if every person who showed up at church next Sunday had a super struggling sense of self and was waiting for someone to come over and pump up their ego balloon. Everyone is just desperate to have someone acknowledge them so they can feel like they belong. So everyone is holding back, waiting for the other person to make the first move, to approach them, and yet nobody is, because everyone is thinking it's someone else's job to make the first move, to pump them up first. It would be a mess. Everyone would go home after church, offended, and with an extra deflated sense of self, feeling as though they aren't loved, that they aren't seen and appreciated. 

25:15 

And if we spend all of our time at church focused on the fact that others aren't behaving the way we think they should, that they aren't pumping us up, we really close down the channel for feeling God's love while we're there. If our thoughts are, "nobody loves me, I don't belong here," then we create feelings of sadness, disconnect, isolation, maybe loneliness, and from those feelings, we create actions of disengaging emotionally and physically. We shut down, we disconnect, we sit in the back, we sneak out early, we isolate. We become super focused on ourselves and our insecurities, and we become, in action, the very people we are critical of for not reaching out to us. 

26:09 

When instead, if we have a strong sense of self, we can absolutely love and appreciate others approaching us and engaging with us at church, but we aren't dependent on them for us to feel as though we belong. We have the capacity to see others with eyes of grace, to view ourselves with the eyes of grace, and to create a safer space for others to engage because we  will interact with them in helpful and encouraging ways. And when I don't rely on others pumping up my ego at church, I can focus instead on serving and blessing others. I can more easily feel God's love and promptings, which all contributes to my feeling of belonging, and even to my spirituality, to my connectedness to God. 

26:59 

I believe that God is always at the ready to help us, and that His love never wavers. There are some verses in Isaiah where it talks about the people doing all of these rotten things, and yet it says God's hand is stretched out still. And it repeats that idea several times, that regardless of what the people are doing, that God's hand is stretched out still. God's hand is stretched out to us, but in honoring our agency, He won't grab us, He won't pull us or shake us and make us do anything. He waits for us to reach out and grab His outstretched hand. A strong sense of self makes that process so much easier. We are able to get out of our own insecure thoughts and look around and see what's available to us to include God's hand. 

27:53 

A strong sense of self completely opens up our availability to see and accept the love and acceptance that God is offering to us. It allows us to step into a level of spirituality that is only available when we step out of the desperation of others seeing us and shoring us up. That desperation really does make us self-centered and heavily focused on our insecurities. When I have a strong sense of self, I can allow for others to have human tendencies and not get offended and hurt by them. I can understand that others see and understand the doctrines and the applications differently than I do, and I can be strong in my own conviction. without needing others to validate my ideas and my beliefs. I can choose to be where I choose to be and not feel threatened by opinions and ideas that don't directly align with mine. I can understand that my relationship with God is between him and me and let other people's relationships be between them and God and have the confidence to be who I feel called to be. 

29:09 

I believe our spirituality is absolutely affected and impacted by our sense of self and that the stronger our sense of self, the greater our capacity for connecting with God. And this is all part of the brilliance of growing up into middle age and I love growing up. Don't you? Pretty amazing place. Okay, sense of self and spirituality. What do you think? Good stuff, right? Okay, next week we're gonna be talking about sense of self and sexuality. It should be fun. We just keep going on the sense of self stuff. There's so much here and it's so vast in the foundation that it creates in our lives. 

30:02 

So if you would like some personal help from me to figure out stronger sense of self, better relationships, staying in your own lane, how to own your own, all this stuff that I talk. I would love to talk with you. I offer 90 minute consultations. We're not gonna talk about 90 minutes of trying to talk you into coaching with me. That is not what we're doing. I spend the vast majority of that time working with you, coaching you, helping you see your own stuff, helping you understand better how to move forward. And then we take the last few minutes, we talk about coaching and I tell you about how I work with my clients, what it looks like, how much it costs, all the things. 

30:47 

And I promise I'm not a hard sell. I just don't believe in that. I don't like people who are hard sells with me and so I'm never gonna be a hard sell either. But listen, this stuff works and it is powerful and I promise you, you will grow more in 12 weeks of working with me than you will in two years of doing this work on your own. Just because having someone show you what's going on in your brain, help show you things that you are completely unaware of this will change your life. I know because coaching has changed my life. It has shown me things that sometimes I haven't been very excited to see because they've been hard. It's been hard to see things. This is work. W-O-R-K. Like, this is not easy stuff. It's hard to see your greatest weaknesses and ways that you hurt other people, and yet this is the only way that we are going to grow and become who we need to become. This work that I do is some of the most spiritually aligning work that I've ever done. I feel like this allows me to be more Christlike than I've ever been to live more in alignment with the values that I hold dear to my heart. It's beautiful work, and I hope that you will take me up on a free coaching session and consultation. We can talk about coaching and let you see. 

32:23 

And then I do have the classes that come up as well. So if one-on-one feels a little bit intimidating to you for whatever reason, classes are a great, great way to move into still a greater progress but maybe a little bit easier to access for some of y'all if you're nervous about the one-on-one, because I know I'm super scary. I'm not scary, but I am direct and I am going to...you don't get on a coaching call and if you're paying me, you're not paying me to be your friend. You're paying me to show you things that are going to make your life better and that's what I do and I take it very seriously. 

33:03 

Okay, that's going to do it for me, my friends. Have an awesome, awesome week. We are coming in on the holidays. It's December and wish you all the best managing your mind around all the things holiday that come up for us. Have a great, great week and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

33:22 

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.