00:00 

This is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale, and this is episode number 46, "Choosing to Love 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. 

00:22 

Okay, hey there. I was just cracking myself up because that pre-roll part where I say "this is Intentional Living", it took me like five tries to get that done because I just kept making the silliest mistakes, and it was just making me laugh. I couldn't, anyway, it was just very funny to me. It's probably not funny to you, but I'm running a little bit high on energy today. I have these days occasionally, but today I was low energy, all morning, struggled to just get myself to focus and get work done, and then I started writing this podcast, and this, gosh darn it, I love this topic. This is what I'm passionate about, and this is why I do the work that I do. Because this is the most valuable thing that we can learn, how to choose to love ourselves, and I know that there are some men that listen to this. Mostly I choose to talk to women. So men, all of this applies to you as well, but generally you'll notice that I talk to women. 

01:23 

But this is the deal, ladies. This is what holds us back. This is what keeps us from having the relationships we want to have. This is what keeps us from changing the world for the better and letting our compassionate natures take over the world, right? This is what it's about, and so we're going to have some real talk today, and it's a soap box day for me for sure. So I'm going to thank you in advance for humoring me and letting me preach today because I will get preachy because I love this. I am so, so passionate about this topic and I want you to understand this at a level that it starts to change your life. So expect me to get a little bit worked up today. This is why my energy is so high because by the time I finished working through this I was like, "yes! We have to do this. We have to get this out there. We have to do it." This is the key to really having the life you want to have. 100%. If two people in a relationship both have this level of self-love that we're going to talk about today, it would be an unstoppable relationship. 

02:49 

Okay, so here's the deal. We're just going to jump right into it. It is time for so many of you to stop beating yourselves up. If you are mean to yourself in your head, this today is for you, okay? First of all, I'm pretty sure that you're not doing all this self-destructive stuff on purpose. If you are, we really need to have a talk and you probably need to get into some counseling, okay? But here's the thing, most of us, though we're not doing it on purpose, you still doing it and it has to change. I'm just not even going to be nice about this. It has to change. 

03:30 

So let's start by talking a little bit about how this whole process works in our brains, okay? For most of us, this would have started when we were younger kids. Maybe we were talked to in an unhealthy and unkind way, such as being told we were stupid or we're ugly or you're the dumbest kid ever or whatever, okay? Maybe we just heard other people in our lives talk like that to themselves. Maybe your mother was just always saying, "oh, I'm just stupid. I'm just not smart enough to figure this out," or "I'm just so ugly," and "I'm just so fat," or whatever and we picked up on it and that became the language that we started to use because we thought that that's what we were supposed to do. Maybe we didn't get into the habit of thinking these kinds of of horrible mean thoughts until we were teenagers or even young adults and then we felt self conscious, as most younger adults do. And we thought that that's what we were supposed to do because maybe we were afraid of being stuck up or conceited or having people think that we thought we were better than them, so we countered that by thinking that if we always told ourselves we weren't that great that we would never get too full of ourselves, right? People would think that we were humble. 

04:44 

This had nothing to do with humility and pride, by the way, absolutely nothing. So if you think that we're talk what I'm talking about today is going to make you prideful, put that thought in a box and put it on the shelf because that is a discussion for another day. This is not a prideful thing. This is not a humility thing. This is a I'm a child of God thing. 

05:10 

Okay, so another scenario. Maybe we were abused at some point and from then on everything in our head changed as our brains were trying to cope with what was going on. The point is for some reason at some point in your life you started talking mean to yourself. Now I know everybody out there does not talk mean to themselves. I rarely talk mean to myself. I think I'm like pretty freaking amazing and I will tell anybody that at any time but that doesn't mean that I don't mean you're not freaking amazing. I think you are. I think we're all freaking amazing and I think that's wonderful and amazing and great. Did I just use amazing like five times in the last sentence? There you go. 

05:54 

Alright, so this is the thing: it has nothing to do with anybody else. But at some level, we started talking mean to ourselves. And by mean, I mean really mean. And I just used mean like five times. Some of you never have a nice thing to say to yourselves. Would you ever say to your best friends the things that you say to yourself? Okay, if the answer to that is "no," it is time to start changing your thinking. If your best friend spoke to you the way that you speak to yourself, would you keep them around? Okay, no, you wouldn't. If you're talking the way that I'm imagining that many of you talk in your heads, you would not keep them around. If someone who's always like, "oh, freak, what is up with your hair today? You have like so many zits on your face. I can hardly stand it. How in the world are you 45 and have that much acne? My gosh, where did you buy that shirt? That's like the stupidest, ugliest shirt I've ever seen in my life." You are so mean, these things that we think in our heads. 

07:03 

This is the thing, my friend, you hang out with yourself every single day, all day long. People who are around that much need to be our best supporters. And you are your own inner circle. The person who should always have your back. The person who should shore you up when no one else is around to do it. It is your job. It's not an "it would be nice if" concept. It is your job to build yourself up and have confidence. It is your job to create a space where you can grow and develop and move into your best self ever. It is your job to create a happy and a healthy space for your spirit to find comfort and peace and happiness. 

07:55 

So let's start taking this job seriously, shall we? We cannot afford to allow ourselves not to believe in us. And I'm not talking about the motivational speaker type of belief, or you can make a million dollars in four months if you believe in yourself, or you can climb Mount Everest if you will visualize it every day for a year. Not that kind of stuff. I think those things have their place, but this level of belief is different. This is truly knowing yourself and acknowledging yourself and seeing yourself as a person of great worth. This is getting to the point that even if someone tells us we're stupid, we don't even entertain that thought. We don't think, "huh, am I?" No, that doesn't even cross our mind. This is getting to the point that even if someone tells us we're worthless, we know full well they are lying. This is getting to the point that when we do something we're really not proud of, we know that we are still a person of worth and that we just need to get our crap together. Getting to this point may require some major brain changes for some of you and some minor changes for others, but the brain changes all take place at our own doing. We are the ones that have to create the change. 

09:17 

Okay, aren't you tired of feeling like crap and like you don't matter? Aren't you tired of feeling insecure and other around other people for not only for how you look but also for your thoughts and your emotions? Aren't you tired of feeling as though you have to change yourself and feel like you need to fit in? Of course you are. It's exhausting to always be in such inner conflict. Your spirit is crying out that you are amazing and beautiful just the way you are and worth every bit of energy that God pours into you and your brain is fighting every piece of that. Your spirit knows it. Your brain is fighting it. Your brain is fighting it by saying ridiculous things like she's only saying that because she's nice or I've got to be the dumbest person on the planet or nobody else would ever make that mistake. 

10:13 

So let's talk about your brain. Sometimes your brain doesn't have any idea what it's talking about. Your brain lies to you all the time. There's this part of our brain we call the primitive brain and it basically thinks whatever it wants to whenever it wants to and it's always making up stories. As well it's always telling us things that it thinks will protect us because of past experiences even though it doesn't have full thinking capacity. Our frontal cortex has full thinking capacity. This is where we  do all of our planning and preparing and where we know what's best. But our primitive brain is the part that causes us to do things without thinking. More than anything, our primitive brain wants to get on autopilot because then it can save energy and not have to think. It's like our primitive brain just wants to hyper-automatize everything so it can sit and do nothing all day long. Except think ridiculous thoughts that don't do us any good, right? 

11:24 

So at some point in your life you started thinking these self-deprecating thoughts. Only you know why and you might not even know why, but at some point you started doing it and you kept doing it. You created a pathway in your brain of thinking horrible thoughts about yourself that eventually your primitive brain said, "ah, now this feels comfortable. This path is so easy to walk, no weeds, branches, no rocks, no logs. I could just walk and walk and walk on this path forever. It's so easy." That's how habits are formed and our primitive brain loves habits. Anything it can turn into a habit it will so it doesn't have to think. Here's a little side note. This is what makes praying and reading scriptures regularly so darn hard. Not the actual doing of it but the focus part of it. Our primitive brain says, "oh we're doing this again. Let's turn it into a habit and then we don't ever have to think about it again." So our brain tries to put it into habit mode and that's why after 20 minutes of praying or reading we may have absolutely no idea what we've prayed about or read about because our brain took over. So to to counter that habit we have to work really really hard to stay focused and to stay where we need to. 

12:47 

So anyway, back on track. So our brain loves to turn things into habits, right? That's amazing and great with so many things. If we had to think about every action we engage in every day, we would be exhausted before breakfast. So thank you, primitive brain, for doing such a great job and habitizing so many things. However, primitive brain, you're not my thinking brain and you don't always know what's best for me. So at some point our primitive brain created a habit out of speaking poorly to ourselves and that became our go-to when we made a mistake or didn't feel like we looked our best or gained 20 pounds or breathed wrong. Heaven forbid, right? Our primitive brain will start beating us up for any and everything we do. Even if we do something completely amazing, our primitive brain is in the habit of saying, "oh it was just a fluke," and we believe it. 

13:51 

So here's the deal. How do we wrench this habit from our primitive brain? How do we take back control and stop being so gosh darn mean to ourselves? Okay, first we have to become aware of the thoughts. So many of you are having demeaning thoughts all day long and not even realizing it. But when you start paying attention you will start to see them. It's like the yellow car, right? You have no idea there are so many yellow cars out there until you start looking for them. And if you start looking for your demeaning thoughts you will start to see them if they're there. Once you start noticing them you have to immediately jump from that old worn easy to walk path of being so mean to yourself and jump onto that brand new jungle path that is full of weeds and rocks and branches and logs. 

14:45 

Easy to do? No. No, it's not at all. But here's how it works. As soon as you see what's going on with the beating yourself up, you have to stop. You may notice with the thoughts, you may not notice until you start having feelings of insecurity or awkwardness or depression, or you may not notice until you start in with actions such as closing down, hiding in a corner, apologizing over and over for something that doesn't need to be apologized for. It doesn't matter when in the thought model you start noticing it, whether it's your thoughts, your feelings or your actions, or maybe not even until you start seeing the results of your life that are crappy, but once you see it, you have to stop right there and end it. And you end it by inserting a new thought, one that you really believe. So if you find yourself saying, "gosh, I'm so stupid," stop, and then jump over to your new thought path and say something like, "whoa, that was unfortunate. Let me try that again," alright? 

15:51 

This is a process of retraining our brains to think the thoughts we want it to think. It does not matter, especially when you're first starting, where in the thought model you catch yourself in this process. You may catch yourself in the thoughts, the feelings, the actions, or maybe not even until the results, but wherever you stop yourself, stop, go back to the thought, create the thought you want to create, okay? That's going to create the feelings and the actions and the result that you want. So if you don't catch yourself until the results, that's okay. Keep with this process and eventually you're going to start catching yourself in your actions. And then eventually you're going to start catching yourself in your feelings. And then eventually you'll start catching yourself in your thoughts. 

16:38 

Now, you're never going to be perfect at this, just so you know, okay? We're never going to be perfect. We're always going to struggle with this, but the quicker we can get at recognizing when we're doing this, the better we're gonna be off, right? So if you find yourself caught in a shame spiral because you messed up the new recipe you were cooking for dinner, rather than saying, "I just can't do anything," right? Which would be in the A line, or the action line, right? It's much more helpful to say, "huh, I'm obviously not going to be perfect all the time." Or you could say, "I'm so freaking awesome that this is really shocking. Let's go out for dinner." The point is we all make mistakes. We all have really bad hair days. We all say things we wish we wouldn't have later on. We all spill on our shirts when we're eating. It's called being human. And we all are subject to human behaviors. And that's exactly how it should be. But this beating ourselves up for being human, it is not creating anything positive, okay? 

17:45 

Let's put this in a thought model so that we can see what it looks like. Let's say that you're at a party and you meet someone new and you said, "hey, when's your baby due" to someone who wasn't pregnant? Okay, is there anybody who has not done that? Okay, I don't see any hands up out there at all. I've done that, I think everybody has, okay? So the circumstance would be, "I said, 'when is your baby due,' to someone who wasn't pregnant?" So my thought about that could be, "oh my gosh, I'm so completely stupid." Alright, my feeling for that is going to be, all of a sudden I'm gonna get this wash of insecurity, this wash of shame, right? 

18:26 

My action then would be I might stop avoiding, I might start avoiding the person. I might stop talking to anybody at the party altogether. I'm going to, I might apologize over and over and over for making that little faux pas. And then the result is I really start to believe that I am stupid and I've created, that thought has created my result. And then if I keep following that circle around and around and around, eventually I'm gonna completely shut down and I'm gonna have zero confidence in myself. We've just created our thought that we're stupid, okay? And we get to the point where we really believe that we're the biggest imbecile to ever walk the earth. Okay, so let's go back, let's rewind this. 

19:17 

So let's say you did this and when you were apologizing for the fifth time to this woman, you catch yourself. What do you do? Stop. In the words of Dieter Uchtdorf, "stop it," right? And then go back and figure out a new thought. Maybe something like, "ooh, unfortunate, but it was an honest mistake." Or, "ooh, that wasn't my best moment." Or maybe even, "oops, maybe next time I just won't say anything until they give an indication that they're really pregnant." We don't have to demean ourselves. We don't have to harass ourselves, we don't have to beat ourselves up. Just recognize that we made a mistake and move on. So then our model would look something like this. 

19:57 

So our circumstance is going to be the same, right? "I said, 'when is your baby due' to someone who wasn't pregnant." My thought could be, "yee yee. Unfortunate but an honest mistake." My feeling then, I could still be confident. Because it's not saying anything about me except I'm a human. My action then, if I feel confident, I'm going to continue to engage with others. I'm going to have a great time at the party. I might make some new friends. 

20:24 

My result is that I then embrace myself for who I am, recognizing that I make mistakes and it's okay, and that it has absolutely nothing to do with my worth as a person. So by allowing the thought that I make honest mistakes sometimes, and realizing that's all part of our human experience, We cannot beat ourselves up because here's the real deal. t really has absolutely nothing to do with your worth. You are an amazing, terrific, smart, kind, compassionate person regardless of what you think about it. But when you can align your thoughts about yourself, what's going on in your brain with what your spirit thinks about itself and knows about itself, that's when you become unstoppable. This is when you really become healthy and happy and you can grow and move forward.

21:29

So start paying attention so you can catch yourself. As soon as you notice, whether it's the thought, the feeling, the action, or the result, stop and then go back and insert a new believable thought. Okay, it has to be something you believe. Otherwise, your brain's gonna go, "oh no." Okay, but maybe you're not to the point yet where you can fully believe that you're freaking amazing. So don't use that as your go-to thought. Start with something smaller and something that you really can believe like, "I know I would never say something hurtful on purpose." Okay, and this is a process. Remember to get your primitive brain to buy into the idea that the new path is better than the old path, you have to be walking the new path more than you walk the old. The new path has to become worn and easy to walk and the old path has to start growing weeds from disuse and this does not happen overnight. So be patient with yourself, but be consistent. Consistency is the key to moving forward in anything we are seeking to do. 

22:37 

When you start changing your self-talk into something positive instead of negative, you will see amazing changes in your life. I promise you that when the person you hang out with the most really loves hanging out with you, that's you, by the way, you will be less lonely you will be more content. You will have more confidence to try new things, you will feel fewer mood swings. This "be your own best friend thing," it's amazing. It's the best place in the world to be and I so want you to be there. I want more than anything else for you to be kind to yourself, to believe in your own goodness and your own worth. I am a firm firm believer that so many of our emotional problems stem from this place of not understanding and embracing our self-worth and not aligning our thoughts with our spirits our spirits know who we are. And I'm sure it's very uncomfortable for them to constantly be told they are not good enough. They're stupid. They're fat and ugly. They never do anything right because our spirits do do everything right and they know it. They know that they're beautiful and amazing and good enough. We just have to get our brains on board, make that alignment and settle into the most wonderful life ever.

24:12 Will all of our problems be solved?  Will all of our bills be paid and all of our relationships be easy? Absolutely not, but that's not what this is about. Getting our thoughts where they need to be is not going to solve all of our problems, but what it will do is get us to a loving, peaceful place where we can see things more clearly. We can treat people the way we really want to. We can have the confidence to go in the direction of our dreams. And this, my friends, is an amazing first step to resolving any problem we're running into in our lives. 

24:51 

So please, please, please, if this is your struggle, do what it takes to start to figure it out. Your entire future and the future of all those around you depends on this. Playing small does not serve you, nor does it serve anyone else around you. Please be aware that when you are in an amazing place, you can help others get to an amazing place as well. Just from being you, you can set an example of how to talk to yourself and let others know how to treat you. 

25:27 

So please commit yourself to do better and to be better. Commit to think awesome thoughts about yourself. Commit to be kind to yourself and to be your own best supporter. Commit to love yourself So much that you just can't get enough of yourself. This doesn't mean that you become conceited or think that you're better than anyone else. It means you think you're amazing. That's all it means. This has nothing to do with anybody else. This is about your relationship with you and you choose what it will be. 

26:06 

You're not going to accidentally fall in love with yourself. You will intentionally choose to love you and think thoughts that build that love. Because it really starts with love for yourself. The more you love yourself, the more you can love others. And that includes children and spouses and I believe even God. The more we honor and love ourselves and embrace our inherent worth, the more we can do that for other people and for God. There you have it. Commit today to think amazing thoughts about yourself and watch your life change before your very eyes. Just so you know, this is one area of life coaching that I am brilliant at. This is one of the main reasons I love coaching so much, especially women. I think women are so freaking amazing and that if we could just get our heads in the game and build ourselves and others and have confidence and, we could change the world for the better. We're amazing. But not when we're playing small. Not when we're pretending that we're not enough. Not when we don't believe that we're not enough. If we could step into our spirits and let our spirits do their thing, this world would change. It would change. I know that because we are amazing women We have the power If we will allow ourselves to tap into it and if we will start to train our brains To think what we were meant to think.

28:05 

if you're on this path and if you get stuck getting to a better place, let me help you. Contact me through my website tanyahale.com and let's get some serious work done. There's no reason for you to live in insecurity and uncomfortable with yourself and unhappy You can do this. I know that you can but you have to want it. And You have to be willing to do the hard work to get off that well-worn path and to get onto a path that's uncomfortable and stick with it long enough until it gets worn down and it's easy to walk. 

28:51 

Love growing up, don't you? Love it, love it, love it. Thank you for being here with me today. If this podcast is helping you, share it with a friend, please. You can go find it on the internet and share it on Facebook if you would like. Share this if this is helping. Leave me a review, okay? I've got a lot of downloads and not very many reviews. Please help me out. That would help me and it would help a lot of other people, okay? And subscribe if you haven't yet. This is the place to be. This is an awesome place. Join me here, okay? Thanks for being here. I appreciate it more than you know, and thanks for letting me get on my soapbox today and rant a little bit and be a little bit psychotically passionate about what I love. Have a terrific day. Commit yourself to think better thoughts and to be your own best friend. Talk to you later.

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!