Hello everyone, and welcome. Today we’re going to talk about self love. Sometimes that sounds like a pie in the sky kind of thing to do. So today, we’re gonna break it down in a very grounded way, so that by the end of the episode, you will know how to love yourself better and that, in turn will help you love others better too. So it’s going to be grounded, practical, doable, like all my episodes, and they get to be something you can listen to today and apply tomorrow. So that’s what we’re all about today. Okay, if you want a strong marriage, mastering your own experience of self love will absolutely help you make your marriage as strong as it can be. Before we dive into that, I have a couple of things I want to share. First, I usually record these episodes in my office by myself with the door closed. But today, we are in a beach house. And I’m actually recording this in front of a studio audience quote, unquote. So my husband is on his tablet, sitting across from me reading and smiling. As I mention this, he’s reading and listening just a little bit so it’s kind of fun. Okay, before we dive into self love, now that you know, this is being recorded in front of an audience, I feel like I’m a friends show or something regarding. I want to make sure that you sign up to get my emails so you don’t miss any details about marriage makeover live. That is a special virtual event that I’m hosting, you need a ticket to get in. There is going to be a pop up Facebook group for it. And I’m going to be teaching you some very simple principles. You can make small tweaks with these principles. And you can tweak how you’re showing up for your relationship. And those little changes can have a huge impact on how your day goes and how your marriage feels. You are absolutely cordially invited. And I’d love to see you there. I’m going to answer questions, it’s going to be super interactive. So it’s going to be great. You do need a ticket to get in. So you want to get on that right now. You can find the link to register, along with all the details at maggiereyes.com/marraigemakeover. And I will be opening the doors to the next round of marriage MBA during marriage makeover live. So you will definitely want to be there to get all those details, ask any questions you have and things like that. If you are listening to this in February of 2021, definitely join me. If you are listening to this at some other point in the fabulous future, make sure that you sign up to get my emails, just go to my website, maggiereyes.com to do that. So that you always get notified of any special events or programs that I have going on to help you make your marriage stronger. Okay.
When we talk about loving our partners, we also need to talk about loving ourselves, which is what we’re going to dive in deep into today. And I’m going to tell you something that goes contrary to popular opinion, I don’t think you need to have it all figured out to be deeply loved by someone or to love someone deeply. I think it definitely helps if you’re doing your own work, to own your experiences and the reactions in your life. And just the fact that you’re listening to a show like this one really means you’re asking deeper questions about what it means to be a wife, what it means to have your own identity, even as you unite your life with another human. So it definitely helps to be doing your own mental and emotional work. Absolutely. And also, we can have a great healing and make beautiful progress by being compassionately witnessed by another human. So I just want to say you never have to wait for everything to be perfect, which doesn’t exist for it to be awesome, which is available to everyone. And I think that’s just really important as we’re talking about something like self love, think oh, I don’t have enough self love. So I guess I can’t do X, Y or Z, is a narrative that I see among my clients, my friends, my colleagues, I’ve had that narrative in my life, those thoughts in my life. And I just want to make it clear that while we figure it all out, we can have beautiful, passionate, imperfect love that is awesome and amazing. There is no need to have it all figured out. Ever. Very important. Okay, so here we go.
A few years ago, I was interviewed about self love and asked about how important it is to the other relationships in your life. How does your own self love affect your relationships with the people that you love? And as you can imagine, it’s very important but as the I don’t think we really talked about it quite as much as we could. We talk about communicating better, or listening closely. We talk about things like forgiveness or vulnerability or building trust with your partner. But what about building trust with yourself? The way I think about it, self esteem, self confidence, and self love are all branches of the same tree. And to a great extent, outer success in life, material success of jobs, goals, businesses, achievements, material possessions, and inner success in life, how you feel about yourself, when you’re alone, satisfied, proud and peaceful. Outer success and inner success are hugely impacted by our level of all three of those things, our level of self esteem, self confidence, and self love. So if learning how to love yourself determines how you experience your outer and inner success. I think it’s time we start talking about it, understanding what it is, and learning how to really build our self love muscles.
So a while back, I was talking to a friend of mine, and it gave her one of my favorite life coaching assignments, I give this assignment often and I told her to write a list of 25 things she was proud of. And it’s called self appreciation, it’s one of the practices that I learned in the Life Coach School, which I absolutely love. And it’s part of one of the core learnings to learn to value ourselves and what we bring to the table, whether at work or at home to really practice self appreciation. So I was talking to my friend, and I remember what we were talking about that I said, Oh, this would be a great exercise to do. And she didn’t want to do it. She thought that you had to be boastful and probably arrogant, to have a list of things you were proud of. And actually, I’ve seen this a lot with my clients. And I was actually thinking about this when I was writing up the Notes for this episode, I was talking to one of my clients last week on a coaching call. And we were talking about how you can be humble and own your authority. You can be humble and own your education and experience at the same time. You don’t have to suddenly become this arrogant person to own that you’re brilliant at something and analysis or putting deals together or whatever it is that you’re actually excellent at. So if you have ever struggled with thinking about boastfulness, or bragging, or arrogance, when trying to think about your accomplishments, I really invite you to just lean into saying, I do this and they do it well. That sentence; I do this, whatever your this is, or multiple this’, and I do it well. Do other people do it well too, absolutely. Do you suddenly think that you are the queen of all things? I don’t think so. Right. But you can think you do this, and you do it well, and that’s it. It can be that simple.
So right now, as you’re listening to me think about one thing that you genuinely excel at, think of it right now. And think I do this, and I do it well. And notice how that feels in your body. Just take a breath, take a moment. just scan your body notice any resistance or any relaxation. Notice if you feel opened or contracted. Just bring awareness to where you are in owning your abilities. There’s no right or wrong answer. We just want to notice what’s happening. And what happens is when we bring that awareness, we can start practicing bringing ownership right? And owning I do this and I do this well is absolutely part of loving, right owning is part of loving. So here’s another sentence, I do this and I do it. Well take that away from today. And take this one. I love this about me. That is a sentence that I invite you to practice this week. Notice how you’re showing up for the people that you love. Notice how you’re navigating work or projects or whatever is important to you right now. And notice what qualities you are bringing to every day. Think about things like I am loyal or I am generous or I am organized. Or I’m compassionate, whatever comes up for you that you know you are being right now. And then add in your mind, I love this about me. Okay, I’m going to give you an example, which is really lean into that. So for me personally, I’m enthusiastic. I get excited over small things. I feel so much joy to be alive. I’m excited to be recording this right now. It’s amazing the modern technology of the world, I write some notes, I record them and you’re listening to them. It’s amazing. So as I mentioned, my studio audience here with my husband, we’re renting a beach house for this week. And as I prepare this episode, I just sort of looked around all the different things the house and sort of settled in. And this is the most equipped house that I have ever rented in my life. They have a bag of paper clips, and rubber bands and the kitchen along with every kind of nail and screw you can imagine. And some clippy things, I do not know what they are for but I’m very happy they are there. I just liked the fact that they were supplied, every detail was thought of. And I feel like rejoicing in the thoughtfulness of the team that takes care of this beautiful home. And I love that about me and love that I get that excited about life. So do I think that I am the queen of the universe?
No, I just love that about me. And I invite you to love that about you, too, whatever that is for you. Okay, so back to my friend. I asked her to list 25 things she loves about herself. And she didn’t want to be boastful. So you all know, if you listen to this podcast for a while, and I’m crafty, and creative. I can be sneaky, but only for your highest good. So I reframed it for her and I asked her this. What if I asked you to name some achievements that you have had and skills that you possess, to give to a potential employer. Instantly, she said that was different as you could totally put that list together, which I thought was fascinating, by the way, but why the change? When it became about someone else or something else, it was suddenly so easy to do. Which was really great, because it did get her moving and noticing the qualities that make her strong and appreciating all she has to offer to the world. This is fascinating, right? Because self love has nothing to do with being boastful or full of ourselves or selfish or arrogant. Self love is about having regard for our own well being. That’s it. Self love is about having regard for our own well being. Being able to look at ourselves and appreciate our good qualities, forgive our mistakes, laugh at our bloopers, and generally speaking, treat ourselves nicely. In other words, loving ourselves is just like loving anyone else. So how do we build self love? There are a lot of different ways, there’s a lot of different things you can do. Today, I’m going to offer you four very simple ones, four core elements that can help you build your self loving muscles, kind of like little vitamins, emotional vitamins that you can take. And you can apply them to loving yourself or anyone else for that matter. So here are four core elements or four of the core elements of self love: trust, empathy, compassion, and value. And we’re going to take them one by one.
So trust, do you trust yourself to make good decisions? Do you trust yourself to keep your word when you give it? What about when you give it to yourself instead of other people? Like do you trust the word you give yourself? Is it okay to let yourself down as long as you’re always keeping your words to others? Why or why not? Right? And I talk about in the podcast in a variety of ways in different episodes about how self betrayal is not loving to you or to the other person. Right? So you want to check in on that. How do you build trust, I like to do it in the tiniest steps possible. If you haven’t followed through on a promise that you made to yourself in a long time. Don’t start with a huge promise now start with a tiny one. Start with the tiniest one that you can start with. If you have been working too hard, make you make a promise to take a 10 minute break or a stretch or drink some water. If you always leave work late, make a promise to leave half an hour earlier once a week, not every day, once a week. To give you some kind of examples of what to think about. Start with the smallest decision that you can make and keep and then keep it and then make another one. Oftentimes when you try to build a muscle just like you walk into the gym and you want to pick up 50 pounds, but you haven’t picked up the two pounder yet, right. Start with the two pounders okay. Okay, I did a whole episode on self trust. I refer to all the time. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, definitely, you’re going to want to listen to that one. We will link to it in the show notes because it’s so important. Trusting ourselves is such an important part of loving ourselves. Okay?
Let’s go on to empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand your own feelings and thoughts, understanding them without judging them, or making them wrong, or pretending they aren’t happening. Right? Just understanding them is truly an advanced form of self love. So how do you start to understand, if you’ve been avoiding feeling your feelings for a while, right? Sometimes we numb or we disconnect as a coping mechanism if there’s a lot of feelings going on, right. So you start by giving yourself permission to feel what you feel, whether it’s happy and grateful, or sad and disappointed, whatever it is. I always love to remind you that life happens in a spectrum. Just like a song isn’t one note, the ups and downs of life, are what give your experiences weight, and texture and beauty and power. So you can be happy you got promoted and disappointed your child didn’t make it onto the soccer team all in the same day. You can be sad, something in your life didn’t turn out the way you thought it would and grateful you are healthy at the same time. Having empathy is acknowledging your humanity and all it’s beautiful and ugly layers and accepting them as they are. When you have empathy, you can accept reality as it is in this moment, even as you take steps to change or improve it. And that brings us to compassion. Do you beat yourself up when you disappoint yourself? A lot of us do I certainly have. Do you mentally yell and scream at yourself when you make a mistake? Do you ever call yourself names? Would you do that, whatever it is you do when you’re disappointed to someone you love? It’s a great question to think about. And if it isn’t something you would do to someone you love, why do you do it to yourself? So building compassion, which really at its core, it’s the desire to alleviate your own distress. That starts with how you speak to yourself. If the thoughts and words you’re having in your brain are tearing you down, instead of building you up, you can start building empathy by questioning those thoughts. You can start building compassion by asking yourself, if my husband or my best friend was going through this, what would I say? You would probably say something like, I believe in you, everyone makes mistakes. Let’s start over. You got this right? Try telling yourself whatever you would say to someone else with love. And then pause and see how you react? Do you accept your own compassion? Does it feel odd or weird? or unusual to receive it? What would it take for you to accept it? Right. And if you do accept that, that’s awesome. That means you’re doing very well on your path to self love, keep going.
And that brings us to value. Now this is really interesting. I’m kind of a word nerd if you haven’t noticed yet. And the word value comes from valutas; to be of worth to be strong. The last component of what I like to think of as my self love chocolate layer cake, is treating yourself as if you are valuable. If your opinion was important, what would you do? If how you felt about this issue, whatever issues in front of you right now really mattered? How would you handle it? Because you are important and how you feel really does matter. So to practice self love is to act like you matter in your own life. And I know this sounds really simple, like deceptively simple, but in so many ways we show up into situations where we and then we start acting as if we don’t matter. And one of the ways it shows up was we put everyone else first and then we put ourselves second. So how do you do this if that’s been the case? You start connecting with your tiniest delights you know like to start small. You add one thing that makes you smile on the path of your day. Whether it’s changing the radio station, buying a cupcake wearing perfume, watching a TV show that always makes you laugh, whatever it may be. You put yourself first on the smallest scale that you can manage at least once a day. And this way you build your trust, you build your value, you build your empathy and your compassion all at the same time. And I really want to emphasize that self love is a practice. And as I mentioned before, you can do it completely and perfectly, and still build your loving muscles. As long as you keep practicing. Just like the sounds of a piano might not be beautiful during your first class, your first lesson, but after a few months, you can play some basic songs, right? Same idea, you get better and better. Practicing self love may be messy and scary and wobbly, and sound off key the first few times you do it. But eventually all that practice comes together, your life starts to feel better, your decisions start to get easier and your self love is stronger. So, so powerful.
So there you have it, trust, empathy, compassion, and value. Those are four sort of entry ways into self love, that you can cultivate in yourself, you can cultivate them in every relationship that matters to you. And if you know someone who’s really struggling with self love or self esteem issues, please send them this episode. It might be the spark of inspiration that they need in order to choose to love themselves today, and have a really grounded and concrete way to approach executing on that choice. We can’t help everyone on earth even though we wish we could, but we can help one person at a time. Okay, that’s a wrap for today. Remember to go to maggiereyes.com/marriagemakeover to get your ticket for marriage makeover live. And remember that one person can change the world and one person can change a marriage. I am sending you the biggest hug right now.