How to love yourself

Ep 213 Transcription

In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about loving yourself. Now. You might be thinking, hang on, am I in the wrong place? Isn’t this a podcast about money? And let me tell you, that your capacity to love yourself and your sense of self worth is directly related to your capacity to earn. In today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing my own journey of self love and how you too can learn to love yourself more.

Many years ago I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts. It’s called The Life School Coach Podcast and Brooke Castillo, the host was talking about how she likes herself. And I thought, wow, that is so inspiring. At the time, I had two young kids and I was in such a spiral of self loathing that even the concept of saying on a podcast I love myself seemed so far fetched to me. So it really piqued my curiosity around how someone gets to a place where they can confidently stand on their own, no matter what people are saying about them or what else is going on. Brooke Castillo was sharing it in the context that, she has a massive business and she was sharing about how she has lots of haters and people who say things and have opinions, and she said, “I don’t care, because I love myself. I know that the work that I’m doing is important. And it doesn’t matter what other people say, because it won’t affect how much I love myself.” And that was really so inspiring for me and something that I really wanted to achieve; that level of self confidence, self worth and self love.

So it took me a long time to start to change my relationship with myself. However, I remember listening to that podcast episode and making it a mission or a call for myself, that I wanted to learn to love me. As I record this podcast today, I can honestly say that my confidence and my sense of self love have completely changed since that point in time.

How I changed my relationship with myself (and what triggered the change)

What I wanted to do was talk to you a little bit about the journey that I’ve been on, so that perhaps you can start to take steps to learning to love yourself as well. This journey really started for me when I really started diving into mindset and learning about mindset and obviously a lot that I was doing/ know was in the space of money. However, one of the things that I learned about mindset is that a lot of what we think is a fact or a truth is simply a perception or a lens that we are looking at things through.

So after I had my second child, I felt like I lost a lot of myself. Anyone who’s been through the process of having children will know that your body changes significantly when you have children. I also breastfeed both of my children, which again changes your body, and I think that for me, I really started to question my physical attractiveness, but also actually who I was as a person, I felt like I lost a lot of me and a lot of my identity when I became a mother.

At the time, I thought that these things were just a fact, you know, it’s just a truth that you will completely lose yourself when you have children and you will no longer have your own identity or be able to create your own life. Now, at the time, that felt very real for me. I was in the throes of juggling a toddler and a baby and all of the things and the more that I started to really think about who I wanted to be and the life that I wanted to create, I started to recognise that that thinking was not going to serve me. I remember that I didn’t want to go to events because of the way that I looked and I just was really lacking my inner core, like who I am as a person.

So the journey basically started by identifying firstly that I wanted to be confident. I wanted to love myself, I wanted to have that inane sense of I am worthy in myself. And the journey to get there, I’m not gonna lie, has been a very bumpy one, however, with personal growth always comes discomfort.

The tools I used to work on my self-worth

Some of the work that I started to do, one of the activities that I did and I can’t remember where I heard this from, but it’s called mirror-work and basically what you do is you look in the mirror at your physical body and you talk to the things that you like about yourself. You really say you’ve got great whatever, and I looked in the mirror this time and I just cried and I couldn’t think of anything that I liked about how I looked. And it’s ridiculous because I look back at photos of myself, you know, after I’d had my second child and I think, do you know what, you actually looked really bloody good for someone with two little kids? I certainly weighed less than I do now. And it’s funny because this is what is going on right in my head, I was like, there is nothing to love about the way that I look right now. And hindsight perception, looking at things through a different set of lens, I look at photos and videos of myself now I think, gosh, you’re amazing and you’re strong. I can’t believe you’re still running a business with too little humans. And you know what? You actually looked great. But at the time, it felt very, very real for me.

The more and more that I did mirror work, the more that I could learn to appreciate things about myself. Even if they aren’t necessarily perfect, if that makes sense. So yes, my stomach doesn’t look like it did before I had children, but guess what? I grew 2 little humans inside me. That’s pretty amazing. I’ve always hated my ass because for someone of my frame, I’ve got a disproportionately big backside. And it’s funny because the more that I started to do this mirror work, I just look at myself and and more and more be like, do you know what, like, you’re curvy and that’s OK. And as time goes on, the more you actually really start to appreciate yourself.

My husband actually said to me the other day, he said, I’ve really noticed how much more confident you are in your own skin. And I know after the children, like if we were going to the swimming pool or anything like that, I’d be covering myself up. And these days I’m like, do you know what? Whatever. Let it all hang out. And he said it’s actually really sexy the way that you feel a lot more confident in yourself.

How your self confidence helps you sell more and attract more money

This is kind of the point and the reason that you want to go on this journey is because the more that you love yourself, the more self confidence you have, the more magnetic that is. And ultimately your worthiness is attracted to your capacity to create wealth. Your confidence directly correlates to your ability to sell. Think about it. If you are walking up to sell and you’re thinking no one wants to buy from me, I’m such a loser, I’m not a good person; how is that going to come across in your selling process? As compared to when you were like people would be crazy not to buy from me, I’ve got this amazing thing, and I know that I’m the best person to help them. Like the energy that you were going to show up in is going to be completely different. So mirror-work was one of the first things that I did on my journey and something that I still do to this.

There’s also the work in terms of falling in love with the person who you are. As someone who lacked a lot of confidence early in my life, I was bullied quite a lot in high school and in turn that of course creates a lot of a lot of questioning, a lot of self confidence issues and you really start to sort of question your worthiness as a human. But again, all that this is, is a perception. It’s a lens of how you are seeing things.

Let me show an example of this. When someone came to me and they said, Clare, I need to talk to you about something… Last time I called up, I said this to you and I’m really, really sorry, I shouldn’t have said that and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, and you must think I’m a really awful person. And I understand if you never want to see me again. And I said, oh, I didn’t even I don’t really care, it was water for ducks back to me… and they’re like you just saying that? No, I said, I don’t care, it didn’t bother me at all. Now someone else had gone away from that exact same conversation and to me, I hadn’t thought a second thought about it. And I’ve also been on the flip side of that where I’ve had something happen and I’m thinking and thinking and thinking about something finally decided to talk to the person about it. And they’re like, I don’t care. But that’s the funny thing isn’t it, that it’s always going to be a perception in how you were looking at it.

Someone who is immature to one person will be incredibly mature to another person. Someone who is really silly and fun and playful, someone else will perceive them as quite serious. And I think this is the thing that’s important to remember as you go on this journey.

Another thing that I really recognised was there’s this almost need to think that you have to be perfect, that you have to be good at all of the things. And I had a lot of insecurities because, yeah, I’m not good at a lot of things. I’m not naturally someone who, you know, is a great cook. When I say not naturally, I’m not a great cook. But the thing is, you don’t need to be excellent at everything. And I used to berate myself internally, a lot about all the things that I wasn’t good at. I’m not good cooking. Not good at keeping the house clean. I’m not good at showing up confidently and speaking on social media. And I realised that that wasn’t serving me. I’m never going to be perfect. No one is perfect. And you can either focus on. All the things that aren’t so good about yourself. Or you can start to focus on the things that I could.

Some of my biggest failures in business have become the stories that I’m able to share and deeply connect with my clients and say, Oh my gosh, I’ve been there, done that myself. My fear of public speaking has transitioned into something where I am now a confident speaker getting paid to speak and this again is such a strength, because something that was a weakness of mine has now become a story, an area in which I can empathise with people that are struggling with it. And even if it’s something that you don’t become great at, I don’t think I’m ever going to be a great cook! That’s OK. There’s a lot of other wonderful things about me that I can love.

My challenge to you to help you on your self-love journey

So here’s what I want to challenge you to do. I want you to start to think of all of the fantastic things about yourself. Whether you’re in a space of self loathing like I was many years ago. Or whether in a space where you are pretty confident, but you’re wanting to grow your self love even more. Focus in on what you love about yourself. Even if you can only think of one tiny thing or a few tiny things initially. And amp them up, really explode the feeling of how that feels and try and think of more and more and more things. The mind is so incredibly powerful. And it sees what it looks for. You will all have heard the red car analogy right, like as soon as you start looking for a red car, guess what you see, red cars everywhere! And it’s the same when you are looking for evidence that you know that you’re not attractive or that you’re not very good at a lot of things, you’re going to find more and more evidence of that. Start to look for the evidence that you are fantastic.

One of the ways that you can do this is someone ever pays you a compliment or smiles at you, or sends you a nice email, capture that and really lean into it. The more and more that you are able to snowball that feeling, the more and more you will fall in love with yourself.

I know this has been a bit of an unusual episode, a little bit different to my normal podcast episodes, but this has been something on my mind as I’ve really been observing how much growth I’ve had in this area and noticing the knock on effect, that positive knock on effect, that’s having to many other areas of my life, and I really wanted to share it with you.

So learning to love yourself is a really powerful tool for many reasons, but one of them is to support you in your success and wealth creation. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode of the podcast and I look forward to chatting to you again next week.