Loving Yourself Harder

Welcome to This Daring Adventure podcast, where we work on bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to be in order to live a bigger and bolder life. In this podcast, we will provide inspiration, tips, and skills you need to make your life the adventure you want it to be. Here's your host, mindset mentor and life coach Trista Guertin.

Hey everybody, welcome back.

This is episode 65, Loving Yourself Harder.

I am back to normal life, non vacation mode, from Nepal. I got back last weekend and it was a great week. Very short, definitely I should have taken two weeks, but that's okay. I have another vacation coming up in May. I'll be traveling to Paris and probably Greece. I'm still working out the details, but it will be a nice little break. Paris has been on my list of things to do for a while. I haven't been there for a few years, so I wanted to get back, even if it's just for a few days, to enjoy the city. And then I will probably take a week To work and have a bit of a break somewhere else and I'm looking at Greece.

Today I wanted to talk about loving yourself harder and this is something that came up for me last week. I was doing a lot of work reviewing Q1 planning for Q2 and thinking about my future self and who I wanted to become. And in these times when I have a bit of downtime and space to think and look back and look forward, it's easy to go down a rabbit hole of thinking about what should be different, what I should have done differently, the mistakes that I made. Things that disappointed me and all the shortcomings and. Missed opportunities, that I've experienced and thinking about how things should be different than they are.

And one of the things that I had to consciously do the work of over the past few weeks was understanding that these mistakes, these disappointments, these missed opportunities are a part of life and they will happen. They will continue to happen, but, it's an opportunity for me To become better at letting them go and moving past them and using them as an opportunity to learn and to grow and to stop feeling badly about them. So I wanted to go in a little bit about that today and. I think it's important because there really is no escaping it. mistakes, disappointments, missed opportunities will continue to happen.

They will show up in many different ways in our lives, things that, we will use against ourselves to beat ourselves up, to make ourselves feel badly, but it really is during these times that we cannot go back and we can't undo what we've done or what, what's happened, what other people have done, but we always have a choice as to how we want to respond and how we want to treat ourselves and how we want to use it as perhaps an opportunity.

And as an opportunity, each of these can be a space. For us to either love ourselves harder or to love ourselves less, and I vote for harder. This is because there is no downside to loving yourself harder. And in fact, it is the path for us to achieve greater self awareness and development and build greater resilience. And to really help take ourselves to the next level, which is basically what we're here for, as far as I'm concerned, you and I are a work in progress. I've said that and thought that many times, and it's true. You will never be done. I will never be done. And to me, this is one of the best parts of being a human being. Really, when you think about it, that we have this capacity to grow and to evolve and to change and to learn, and that the possibilities for our lives and ourselves and our capacity to grow is unlimited and everything can be an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and to create a greater and deeper connection with ourselves as well, which is amazing. Which is truly one of the greatest gifts we have as a human being. And so you can either use mistakes and disappointments and missed opportunities as an opportunity to make yourself feel badly or to understand what happened and to pull out what you can learn from it to grow and to use. To take yourself to the next level, as I said, or you can use it to beat yourself up and feel badly. And we all do this, it beating ourselves up and making ourselves feel bad comes very easily, right?

Our brain will default to the negative. It will look for problems. It thinks it's keeping us safe. It thinks that by doing this, by defaulting to the negative and looking for the problems, it will help us to keep us safe and avoid that sort of problem in the future. But it feels terrible and it's not necessary. When you take the time to understand what happened, what went wrong, what you maybe did that you could change in the future, you become more conscious of how you are showing up in your own life and what you are doing. And it is an opportunity then to do things differently going forward which can lead to bigger and better achievements and results. So it's important as a first step to stop beating yourself up.

No more criticism, no more name calling. That is one of the most important steps when it comes to mistakes and disappointments and missed opportunities, you also want to stop judging yourself. It's easy to get caught in the trap of trying to obtain perfection, perfectionism. We see unrealistic standards all around us. but letting go of that self judgment and practicing self compassion is important. And somehow when we make mistakes or encounter setbacks it's very easy to be judgmental.

But when we have that self compassion and we can be kind and understanding to ourselves, We then develop a greater relationship with ourselves and we are human. So these will continue to happen and it's learning to treat ourselves with the same empathy and same kindness and compassion that we would to a child or a friend in the same situation.

Oftentimes, we are kinder to others, than we are to ourselves and if you're finding that then it is important to stop take a pause remember that You deserve the exact same compassion and kindness that others you would give others Then whatever happens don't use any of it as evidence that you are not worthy.

You are a hundred percent worthy just because you are a human being on the planet.

That's it.

You just had to show up. Don't use it as evidence that you're not good enough or not capable of creating or living the life that you want. Mistakes don't have to be terminal. They don't have to be fatal. And when we can see mistakes and disappointments as opportunities for growth rather than signs of inadequacy.

Then this is what will empower us and You have the power to respond in any given situation, and you can use this as an opportunity to shape your own narrative and define your worth. You don't have to allow any of these mistakes or setbacks to define you, but can you can use them as stepping stones towards your goals. And this is. is where you generate empowerment and it will help to build greater confidence and self esteem, but you are already 100 percent worthy. You are good enough. You are capable of creating whatever it is you want. None of these mistakes, none of these failures, none of these setbacks or disappointments define you. You get to define you. Not your actions, not your mistakes, you learn from them, you use them, and then you move on.

One of the important things that you can do is ask yourself how you can love yourself better, deeper, more, giving your brain that task, opening it up to having these thoughts in this conversation with yourself will help you to find ways. To create that connection with yourself and show up in a more loving and compassionate way.

What would it look like to love yourself more?

How can you show up for yourself in a more loving way? Set your brain give it that task Find those ways I think for each person, it will be a little bit different.

So I think it's important that you spend some time reflecting on what that would look like for you. Certainly, there are the basic things that I've already mentioned. No judging, no criticism, no beating yourself up, having the greater self compassion.

But what does that look like for you? What else can you do? How would you show up? How do you respond in those situations? Then you want to commit to it, set an attention, commit to doing this for yourself, commit to not beating yourself up, not judging yourself, not using your mistakes against yourself. If there are going to be obstacles in your way, which there probably will.

Can you find them finding the obstacles ahead of time? What are the obstacles that would prevent you from showing up for yourself in a more loving way? If you can distill those down, then you can solve for them ahead of time or have that awareness when they do happen and solve for them, then it will take practice. It's a skill that you will need to develop and you will have to practice thinking, loving thoughts on a daily basis. And practice every single day, gain that awareness of where you are beating yourself up, which thoughts are criticizing and judging yourself, and then start to override your default thinking. A lot of these thoughts will just come very easily and very naturally to you because you've been thinking them for so long and they've become beliefs and that they're just on repeat. And our brain loves that. It loves something that is it's just easy and it loves to repeat these patterns and these thoughts because they just don't take any effort and you will have to gain that awareness and then practice overriding them.

But you will become better at it and it will become easier for you. Just be kind to yourself and if you need support, get the support that you need from friends, from a coach, from a therapist, with whomever that can provide that support to you. It takes work. It takes effort. And sometimes it takes someone who is more objective and has some space and some neutrality to point out. Some of the thoughts, some of the things you're saying, some of the things you're doing that perhaps are not allowing yourself to love yourself as hard and can show you and help you to develop and build that relationship with yourself that you want.

Whenever something happens, whenever there is a mistake or a disappointment or a setback, take the time as well to not only see, what you're thinking about it, but how you can reframe it. And this is an important part of how we grow and how we develop. It helps you to see That these are opportunities and taking the time to find where those opportunities may be is very helpful for building that evidence for your brain.

Otherwise, your brain will default to the negative and make it a problem and just, Be all the doom and gloom, but it takes a bit of work and it takes a bit of time and effort to reframe it and to redirect your brain to what are the opportunities here? What can I learn here? And this is how we become more resilient. this is how we evolve. And from there, then we can go on to bigger challenges and bigger opportunities. And this is why we're here. So it's an important step in the process. One of the things I've also come across and have been telling myself lately is that whatever has happened was always meant to have happened. It's not for everybody. I realized that, but I find that when I think that, when I tell myself that I can let go a little bit, I really let go of some of the resistance and let go of some of the arguing with reality and move into acceptance. It just brings me a little bit of peace. It brings me a little bit of calm. I don't know whether it was actually always meant to happen that way, but it did happen that way.

I can let go of that resistance because arguing with reality and creating that resistance It's what keeps us stuck and it keeps us feeling badly.

So moving into that space of acceptance and that it was meant to happen brings me peace. you can try it. It may work for you, but remember that all of this work is a skill and it is challenging when you start and it's not something that we're taught. It's not something that comes naturally, but with daily consistent work, we can improve and we will get better at it, I promise.

You can create a deeper connection with yourself and love yourself more. Love yourself harder.

This is the path to growth and involvement and building your capacity and building that life that you truly want. It's how you achieve and how you create the life that you truly desire. So keep practicing, keep showing up for yourself. Be gentle and you will become more of you and love yourself more each time, each day, each step along the way.

You have so much to learn about yourself.

This is your greatest adventure. if you can embrace that, and enjoy it as a part of the process, you will never ever be done. And that is one of the greatest gifts of our lifetime.

I am going to be holding another webinar masterclass in the next 10 days. I will be putting a link in the show notes. It will be about creating your future self. It's some of the most interesting work that you can do. And I will put the link for you to sign up. It will be live, but if you can't make it, a replay will be shared if you register in advance.

I also offer the opportunity for you to try coaching for yourself. It's a 45 minute session, bring any issue, any problem that you want. And let's talk about it. Let's get you coached and you can learn more about my three month program. It is a great opportunity to Understand and learn more about yourself and really take yourself to the next level.

You don't have to stay stuck.

Nobody teaches us all of these things about our brain and about our mindset and about our emotions, but it is possible to start evolving and to start changing. when you have that support and when you invest that time and energy, you can Into yourself and into your growth, that's when you really start to move yourself forward. so the link to my calendar will be in the show notes and you can sign up and I look forward to meeting you then.

Thanks everybody. Have a great week. Talk to you later.

Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to This Daring Adventure podcast with your host Trista Guertin. We hope you enjoyed the tips and conversations on how to get excited about life again.

As always, you can head to tristaguertin.com for additional resources and to book a one on one coaching session.

You can also follow Trista on Instagram at tristavguertin.

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