LOVE Recap

Episode 87

The Know, Love, Grow series is all about how you spiral up in your own life, and in turn, how that carries over into your relationships with your family members. The greatest influence you can have on others is to live your life in such a way that shows them what is possible. You communicate volumes just by the way you are being in the world. This doesn’t require you to say anything. If you want to have a positive influence on your family, look at who you are being in those relationships first. The Know, Love, Grow series is designed specifically to help you go through this process.

If you want to have a positive influence in the lives of your family members, help them to grow and achieve the wonderful things you see in store for them, this is the series you need. Follow along on this podcast for the first three months of 2023 as I show you what it means to Know, Love, and Grow.

Start this process for you!

Download my free pdf worksheet with 30 journaling questions to begin to know yourself better:

Download HERE

When you begin to discover new things about yourself and know yourself better, this has the tendency to bring up some hard emotions and one of the biggest ones is shame. At it’s core, shame says to us, “There’s something wrong with me.”

We easily get stuck in thinking there is something wrong with us, and when we get stuck there, we can’t access the very thing we need to grow.

To help you work through any shame you may be experiencing, download this free worksheet: Download here

Are you wondering if coaching is right for you? I offer a one-time, 50 minute coaching call at a highly discounted price of $25 so you can try it out and see what coaching is all about.

Bring your relationship problem you’re stuck in and work on it with me. We can do a lot of work in 50 minutes. I’ll see you on our call.

CLICK HERE to set up your call


Full Transcript

How have you been enjoying love month?

I think it’s a hard month is as easy as it sounds, I think it’s actually a really hard thing to do. And that’s why I’ve given you some of the episodes that I have this month in finding self compassion in tolerating uncomfortable things, in recognizing the difference between rejection and resignation and acceptance and love.

That’s why I’ve given you the episodes that I have.

Now as you have gone through the know episodes from January, probably you discovered some things that are hard to see about yourself, and maybe just trying to do the questions on the PDF that you downloaded. Maybe that alone brought up some hard things for you.

When we do things like this, we discover things about ourselves, we shine light on parts of us that we’ve previously hidden or buried. And that part that we previously hidden or buried is called our shadow self.

We all have parts of us that we don’t want to take a look at. And that we don’t want anyone else to see things that you’d like to hide and push down and pretend that they’re not there. And just, I’m just going to list a few of them. But they’re the list could go on and on.

This is not an exhaustive list. It’s just a sample. But you might have found some places that you’re selfish, that you’re a little indulgent with yourself. Maybe you notice that sometimes you’re lazy, or prideful, are envious and jealous. Maybe you’re deceitful and part of your life. There are many different ways and different vices that we all have, that I can I could keep going but you get the idea.

So when you open yourself up to this shadow self, this part of us that we don’t want to acknowledge and see. And we say to ourselves, yeah, there’s good and there’s bad in me. And there’s good and there’s bad in other people too, when we are willing to take a look at that. That’s when we start to integrate our whole selves together.

That’s when you start to bring all the pieces and parts of us and put them together and we can begin to move forward. If we’re fragmented into different pieces, it’s very hard to move something forward and grow it when it’s not even whole and complete. But you don’t have to be healed from all those things. To be a whole complete person. You just want to acknowledge that all those things are there. Everything that you see everything that you don’t want to see everything that you love to see, all of it is there and all of it makes up you, then you can begin to move forward.

Remember, a problem well defined is a problem half solved.

If we’re not looking at part of the problem of who we are. There’s no way we can solve it, we’re just going to be batting at smoke trying to get the smoke out instead of putting out the fire. Now when we see there’s good and bad in me, and there’s good and bad and everyone else too. This is called a shared humanity. It helps us to find love for ourselves and love for other people.

We see we’re all in this together. I have heard things, you have hard things. I have things I love about myself. You have things that you love about yourself. I have things I really don’t like about myself, and so to you, we’re all in the same boat. We’re all part of this human race, just trying to do the best we can.

Now this is the love recap.

So I’ll be going through some of the things that just stood out for me this month. And for sure, if other things stood out to you, then that is what’s important to you, not what stood out to me but this is my takeaways for the month. And hopefully you’ll see something that can be useful to you too. So some of the things that get in the way of us accepting ourselves just the way we are right now. Shame and judgment. This I idea the saying to ourselves, there’s something wrong with me.

When we do that, it leaves us to hide, to beat herself up, spiral downward instead of upward shame shields that Aimee and I talked about in the very first week of February. Those keep us from accessing the very thing that we need to grow. Because shame shields are hiding things from us hiding things from other people too. And remember, if we’re hiding part of us, we’re not whole, we can integrate the whole person.

Perfectionism is a huge problem for women. And it’s a huge shame shield.

We think if we can just do things perfectly, then we’ll, we’ll finally be acceptable and worthy. But you know what, no one can attain perfection. So this just leads us into more shame, thinking more things are wrong with us.

Perfectionism is debilitating.

Another thing that gets in the way of us loving and accepting ourselves is the negative self talk. And I’m not going to go far into that, because I just did that last week in Episode 86, on self compassion. So if you want a reminder of what negative self talk looks like, go and listen to that episode again. But that is one of the things that keeps us from accepting ourselves. Another one, comparison, comparison with other people. This is crazy that how much comparison we do.

Betty Jamie Chang said, “Comparison with myself brings improvement. Comparison with others brings discontent.” Isn’t that the truth?

And Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Let’s stop letting that comparison rob us of our joy.

Let’s stop comparing. No one else is just like you.

No one else was raised in the family that you were raised in has the same physical biological makeup that you do have the siblings that you have, have, every experience that you’ve had in your life has had exactly the same thoughts or feelings. No one else is exactly like you. And this is one of the best things ever. Because there’s actually not a real way to compare ourselves to something that’s not even like us, you’re comparing things that are not even comparable, when they say apples to oranges, that’s what you’re doing, you’re comparing two things that can’t really be compared, because they are not the same.

So anytime you find yourself comparing, you’re going to probably find yourself coming up short. That’s the reason that your brain is comparing. It’s to tell you what you need to work on. So you can go fix it, so you’ll be more acceptable. It just robs our joy and brings discontent.

Another thing that gets in the way is thought errors. We think that we need to be harder on ourselves, in order to get ourselves to be better. It’s like we’re saying to ourselves, if I go easy on myself, I won’t work hard to improve. So I need to be really diligent and strict with myself. Well, this is often a wrong thought. It’s an thought error.

The Far enemy of love and acceptance is rejection. This sounds more like rejection to me. I’m not good enough. Now. I need to beat myself up to be better. And remember, the near enemy is resignation. It’s just kind of throwing up our hands and saying, Well, I can’t do anything about it anyway. So why even try.

When we love someone, we do what’s best for them, because we care about them now and we care about them in the future. We don’t require them to be different to earn our approval, we can do the same thing for ourselves. For others, we can walk alongside. We can walk alongside them as they work things out that they’re here on this earth to work on.

For ourselves, we can walk alongside ourselves by showing compassion and requiring hard things of ourselves. We are apt to be the hardest on ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we don’t require ourselves to do hard things. Another thing is we fight against reality. This gets in the way of our own acceptance.

Byron Katie said, “When you fight against reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”

So when we accept reality, we can begin to move forward. Until then we stay stuck. What are some of the benefits that you get when you decide going to love and accept myself? Well, you are able to integrate your whole person, the parts that you like and The parts that you don’t like, see you have access to what you need to be able to move forward and grow. love and acceptance are like a bridge between knowing who you are, and growing who you are.

And when you truly do this for yourself, you learn how to do it for others. This lets you calm down and allow you to be right where you are. And that for that to be acceptable. And then you allow other people to be right where they are. And for that to be acceptable. You can accept them right now as they are without them having to change some of the things that can help us get to this part where we love and accept ourselves better. rooting out shame, calling it out for what it is, I really recommend any book or any podcast or YouTube video.

Anything that Brene Brown has put out there is I think it’s always valuable.

She’s a master at naming shame and calling it out and then helping us to work through it. And I’m so grateful for her work and for her willingness to be so open and vulnerable in such a public space. The download for February is a worksheet that is working on this, remember, so if you’re finding that this is something you need help with, go to those show notes and download that February download.

I love her book, The Gifts of Imperfection. Especially, remember I said perfectionism is such, it’s such a struggle for women more than it is men. Although it can affect men, it just doesn’t affect them as often and as universally as it does women.

And The Gifts of Imperfection is a book if this sounds like you, this is a great place to start. She even has on her website where you can go and take a little quiz. She has 10 guideposts for wholehearted living, and it tells you really which guideposts you need to work on more as you take this quiz. So awesome resource right there for you.

Another thing that we can do to help us love and accept ourselves better is to allow discomfort, love and acceptance are not often comfortable places to be they, they really are sometimes very difficult to get to. So when we allow that discomfort when we allow ourselves to feel the emotions to move through them, to sit with them and not try to discharge them onto someone else or separate ourselves from them. We open ourselves up to growth.

Because if we just stay in comfortable places, we limit our growth, think about going to the gym and just lifting one pound weights and thinking, Oh, I’m doing so much to grow. While you’re doing a whole lot of comfortable weight lifting, and not stressing those muscles. It’s the stress on the muscles that produces the muscle growth. And the same thing goes for us, we need to be a little stressed in order to grow.

Think about though if you were used to lifting 15 pound weights for your biceps and all of a sudden you said “Hey, I’m gonna go get 50 pound weights,” you would hurt yourself, you would be doing some damage to your body.

Make sure that you are doing appropriate growth for where you are appropriate discomfort and stress levels. Another thing that we can use to help us to love and accept ourselves and our situations better is self compassion. There’s a whole episode on this just as I mentioned before, last week, episode 86 tensive ideas for how to work on self compassion. Kristin Neff is a great resource for this. She is a self compassion expert. She has a website with many, many resources on it.

So how do we love our family members better? The same ways that we love ourselves better those same things help us love our family members better. And the same types of things that keep us from loving ourselves, keep us from loving our family members better.

So we can’t give someone else what we can’t give ourselves first, let go of judgment, let go of comparison. Let go of shame. Work on those three things. Together with self compassion leads us to that common humanity. I matter you matter. I have good and bad in me. You have good and bad in you. We’re all in this human race together. Remember.

You know I often get asked things from people that their family members are doing that feel icky to them. So I’m going to point out some of those things today because they don’t feel good when you’re on the other side of them. And one thing is pointing out somebody’s flaws, in the name of “trying to help them.” Now unless there’s a safety issue involved, where you are truly concerned about their future safety or their present safety, you are not helping them by doing this.

And this is not loving, this is not accepting, and it’s not loving, and it’s hurtful. And it causes people to put up walls between you and them. I see this all the time in parents, they say things like, it’s my job to help my kid be better if I don’t tell them this, they’ll never know. And then they’ll end up never getting married, or no one will ever want to hire them. Because look at look at how lazy they are. Or they’re going to end up living in my basement when they’re 40, I have to tell them these things, or they won’t know.

Well, pointing out to your kid, no matter how old they are, how they are not measuring up is only telling them that you don’t accept them. And they need to change for to earn your acceptance. This does not make them want to improve, it does not make them want to be around you. And they start hiding their true selves from you.

You speak volumes to your children, no matter how old they are, just by the way you will live your life. And the more they feel loved and accepted by you, the more they will open themselves up to allow themselves to be influenced by you. They will not put up walls, and you will not approach them and trying to fix them. Because they don’t need to be fixed. You just help them by loving them.

There’s some common misconceptions of doing this work of loving and accepting yourself. And these are just just a sample. The first one is I’ll be a selfish conceited person will this is a snap judgment and it’s a thought error. It’s not true. Another one is I won’t keep trying to improve. Well, that’s the resigned position. Remember, that’s the near enemy of love and acceptance.

And so that’s why we go to the rejection part where we are like, I’m not okay the way it with the way I am right now. I need to beat myself up to go to be better. Neither of those are love and acceptance. Another one is, there’s too much wrong with me right now to accept myself just as I am. Again, that’s a rejection statement.

Another thing that I hear people say quite often is, well, if you knew the real me, you wouldn’t like me either. Again, another rejection statement, we think that we’re just pointing out the truth, or actually pointing out what our mindset is how we are interpreting a set of facts, a set of data that we’ve been given before us. And this is the way our brain is choosing to interpret it, it does not mean that it’s true.

And the more that we can start challenging those beliefs, the more we can start integrating the whole person. There are so many lasting benefits of loving ourselves. Less time spent in shame, judgment and disappointment, more time spent in love, peace and joy, a more mature version of yourself. And when you are more mature, you can hold contraries:

I can love myself just as I am AND I can still want to grow and improve.

I can love my child just as they are And I can be patient while they figure their life out.

And you start growing from a place of abundance instead of a place of scarcity. You stop saying things to yourself like, well, I have to be better. So people like me. So I’m more acceptable. So I’m finally Okay.

And you start saying things to yourself like I want to grow because I love myself. And I care about my own development. I hope you have enjoyed love month. I know it’s been probably a harder month than you expected.

But I think that you’re really going to love March and grow month.

So join me next time as Amy Gianni and I introduce March’s theme GROW.

This is probably the month that you’ve been waiting for. Because right we all want to know how to grow and become better. But I’m going to tell you this right now, you won’t become better. There’s no better. As you work on growing you become a different version of yourself. Maybe a version of yourself that you have an easier time accepting. But that doesn’t mean you are any better than you are right now.

Join me in March for GROW month. Thanks for being with me, and I’ll see you next time.