Leadership Therapy: How To Love Yourself

Here's the solution to trying to love yourself. Love, love, love, love, love the squirrel that's looking for a nut. And then the squirrel finds a nut and he says, well, I didn't want a nut. There's this weird gaslighting thing. It's craziness. It's buffoonery. You can go to Costco and get the biggest thing of lube and lock yourself in a room. As a leader, I want you to think about this. If you're going after a mission and you're trying to find collaborators, see go on this journey with you for this mission. Whenever I've done it, bigger doors open up for me than the plan that I had written out for myself.

Welcome to the Syndicate X Library, where we study leadership and human behavior. Today I want to talk about something that is a big topic. Self love, loving yourself. You know, the first part of being a leader is addressing your internal relationship. Kind of figured that out when I was writing the leadership book that I put out earlier this year and it ended up being two books because one was about that. It was the I am addressing the self. And then the second one was leadership. What I figured out is you can't talk about leadership until we talk about the person that's trying to be a leader. Your relationship with yourself, how you interact with yourself is a big, big part of that. What I'm going to teach you today is going to be of a lot of value to you, but it also is going to maybe surprise you, but it's going to give you some tools that will help you be more effective and I think, happier at the end of the day. So self love like this comes up all the time in workshops and you've seen it here on Books that Changed My Life. We're reviewing a book and there's a chapter in there about loving yourself. Love, love, love, love, love. So what does love mean? If you're trying to love yourself, you'd have to understand what love is. What we did is. We asked Kevin to go out on the street and just ask people, what does love mean? What is the meaning of love?

What is love? Baby, don't hurt me no more. Is that good?

I've never experienced.

I have no idea. Love is. Everybody has their own opinion on love. It's not. I don't feel like love is. Like has a definition. Everybody makes their own definition. Love is incredibly hard to define. It's very complex. It's like. It feels so dumb saying this, but it's like eternal light being up. I don't know, love is the feeling that I get when I stop and look at the details in plants. What is love?

Lots of sex. Perfect. Yeah. People have a hard time describing what love is. People are confused. I don't know. We're complicated as humans. We have many parts. There's many parts of us to love, not to love. It's the interaction between other people. Is it personal relationships like a spouse or a boyfriend or a girlfriend? Or is it family? Is it friends? It can all get pretty complicated and confusing. The other thing that I would ask you is, is love external or is it internal? You know, growing up as a kid, oftentimes love was described as something external. Like you fall into love. Like you trip, like it's an accident, like you accidentally fall in love or you're hit by Cupid's arrow. And that insinuates that it's external, that you have no control over it. But as I've gotten older, what I've learned is that you control it 100%. It's completely inside of your control. And so it's like the squirrel that's looking for a nut, and then the squirrel finds a nut and he says, well, I didn't want a nut. It's like, but you were looking for a nut. So if you are looking for a nut and you find it, that's internal. Your internal drive made you go hunt for it. And then when you found it, it was what you were looking for. And so here's the solution to trying to love yourself. Stop it. Stop trying to love yourself. It's very narcissistic, and it will go on forever, and you'll never figure it out, just like yourself. That's it. I mean, just think about it for a second. If you're trying to love yourself and then you do something stupid, which we all do. We're not so great. We're flawed. You know, it's just. I mean, if you think about it, it's funny how goofy we really are. You're going to have to break up with yourself and get back together with yourself and break up with yourself and get back together yourself, or you're going to be so biased that you're not going to take chances or do anything because you're afraid that if you make a mistake, you're not going to love yourself anymore. It's. It's craziness. It's buffoonery more than anything else. So stop it. The solution is to like yourself. That's the answer to all this, is let's just like Ourselves, let's bring the volume down, the temperature, the stress, let's just let the air out a little bit, and let's just work on liking ourselves, right? Because here's the thing, it's masturbation. Trying to love yourself, it really is. Like you can go to Costco and get the biggest thing of lube and lock yourself in a room. You are never going to become a better lover by masturbation. That isn't how it works. You become a better lover by focusing on your partner or your partners. That's how you become better, is by externalizing your efforts to somebody else. And then that's where you find love. The reciprocation of others is where you find love. As humans, we're looking for belonging and meaning. That's what we want. It's in us, it's in our DNA to find meaning and belonging. And so you're not going to find meaning and belonging by writing yourself a blank check that you can't cash. You find it in providing value to others by understanding others. And so think about this for a second. If you're a chef, right, you find love and reciprocation by making a dish that makes other people have a certain emotion, experience. And you know, you end up, over time, getting your fuel from the outcome of what you're creating for others. You want to be a creator. If you're a barista, if you're a songwriter, if you're an actor, if you run a business, an engineer, an architect, whatever it is, you're going to find your value in your meaning from externalizing your effort to others and paying attention to their reaction, constantly getting better, constantly improving your value and giving more than you get, right? There was a thing that my grandfather used to say to me when I was a little kid is he used to say, son, if somebody pays you $4 an hour and you give them $8 an hour worth of value, you're always going to be in demand. And that's how it is. Like, you're going to find love by providing value to others, by putting effort into the craft and into the little opportunities that are in front of you. What just happened is I let you off the hook. That's what I did. I let you off the hook. You can stop playing that game and become a creator. Start creating things, start enjoying the interaction with others, stop being so introverted and isolated and project your energies on making things around you better, no matter how small the opportunity feels.

Trust me, the thing that I've learned is that if you really, really put passion into tasks that you can do. If you wake up every day and try to make it a little bit better, try to provide more value, doors open up and opportunities come out of nowhere. You know, one of the reasons why I don't make a five year plan ever is because whenever I've done it, bigger doors open up for me than the plan that I had written out for myself. Because what I do is I focus really hard on the thing that's in of front front of me and I try to provide as much value as I can. I'm not looking for different opportunities or for greener grass. I'm just trying to do the thing that's in front of me the best that I can. And doors start to open, I start to make more friends, I start to make more connections. And that's where you find meaning and belonging. And I think what we would ultimately be looking for is love. But we don't find it by locking ourselves in a room with, with the jar of lube. Not long term, maybe temporarily you do, you could make that argument, but it isn't a scalable thing. So we wanna add value, we wanna take responsibility for who we are.

Leverage the little opportunities in front of us and be a creator. At the end of the day, as a leader, I want you to think about this. If you're going after a mission and you are trying to find collaborators, seek other people to go on this journey for this mission. It can't be about self love and about yourself. In the leadership book the 17 laws, law number two is, it's not about you, it isn't about you, it's about the mission. It's about learning and understanding as much as you can, providing value to the people that are working with you and you're collaborating with. It's much bigger than you. And you want to go after something that is a lot bigger than you. You don't want to be so stagnant and so introspective in what you're doing. If you notice the same people that are trying to figure out how to love themselves also are locked up. They just are locked up because they're afraid. They get afraid of trying something that would make them not love themselves. Like just think about if you're trying to go around and function in a way that everything you do is adorable and pretty and likable, then you're never going to take any chances, you're never going to learn anything. Because we learn by making mistakes. We learn by putting ourselves out there and trying for something bigger than what we currently have. And you wouldn't aim for your full potential if your goal was to love yourself, because there's a lot of pain and hard lessons that are going to happen. If you're trying to live up to your full potential, pay attention to the self help community because this whole idea that you need to love yourself is a continuity program. Most people.

Never thought about needing to love themselves until they saw a YouTube video or they read it in a book. And now all of a sudden this like this separation in psychosis happens where they're trying to do something that isn't really possible and in the end ends up making them gaslight themselves more than anything. And there's a great quote here in Nathaniel Braden's Six Pillars of Self Est. What he says is if the aim is to prove I am enough, the project goes on to infinity because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable. Let me read that to you one more time. If the aim is to prove that I am enough, the project goes on to infinity because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable. The that's what the self help industry is doing is they're making it debatable. Like, I didn't think I needed to love myself, but now I, I don't love myself and I don't even know what love is. So how do I love myself and figure out what love is? And then you just end up creating this problem that never existed to begin with. It doesn't exist. Just like yourself. That's it, like yourself. Root for yourself, hold yourself to a high standard, care about yourself, prioritize yourself, but add value to the marketplace. That's what it's all about. Rumi has a metaphor that he suggests that the search for validation or enoughness is futile because what we seek is already within us. Much like searching for worth when it's already inherent. It's like when you have your sunglasses on your head but you're looking for them everywhere and you can't find them. Well, they were on your head the whole time, like yourself. That's it. So in the pursuit of self love.

Let it go, drop it, relax everything and just like yourself and get to work providing value in the marketplace, paying attention to others, paying attention to where you can slip in and make things better and you will find love from that. That's where you're going to find love. Just like with a partner or partners. That's how you find love. I think love is a decision more than a feeling.