Commit To Loving Yourself Fully with Kamal Ravikant

Coming to you from the center for Social Confidence in Portland, Oregon, welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy, Helping men everywhere go from social anxiety to social domination with your host, Dr. Aziz.

Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today is going to be extremely valuable for you because we're going to be talking about how you can love yourself more. What that actually looks like, feels like, sounds like what that actually is. So it's not just some intellectual concept, but it's actually something that you bring into your life. And I have an amazing guest today who's written a powerful book about this and he's a very eloquent and well spoken author and poet. And you might have even read his book. It's one of the most popular books on Amazon on this subject, which is about how to love yourself. And before we dive into that interview, I wanted to address one thing which is sometimes we have resistance to the idea of loving ourselves. And you might have that. You might even hear me talk about loving yourself. And maybe your response is like, ooh, I want that. I want more of that. I want to know how to do that. And your response also might be, oh, that stuff. You might roll your eyes or think it's silly or have some other way of dismissing it. And if that's happening for you, I would encourage you to slow down and look at that. Why? Why would you dismiss loving yourself being kinder to yourself, more gentle or compassionate with yourself? My experience, the only reason people do that is because they've already experienced so much pain that they're just hardening themselves. They're hardening their hearts. And the idea of being open with themselves, warm, loving, gentle, it's just too painful. They don't want to open up in that way. So we just push it all away. We push loving others away, we push loving ourselves away. But the only result of that in the long run is pain. So wherever you are, I encourage you to listen with your mind and open up your heart and actually take in what we talk about and see how to apply it and use it in your life so that you can love yourself. Because as the title of this episode on his book says, love yourself like your life depends on it, because it does. So, without further ado, let's dive into that interview. Enjoy.

Expert Interview.

My guest expert today is someone I'm very excited about having on the show. His name is Kamal Ravikant and he is an author and a poet and many other things who's had a wide range of fascinating experiences in his life. Many of which we'll get into in this interview, including working in Silicon Valley, some of the brightest minds in the world there. And you may have heard of him because he's the best selling author of the book Love Yourself like youe Life Depends On It. And he's also the author of a new book that we're going to get into in the interview as well, called Rebirth, which is about a pilgrimage across Spain and how a character grows in many ways, one of which is through loving themselves. So thank you so much for joining us on the show today, Kamal.

I'm honored to be here. It's kind of funny to be called an expert, but sure.

Well, you wrote a book on it, so there's some credit. But it's not just a book because there's also the teachings within and it comes from your own experience. So let's actually start with that. And some people might have read the book and some may not have, but that's really what I wanted to dive into in our conversation today is about loving ourselves. And maybe we'll start with a little bit about your journey. What was happening, what led you to even really make a study of this in your own life.

Yeah, honestly, it wasn't a study. It was a move out of desperation. So my background, Silicon Valleys, I've been there since the first dot com boom. I've been building companies there, startups there, and some that done very well, some that blew up the classic entrepreneur game. And also on the side I was writing. Writing is what I believe I was put here for. And collecting rejection letters from agents and publishers over a decade, but just becoming a better and better writer. Then my last company that I built and I self funded the whole thing and I was doing really well. I took money from friends and family and the thing blew up and I had lost, you know, I lost everything. I was in debt, I was incredibly sick, I was depressed out of my mind. And depressed is actually a minor way to put it. And I basically had to figure out something to save myself. Or like I was gonna, I was gonna, you know, I killed myself. And so I made a vow to myself to get out of it. And how I did that was a vow to love myself. And I don't know honestly where that concept of love yourself came from, but that's what came out. And I'm a big believer in the power of personal commitment. And I realized that since I made that vow, I had to figure it out. And I was really, really sick and locked up in my apartment. And so I just Started working on myself, trying to figure out what. How to love myself. And what worked, I went deeper. What didn't work, I threw it away. And within that's a little over a month, my life had changed. And what was ironic was. Or interesting was it wasn't just my internal self. I mean, you know, it was actually my external life was changing too, which kind of blew me away. And so, you know, I would tell some friends about it and it would actually really help them. And then eventually I wrote this little book. And when I say little, it's little on purpose because the way I write, every word matters. And I wanted to write the book that I wish someone had given me when I was down. Because I have no patience for 500 pages of theory and neuroscience or whatever. Just tell me what works and some thoughts on it. That's it. I wrote that book and I put it out and Love Yourself like youe Life Depends. And then it took off and changed my life. Yeah. So that's a bit of the story.

Yeah, I love it. And you said something in there that I think is extremely important. You said, I made a vow to love myself. And then I believe in the power of personal commitment. That I think is perhaps one of the most important pieces of this puzzle is this.

I think it is the most important piece in light. Yeah, it really is.

So say more about that, about how you see that as the most important piece.

Well, it's, you know, I would say, you know, before we started talking about confidence, I would say it's the surest hack I know to confidence, which is if you start making commitments to yourself and keep your word to yourself, you develop a level of confidence in you and that you can't get externally. And when you get that confidence inside you, you walk differently, you approach things differently. You just know that whatever it is, if it really is something you want, you'll make commitment to yourself and you'll figure it out and you'll do it. And it changes everything. This basic concept of personal commitment changes everything in life. Everything great, whatever I consider great in my life has come from that.

Yeah. And yeah, there's so much that can come from that decision. That moment that we said, this is what I'm going to do. And I think that vow, it sounds like in your case, came from immense pain.

Yeah, desperation, actually.

Desperation. And I can only gather that there was a lack of that self love in that time.

I think it was, I think a very significant dose of self hate would have been the honest assessment. There was no self Love there, my friend.

Yeah, yeah, the opposite. Right? Like not just ignoring, but actively, you know, criticizing. And I know that's something that everyone listening can relate to to a greater or lesser degree. Even if we're not in the, you know, the pits of or the depths of despair, there is this tendency to be more impatient, dissatisfied, critical, judgmental of ourselves, which is a lesser form of self hate. And so that vow, there's that moment, there's that resolve like, okay, I'm going to do this. Then. What did you find worked? You said I threw out the stuff that didn't work. So we probably don't need to go through a whole lot of that. What did you find was really helpful for you to follow through on that vow?

Well, you know, I started with the very simplest things I could. There was no grand big plans, no good theories. I have background in science, so I know neuroscience. So I thought about the way the brain works, neuroplasticity, and just sort of went with that and sort of like just started. Look, I was so weak at that time. I couldn't even walk outside my apartment. So I was kind of stuck there. So I just started working my internal self, which was, if you're looking back, was such a gift. Rather than going externally and trying to find love for myself, I had to find an inside. And that's what I did. I just started working my inside and from the very simple as actually just started telling myself and making myself feel it on purpose to all these different things I tried with different meditations that I came up with. Looking in the mirror. I mean, literally, I was like a mental patient locked up in my apartment, just with this desperate thing of like I was going to love myself and die trying and eventually end up loving myself. And so like the book actually is, encapsulates all that in a very concise manner that I found it was very hard to explain in person. Part of the reason why I wrote the book was just to. So I don't have to explain it all the time. You know what I mean?

Right.

But it really is. But fundamentally, fundamentally, it all comes from personal commitment. I think if I didn't believe in the power of personal commitment, it wouldn't have happened. If I hadn't made that vow and believed that in the power of making a vow to yourself, I wouldn't have done it or I would have like given up after a day or two.

Yes.

You know, because the thing about it's not just making the commitment, it's keeping it. And you know, we fall Through. It wasn't like I was doing it every moment, you know, but like I would fall and I would get up and I would try again. I would try again. That's what a commitment is. Commitment isn't like 100% all, 100% of the time. It's a matter of, you know, we're human, right?

Right.

We fall, we fall short, then we get up and we continue going. That's what commitment is.

We're going to pause right here for one moment, take a quick break and return to our interview with Kamal Ravikant. If you don't think much of yourself, how do you imagine other people will think of you? You guessed it. If we want others to take us seriously, like us and be attracted to us, we must first master our self esteem. That's exactly what you'll learn how to do in Dr. Z's brand new version of the confidence code. Go to YourConfidenceCode.com now to learn more and get your free copy of his ebook Radical Self Acceptance. Three Ways to Truly Love Yourself in two weeks. Yes, and there's something about it, it orients you and reminds you where you're headed. Because what I find is I'll be working with clients and they're struggling with a lot of self criticism and they'll kind of want the technique, right? Like what do I do to make it stop? And as you experimented with, there are dozens or thousands of different ways to do it. And one of the ones that you teach in your book ends up being a very simple mantra, right, of saying I love myself. And yet someone could hear that and be like, eh, whatever, that's not gonna do anything for me. And it could do nothing for you. Because if the, that's just a, that statement means nothing if you haven't decided, like, hey, I don't want to treat myself like that anymore, I want to love myself. Because then that statement brings you back to your personal commitment, to your value.

Yeah, I'm going to expand the book because I realized I didn't put a lot about personal commitment and it so belongs in there that I need to expand the book and put that in. Because really when you have that personal commitment, the rest becomes easy because you're going to do it. You're going to try, you're going to try. You know, you become like Edison, you just try. That's what I was, I was like Edison trying to come up with a light bulb. You know, I was just throwing, you know, I didn't care. I just had to get to that one time where it worked.

Yes. So let's see here. When someone hears that. So I guess to sum up so far, the core of this is like, you must make a deep personal commitment to loving yourself or to whatever, whatever.

Matters to you at that moment. Love yourself came out for me. And honestly, because I was so desperate, I think it was, I went for the most basic, fundamental thing that I internally felt could change everything.

Yeah.

And loving yourself really does. I mean, what else can, you know, not liking yourself, not thinking you're enough. You know, I was watching this interview with Dave Asprey yesterday. I started laughing. He said people should stop saying I'm enough. You know, you're amazing. Start thinking I'm more than enough.

Yeah. Go beyond.

Oh, my God, he's right. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah.

Enough being the baseline, right? Like.

Yeah.

Yes. So with this personal commitment, I feel like the objections or kind of challenge people have with this and clients that I've talked to is even to myself, well, I'm going to love myself when I'm no longer feeling anxious or when I no longer do something awkward or whatever, when I'm that amazing person that I want to be, then I'll love myself. And in the meantime, I don't believe it. I don't buy it. I don't deserve it. There's all this kind of closing down on ourselves until we're this person. What is your experience with that? How do we open that up and really invite in unconditional self love?

You know, honestly, I understand where they're coming from because I used to feel that way. But here's the thing. It's like, it's not even fake it till you make it. We're not going to just one of us. Look, our whole lives, if we're stuck in our heads, we're like these monkey minds running around. We're not just going to wake up all of a sudden unless we have a stroke and everything's changed in our head. And you don't want to stroke. It's a different kind of change. Right. It's like you got to work on it because we have these patterns in our head, these consistent patterns that are negative self talk. The only way we can change it is to work on consistent positive self talk. And you do it consistently. You know, that's also neuroscience. You know, neurons that fire together, wire together. Well, your neurons have been firing together for however long you've been around since you were like 3 years old and, you know, started like discovering a sense of self that you didn't like or you were put down or whatever. You know, we carry stuff from childhood that so deep ingrained that just all this talk that we don't even realize we're doing for ourselves. Right. And so the only way around it is to start creating more powerful pathways in the brain, which is like creating that positive self talk and making yourself feel it. And, you know, so it's not a matter of, okay, once I have, once I'm in shape, I love myself. Once I'm this I love. You know, the irony is once you start loving yourself, you start doing things for yourself that are better for you, or if you're not, you at least recognize it and then you're doing it by choice. When you love yourself, you actually get to those places. That's the irony. Far easier than if you get to that place. If you get to that place, you won't automatically love yourself. Trust me, you will just start looking for something external else that you'll think, oh, when I get that I love myself, not when I get this job, okay, Then it'll be when I get that car, when I get enough, whatever the external level results in that because there's always a higher rung of the ladder. Always someone doing better than you.

Mm, yeah. So that love is not gonna be a byproduct of achieving that external thing. It's just gonna happen to us.

No, in fact, you know, I can say that from, with 100% insurance. Look, I'm a career in Silicon Valley. I'm surrounded by very successful, incredibly smart people. And so I've seen people go from nothing to massive, massive success where they have nothing, to hundreds of millions of dollars the next day, right. After a year and a half of building their company. And doesn't mean they woke up and they were just loving themselves or their lives, you know, afterwards at the lottery ridden thing. Eventually, after a few months, the euphoria fades and you're back to you. Yeah, you still got you, you know, and so you always, I think fundamentally we always have to work on ourselves. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's actually a really good thing because then we're always improving. You know, for me, loving myself is not just like, I hate it and then it's always there, like this levels, you know, it's like in anything in life, it's growth, there's deeper levels that you learn and it's a beautiful thing because life is growth. If it's not, then if you're not Living. If you're not growing, you're dying.

Yeah. So let's take this into a few specific scenarios and we could see how you might guide us to more self love, to loving ourselves more. So one example might be, let's say I'm feeling anxious in a scenario and it could be before, you know, someone listening. Might be before starting a conversation or before giving a presentation. I actually have, I do three live events each year and what I find is about two weeks before the event I start to feel more and more anxiety.

Yeah, of course, of course.

And so there it is. Whatever the source, whatever the perceived external reasons, there's fear or anxiety or tension that starts to mount. What might you, if you were in that situation, what might you do to meet that and provide ourselves with or yourself with love? We're going to pause for one more moment here, take a quick break and then return in just a moment.

According to Career Partners International, 40% of 400 U.S. and Canadian business leaders interviewed chose coaching as their preferred method for leadership development. Research is accumulating that shows a return on investment of five to eight times the cost of coaching or 500 to 800%. The fact of the matter is coaching works whether it's to improve your performance at work, increase your income or have better relationships. When you invest in yourself through coaching, your life transforms. Go to socialconfidencecenter.com coaching to find out more about how to work directly with Dr. Aziz in private. One on one coaching.

Well, look, one thing to understand is fear is wired for fear. Fear is normal. I fear like look, I do public speaking and I'm terrified every time I go on stage. Like petrified is the word actually. But I seem to do very, very well. People seem to like my talks. So the key is, you know, one is oh, recognizing. Like actually rebirth, the new book is a lot about that. It's fundamentally about facing your fears. And one thing is it's a story told to basically where the reader learns about fear and facing our fears. But in a very practical way. But realizing this is a fear. Fear is not going to go away. We don't just wake up and feel loving soul. Fears are gone. You recognize them. The first step is recognizing it. There's a story I tell Rebirth about that. And the first step is recognizing when you recognize, oh, this is fear. That's all. It's fear. Hello fear. You know, like, hello fear, my old friend. Whatever. Like here you are. And then when you recognize, you realize fear is not you. It's just fear. You is Just still this person that's going to go on stage and still do this. And so what I normally do is I just, like, I get centered once I recognize the fear and it comes up, man, and I get centered and, you know, by doing my Love myself practice very simply, and. And then I go on stage and I do what I do. And, you know, like, I think one of the things, Unfortunate things that I think we see in society is we think that people who are doing stuff are not afraid. You kidding me? Everyone's afraid. Everyone's like a duck paddling, you know, looking calm on the surface and just paddling drastically under the surface. That's humans, man. It's like no one's living the Instagram life. You know, they're in there sitting on the toilet, crying and eating a pint of Haagen Dazs. That's their reality, you know, but that's not the photo they post. You know, I so, so, like, my God, man. It's like we can't look at other people's Instagrams and think they're living their life. And look at me, you know? It's like, you have no idea. The more that they're always posting about their awesome lives is the more shit.

You know, I love the extreme imagery of literally on the toilet crying with. While eating. It's not just on the couch. It's just extreme, extreme suffering.

I think it's important to realize that, look, we all get afraid in different. You know, everyone gets afraid. It's just in different ways in different situations, Right? And first, I recognize that that's human, that's normal. You know, I get that sometimes. Look, we were talking about this before. I grew up as a very shy kid, and I was very, very shy. How have I overcome that? By throwing myself into situations, by committing myself to doing things that make me face these things. And over time, then it just kind of like. Because once you do that, you know, you can handle all these. None of this is gonna kill you. And I still get it sometimes, and I'm okay with it. It's okay. I'm human.

Yeah.

I'm okay with it. And if that's what I feel in the moment, I feel it. But the question is, am I still gonna go through or not? What you do over time is you go through with it. You go through it, and then eventually you develop the confidence and you don't feel that fear anymore. Like, the fear I feel of public speaking now is very different than what I felt when I was first doing it. And that's like anything, man. Right. And that's where confidence comes. You do it again and again and again until it's, it's now the fear is how am I going to give a better talk? How am I going to go still be present and not repeat what I've spoken about before, which is growth.

Yeah, that was actually my follow up question is to see how you notice it being different when you first were doing it versus now. Because you said that before you go on stage. Now there's still this spike of fear.

Of course.

So how is it different now than it was earlier?

It's different in the sense that now I know I can do it. Before I didn't even know I can do it. The first two times I wasn't even sure. Like I wasn't very. Now I know I can do it. Now I know that no matter what I can do it. Then the fear is how will I be good? Or how will I give to this particular audience what I feel I should, you know, what is the most I can give to them? That's different than any other audience I've spoken to. So it's a different kind of fear. And that's okay. That's actually, you know, I recognize it and then I go and go and do my thing. Right. Whatever that is.

Yeah. And that comes from that repetition. I love that idea of. Because I think there's another layer of suffering we can have where if we feel afraid about something and I think fear and maybe other emotions too, we can respond to them. We've conditioned ourselves or been conditioned over time to meet that fear with self hate or shame. Oh man, there's something deeply wrong with me. I must be a cowardly. Blah, blah, blah. Even though we still might go do the thing which is the opposite of cowardice. Right. It's like we're facing our fear even though we have it. That's. That's courage. But so what I love what you're describing and you can hear it in your tone is like, oh, there it is. Okay, I love myself now let's go do it.

There you are again. We meet again. You know, we meet again, that's all. And you know what? Sometimes we give into it and that's okay. You're human, you know, it's okay to recognize it. Like, look, this time I don't feel like it. I just don't want to deal with it. And that's okay. Yeah. You know, there's no grand moment in life or when you do it and boom, you Won life and the cherubs come and the angels are singing. You know, it's life is moment by moment, right? And sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And, you know, those are very relative words. That's why I think a personal commitment really helps when you say, okay, I'm going to commit, that I'm going to go do this, and, you know, we're not going to hit 100%, even sometimes 50%, whatever, but at least you do it. You know, you do it more than you were doing it before.

That brings us to the end of the episode for today, not the interview in the next half. I didn't want to break it up because there's so much good stuff. So in the next half of the interview, we're going to be covering some interactions, incredibly important topics on how to bring this into your life, what gets in the way, what stops you from loving yourself and how to do it even more. But today we got to end with what we always end with, which is your action step.

Time for action.

So for your action step today, we talked a lot about in this first half of the interview about his personal commitment to deciding to be on your own side, deciding to love yourself, and how everything emerges from that, figuring it out, can we do it? How do I do it? That all comes later. But there's that core commitment, that core decision. You heard it in Kamal's story. It's definitely true. In my experience, we have to decide. We have to say, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna figure this out. I have to do this. So I encourage you for your action step, to make that decision, to be on your own side and then try it out this week between this interview and when you hear the next one, the second half of the interview next week. And just notice how it goes. Is it easy? Is it hard? Is it something that just happens naturally for you, or do you really have to work at it and just notice because you're going to learn more? And that decision to take it, put it into action and make it a personal commitment is what's going to set the stage for you truly mastering this area and ultimately loving yourself no matter what. So thanks for joining me today, and I look forward to speaking with you more. Stay tuned for next week's interview because you're not going to want to miss it till then. You're awesome.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to social confidencecenter.com.

Sa.