Two Roads To Self Love

Hi, my name is Donny Rouse and you are listening to the podcast One Life, Two Roads to Self Love. About five years ago, a friend of mine was visiting from Switzerland. She was in my home city of Stamford, Connecticut, which was kind of bizarre in and of itself being that there was an event being held in Stanford. And while she was in Stanford, she called me up, she goes, hey, I'm in town. Why don't you come down to the hotel and meet me for a drink? I get down to this hotel and you know, she signaled. She calls me, tells me to come to the back room. In this back room I see just a stage of women dancing. I'm not sure what this has to do with the story, but I'm going to tell you the entire thing. And she calls me on stage, I'm like, what the heck am I doing here? All of a sudden I'm on stage, I'm dancing to Bohemian rhapsody with like 10 women, 10 or more women around me. And it was kind of bizarre in a way because I didn't at the time, I didn't know what I was getting myself into. Years later I'd realized that that group that I met there would actually become one of my social circles. But not the point. After the event ended, we went to the hotel bar and I was just listening. I was just observing the people speaking and one of her friends speaking to her. And she was talking about this exercise of self love. She was explaining how she would look in the mirror for 10 minutes at a time and each time pick out five new things that she loved about herself. And she would not leave the mirror until she found those five things. And as a result of looking for those things, she found that she was increasing in her self love and her self worth. After hearing this, I was like, you know what? That sounds like a great practice. I would think I would like to try it. It sounds like it would be very beneficial to my life because I was having issues of self worth and self love. So I went home and I started it. I had a little journal and I looked in the mirror for 10 minutes and at first looking at the looking at myself, I couldn't pick out anything that I loved about myself, which was kind of hard. It was like looking in the mirror and feeling anxious because I couldn't name anything. Then as I started looking at that, I started asking a different question. I said, what can I appreciate about myself? What could I love about myself? Then as a result of asking that question, I started to look at all the things that were Unique to my face. So this is. Let me explain. So you're looking in the mirror completely naked. You're looking at your entire body, because it's an acceptance of your whole self, not just looking in the mirror and looking at your face. So I was looking at it, and I started writing and I started looking for things that were unique to me. And as a result of doing that, I was realizing that those were the things that made me beautiful. Those were the things that I loved about myself. And as I continued this practice for I don't even know how long it was, maybe, let's say, 10 days, I noticed that there was a shift happening. I noticed that when I stepped outside. Now I was no longer critical of other people. Right? The people who are critical of other people are usually more critical of themselves. So now I was outside and I was looking for things to love about other people, things that made them unique. Where I would say, typically, when we see that we're not like other people, we tend to put ourselves down. But now this new vision of the world, I was actually seeing people being even more special for who they are. Fast forward. I ended up stopping doing that practice. Like, so many things that we know are good for us, we stop, and then we're like, oh, my God, I don't feel good anymore. And we were like, what happened? And we realized that we stopped the practice. We stopped that pattern, that routine, that thing that was actually making us feel good because we think we do get a little bit of a change, and we think we've gotten it, and then we haven't conditioned that pattern long enough. And the pattern slips away. Then fast forward, years later, I was working with my father. We were in office building, doing some air conditioning work, and he asked me to help him with something. And as I'm helping him, I look out into the window, and as I'm looking into the window, I heard myself say to myself, in my head, I heard the words, you're ugly. As I heard that, I thought to myself, I was like, well, says who? It was probably one of the first times I'd ever questioned that voice telling me that I was ugly. And when I asked the question, like, well, it says who? I looked back in my mind, I was like, well, what was. Who said that? And I went back to my brother, my older brother Philip, when he was younger, and he would tell me, like, oh, you know, you're ugly. And he would call me names. And it wasn't because he really felt that it was. He was angry. And the quickest way to give, you know, to give a jab to your younger brother to make him feel your, your, your anger or how you're feeling is that you throw a personal jab. And who knows that he's probably feeling that himself inside for him to say that about me. Right? Because we really are reflections of one another. What we see in someone else, we also have in ourselves. Fast forward. So fast forward to about maybe like we'll go back like a month ago from today. A month ago from today. I've been practicing more of just being conscious about what is going on in my mind and checking in multiple times a day, saying, what am I feeling right now? Putting my hands on my heart as I'm doing it right now. Deep breath in. What am I feeling? And I would feel that internal state in my body. And then if it wasn't one that was, that was productive. It wasn't one that was a positive state. I would switch. One of the things I saw myself doing was again, looking at people and criticizing different aspects, because that's what I was doing to myself. But the habit, so observing all this now, I made literally a mental check where I was, you know, what I would see myself observing, and then I would switch to appreciating. It was a conscious shift, observing and maybe criticizing to appreciating. And I was doing that for weeks. And what I noticed as a result of that, of just conditioning myself to, all right, see this go here, See this go here, see this go here, was that I was actually starting to appreciate other people by conditioning that and saying, you know what? I do not judge. I appreciate for people for who they are, what they are. And by taking that judgmental factor out of it, I noticed a different shift, a different road. I noticed that I was a lot kinder to them. But when I looked in the mirror when I got home, I was a lot kinder to myself. Aha. Two roads to the same point. So two roads to self love. The first road was I was looking for the beauty within, inside myself. And once I found that and accepted myself, I was able to see in others. And then the other road was I looked for beauty and I accepted others as they were. And as a result of that acceptance, I accepted myself. So really, the lesson here is be kind to yourself, be kind to others. But choose one of those roads. Maybe you want to incorporate it tomorrow morning or tonight before you go to sleep, look in the mirror and pick out those 10 things. Whatever practice you choose to put in place to choose to practice, pick one try it out for 10 days. I promise you, I promise you, you will have a shift in how you feel towards yourself and how you feel about other people. The easier one, if you haven't done a lot of the, like that, that mental, like that inner work, then the second heart, the second part might be a little bit more difficult, like looking and accepting others. Because you really have to be aware of the mental chatter going on in your mind. You have to know, you have to be able to separate the two, right? This is the chatter that's going on in my head. This is who I am, this is the truth and this is how I'm gonna shift. But unless you have that awareness, unless you have that practice, that could be a difficult thing to do. But the self love looking at yourself for 10 minutes at a time and choosing five things that you can do now, even if it takes more than 10 minutes, you sit in front of the mirror and you do not leave until you have those five things and what you're going to find yourself doing, you might say, oh, cr. You know what? I don't feel like being in front of this mirror anymore. I'm just going to pick five things. You'll pick five things that are unique to you and then tomorrow it'll come easier and you'll pick another five things and you'll start to look for all these little things that make you unique. And it'll shift your consciousness, it'll shift how you feel about yourself. It'll shift your self worth to something even better. Guys, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Self love and self worth are such important issues because they impact everything. Everything we do, everything we strive for, our relationships, it's in our entire life. So if you know anyone who might benefit from hearing this episode, I invite you to share it. Take a screenshot of it. If you're listening on your cell phones, take a screenshot, share it to your social media because this is actually a message that everybody needs to hear. Every, we all think that everyone else has it figured out, but they don't. They really don't. I one last little rant. I was looking at this YouTube video. There's this beautiful model, beautiful model. And you know, you would look at someone who is on magazine covers and doing Runway, there's like, wow, they are beautiful. They must be so confident. And she was, she was the most critical person of herself because her, her self esteem was literally just thrashed. Thrashed. It just goes to show you that every single person deals with the same issue. There's no difference between one person and other. Some people hide it better than others, and some people truly are that way because they've done the work. So again, I invite you to invite your friends if you found value in this podcast. Leave a Comment Leave a review Share with your friends who you think might benefit from these words and just get the podcast out there. You know, share it with everyone. I think we need to get word out because I. I hope you really everything I'm putting here, it's all from personal experience, and it's all to help you grow as a person so that maybe you could see a little part of yourself. In my experience, that is it. Guys, have a beautiful, beautiful rest of your week. God bless, and I will see you soon.