Unlocking Your Inner Power: A Deep Dive into Self-Love, Core Circles, and Spiritual Wisdom

But many times when we're talking negative about ourself, we're like, you're stupid. You don't know what you're doing. You did. We don't actually say, george, you're stupid, George, you don't know what you're doing. Like, we don't even call ourselves ourselves. Most times when we're talking negatively. If we did. If we stopped and just inserted our name, it would make such an impact that you would immediately be like, that's unacceptable. I wouldn't let anybody else talk to me that way. Why am I talking to myself that way? But we don't. We, like, take the most important word, our name, out of it. And it's important when you start to rebuild that you actually do use your name. When I'm talking to myself, I'm like, george, you got this, George, you can do this, George. Now you know better than that. And I'll literally have a conversation with myself using my name because. Because I really do feel like there's us and there's us.

Welcome back to Beyond. You'd default. My name is Liz Morehead, and as always, I'm joined by the one and only George B. Thomas. How are you this morning?

I'm doing really good, Liz, but I want to start out by a little disclaimer. I've never disclaimered one of these episodes so far. A lot of what we're going to talk about, I just want all the listeners to know that I am preaching to myself that I am still working on all the things that we're going to talk about, the questions that you're going to go, the things that we're going to unpack from my brain. I fully understand that some of the words that come out of my mouth, I might come back and listen to this and go, I should probably start doing. I should probably start doing that.

It's fair. Well, let's be perfectly honest. Every time I'm asking you a question, quote, on behalf of our audience, I go. And on behalf of our audience, I mean, on behalf of me, yeah, I will be seriously taking notes. Thank you very much. But I think those are the best types of conversations. Right? You know, how many times do we often find ourselves having the exact conversations with others that we should be having with ourselves, Whether that's giving advice. For example, I was telling somebody earlier this weekend, you know, you should spend a little bit more time connecting with yourself. How are you setting boundaries around yourself? And then this little voice inside of me went, and, Liz, when was the last Time you meditated. And I went, listen, you saucy be. This is not about me right now.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned boundaries, though, because. And I'm sure we'll get into it, but if you don't know yourself, if you haven't cultivated a relationship with yourself, it's going to be very hard to understand what your boundaries are. And if you don't understand your boundaries, then you really don't understand the game that you're playing. And then it's a hot mess.

Oh, my gosh. That is exactly what we're getting into today. In case you missed the title of today's episode, we are talking, in fact, about cultivating relationship with yourself, why it's so important and what that looks like in practice. But to your point, George, I love what you said right there about boundaries because we often talk about defining a clear sense of self, and I like to think of that literally. What is the boundary that defines you in this space? But before we start going down that path, before we start talking about boundaries and defining ourselves and what we need for ourselves, I want to ask you, why does this topic matter? Why are we talking about cultivating a relationship with ourselves?

Yeah, I'll keep it simple. It's a question. But it's actually, like, one thing that I want you, Liz, and you, the listeners, to actually think about. Just one thing, make it very easy. And the question is, who is the human on this planet you spend the most time with? Oh. See, the human on this planet you spend the most time with is yourself. And here's the thing. When you're in a room by yourself, you can feel bored. You can feel lonely, you can feel frustrated. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, you can feel all of the negative words that you can throw at this podcast. Or you can feel joy and happiness. You can feel optimism and excitement. You can feel like you're in good company, yet be in a room by yourself. So the fact that we don't take the time to understand that this relationship does matter. It's the most important relationship that you can cultivate. Like, everything that comes to the outside world starts inside you and your perception of who you are. It's like the factory, right? And when later we might talk about, like, you as a company, like, it's funny, this is not my professional podcast, but, you know, on my professional podcast, Hub Heroes, we talk about marketing, sales, service, like, the different departments of your organization. And what I want people to realize is we have, like, different departments inside of our organism. You know, gut, heart, mind, that we have to make sure are aligned, that we need to make sure understand these things. And if we're not cultivating a relationship with ourself, we can't do that. And if you're wanting, right, you're listening to this podcast, I would assume that you want to live a life beyond your default. If you're wanting to live a life beyond your default, then you most likely will be focused on adding value to the world. And added value is way easier. I might even just say possible if you come with a filled cup. Now, we're going to use that analogy of like an empty cup and a filled cup for this podcast, but let's talk about that cup for a second. If a cup is always empty, if your cup is always empty and you need others to fill it, then this makes you an energy vampire. And people can feel that. Now, a simple principle of life is that people remember how you make them feel. And there's an actual quote that might be ringing in your mind right now. They may forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. The funny thing about that is the quote usually is the Maya Angelou said it actually can be found. By the way, in 2003, Maya Angelou said that quote can be found in a volume from 1971 called Richard Evans quote Book and was first said by Carl Buhner. Anyway, that's a little nerdy. Like you got to understand the world around you and the things that are thrown at you. And unless you can be rooted and grounded and have your own borders, your own barriers, your own things. And if you've taken time to build these, listen, if you want to show up and add value and make people feel a certain kind of way, you have to do a couple things. And so why does it matter? And what should you be doing? I need, and I'm going to phrase these as questions, but they could be statements like, right now you're sitting listening to this and let's just say for this podcast, moving forward, when I ask a question, it's like I want you to write it in your notebook and give it a 1 through 10. Right now do you feel like you can depend on yourself 1 through 10? Right now, do you show up for yourself 1 through 10 and right now do you have things in place that you protect yourself? You see, when you depend on yourself, you show up for yourself and you protect yourself. When you do these things, you start to build self trust. We always talk about self worth and self. All these selves right? But you start to build self trust when you start to trust yourself. That's actually how you kill the enemy in your head. That's how you kill the inner critic. Because you trust yourself, you've culted a relationship with the person that you spend the most time with. You see? And if you focus on a healthy internal relationship, the inner critic speaks less. You grow internal love for yourself. And because of this external love, that's what energy, that's what flows to the rest of your relationships. So because of that, all the external relationships that we talked about last episode become better because your cup's full, you trust yourself, you're showing up for yourself. So I have to ask the listeners, as you listen this podcast, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you trust yourself to have your best interest at heart versus always thinking somebody else is coming to save the damn day?

You know, maybe it will be helpful for the listeners to hear my answer to that question. Because the answer to that question six months ago, seven months ago, was I looked in the mirror unexpectedly one day and realized the answer was no, I did not.

Been there.

And it's a scary moment. You know, we talked about it a little bit on the last episode and I alluded to it. You know, I recently went through a divorce. But there's another, more, I wouldn't say more insidious side, but the one bit of dimension I would add here is that sometimes a lack of trust in yourself can also manifest itself in the way of you are making choices in your life not based on any sort of internal compass. I'm not saying you're immoral, but you may just end up in scenarios where it's like, why do I want this job? Why do I want this house? That's almost like that. This is not my beautiful house. This is, you know, you have that moment. And I remember looking in the mirror one day going, I don't understand why I'm picking any of the things that I'm picking. Because I didn't trust myself to build a life that would make me happy. And I think that is something that can sometimes happen with folks when they go down this path.

And you're knocking on a very interesting door. You use the word happiness and if you don't know yourself, if you aren't building a relationship with yourself, how do you even know what happiness equals for you? I'll never forget I was on, I go to these weekly meetings for high performing men. We meet, we talk. And I'll never forget that we asked One of the gentlemen, well, what makes you happy? And his response was, I don't know. And, man, like, I could feel just complete sadness in myself at that moment. Because if you don't have the answer to that question, there are so many other questions that have been left unanswered about yourself and so many things that you have probably buried or packed away and haven't worked on. And you should be able to say, this makes me happy, or these things make me happy. The answer to that in your life. Which, by the way, at the end of this, Liz, I know you're going to ask me, like, what are some questions you should be asking? One of the questions is, do I know what makes me happy? That's one of the questions that is going to be at the end of this podcast.

What I love about what you just said there is that the importance of being able to define that. I think, though, it's so easy in today's society to lapse into the default state. And I'm very interested because, you know, I prepared you for this because I said, george, you know, we're going deep with a relationship with ourselves. You need to start thinking about where this journey began for you. But one of the things I want the listeners to understand as they're going through this is that you and I have a very interesting relationship with the word should. George, we live in a society that loves to shove a bunch of shoulds down our throat. Oh, you should be doing this. You're not doing this. Oh, no. So when you hear us say things like, you should be able to define your own happiness, we're not saying that from a place of the fact that you can't right now makes you a bad person. It means you're already behind. We are just illuminating an area of you should be able to define your own happiness because you are allowed to define your own happiness. And we live in a time where a lot of people have lots of opinions about everything in your life from.

The moment you're born, right?

What preschool you go to, what elementary school you go to, what middle school you go to, who your friends are in high school, where you're considering applying to what major you get, who you're dating, what you're wearing, who you marry, what that wedding reception looks like, how you raise. Everybody has an opinion about how you live your life. So when we say you should be able to define your own happiness, we do so having personally understood how hard it is today to make that choice, to live beyond your default.

Yeah.

And George, take Us to that moment in your life, that catalyst moment in your life that made you. Because you alluded to this earlier, right? Like, you're sitting here talking about understanding how to define your own happiness, and you're there, and you've made it there. But I know this journey has a beginning. Where did that start for you?

I want to pull over at the rest area for a second, though, because you mentioned the word should, and I literally emcee this event on a monthly basis. And one of the things, the narratives that I talk about is if you realize you're shoulding all over yourself, make sure you transition that into what worked for me. Right? Because we're helping other people in this event. And, like, you should do this. You should do that. You're shooting all over the audience. Like, just chill out and bring it in. Like, talk about you, you and your story. All right, let's pull back out of the rest area and get on the highway here. So listen, this is hard for me to say, but easy for me to say at the same time. I didn't understand the assignment. I didn't understand the question. I literally had to, like, lay in bed last night and go, I'm not sure when this actually took place. What made me transition in this area. And I. I actually woke up and I was like, oh, wow. I had. I had forgotten about that. But it was there. It was in my brain because I had assigned my brain. I had assigned the universe. I had asked God, I need there to be a moment. Where was that moment? And I buried it. But I'll never forget. This is like, shortly after I met Kelly, my wife, and we had gone to some family events, you know, reunions and dinner at her aunt's house. And she has an aunt, her Aunt Nancy. And I love her Aunt Nancy to death. She is an amazing human, compassionate, loving, just this tiny woman who exudes this quiet power. And I'll never forget, my wife came to me one time, and she said, probably in different words, but my brain heard, aunt Nancy says that you're filled with anger. And my response was, no, I'm not. That was my response, all right, I'm not angry. How dare she say that I'm angry. And then I had. I was like, wait, whoa, whoa. Why did that just come out that way? And so it literally was, listen to the words that I just said about this human right about Nancy. And I'm like, if she is saying this thing, I probably can't escape it. Like, this is probably a truth. And what's interesting Is I hadn't realized who I was willing to live with. I hadn't realized the amount of garbage that I hadn't unpacked from being a kid, from, you know, divorced family, high school, dropout, divorce, lost friendships. There was just a lot of stuff, like, I was a hoarder of all the bad things of my life and emotions. I was my own nightmare roommate. And here's the thing, like, we're more than willing most times to live with our negative self when if it was another human being, we would have divorced them years ago.

Well, isn't that the thing, though? Isn't that the thing that often keeps us, quite frankly, from wanting to cultivate that relationship with ourselves? That idea of if the world only knew who I really was?

But see, that's a trap.

It reinforces the story that even though it's a sucky story about ourselves, it's a comfortable one.

But, see, here's the thing. You've got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. First of all, comfort is not the destination that you want to go to. It's in these painful processes that you actually grow to be the human that is living beyond your default. For me, though, I realized at that point I had to build a new relationship with myself because I no longer was willing to live with that negative human. I needed to be able to be in a room and love myself, because the next time I went over to Nancy's or to her union, I wanted her to see a difference. Like, it was important to me that she would see that I was different. And what's funny is, if I think about my math teacher and his words, and I'm going to prove him wrong, and Nancy and her words, I'm going to prove her wrong, I can start to put these blocks of, I have built myself into a better human because I refuse to accept anybody's vocal verbiage of who I am. Except I wasn't willing at that point to accept my own vocal verbiage of who I wanted to become?

I think we all just need to take a moment of silence for that. I'm gonna go buy a microphone, ship it to you real quick, and just.

Let you drop it. Let me drop it? Yeah, let me drop it there. All right.

But I can't let you go off the hook entirely. In fact, I want to dig in.

A little bit here. I want to go a little bit.

Deeper into some details. You know, we've been talking a lot in metaphors today. We've been talking a lot about this idea of cups. And, you know, filling our own cup and talking about cultivating a relationship with ourself and how important it is and finding happiness. And my type A self is going, okay, so what does that look like specifically? What are the activities you do either on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that quote unquote, cultivate that relationship? What do we do?

Yeah, we'll get to the tactics in a minute. I think we have to actually start with, like, why did this become important? Past me just trying to prove people wrong.

So you're skipping ahead in the narrative, but we can go there first. Yes. So when we say you're spending time on this, anything that you want to spend time on means it's a priority.

Yeah.

So at some point you made the realization.

Yeah.

That this isn't something you just figure out once.

Yeah.

This is like a garden you need to tend.

Well, first of all, you got to turn it into a garden. And let's just skip all the metaphors because when I think about, why has this become a relationship? Building a relationship with myself that I want to spend lots of time on when I think about that, no metaphors, no jargon, no getting cutesy. I didn't like myself. I did not like myself. I did not like the choices that I was making. I kept putting myself in piss poor places in life. And I knew there had to be a better way. I had to convince myself and finally did convince myself that I was smarter than this reactive, angry, frustrated life that I was living. And so when you start to do this, now we can start to get into, well, what are the tactics look like? What actions are you taking? Yeah, you have to draw a line in the sand where you're like, enough is enough. You mentioned earlier, Liz, this voice that's like comfortable. You got to get the point where you're like, no, call it what is maybe is what I'm looking for. Like, I am sucking at life right now. Why is it because I am treating myself like ish?

Oh, yeah, you and I had that conversation about myself. What was it a few months ago when you asked how I was doing and I said, I gotta be honest, George, kind of tired of my own bs. Like, I'm like, I don't have a better answer for you right now. That's just kind of where I'm at. And I think you bring up a really valuable point there. You know, it would be nice if a lot of us got to that place before those big moments. But I think it's really important is that you can look at it One of two ways. And I'm leaving all metaphors to the side when I say this. You can look at it as, I'm tired of my own BS or the way I started reframing it in my mind because I've noticed so much of the reason why I never took the time to define my own happiness and to do all of these different things and to really cultivate a relationship with myself was because I didn't think it was worth it. A lot of it stemmed around the language I used to talk about myself every single day. And so one day I decided, what if instead of saying the reason I made all these changes was because I was tired of my own bs, what if instead I started saying, because I'm gonna bet on myself, because I'm worth betting on? And I think that's something that's really important for people to remember.

What's interesting about that, Liz, is. And this is gonna sound small, and we'll probably dig deeper into it as we go through this, but many times when we're talking negative about ourself, we're like, you're stupid. You don't know what you're doing. You did. We don't actually say, george, you're stupid. George, you don't know what you're doing. Like, we don't even call ourselves ourselves most times when we're talking negatively. If we did. If we stopped and just inserted our name, it would make such an impact that you would immediately be like, that's unacceptable. I wouldn't let anybody else talk to me that way. Why am I talking to myself that way? But we don't. We, like, take the most important word, our name, out of it. And it's important when you start to rebuild that you actually do use your name.

Can you give me an example?

Yeah. So one of the things that I do is I've gotten to the point, and again, this goes back to filling your cup. And we might dive a little bit deeper into this. If you're always waiting for somebody else to fill your cup, think about when I said that a while ago. Yet you can become your own guide. You can become your own mentor. You can be the person who is filling your own cup. And so when I'm talking to myself, I'm like, george, you got this, George. You can do this, George. Now, you know better than that. And I'll literally have a conversation with myself using my name. Because I really do feel like there's us and there's us, and that's gonna sound weird to some People. But, like, we'll dive into this later with, like, looking in the mirror. And I've got questions around this for people, like, when you wake up in the morning. But I feel like there's two people inside of our brain many times. But I want to get back on track because we've used the word cultivate. And you said garden a little bit ago. And I said, if there's even a garden, or at least in my brain, I said, well, there might not even be a garden there. I think it verbally came out. But, hey, rewind, and you can see if I said that.

But you did.

So I want you to think about this, right? You got a house, you got a yard. You decide, hey, I need to build a garden. The first thing that you have to do to build a garden is you have to rip up up the soil. You have to destroy something. You have to destroy something to make something new.

That is a Picasso quote. Did you know that every act of creation begins as an act of destruction?

Yeah. And so now, here's the thing. Just like yourself, you have to actively work on yourself now. You've destroyed the ground as it was. Now you have to actively plant the seed. You have to actively water it. You have to make sure that you're giving it the best conditions to grow so that you can bear fruit and vegetables and be able to eat the things from your garden. My question to the listeners is, are you giving your garden, you the best light, the best water, the best thing to then produce fruit into the world so that you can live a life, that you are nourished and full and able to move forward and. But here's the thing. I'm painting it as a pretty picture of, like, it's painful. It's painful at first, but it's so good, and it feels so much better in the long run when you've got the garden for the second year, the third year, the plants are more mature, they're producing bigger fruit. You didn't have to necessarily destroy an entire area. You just had to maybe pick a few weeds out that were in your life.

People talk about, like, being in a state of receivership, wanting to let in the things that they feel that they are meant for, the things that they want in their lives. And one question I asked someone yesterday was, is there even any room in your life for the things that you want? But that's an episode for another day.

Yeah, that's a whole episode.

I've got my pen ready. Do we. Are we ready to talk about tactics?

Yeah. Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

So let's talk tactics. What is true cultivation of a relationship with yourself look like? I'd love to peek behind the curtain of what that looks like with you.

Yeah. So the first thing that I started doing is I started reading books. Now, when I say reading books, I mean listening to books, because I'm more of an audible guy than an actual, like, sit down and read it.

That counts. I know. That is a hot debate in the community of whether audiobooks is actually reading. Yes, it is. Is here. It is.

Yeah. So there are four books that helped me cultivate a better relationship with me and help me to the point where I could even have these beyond your default journey conversations. One book is the Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and it is phenomenal. There's a movie, too, I think I watched, like, years ago. But the book, the book, the book, the book for all of these. The book. By the way, there's a book called Soar, and it's by T.D. jakes. He's a pastor. The book is amazing. There's also Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty, which you kind of can't turn anywhere on the Internet and not see Jay Shetty at this point. But the book. And when he talked about the monkey brain and the monk brain, I about lost my stuff. I was like, what is going on right now? And then since reading it twice, have told almost everybody that I come into contact with. If you haven't read it, you need to read it. And that's the Big Leap. Leap by Gay Hendrickson. The Big Leap. You'll find it. So the Way of the Peaceful Warrior Soar. Think like a monk and the Big Leap. Like, if you're truly trying to set out on this course, that is four pieces of text that you could put into your mind. By the way, there is a fifth. It's called the Bible. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But here's some things, like activities. I had to get to the point where I would give myself grace, and that's so hard for us to do so many times, just to be compassionate for ourself and to allow ourselves the understanding that we're imperfect beings and we are going to make mistakes and not to beat the crap out of ourselves. And there's a huge difference between beating yourself up and just noticing and then taking action on those things you're noticing. One of the things that I was really bad at that I do as an activity now is I try to get plenty of rest. And I know that's gonna sound like, you know, oh, get good sleep. Thanks, George. Listen, I want you to think about the last week, two weeks or 30 days, and the amount of time that you've slept. Because when you sleep, that's when all the things that are firing in your brain all day long when you're sleeping, that's when they're actually, like, connecting and merging and rebuilding. Like, you need to get rest again. Go back to the Healthy Hustle episode. I make it without sounding weird. I make it a point to talk to myself. Using my name through the situations that I'm going through. I am truly trying to become my own guide, my own mentor on the things that I know are in my brain and these little bites of information that I can play on loop and then be like, george, all right, here's what we're gonna do, buddy. What I want you to do, George, is I want you to sit down, and you need to kind of strategize at this point. I know you feel like being a bull in a china closet. You want to run through it. They pissed you off. But, hey, George, what you need to do is the opposite of that right now. And so, like, I would talk to a true friend, you know, if you were having a hard time, I'd be like, liz, listen, this is what I would suggest doing that for myself. Here's the other thing, too. If you know yourself, you start to understand your own. Love languages. One of my love languages. I love gifts. Like, I just love gifts. It's. I know that. So I'll take time to, like, gift myself. Like, you know what? You deserve a new xyz. It might be a watch, it might be a hat. It might be, you know, something dumb, like new wipers on my car. But I'm gonna go buy me this gift because I know it's going to make me feel a certain kind of way. And the last thing. And again, it ties back to our last episode, which led us into this episode, is I have really tried to pay attention to my core circle. Does it need to grow anymore? Does it need to shrink? How can I be pouring into them? And I'll tell you, even since last week when we recorded this, this whole, am I the Uber driver or are they. The GPS has not been able to leave my brain, and it's given me a whole new way to kind of look at these core humans that are in the circle, and how much of or what type of attention do I pay to them? Because there's totally two different sides there. So that's literally kind of the things that I block out that I'm trying to pay attention to or do or insert into my life.

I love that. A couple things that just came to mind. Number one, I had a similar thing where I started evaluating after this happens after every conversation that we have, obviously. But when we were talking about the relationships piece last week, I noticed an interesting little side effect, a positive one where how I treated an external relationship actually helped me cultivate a relationship with myself. I was talking to someone and they noticed like I was making more time for them and came up and I said, well, yeah, I've purposely made my circle much smaller, so now I get to be more choosy about how I spend my time. And so I referenced the Simpsons and I went, I choo choo, choose you. And it was just kind of. It was a silly, cute little moment. But then I realized, wow, I care about myself enough that I believe I'm worthy of having cultivated relationships with others, that I get to be choosy in my own life. A couple other things that came to mind in terms of tactics that I do in my own life. I try to meditate every morning. One of the things I noticed is that when I was really struggling to define my own happiness, often it was because even though I was an only child, even though I lived by myself during the pandemic with a cat, you know, I had this false sense of, well, I'm really good at being by myself, but I actually did not know how to sit in silence and stillness with my own brain and my own thoughts. And a meditation practice. I use headspace. I find that to be a really calm is great. I use it for other things. But headspace is great because it teaches you how to move through uncomfortable feelings and how to observe thoughts as opposed to experiencing them. And then the other thing I would recommend is that if you are someone who is a creative like George or myself, I would recommend a book called the Artist's Way. It has some incredible, incredible activities. It's a guided 12 week program that involves stream of consciousness writing. And it's really helped me connect with myself as well. George, I want to dig a little bit more deeply into some of the things that you do for yourself. I know that we have said in the past, obviously that when we talk about spirituality, when we talk about religion, when we talk about the Bible, we are doing so from a place of this is our lived experience and we are by no means doing so from a place of we are preaching to you about how you should be living your life. However, you did note the Bible is one of the books that you can consider to be in shaping this narrative for yourself. Can you speak to that a bit?

Yeah. And it's funny because I haven't really stated this, but I'll state it. I'm purposely not bringing a lot of scripture into the episodes because I don't want somebody to tune in immediately, be like, oh, this is a spiritual podcast and be gone. And I don't want them to think it's a religious podcast. By the way, being religious, being spiritual, two totally different things. Probably an episode in the future, but I'm gonna bring a couple scriptures in this episode. And so just bear with me and realize that you, the listener, whatever your beliefs are, you can still use the words in a way of the power that they have. Let's just start with this. You have to know yourself to understand yourself. And Liz, we kind of bumped into this earlier. It's only when you understand yourself that you can know your boundaries and set your boundaries and start to create a safe space for you to play the game of life. It's also when you know yourself and start to understand yourself that you then start to know your values. Values are actually what help you. It's like, okay, we're gonna shoot over to the right, he's gonna run to the 30 yard line. And your used are the core pieces of what allow you to run the plays in your life or plays that you wouldn't accept in your life. And so for me, when I think about this, knowing yourself, understanding yourself, setting up your boundaries, knowing your values. There's actually two pieces of scripture that I want to pull out for this episode. And one is Mark 12:30, 31, and the other one is Acts 20:35. Now Mark 12:30, 31 goes a little something like this. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. I want you to realize that's broken into three things. Remember I talked about marketing, sales service, your inside organization, the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. Now, if you hate yourself, if you don't like to be in a room by yourself, if you are your worst inner critic because you haven't got to know yourself or cultivated the relationship, how in God's name are you supposed to follow the commandment of love your neighbor as yourself, it almost positions that you are supposed to love God, love yourself above, and then that's how it flows out to the world. Remember I talked about energy flowing out. So Acts 20:35, in everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak. Remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said, it is more blessed to give than to receive. We always talk about giving to others and helping the weak in this fashion. But if you just stop for a second and realize you're a human just like the rest of the humans, you're an imperfect human, you're a weak human. When's the last time you have given to yourself? So therefore you could give to others? This is why I tie into being my own guide, my own mentor. How do I give myself a pep talk? How do I give myself the energy? How do I fill my cup so that I can. But this is a self realization imperfect and weak human, not always with other people who can fill his cup out of necessity. How can I become that person? See, because when you pay attention to Mark 12:30, 31 and Acts 20:35, you realize like you're supposed to love yourself, you're supposed to then radiate your energy which helps you to live out your passions. And it's all because you have this self realization of being an imperfect weak human, that you can have self conversations, teachings and mentorings to self. Self conversations, teaching yourself, mentoring yourself. You can't take others to the next level, help them live a life beyond their default, unless you're leveling yourself up along the way as well.

How do our listeners know if they have an issue with their own relationship self? What are the symptoms they might be experiencing in their lives? Because I think there may be some more obvious cases where it's like, yep, that's me. Hi, I am the problem. It's me, Taylor Swift, one through five. But. But there are other times though where it's more insidious, right? Where it's more like a death by paper cut. Until you wake up one morning, look in the mirror and go, oh no.

I think there's three things that I'll talk about here. When you're in a room by yourself, are you lonely or is it an opportunity? See if it's an opportunity that you can fill your cup. If it's an opportunity that you can love yourself. If it's an opportunity just to kind of shake the rest of the world off. But if you're in a room by yourself and you're lonely and frustrated, and beating yourself up. You probably have an issue, this conversation that we're having today.

But that's good, though. That discomfort is good.

That's where this comfort is. Like, knowing the problem exists and not accepting the discomfort and growing through the discomfort is good. If you're not keeping yourself accountable, and I'll position that as a question, are you keeping yourself accountable? If you're like, I'm gonna do this, and then you get a weekend, and you're like, well, I'll do that some of the times, and then you get another weekend, and you're like, well, I'll do it occasionally. Now, you don't trust yourself. You don't believe in yourself. And if you don't believe in trusting yourself, it's very hard to love anybody that you can't trust or believe externally. So how are you going to do it internally? So I would say, like, how can you keep yourself accountable? How can you make sure that you are believing in yourself, that you are trusting in yourself, therefore allowing you to love yourself? And this next one, you have to ask yourself, am I demolishing my own divinity? You have to understand, you're a whole human. You are perfect as you were created. If I were to say that to myself, I'd be like, I am whole and I am perfect as I was created. When you can't love yourself, when you're demolishing your own divinity, you're saying that you are a mistake. You're saying that you're a junk. And I gotta be honest with you. God don't make no junk. The universe don't make no junk. Like, you are here for a reason. But you have to love yourself and unlock your inner superpowers to be the light to the world, to be who you're supposed to be. And if you can't stand to be in a room by yourself, if you're not keeping yourself accountable, and if you're demolishing your own divinity, how in the world are you going to achieve that?

So when we think about folks who may be listening to this, because we alluded to this earlier, right? You let the cat out of the bag. You always kind of know where I'm leading us to, which is, what are some of the questions people should be asking themselves at this point? Because we've spent a lot of time talking today about the importance of this relationship, how it directs so much of our lives, not just in terms of trying to live beyond your default, but just in general. You have to start here before you can start thinking about anything. Outside of yourself, what are some questions that can help people on their journey?

The first question I'm going to ask the question and then I'm going to give it some context. The first question that I have to ask myself and remember all of this is like a work in progress. The first question I have to ask myself, and that I would hope the listeners would ask themselves is when life squeezes you, what comes out? Because life's going to squeeze you. Let me give you some context here. If I take an orange off of my counter, cut it in half and squeeze it, what am I gonna get? Orange juice. Because that's what's inside of it. If life squeezes you and anger comes out, who are you? If life squeezes you and frustration comes out, envy comes out, who are you? Right. If life squeezes you and grace, empathy, compassion and love come out, who are you? So look at the times when life squeezes you and your reactions to understand where you truly are and how you might need to change your inner self so that when life squeezes you, the external juice is what you want it to be. The other question that I have to ask myself and I think the listeners need to ask themselves, by the way, this could be on the daily, the hourly, or the minute it am I beating myself up or am I noticing things that I want to change along the way? Because there's a fundamental difference. You're so stupid, you're so dumb. Well, that probably wasn't the smartest decision. Let's document that and pay attention to it in the future. There's a difference between beating yourself up and just noticing things that you want to change. Do you know your self worth? This one's a biggie and it's hard, but do you know what you're worth? Like, I'm gonna let that sit with people for a minute. Like they might want to pause and be like, I don't know, like. And that's the second.

I don't know.

Yeah. And that's the second question that makes me sad. Hey, what makes you happy? I don't know. What are you worth? I don't know. You gotta know what you're worth. You gotta know your value. The other one, and I said I would come back to this is what makes me happy. What makes you happy. Now I'm gonna go back to this self worth thing for a second because of your visceral response, lean in face.

And like me like that. But yeah, it's fair.

Most people don't know their own self worth. They have never taken time to understand their self value independent of the world's opinion and validation. They want opinions. You should have your own opinion of yourself. They want validation that they're headed in the right direction. You should validate your own ticket of life. That's the thing. We have to spend more time with ourselves cultivating this relationship because we're letting the world be our uber driver that forgot their GPS and is just driving us all over the wrong places that we don't need to be. Instead of us being our own guide on this fabulous journey of life filled to the brim of positive loving energy that we can spill out to those around us in being the most value based, loving light along the way. Sam.