3 Ways To Love Yourself As You Are

A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead On Purpose podcast. You can check them out@nzmortgages.co.nz why is self compassion often the hardest kind of love to give? Have you ever caught yourself being your own worst critic? Today we're going to talk about the three key steps to begin showing yourself the love you deserve. I'm James Laughlin and on this channel we unlock your full potential through proven habits and strategies for personal mastery. Let's be honest, sometimes we are pretty damn hard on ourselves. A lot of the time we are. And the things that we say to ourselves and the standards we hold ourselves to, we probably would never consider doing that to a dear friend or family member. We just wouldn't. But we're happy to do it to ourselves. Well, I can tell you firsthand that that chips away at your happiness. It chips away at your self esteem, it chips away your potential. And certainly when I was a young kid and I was drumming and all I wanted to do was become the World Solo Drumming champion, I was so hard on myself and I would play six to eight hours a day and I'd have bleeding hands and rsi, just like all the other top young drummers wanting to be the world champion as well. But often I would record myself on a cassette tape, yep, I'm really that old. And I'd play it back and go, God, I'm crap, that's absolute. And I had some more expletives As a young 12 and 13 year old, I was really almost angry at how terrible I was because I was comparing myself to, you know, a 37 year old 10 time world solo champion. And here's me at 12 or 13 trying to figure it out. But I was beating myself up and I was constantly comparing myself to someone else's highlight reel. So to me it's critically important that we identify where we beat ourselves up. It could be health related, you know, I'm too weak or slow or fat or whatever it might be. It could be your inability to understand finance and how things work in the world economically. And so you beat yourself up because you don't get it and you're not sure what to do or you make mistakes. Look, none of this beating up stuff helps. We need to build ourselves up and we're either self builders or self beaters. We which one's it going to be? So I'm going to share with you three crucial steps to really increase that self compassion, increase that self worthiness. And this is the soft Stuff, Yes. And often when I'm doing keynotes or delivering training and workshops, there'll be someone in the room, most often male, that will go, oh, my God. Self compassion, self love. I'll move on from this stuff. They're often the person that needs it most. So if you feel any resistance in this one, this topic, then it's for you. Listen up and let's explore it together. Let's have a bit of fun with it. So first things first. Number one, embrace imperfection as growth. Now, I meet people often, in fact, at our annual event every year, we've got a lot of people who put their hands up to say that they're perfectionists. When people say, hey, I'm a perfectionist, I jokingly, but kind of not jokingly say, oh, so you have no standards. And they look at me really peculiarly and go, what are you talking about? I'm a perfectionist. I've got the highest standards. Well, I disagree. I think you've got no standards. And here's what I mean. Perfection. Perfect. Let's go. Say we go and see the Mona Lisa and you look at it and go, james, isn't it perfect? And I might look at it alongside you and go, I think it's incredible. However, it could be a bit bigger. It's kind of small. It's not perfect. Let's say we go to watch an amazing orchestra. They're performing. And I go, that was absolutely perfect. The drummer was perfect. And you might go, it was pretty awesome. However, the drummer was slightly too loud for my liking. It kind of ruined the balance and the ensemble right away. We can't agree on perfect, but we could both agree to, hey, that was really, really good. Hey, that was fantastic. That was awesome. But perfect means no flaws. Perfect means no room for improvement. So that's why I say if you're a perfectionist, you have no standards. Because perfect is not a standard. It's not measurable. We can't agree on it. We can agree on good. That's an area that we can agree on. We can agree on that. 30 milliliters, that's 10 centimeters. We can agree on, hey, that was the right decision. Might not have been the best decision, but it was the right decision based on what information they had at hand. So I believe if you're going to be a perfectionist, you're not going to have something to measure against. You're always going to fall short and you're really going to see failure a lot as a negative. So I want you to think about what high performers do. I'm so, so fortunate to work with some of the top performers across multiple sports, entrepreneurship, business. They do some things that others don't, and that is that they embrace their flaws, their mistakes, their faux pas as growth, as learning. They flip it really quick to go, hey, what can I learn here? What's, what's in it for me to actually move towards mastery? What's mastery? It's trying to get better. It's a journey towards just slight improvements. So I want you to think about that. Embracing imperfection as growth. Number two, celebrate the small wins. Achievers tend to overlook the small victories. I call them little micro victories. So it's important that we celebrate the small wins. I was working with a professional sports team last year and they were some days, you know, performing brilliantly and momentum was building and other days it was pretty average. And we noticed that on the average days, the they didn't celebrate anything other than a big try, like a big goal. All the other little things that lead to the big goal, they weren't celebrating them and they weren't getting as many of those big goals. So I started reinforcing that. Hey, when there's a good pass or someone sees a bit of space or someone takes possession, celebrate it. A tap on the shoulder, a little clap, a yes, go for it. These verbal and, you know, physical gestures are what we would class as celebrating a small victory. Those small wins lead to more momentum, more self esteem, more self worth, self confidence. And therefore we can move forward to more and more and eventually celebrate bigger goals and bigger wins. So it's really important for you to practice this and go, what are my small wins today? You got out of bed, well done. Say well done. You didn't sleep in past your alarm. You started with a glass of water rather than a cup of coffee. But you still had your coffee, but you started with water. You maybe started with 30 minutes or 20 minutes or 5 of no digital devices. These are all wins. These are big things. You made your bed. You got to work one minute early. You didn't lose your cool because someone triggered you or someone did something stupid. Someone cut you off in traffic and you went, cool, I'll pump the brakes, let them in, smile and wave rather than pump the horn and give him a different gesture. We've all done it. Unless of course, you're an angel. But we've all lost our co. We've all reacted negatively. You know, taking control of our emotions, to me is a small win. So celebrate those because that allows us to become more confident in who we are and actually like who we are. Many of us have lots of self loathing things that we beat ourselves up over, things we've said in the past, things we haven't said in the past, things we've done in the past, things we haven't done. There's a lot of self loathing. The only way to actually counteract that is to have self love and to celebrate little things that you do. Celebrate being able to see the sunrise because you got up a little bit earlier. Celebrate the fact that you got your tax return done because you made time and what gets scheduled gets done. Really important to celebrate the small wins. Encourage those around you too. People around you that you love. Encourage them to celebrate their small wins and if they don't do it for them, say, hey Suzy, that was awesome. I loved how you set out to go and get that client. You acquired them and now they're our number one client. Well done. Like that's amazing or hey Robert, amazing to see you saying you're not going to drink alcohol. Here we are, Friday afternoon drinks and you're on the alcohol. Free beers. Well done. Small win. We've got to celebrate it for others and celebrate it for ourselves. That's why I journal a lot. You know, I like to write down things I'm grateful for, but also things that I feel like was a little win. Like what did I win on today? Often I'll have a list of my essential things, the essential critical few. You know, Jim Collins, the good to great author, talks a lot about, you know, the essential critical few over the important many. The important many is your to do list. But the critical few, it's the most valued priority. So I often have those in my journal and I'll put a line through them and a tick when they're done. And it feels so good. Line tick, line tick. It's lets off this chemical release and I don't see it happening but I feel it say oh yeah. Accomplishment, satisfaction. As I've mentioned before, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah put this great book together on how to build the life you want. And in it they talked about how do we feel happier. One of the ways we feel happier is when we are in the pursuit of satisfaction and to be satisfied we've got to do difficult things, we've got to complete things. So it makes sense now that when I go line through it, the strike through and a tick when I've completed, then it makes me feel satisfied. So I want you to think about celebrating Those small wins today. Okay? Last but certainly not least is prioritize self compassion over self criticism. I recently interviewed a global legend, Dan Pink. If you haven't read any of Daniel Pink's work, you need to buy the book drive, written in 2009. He sold millions and millions of copies. And we were chatting and I was interviewing him and at one point he asked me some questions and he said, whoa, that was really critical what you just said of yourself. It was really critical. I was like, oh, yeah, I guess it was. But I didn't think anything of it. And he started to explain to me the damage of being self critical. So I want you to think about practicing the self compassion. I've started doing it since that I shared with my partner what happened on the show with Dan Pink. And now she's also saying, hey, do you see what you just said to yourself? We were in Fiji recently on holiday, and I'm not a great swimmer. I'm not super confident, large ocean swells and stuff, et cetera. Not a fan of getting into that. So as I was getting in, I saying to my partner and my son Finn, who's it? You know, you need to realize that I'm pretty weak when it comes to this stuff. And right away my partner was like, whoa, no, you're not. It's just not your greatest strength. And you're not confident in there, but you're not weak. And so it was really great for her to call me out because I went straight to telling my son, I'm weak at this. Wow, what a terrible thing to say. But it was me trying to just be honest how I felt. So I've got to change that stuff. We're all on a journey of this. I am by no means the expert, but I'm constantly meeting with the experts to figure out what we need to do to have a life of more joy, a life of more meaning, and hopefully start to turn those mental illness statistics back. So we have mental health rather than mental illness. So number three is prioritize, Prioritize self compassion over self criticism. High achievers often hold themselves to impossibly high standards. And when things don't go as planned, they are their own harshest critics. I've certainly been there. Don't know about you, I'm sure you have, but you know, high achievers, people that want to be the best, they. They want nothing but absolute perfection. They're idealists. It's important to be a realist when it comes to being a high performer. Things won't always go your way. In fact, more often than not, they won't. And it's seeing that failure or that misstep as an opportunity for learning. And as cliche as that sounds, that's what it is. It's an opportunity to grow and opportunity to learn. Practice self compassion by treating yourself the same way as you would treat a close friend and show that sense of understanding, patience, care and duty to yourself like you would for a friend that you just absolutely love. This kindness fuels resilience and to me this is how we sustain high performance. I'm really fortunate to work with high performers, some of them at the very top of their game internationally in sport, business, entrepreneurship. And the one thing that I work on a lot with these individuals is how do you show yourself more patience, give yourself more grace, show yourself more love, and have more fun along the way? Well, practicing these three steps is absolutely critical. So just to wrap that up, the three ways to love yourself more Number one, embrace imperfection as growth. Number two, celebrate those small wins day to day. And number three, prioritize self compassion over self criticism. Thank you so much for tuning in here on YouTube. It's James Lachlan. I just want to say a massive thank you. Please hit that subscribe button and get out there and lead your life on purpose. A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead on Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages.co nz.