Mel Robbins walks through a three-step approach to accepting yourself even when you don't believe it yet. Make a "Careless List" with two columns: things you want to care less about, and things you want to care more about. Revisiting these lists repeatedly activates your prefrontal cortex and reshapes how you think.
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How do you accept yourself if you don't like yourself? So there are two things that I'd recommend you do. The first— well, actually there's three. The first one is that you need to acknowledge that until you accept yourself, nothing will change. If you are someone who is saying, "I don't believe it." Yes. In that case, what you want to do is use other strategies and tools that allow you to strengthen the self-acceptance in other ways that naturally will help you recognize that you are valuable. In spite of not believing that initially. Okay, so the very, very first tool is very simple. We call it the Careless List. What you're gonna do is grab a sheet of paper, divide it into two columns. On the left, I want you to write down all the things you want to care less about. Mm. I wanna care less about my physical appearance. I wanna care less about what people in the street think of me when I walk by. I wanna care less about what my family keeps saying about my acne or my weight or how I look. Actually acknowledge it. Give it a physical outlet. A lot of people don't actually want to acknowledge their fears because they're afraid that they'll make them real. But I'm a proponent, and a lot of evidence suggests that if you can just make them real, it gives you something to work with. You're not hiding from it. So you write down everything you actually want to care less about, put it in the left, and then just reflect on how you feel when you look at that. The next step is, okay, what do I want to care more about? What do I actually want to shift my attention to? Because attention is such a superpower. If we're not aware of it, we're going to be stuck in patterns that keep us stuck. But if we can become more aware of it, be a bit more curious about how we're thinking, this is called metacognition. It's the ability to think about your thoughts, and it is a fundamental superpower because the moment you start thinking about your thoughts, you're no longer in your thoughts. So consciously write down, what do I want to care more about? Well, I want to care more about being of value in my life. I wanna care more about having the kind of courage that allows me to take the step even if I've got the acne or I look a certain way. You map them down. Mm-hmm. And then it's a super simple practice. You just bring yourself back to this regularly to remind yourself, okay, my attention is going onto these things, but I really wanna care less about them. How do I actively shift my attention to what I wanna care more about? When you consciously take control of your thoughts, you're re-engaging the prefrontal regions in your brain. We get more activation, more blood flow going here, and then it fundamentally shapes how you're showing up.
