Become the Best Version Of Yourself

Today we have got a great topic for you, and I think the timing is going to be right on point. We're going to be talking about how to become the best version of you, meaning how to be your best self. I'm going to give you 3 sort of tips. These are really habits that if you put these into practice and you kind of integrate them into your life regularly, what you're going to find is your best self will emerge. If you've ever had this thought or feeling like you could do better, you could do more, you're not living up to your potential, then this video is definitely for you. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life on track and get back to living the life that you want to live. Hopefully that's your best life, which is what we're talking about today. And this topic applies to you whether or not you have anything to do with addiction or not. These things apply. So let's get down to it. Essentially what you're going to be doing here is you're going to move from making decisions and acting out of a place of fear and desperation to Acting from a place of self-respect. Okay? It's when we get in that fearful, doubtful place that our not good quality show, right? Our defense mechanisms come out, our bad habits come out, and we tend to make really bad decisions when we're making them from an emotional place or from a fearful place or a desperate place. It's just not the optimal conditions. And I'm going to give you 3 steps for how to move out of that place into a more self-respecting place so that you feel like you're the best you, that you are bringing something worthwhile to yourself and the people around you. And you're just basically going to like yourself and everyone else a lot better. Because you know what? When we like ourselves better, we tend to like other people better. When we don't like ourselves and we're judgmental on ourselves and we're harsh on ourselves, guess what? We're judgmental and we're harsh on other people. So step number 1 for accomplishing this is adjust, or at least assess your expectations, particularly when it comes to other people. We all have these visions in our head about the way things should be, ought to be, supposed to be, things like that. And that is going to get us in a really bad place quickly because when things don't go as they're supposed to or should or ought to, then we feel like there's been some sort of injustice, right? And then we feel upset and we feel sorry for ourselves and we feel angry at other people and we feel resentful about situations. And all of that is coming from a place of expectations. It's what we think other people should do, how we think other people should feel or act. Or behave. That is the fastest way to set yourself up for having a bad emotion as there could be, right? There's no such thing as supposed to, ought to, or should, right? No matter what your mama or your grandmama said, I'm telling you. And it's those kind of thoughts that are going to get you in a bad place. Like, you know, a good wife would do this or should do this, right? A grateful child would act This way. It's these kind of thoughts that get us into a bad place because people don't live up to those expectations. Sometimes not at all, and sometimes they do sometimes, but not other times. And then we feel like we've literally been robbed, like there's some injustice that's happened when actually not. That's not the case. That's us imposing our will onto other people. We're projecting what we want onto other people and then being mad at them when When they don't come through with it, basically. So it's about being honest with yourself about what is and not necessarily what we think things ought to be or should be. Now, number 2 habit for you is to— I'm looking at my list. I want is to— I'm going to give you some big category, but I'm going to break it down for you. is to really focus on living with integrity. Now, I've counted this as one of the habits, but there's some pieces to this and we're going to look at each of these little pieces. In a big broad sense, living with integrity just means you are who you say you are. You do what you say you're going to do. Sounds great, doesn't it? Right? I'm in. You're in too, right? We're all for that. But Obviously it's not as easy. We all know we are supposed to act with integrity, but sometimes we don't, right? There's that expectation. And so how do you pull this off? One really quick way to get yourself more in alignment and more in an integrity kind of way is to set and keep healthier boundaries for yourself. One of the ways that we get ourselves into this jam of not being congruent with who we say we are or what we say we're going to do is when we say yes to things that we mean no to. So sometimes living more with integrity means having to set a firm boundary, having to say, no, that's not going to work for me, right? Because a lot of times we don't want to cause conflict. We want to not hurt someone else's feelings. So we'll go along with something that in our heart we're really not going along with. And when we do that, One of two things is going to happen. Either we're going to have like a resentment inside because we're doing something we don't want to do, and that resentment is going to start to kind of ooze out of us in like passive-aggressive type behaviors or even energy, like little stabs at the other person, little jabs. We're angry at them and sometimes they don't even know why, right? And that's because we're not holding a good boundary. That's on us, not on them. If someone's asking you to do something you don't want to do, It is your responsibility to address that issue. Don't be mad at them. Don't tell yourself they shouldn't ask me to do that. They aren't supposed to do that. Refer back to rule number 1, right? All of these things kind of intermingle together and they work in unison with each other, and one kind of builds on the other, and it's kind of a feedback loop, if you will. So You're not doing anyone any favors by agreeing to things you don't want to do. Now, well, okay, hold on. Wait, let me put a qualifier on there. Occasionally we all cave a little bit, right? Like if you're married and your spouse really likes this restaurant, you really like another restaurant, sometimes you're going to cave. You're going to eat their restaurant and sometimes they cave. What I'm talking about is like recurring things where you feel like you're putting your own needs on the back burner all the time and you're saying no to things that you really don't want to do and you find yourself building resentment. The other thing that can happen when you do that, other than the passive-aggressive behavior, is that you just don't do it, right? Is you say you will and you don't, or you kind of do it halfway or not really. And then the other person's mad at you, and then you get mad at them for being mad at you because you're like, you shouldn't ask me to do that in the first place. You see where these expectations and boundaries, it's all kind of coming together, right? So holding to your boundaries, Knowing your own worth has a lot to do with your ability to hold your own boundaries. And if you struggle with this one, I want you to remember that if you care about a relationship and you care about a person, it's really important for you to hold those boundaries because otherwise you're going to ruin the relationship. You're going to develop bad feelings towards that person. You're going to take it out on that person. Or be passive-aggressive in some way, and you'll ultimately end up ruining the relationship. So you're not doing anyone favors by being really conflict avoidant. You really aren't. And most people, healthy-ish type people, can tolerate being told no. And if a person cannot tolerate being told no on something reasonable, then they're probably not a healthy enough person, and you might need to have even a bigger boundary. With how much time and energy you spend with that person. Find out what your standards are and hold to them, not in a snotty way or a snobby way, but this is going to help you with that integrity, with that walk the walk kind of thing. When we aren't living with integrity, most of the time it's not because we're bad people. Most of the time it's not because we want to lie to people or not follow through with what we say. Most of the time it is because of some kind of people-pleasing behavior or conflict avoidance or boundary issue that really kind of leads us into that situation. And a really good practice to make sure that you are living with integrity is to, in recovery, there's a step that you, or in the 12-step recovery philosophy, there's a step that you do like a nightly inventory where you sort of look back over your day and you kind of, it's like a little checklist and it's like, did I harm anyone today? Did I say anything I didn't mean today? Or basically, are there any messes that I need to clean up? Are there any problems brewing that I need to get ahead of? And it's just that time to stop and be conscientious to do what I call keep your side of the street clean, right? And if you get in the practice of doing this on a nightly basis and making sure you're cleaning up stuff and keeping boundaries healthy and that sort of thing, then You're going to feel better all the way around because when you don't do this, it starts to build up. I like to say it's like dirty dishes in the sink, right? If you'll take each one of those dishes and rinse it off, put it in the dishwasher right when you use it, your kitchen looks clean and you feel good. And if you don't do it, then they build up and they build up and before you know it, there's like crusty dishes to the ceiling. And then you're doing all kind of other negative coping skills just to avoid going in there and cleaning them, right? This whole thing just avalanches a big giant problem. This is the same kind of thought process, but this is like in your emotional and interpersonal life. If you want to have an example of those questions or checklist, I've put a link in the description to the nightly recovery questions so you can kind of download those and you can know what I'm talking about when I say like that inventory. It's super, it's literally take you 2 minutes to do. It's not a big thing. And once you get yourself in the habit of it, you don't have to even look at the questions, just kind of process. There's also a really good app for it. I think it's called the 11th Step app. that helps you do that too, which I've used and I feel like it's kind of cool. The third thing, you guys are going to like this one. This one's kind of fun, is play to your strengths and stop focusing so much on your weaknesses. Guess what? We're all made with certain strengths and weaknesses, and that's a good thing, right? And we all can't be good at everything. And if you will take some time to really understand What your strengths are and what your weaknesses are, you can do a better job of consciously creating your life in a way that fits with that. I like to call it, like, I use a term a lot called your genius, and that's where your strengths match your passions. You may already know what your strengths are. If you don't know what your strengths are, I recommend something called the StrengthsFinder. It's this little assessment. It's put out by Gallup. Those are the people that do like the employment surveys. Like if you work for a big company, you may have to do like the Gallup employee survey every year. It's pretty common. Anyways, they have an online test you can take called the StrengthsFinder test, and it's really cool. They've identified like 34 strengths and it'll rank them in order from your strengths from 1 all the way to 34. I think you can get it, it's less expensive. You can get it where you just see your top 5. Or you can get the whole, pay the whole thing and get the all 34. I personally think it's useful, just as useful to know what your strengths aren't as what they are. It's my philosophy that you, if you put energy into what you're already good at, it will grow exponentially, right? If you put your energy into what you're not good at, you might get like this much better, right? But it's not the best use of your energy. Let go of the ought tos, shoulda, coulda, wouldas. That expectation thing we talked about in number 1, that goes for yourself too, right? Look at what is and grow what is already there because each of us have a unique combination of skill sets and every individual has specific life experiences and strengths that literally no other person on the planet has. It's unique only to you because of your unique gifts, talents, weaknesses, and life experiences. You've got something to bring to the world in a way that no one else has. And if you can find out what they are, can you imagine how close that gets you to being your best self? Now, you're not always going to be able to do that, right? We have to do things that aren't our strengths, but if we'll give ourselves permission to focus on those things that we're good at and really let those things shine through, We're going to be happier and more successful. And the other thing, if you want to go back to sort of like number 1 and number 2 with this, is understand the people around you, strengths and their weaknesses, and stop building resentments towards them because of their weaknesses and find out what their strengths are and build your relationship as a team around how your strengths complement each other, especially if you're in a relationship with somebody. This is going to truly bring out your best self because when you're doing things that you're good at, it makes you feel good and you literally have endless energy for it. When you're doing things you don't want to do and you're not good at, it takes everything in you to make yourself do it, right? It exhausts you. You don't feel great after it other than the fact that you've checked it off the list, right? So Work on what you're already good at. Damage control your weaknesses, right? Understand what they are. I'm not saying you let yourself off the hook and say things like, oh, that's just me, or I'm not good at that. But, but understand about yourself will help you. Sorry about the dog. Protect yourself against those even better. Let's see who's with us. Those of you guys that are with me right now, it is like Christmas Eve Eve, and you guys are like The true blues right here. You guys are like the hardcore fans. I thank you for being here. If you're watching on the replay, you're still awesome too. I know you got a lot going on. I got a lot going on too, right? All righty, let's see who's here. We have Amy. Hey, Amy. Um, Amy says Christmas is full of expectations, right? Oh my gosh, that's what makes it so stressful, right? Hondo, hey, I'm glad I went live today too. I, I wanted to be able to be here for you. I'm Be here next week too. Theresa's here and Tracy's here. Tracy says expectations are premeditated resentments. That's a saying I've heard in recovery a lot, and man, is that the truth, Tracy, right? You are setting yourself up for resentment when you put the expectation in place. Alrighty. Says seems like holidays are hard on families. Uh, I want to see if I can say this name right. Sion. Sion, glad to see you here. If I'm saying your name wrong, I'm sorry, I apologize. Maybe you can help me pronounce it. Um, says, I'm glad I helped my nephew's homeless, gave him some money, not a lot, but did take him to Goodwill and get him a set of clothes for free. They are a good company. They even gave him a hat. There you go. And that makes you feel good about you, right? That's playing to your strengths. It's not worrying about if he's homeless, if I give him money, if I help him, I'm enabling. Don't worry about that. Just do what you know is right. We had to hold a boundary when my son was abusive with me. I asked for an apology and he said no. So we decided to cancel Christmas at our house this year. Okay, Amy, I think I like what you're saying about you took an action based on a boundary because I did a video a while back and said the best way to hold a boundary isn't to say it, it's to do it, right? And you're holding a boundary there about your son's behavior. But I'm even wondering, like when you're saying I'm asking for an apology, I feel like You're setting yourself up there a little bit, Amy, because there's an expectation that he did this horrible thing and he should say he's sorry. But that expectation is probably leading you to more frustration. Now, should you have a boundary around his behavior? Absolutely, right? You should not allow someone to be abusive to you regardless of the reasons. Like, even if you know they're going through a bad time and they're having a hard time, that doesn't give you the right. to infringe on someone else's boundaries in an abusive way. So I'm super glad for you. I hope you didn't cancel Christmas for the entire family. I hope that you're still doing something because that's not fair for you and the whole family to not have Christmas based on one particular person. Or maybe you just decided to have it someone else's house, and that's okay too. My biggest expectation I can't let go of is that my Boyfriend be sober. When he isn't, I literally want to hit him. See those expectations? I saw boogers in my eye. You want to hit him. So I would just have to leave. How to balance no expectations with hope? I think what it is, Sandra, is it's probably deeper than you have an expectation for him to be sober, right? Because it's not really a substance that we get mad at. It's whatever that substance does to the person we love, right? It's how they behave when they're under the influence of that substance. So it's like, it's more like what you're saying, Sandra, is whatever it is that happens to your boyfriend when he isn't sober, that's where the boundary is. It's around the behaviors, right? Whether it's like you get mean when you're not, or you disappear for days when you're not, or you're Unreliable, or you don't contribute financially. There's a million things that could be there. Those are where the boundaries are at. And you're right, if you stay and you keep expecting something to happen and it's not happening, it's going to make you build that resentment, just like you're saying. You're right on target there. And you're going to say and do things that you end up regretting later, right? That aren't congruent to who you are. That's not you living with integrity and your values. And sometimes you have to hold that boundary. What was the app for the 11th step? I think it's called the 11th Step app. I think at least on the iPhone store, that's what it's called. I'm sure it is on the Android too. Hey Maria. Hey Amy. Let's see, Tina's here. Tina likes to focus on what you're good at. Yeah, that's my favorite one, right? I like that one too. Hey Amber of the Year. Shan, Sheena, or Shayna. Shayna and Kittrell. Hey Amber, nice to see you. Nice to see you as well. We've got some names in here that are kind of new names in here. How do you not let sadness affect you when your addict doesn't show up to family gatherings? They say they are coming and they do not show up. There we go. That's a good one. That's an expectation right there. And that's a perfect example, right? You're expecting them to come because they said they were going to come. However, the reality based on what you're saying there makes me think that there's a long history of that not coming through. So if you would change that to, I'm expecting him to come, to it would be lovely if they did, and it would be even more wonderful if they showed up, you'll be less frustrated if they don't. That leaves you with that happiness if they do, but not upset when they don't because you realize that There's a pattern of that and you're not going to set all of your hopes and expectations around that. Merry Christmas. My son is in rehab right now. I'm actually feeling relief that he's not going to be here. There's a lot of people watching this video right now, Tammy, that understand exactly what you're saying there. I feel like I'm not getting a— I feel like I am getting a break. I know that probably sounds horrible. Dread for him to come back because my husband won't allow him to come back to our house after because he brought meth into our home and we still have a minor son living in the home. I don't know what's going to happen. You know what, Tammy? I think that thought that you're having about that kind of like secret relief that you're feeling that your son's in rehab and won't be home, that's not a bad thing, right? Because I'm sure that the reason you feel that way is because historically there was so much chaos that came from him being home or around the holidays or family arguments or other chaotic behaviors. What that means, it's not meaning I don't want to see my son. It's meaning I need a break from the chaos and that's okay. And that's a normal feeling that anyone would have in your situation. So don't feel bad about that. All right guys, up next for you, I have a great video for you on how to overcome self-sabotaging behaviors. As we move into the new year, I want you guys to always, I want you guys to get on track with Being your best self. And one of the ways to do that is find out what are your tendencies towards self-sabotage and get 5 steps ahead of it. All right, everybody, I'll see you next time in the new year.