How to Be Kind to Yourself

Don't have psychology degrees and they don't know about how a child's brain works and all this type of stuff. We're kind of raised and I'm going to talk about today in a way that kind of takes us away from our own personal self love. You know, I don't see a baby walking around with self love issues. I don't see when I look at my son, I don't see him struggling with self love. He's pretty Damn happy like 97% of the time. The only time he's not happy is when he's hungry, when he's tired, or if he shit his pants. That's about it. Other than that, he's happy as hell. So I don't really see babies with self love issues, which means that lack of self love is somehow learned along the way. So then let's ask ourselves if we're not talking about self love, if we're talking about self acceptance and self acceptance will get us to self love because self love and just love in general is probably our natural state, why is it so hard to accept ourselves? Well, this is the thing that I always think about in my head is like, why are we so far off track from where we naturally are? And I think there's a lot of different things. The first thing is we have all been socialized. And when I say socialized, what I really prefer calling it is domesticated. So the same way you domesticate an animal, you kind of domesticate a child. And I don't mean that's the child's fault. What I mean is that's the parents fault. So the parents are under pressure, all of our parents are under pressure to socialize us in some sort of way so that we fit in as a normal adult. And so we get socialized so that we fit in. A child does not fit in with normal social constructs. You get that. You ever seen a kid that just decides in the middle of a restaurant, they want to scream, they're in a park, they just want to take their clothes off. That doesn't fit normal social constructs. So when they do stuff like that, it's like, no, don't do that. And so parents don't intentionally do this. But here's something that I see. Maybe they do intention to it. Some do, but most don't. One of the ways that parents will get their child to do what they want is either number one, yelling at them, or number two, emotional rewarding or punishment based on how the child acts. And so, you know, I want you to think about your childhood and also if you have children, I want you to think about how you raise your children as well. A lot of times if you're good, the parents are like, you get my love. They don't say that directly, but that's kind of the energy that we come at a child with, right? If you're good, you get my love. If you're bad, I get, I remove my love from you. And so a child is just this natural, free flowing, wild, crazy kid and they do something that doesn't fit in with society and the parents will reprimand them. The average child is reprimanded eight times more than they're praised throughout their childhood. Which means the average child thinks, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, my mom doesn't love me for doing this, whatever it might be. Eight times more than they think I'm accepted. So they don't think there's something wrong. Like no child is three years old, four years old and thinking himself there's something wrong with society. What are they thinking? Okay, I did something. My mom's retracting her love. This is all subconscious. We're not thinking of this. You know, logically I did something. My dad, my mom is pulling their love away from me. There must be something wrong with me. And so we think, oh, I must be the problem, I have to fix myself. How I naturally am is not good. And so it becomes hard over time for us to accept ourselves now. There's no reasoning for the process. A child doesn't understand everything. A child realizes that the way that they naturally are is not acceptable. With the average child being reprimanded eight times more than their praise, they're thinking I'm not good enough the way that I am eight times more than thinking that I'm enough. And so a child and I really just want this to kind of hit home so you understand why we have self love issues, why we have self acceptance issues, because we were almost taught not to accept ourselves as we truly were so that we would fit in and so that we would get our parents love. And so the child has to change itself and has to let go of certain aspects of itself based on what the parents tell them that they should do. All the child cares about, just so you know, is does my mom love me, does my dad love me? And anything that I do that gets that taken away from me must mean that I'm doing something wrong, which means that I am wrong. You know, when I'm Running around and I'm having fun and I'm screaming in public and my mom yells at me. Therefore that aspect of myself is wrong and I am not accepted as I naturally am. So if I'm not acting right, then I must be wrong. Right? This is starting to make sense to you. Hopefully it's making sense to you. I just want to I really dive into this and I've been studying child psychology for so long and I've been studying parents and the way that they act and I've been coaching people now for 19 years. And I can see how the parents reaction based off of the child when they're younger creates an adult that acts a certain way or holds back in a certain way or doesn't accept themselves. So we learn from a very young age during this socialization process that we are not good enough as we are. So we must act out of alignment with who we think we are. We have to act as a different person. We have to act a certain way so that we get our parents love. Even if that certain way is not me, which the result of that is my true self, who we come in this world as that still exists. Looking at my conditioned self and having trouble accepting myself. Of course our true self is going to have trouble accepting its conditioned self because our true self is going, yeah, this person that I've become isn't me. This is like some caricature of me. This isn't me. This is who I've been told to be. And a lot of times we're not even aware of this. We're just like, I don't like myself, I don't accept myself, I don't love myself. And so this result is this feeling that people have. So many people throughout the world have unworthiness because of the process of socialization throughout growing up. And I understand if you're a parent, this shit is hard. Kids are wild. You're just trying to keep them alive. You know sometimes you do have to reprimand a child when they're wanting to jump off a 10 foot wall and you're just like, oh my God, I've got to keep you alive. But I want you to understand like you're creating your child's personality and their identity every single moment of their day based off of what they see you do, what they see you talk about them and what you say directly to them. And so it's something really important to think about as you're growing up with your children and as you're raising your children. But it's also really important for all of us to think about with ourselves, because your personality has been built, most likely from childhood. It's been built on this repressing of who you truly are. Somehow I'm bad, and I need to look to my parents to see if I am right. I need their validation. And so as we get older, then we start seeking approval of other people. Do you love me? You know, if I get good grades, if I get to number one, if I beat everyone else, if I look sexy enough for you, if I get enough likes on Instagram, if I get enough likes on Facebook, if I make a lot more money, will you accept me? So we do all of these different things for acceptance from other people, because what we're looking for from the external world is what we're actually looking for for ourselves and from ourselves. So we're doing these things to get acceptance from other people, trying to get good grades, trying to get to number one, trying to beat everybody else, trying to look sexy enough, trying to make a whole lot of money, trying to get more likes on Instagram. We're looking for acceptance from other people. Will you accept me if I do this, ultimately? Because who are we really looking for acceptance from? From ourselves. If you fully, 100% accept yourself, you don't care if anybody else accepts you. And it's not like saying you go out and you're an asshole to everybody else. You just have this calm, cool confidence where you don't need other people to accept you. You don't need to be somebody else or act in a certain way or achieve a certain thing for other people to like you, because it doesn't really matter. You already accept yourself. And if other people don't accept you as you are, it doesn't matter, because I accept myself. And so what we do is a lot of us go out into the world and we're trying to do or become something so that we feel accepted because we really just want to accept ourselves. So the issue is that we can validate ourselves. And what we really need to work on is that we need to be able to validate ourselves based off of who we are as a person and nothing else. Not our looks, not our money, not our cars, not our jobs, not our bodies, not our accomplishments, not our social media followings. Just. I'm going to accept myself as I am. It's really interesting, and I've told this story quite a few times on the podcast, but I used to do this meditation, and it was a guided meditation, and he used to always Say you have no pockets, you have no storehouse. And the way I translated that is, I was born in this world with no pockets. I'm going to leave in this world with no pockets, which means that nothing that I have or own or achieve makes me more or less than who I already am. And so what I need to do is accept myself as I truly am. Our baseline is not negative. Our baseline is zero. We have been trained to think that there's something wrong with us. Not on purpose, on accident, but now it's. And that's not our fault necessarily, but it is our responsibility of what we need to deal with. And so what we need to do is we need to just learn to appreciate ourselves as we currently are. If you're short, you can appreciate yourself as short. If you're fat, appreciate yourself as fat. If you're skinny, if you have no money whatever, learn to appreciate yourself as you currently are. Learn to appreciate your negative thoughts. Learn to appreciate your short temper. Acceptance first. No judging. You know, if you go into, like Ram Dass always talks about this. If you go into a forest, you don't go and look at the trees and you judge the trees. You just look at all the trees and you just appreciate them, right? You don't go, oh my gosh, look at that little fat tree. Look at a little ugly, little fat tree. Now look at a little short tree, a little broken tree. We don't go in and judge trees. We just appreciate all of the trees as they are. But we judge ourselves and we judge other people all the time. And we do that out of our own insecurities, right? We have lived a lot of our time and lots of people out there in a state of judging. We either judge ourselves. A lot of times we judge ourselves or we judge other people. And so what I think we should do, instead of asking ourselves, how can we love ourself? It's more of how can we accept ourself? And now when I say acceptance, I don't mean that you just resign to the idea and you don't change yourself at all. I mean that you can still. And I've had so many people be like Rob, but if I fully accept myself and there's not something wrong and I don't hate myself, aren't I going to be like, not motivated to create my better life? And I'm like, no, you can still go out and want to be a millionaire and change the world and create a massive world changing business and have a thousand employees or be the best possible mother and all of it. You can want all of those things and you can always still want to improve because as a human, it is natural for us to always want to be growing and changing and evolving. That is one of the most natural, core things that we have built inside of us. But as you are changing and evolving, you can also just accept yourself a little bit more. You can go ahead and you can create, you know, a multimillion dollar business if you want to, and hate yourself the entire time if you want to. It's not going to be as fun, but you can create the exact same business and you can accept yourself and love yourself as you're doing it. And in fact, I would actually put money on the person who loves and accepts himself. It's probably going to build that business faster because they're not mentally holding themselves back and mentally self sabotaging all the time. And so you have to allow yourself to be a human being, all your flaws, everything, and just learn to accept yourself as you are. You don't have to achieve, you don't have to buy something, you don't have to make a certain amount of money, you don't have to put on makeup. Just accept yourself as you truly are. And one thing that I think that every single person should do that's listening to this podcast is try to rediscover yourself, your inner child, your true self as you truly are. What do you love to do? Like what's fun? What's something that you just absolutely enjoy that you haven't done in a while? And maybe you've been so caught up in having to be an adult and having to provide and having to pay the bills that you haven't done something that you've loved in years? What is that thing? What if you just started to become more of that child again and have more fun and accept yourself? There's nothing that you need to do, there's nothing that you need to prove to change, to be loved and to be accepted. And so what I'm trying to get you to really understand is the most important aspect of being kind to yourself, the most important aspect of self love is accepting yourself as you truly are. Understanding why we probably don't accept ourselves based off of childhood, based off of conditioning, based off of all of those things. And so think about this. Like when you think about your childhood, do you remember any memories from your childhood where you felt like maybe your parents retracted love in some sort of way because of something that you did? Maybe they like a lot of times I hear parents Or a lot of times I hear children say, well, yeah, like, I only got my father's love when I got an A. Or I only got my father's love when we won a basketball game. Okay, well, that's an example of love not being given so fully retracted until you achieve. So people would go, well, I need to achieve, achieve, achieve. Or do you remember if I acted a certain way, my mom would disconnect from me. She wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the day. And so I want you to kind of think about those. Those things that have happened to you in your past. Journal through them. Another thing that's really good to journal through is like, what aspects of myself have I been struggling to accept? Start writing them down. What aspects of myself I've been struggling to accept? And then what can I do to accept myself more for who I truly am? Like, what can I do to wake up and just start from a place of self acceptance? Yeah, you know, I do kind of have a short temper sometimes. Okay, I can accept that. And as I accept that, I can start to change it as well. And then ask yourself the question, what does my inner child want me to rediscover? How will I commit myself to taking the first step towards rediscovering who I truly am? And that's really what I want you to think about, is what would it look like for me to just rediscover my inner child, for me to rediscover who I truly am and then just go on this journey of just self acceptance? The more you accept yourself, the more that you're naturally going to find that, number one, your energy throughout the day is better, life's a little bit easier, and at the same time, self love just kind of feels more natural. Hey, if you loved this video and you want to watch the next one, YouTube thinks that you should watch this video right here. Next. So go ahead and click this to watch the next video. And if you want to subscribe so you don't miss any more videos, click this one right here.