Loving Yourself

Testing, testing. One, two, three, four. Testing. Okay, now it's saying that I'm live. I'll be able to measure whether or not the, when it says it's live, it's actually live, or is it live sooner, is it live later? Anyway, Hi, this is Steve Barnes. I'm here. I'm trying to keep up with this idea of kind of having my morning cup of tea with you. As I've said, you're getting me before I've completely awakened. So you're getting to see my brain as it's sort of trying to organize things. You see the whiteboard in the background where I'm taking notes either regarding work or business or my family. And hi, I'm going to put hi in the, in the comments here. Hi, make sure that that's live. And if there are any questions that you have for me that you'd like me to address, please let me know. You know, send them to me in direct messages or email or just right here in the comments and I will try to answer them either today or tomorrow. So today, you know, we're in the second, we're in the 90 day love feast leading up to the end of the year. And whereas the love feast is specifically about connecting with other people and placing your beloved above yourself, what I found out is that in order to do that, I had to take care of myself more deeply than I ever had so that my needy, wounded, abandoned child doesn't feel like, oh, you know, I gave to her and she's not giving back or it's not what I wanted it to be. Take care of yourself. And this is true, you know, once I looked into that and what, what it was that was necessary to do that, a lot of it boils down to self love. I mean, a tremendous amount of it does. If you love your kids, you'll do anything for them. So if you find that you would do more for your kids than you would for yourself or more for a helpless child in your care than you would for yourself, then that's a good way to determine that something has happened to you along the way. You were not told and supported for being precious. So you have a direct connection to what would make a gigantic change in your life. And that enables you to express more love for your significant other, which then strengthens that aspect of your life. And you have your, your primary pair. You know, if the mastermind idea is that you need to connect with one other person with whom you have total alignment in order to access a deeper form of creativity, the Two of you become like a supermind. But if you're pulling, if your dogs are pulling the sled in different directions, you can't get anywhere. So the idea being that first you internally align yourself, then you align with another person. And then if it requires more people to get your goal together, you know how to do it. You know how to create friends, you know how to create business associates. Because aligning within yourself, aligning with one other person is the core of this. So I made a statement today because I, I frequently come across people who are unhappy with life or unhappy with, with what's going on in the world and they feel depressed. And I said the following, which I say things in the morning without thinking them through. That way I get to kind of see what my instinctive feeling about things is before I've had a chance to edit myself. So this is what I wrote. I have a hard time believing that people with a negative view of humanity have a positive view of themselves. Oh, they may try to convince you that they do, but watch their actions. Do they treat themselves as precious, care for their bodies, have deep loving relationships, do something they love for a living? Isn't that what we'd want for our beloved children? And if we don't have those things for ourselves, are we doing whatever it takes to make it happen within the three gates? The three gates are your safety rails. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? So as long as you're following that, then you can proceed knowing that you're operating within a perfectly workable set of ethics. Frankly, this is what I see people doing when they really love themselves. They, they, they thrive or they make their real effort to thrive. And since other human beings are just variations on what we are, nobody's all that different. This connects us to our sense of what the world is. We start seeing ourselves and other people. So if we forgive ourselves for our flaws, it's easier for us to forgive others. If we understand why we did non optimal and negative thoughts things, it's easier to understand others. And if we changed our own behavior productively, we become a role model for others. This is kind of the core of what I wanted to say today. But that leads to a very natural question, which is how do we love ourselves more? Well, the most important things within the five within the fire dance community are taking five 60 second breaks during the day. The ideal situation is every hour on the hour you breathe, do 60 seconds of deep diaphragmatic breathing. You do this at least five times a day. Once you've Got that integrated. How about doing that breathing while feeling your heartbeat, A version of heartbeat meditation. How about doing your breathing while you visualize the ancient child, that little child inside you that you are committed to protecting, that if you have not taken care of that child, that child is likely to be very unhappy. And if you have not allowed the child to express herself, express himself, yeah, that's unhappiness is there. But the other danger is that you let the child have too much freedom, that you don't make the child do her homework, in which case that child will not graduate, that child will not be able to get the good job. That is something that they enjoy doing because they've had the discipline to learn how to do things that people will pay well for, that you also enjoy. So, you know, if you don't do your taxes, you don't, you don't balance your checkbook, things like that, take care of the adult part of you, the child part of you does not get to thrive. If you turn that stuff over the child, then you're going to live a life of resentment and you'll never understand how things went wrong. So that's a really, really good way to do that, to use your 5 Minute Miracle, you know, every hour on the hour, take 60 seconds of deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing. Feel your heartbeat, visualize your ancient child, or feel your ancient child, or visualize your goals, the things that you are committed to in life. That having the healthy body, the healthy career, the healthy relationship, moving in that direction, feeling joy. There is a prayer, not a prayer, but a salute toast that I talked about yesterday. It's Mexican, that toast being health, love and money and the time to enjoy them. That's a beautiful sentiment. I mean, it really is. And if you think that you're worth those three things or four things, because the time to enjoy them as well, that is not a bad place to start. I really kind of like the idea. So if you told the child inside you that you're prepared to do whatever it takes to make her happy and safe and loved and successful, safe. And then every week you just try to find, you know, don't try do it. You commit to improving 1% per week, just finding one little thing you can change. And one of the things you can do is to join us on Saturday. The Zoom meetings that we have at noon Pacific on Saturday, the fire dance. It's absolutely free. You are welcome. We discuss these things, we workshop these things. We have a great group and you can find a lot of support as well as finding people to support. That's the path of mastery. You're always learning, you're always doing, you're always teaching. And in this sense, teaching can be supporting other people. So it's the fastest ways to get out of your own sense of poor little me is to find a way to help somebody else in a way that you need to be helped so that you have, you have to master it in order to exemplify it, in order to model it. Let me take a quick look and see if we have any questions. If we don't, I am going to get into my day because I have so much to do today. I have so many things to do today. Let's take a look. Oh, Jaime Rodriguez says good morning. Good morning, Jaime. So that's kind of what I wanted to see today, to say today. I, I will say one other thing that Jason, when Jason asked me the question about is there any way that he can predict the results of his friends? And I said, look at the magic formula. You know, map or model times action times gratitude, positive emotions times intention, goals times conviction, which is a belief system that you can and should do a particular thing equals luck. That the higher your scores in all of those, as long as you don't have it, if you have a zero in any one of those, you're screwed. You're. You're out of the. You're out of the game. But if you have at least one, you're in the game. Oh, Carl Blackstone said. Greetings. Look forward to the Mace Windu novel. So do I. That's what I have to work on later on today. So this is just a brief thing. I like to make contact with people. But then I'm going to be diving into that book. It's. It's exciting. You know, I keep myself just a little bit afraid of that. As Patrick Moreno says, the Apple Watch has a feature that reminds you to get up and walk around once an hour for 12 hours per day. It can also be set to do mindfulness breaks. Fantastic. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Exactly what I'm talking about. You find some way to remind yourself. Once every hour, you get 60 seconds to yourself. And during that period of time, you can connect with love. You can visualize your goals. Most people don't think about their goals more than once a year. You know, if that. Think about what would happen if you thought about your goals every month, every week, every day. What happens if you think about them five times a day? Now, that may put Some stress on you unless you add the following thing. You know, I want to do X and have fun in the process. As soon as you add that, your brain starts to look. Starts asking different questions. Have fun in the process. So I promised that I was going to look. Yeah, I've been adding this question to my morning ritual. Jaime Rodriguez says, what can I do today to move forward in some area of my life? Absolutely. So I want you to be more specific. You move forward with my physical health, move forward with my career, move forward with my relationships and self love. Those are the three major things. And whether, you know, there are other goals that are sort of interference patterns between those three. But I want to make sure that you're taking care of those three, because your demons will hide in the room whose door you don't open. So if you are caring for all three of those things, you're going to have to dig deep and you're eventually going to have to deal with the hidden stuff. You know, why don't you take care of your body? Why don't you, you work on your relationship? Why don't you have a more happier career or be happier at your job? You know, whatever it is, why aren't you grateful for it? Gratitude is an antidote for fear and resentment and anxiety. So if you're going to spend your time at a job and it can't be the job you love, you know, if you can't be the one you, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. If you can't have the job you love and you have to do it, find a way to love it. Because this is your life. Why in the world would you go through a single day of your life without loving it? That day is gone forever. So what I, what I'm doing is I'm playing around. This is a slightly different subject, except it's all connected with, you know, what model might help me create for my son a pattern where he just does these things every day, does these things every week, does these things every month, and he's kind of doomed to succeed. Okay, Just, just, we're, we're maximizing his chances of doing it. And I think that we can, that I can make. I can come up with it. I don't think I'm there yet because, frankly, I don't understand Internet marketing as well as I do writing. So I could create a pattern like that for writing. And it works close to perfectly, but I haven't been able to see. Yeah, Carl said, I'm currently working on career changes. My friends keep saying, you're so brave. And to me it's just survival. I understand that you're using pain to motivate yourself and that works. The only difficulty with that is that when you use pain to motivate you, you will start to grow and you will perform better. And then as soon as you have relieved the pain, your motivation decreases. So it's like stretching. Rubber band. I don't, I wish I had a rubber band right here. I don't see a rubber band. An office as messy as mine, and I don't have rubber band. Impossible. There's got to be one somewhere. So if you, if you have a negative pattern, which is usually a matter of you see yourself as a particular type of person, the doctor says you must lose £100. You start to lose that weight because you have the motivation of death. As soon as you have lost enough that your doctor, your doctor is off your back, however, you'll snap right back to your prior behavior. Which is why, one of the reasons why, the emotional reason why dieting doesn't work, you know, because you haven't changed your self image, you are moving away from fear. The trick is if you connected the new behavior to something you love, like your self image, like wanting to accomplish something in the external world that brings you joy, then the more of the new behavior you do, the happier you get. So instead of moving away from pain until it stops hurting, at which point you lose your discipline, snap back. You're moving towards something you love, enjoying the process, and the more of it you do, the happier you get. And that becomes a reinforcing pattern, a self reinforcing pattern. So I just wanted to say, really? Really. Jaime Rodriguez says OG Mandino is the greatest salesman in the world. Says it's all about marketing and sales to a huge degree. Because marketing and sales is nothing more than seeing what value you have, finding people who need your value, communicating that value to them. If you can't find those people, look more deeply. If you think you don't have something to value, put a thousand hours into proving yourself. I mean, this stuff is simple. And if you don't do those things, then you are lacking that core love in yourself. You know that core confidence in yourself. And you know that that's where you can go to work. It's like, okay, I can't get to this. I can't get to B, because A, that sense of self love is not enough. So if you start with the five minute Miracle, the five breathing breaks and you can do it, then you can piggyback other things on top of those five minutes. And if you can't do it, you have identified a very specific arena in which you can get a tremendous amount of benefit in exchange for a small investment of time. And you can perform experiments that allow you to test it. Is this Steve guy crazy? You know, what is he talking about? He's saying that there's a path to awakeness, to enlightenment, as it were, that starts with just five minutes a day. That has to be crap. Try it. Get out of your head. Try it. If you haven't tried it, you don't know. You don't know. So at any rate, very, very briefly, looking at the question of marketing, because that's central to Jason, I believe that the ability to make a living is essential for adults. And I would think that an awake, aware adult human being could appropriately have a goal. I was slapped down a little bit to say that this is what they should, should have. But I think that it would be reasonable that a goal such a person could have would be to be able to support themselves and two other people that person is not going to have is going to have a much easier time attracting a partner or maintaining stability in their lives or surviving an emergency. So let's take a look at the magic formula and apply it to marketing the best way I can right now. And I'll expand on this later. M is for map or model. And in this particular case I'm thinking circular viralosity, which is Brendan Burchard's approach to Internet marketing. Good stuff. Where basically you go through social media, you drive people to a mailing list, you communicate with them there, and once a week you do a show or a larger piece of media that's very carefully thought through, that serves them and also introduces what your product or service to them and it gives them an opportunity to get closer to you by buying that service or product every day. So the A is for action. That means daily action. What are you doing every day? So every day I can have Jason post one link to his mailing list and then every week I can have him do a show on YouTube or Instagram or whatever where he can communicates with people, offers them value and then offers them an opportunity to invest in his product. And maybe every month a special deal. I don't know, I'm still working through this stuff. The G is for gratitude. M A G is for gratitude, that's managing his emotions, primarily fear. So I would like for him to, let's say five times a day during his breathing breaks. If I can get him to start doing that, I'm going to move him in that direction. Actually, I'm going to write this down right now. Five times. I think that could work. He makes sure that his emotions are in the right place. He's managing his emotions. He's keeping. He's keeping himself on track. Clear intention. Let's say his goal is to do 100 of those weekly shows that be about two years. So his goal is to stay on track for the 100 repetitions with 1% improvement weekly, learning more about how to get people in, how to communicate to them, how to improve his product, how to commute, how to improve the way he describes his product, etc. And then number five, confidence that he can and should do this. You know, nobody can guarantee you success. So the best thing to do is to have fun while you're doing it and to serve people while you're doing, you're doing it. We've got his survival taken care of. So if he learns how to have fun and communicating value to people and helping people, then he is automatically having a good time himself, regardless of whether he makes any money. Not only that, but because doing this process demands high level of executive function, he's learning the tools that he needs to do that as well. So this is kind of what I'm experimenting with. His way, me, my way of loving my son, his way of loving himself. Let's see. Good, entertaining. You. All right. All right. So as Patrick Marino says, an interesting thing, Internet marketing is easy. People try to make it far more complicated than it needs to be. Just create good, entertaining, useful content, then link it back to your own site. If only knew about creating good content or being entertaining or useful, you might have a chance. So there are some ways that that is true. I think that there is. That's kind of the flow of things, but understanding how those pieces work together and the audibles, you know, keeping track of the statistics, price points and you know, how to set up the machines to, to sell and so forth, so on. There's a lot of stuff in there, but the basic thing that, as Patrick said, is pretty accurate. All right, so take care. If you are enjoying this, just sign up for my mailing list@www.stephenbarnslist.com and I will see you on Saturday at Fire Dance. Take care.