Why Self-Love is Harder Than Ever in 2025 (And How to Fix It)

Welcome back to the podcast. This is ama7 01. What if I told you that in 2025, getting what you want, becoming the person you know you can become, has nothing to do with you grinding and suffering and hustling and reading all the books? What if it has nothing to do with that and everything to do with loving yourself? We're talking about this one thing, how to make self love practical and real so that you can become the person you know you're destined to be right here, right now. I on wellness and wisdom. Hey, it's Josh Trent. If you're joining us for the first time on the podcast, welcome. This is a place where we give you a different lens to see life through. We help you see life through a different lens. It's called the Wellness Pentagon. It's on the screen right now. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and financial self. It's the nourishment of these five sides of you that actually allow you to step into the fullness of who you are. It seems simple, but simple is not always easy. And on these AMAs, every single Friday we release a question from the audience. A topic that was discussed on YouTube, a post from Instagram, something from our global community around liberation. Now, what is liberation? I believe that liberation is the courage and the capacity to say no to anything or anyone that does not align with with our soul show. Notes from this AMA today are@joshtran.com 701 as well as deeper discussions in the Liberated life tribe@liberatedlife.com make sure you go and sign up for early access when we go live in 2025. Now the question from the audience today is real special. This is a question from Matthew. Matthew says, hey, Josh, I love the podcast and I've been doing everything I possibly can to grow my Wellness Pentagon. But I keep hitting up against this roadblock when it comes to loving myself and believing in myself. There's a long line of depression and emotional health issues in my family and I just want to escape the cycles of it all once and for all. How and where do I begin? What a great question. What a vulnerable question. If you listen to the AMA699 that we did, and if you haven't, make sure you do. It's on the screen right now. It's in the show notes. Wherever you're watching or listening, just tap open your playlist player, your browser, it's right there. Joshtrend.com 699. We talked about the number one mindset shift that you must have in 2025 around your beliefs and your barometer. And we touched on this, and I'm so happy that Matthew, you asked this question today because it is the deepest work we'll ever do. It is the most potent work we'll ever do to love ourselves. But how do we actually do it? Self love is looked at as selfishness, especially from previous generations, where, let's be honest, they didn't have the affluence, the time affluence, the financial affluence that we are afforded with, where we can actually dive in to know ourselves. It's pretty amazing. I mean, we're so blessed, we're so incredibly blessed to be able to even practice self love. It's something our ancestors didn't necessarily all ever get to do because they were just stuck in survival. Yet here's the paradox in 2025, self love isn't selfish. It's about transcending survival and it's the ultimate power move. Let me ask you this. Do you feel guilty when you put yourself first? When you fill your own cup, do you have feelings of guilt or shame or a narrative in your mind that says, I shouldn't put myself first, I should be taking care of everything and everyone else before I put myself first? Well, what if I told you that all successful people prioritize putting themselves first and they do it without shame, guilt or blame? Well, in 2025, we're going to unpack why this is so important to put yourself first and also why the world in 2025 will demand more from you than ever before. And if you don't fill your own cup, you'll have nothing left to give. So first, let's define self love. Self love is the capacity, the awareness and the consciousness to take care of yourself, nourish yourself so that you can do that same thing for others. That's essentially what I believe self love is. It's the consciousness, capacity and awareness to care for you in all the different ways of the Pentagon so that you can then give that gift of caring and loving to others. That's what self love is. Self love is not just bubble baths and candles, right? Self love is about boundaries. It's about self respect. It's about doing the inner work so you can actually break the stigma that's been around for so long. This self love has been labeled as this narcissistic or indulgent thing. But true self love is actually the foundation for authentic relationships, career, success and mental health. Here's why. There are three key pillars for self love. The first is self awareness, knowing what you need and what you value. The second is self respect, knowing boundaries and saying no to people that encroach upon your boundaries without any guilt. And the third pillar of self love is self compassion. Being kind to yourself, caring for yourself, even when you fall short. So let's break down self awareness. Self awareness is the practice of being still enough, being quiet enough to be aware of your behaviors, your thoughts and your actions. If you don't have stillness, if you don't have quiet, if you don't have a connection to God or the spiritual side of the wellness pentagon that is on the screen right now, then it's going to be impossible to know what you need and know what you value. Really, it truly will be. If you don't know who you are, then anybody else can tell you who you are. If you don't know who you are, then anybody else can plug you into the cog and wheel of their dream. But when you know who you are, when you practice self awareness. Pillar one. This is pillar one of the three pillars of self love for 2025. Then you know exactly what you need to love yourself. You know exactly what you value, so you can hold those values with sacred boundaries. Boundaries are big. We talked about this in the episode linked right here on the screen. And below in your show notes with Mark Groves. He talked about boundaries being this buffer where inside of the boundaries holds your soul and your love for you. But when we allow our boundaries because of a lack of self awareness or because of a lack of self trust to be encroached upon, or when we allow our boundaries to be flattened, what happens is we go through a soul retrieval process. The soul gets lost, the soul gets dampened, the soul gets depressed. So we have to actually go in and retrieve our soul, cultivate the courage with our soul, and then re establish the boundaries to know what we need and know what we value. This leads into pillar number two of self love, and that is self respect. Self respect is setting boundaries and saying no to people and places and things without guilt. But a lot of times, because of our societal conditioning, we have been told that especially in the Italian culture, the Italian grandmother guilt, which is very famous, we have been told and programmed by our parents in society that if you say no to someone, if you don't clean your plate, if you don't sacrifice yourself for your family, if you don't go through all this hardship, and then you're not worthy, but the reality is, is that you're worthy because of the boundaries you're worthy because of the self respect. It's in the promises that we keep to ourselves that we develop confidence and self respect. Let me say that again. It's all the little things. When you tell yourself a promise that you're going to eat well, that you're going to move well, that you're going to think well, that you're going to practice financial health well, and those don't happen on the regular, how can you possibly trust yourself? See, it's in self respect that trust is formed. It's in self respect that boundaries are upheld. And so in 2025, pillar number two, if you're going to respect yourself, then you have to set the boundaries and enforce those boundaries and work through the Hawkins Ladder of shame and guilt and anger and sadness. As you go about enforcing the boundary, enforcement may actually be the wrong word. A better word for putting up boundaries is just the structuring of your boundaries. Right? If you don't like the word force, that's why I changed the podcast from Wellness Force to Wellness and Wisdom. I don't really like the etymology or the energy of the word force. So if you place the boundaries, if you uphold the boundaries, then when someone starts to encroach upon your boundaries or your pillar number two for self respect, you can just simply hold up your hand and say no. You can hold up your hand and say no because you say so. Because you're doing the work of respecting and trusting yourself to be at peace. When someone encroaches your boundary, you can just simply hold your hand up and say no. Now this leads to the third pillar of self love in 2025, and that is self compassion, being kind, being compassionate to yourself when. When you potentially fail. Actually, fail is the wrong word when you have a learning lesson. You see how I'm checking my language? We talk about language and NLP in the Liberated Life Tribe@liberatedlife.com because language is the prayer, it is the mantra, it is the messaging that all of us are hearing consciously and unconsciously throughout the entire day. So when I'm kind to myself, that means when I develop the courage and the strength to uphold the boundary. A key example would be like a mother or a father telling you at 35 years old how you should live your life. And instead of you saying, I love you, I appreciate your concern, but here's my boundary. These are the choices that I'm making. And to be honest, I don't need your grace or permission to uphold my boundaries. A lot of times we can have a learning lesson where we haven't developed the courage to uphold that boundary through spoken word or through energy. And so we may kowtow, we may allow people to walk on our boundaries. This is where the third phase of self love for 2025 is so important because it is through this self compassion, being kind to ourselves. When we're learning how to cultivate the courage to uphold a boundary, this is where the shame dragon can spiral us down and we start feeling bad about feeling bad about feeling bad about not upholding the boundary. It's a trap. It's a fucking trap. Do not fall into the trap of lack of self compassion, lack of self kindness, because it is in that space where the protector of judgment is going to come in and try to beat you down. So in recap, the three pillars that we all get to focus on for self love in 2025, self awareness, self respect, self compassion. These three things, you can practice these in the tribe, you can practice them in any community. You don't have to be in our tribe. But the reason I've constructed, the reason I've brought forth this tribe is because something that I need. I'm on the journey with you. I don't have this all perfectly mastered, right? I'm 44 years old, about to be 45 this year. I am still in the practice of mastery of self love, self awareness, self respect, self self compassion. So before we get into the tactical practice of these things, I want to set a tone. Think of this as a keynote. I want to set a tone to what's actually happening in the world right now. It's a time of constant comparison on social media. I know you feel this, like rising expectations, the rapid global change. Self love can be your anchor. It can be your signal of your own heart above the noise and the static of the world. If you don't have an anchor of self love, social media and judgment and society and calendars and responsibilities can come in with so much static, so much noise that you can't even hear your own signal. This is where burnout and broken relationships and feeling lost or stuck really comes in. See, when you don't prioritize yourself, the world decides your value, the world decides your worth, and it's never enough. This is why all the clothing companies and the makeup companies and Hollywood can penetrate and use dark energy to get into your mind and establish with Tico to prove to you by their beauty, by their glamour that you're not enough. You become completely unfuck withable. You become un monetizable you become so strong by doing these practices. We're about to go through that society's manipulation, modernity's hooks can't get into your psyche. They'll try, but you've become so strong that they won't be able to penetrate. Let's go into the actionable framework for 2025 that you can actually practice on a daily basis to become the best version of you. The first one is having a morning ritual. It's a self affirmation. It is a mantra. And the mantra I'd love for you to say is put your hands on your heart and say, I am worthy of the love I give to others. I am worthy of the love I give to others. Say it over and over and over again until you believe it. I am worthy of the love I give to others. Because in that mantra you're reinforcing on an unconscious basis that you're worthy of giving it to yourself. You can't give anything to anyone else that you don't hold right. You can't give wisdom to someone else that you haven't earned. You may be able to like regurgitate it, but people are going to feel in their esoteric nervous system and in their enteric nervous system and in their unconscious nervous system and their automatic nervous system that it's just not true. In other words, we can tell when somebody hasn't embodied something that they're sharing. So even if it's wisdom given from a messenger, the wisdom won't land. The wisdom won't hit and be embodied unless the person themselves has done the work to embody it. Second practice. I want you to say no for one week. Say no for one week. Say no to anything or anyone for one week. That drains your energy. Energy vampires can be acknowledged by just doing this simple practice. When you hang out with someone or when you consume content or when you do anything at all, does it drain your energy? Do you have less energy when you're done or do you have more? Say no for one week. Just one week. Give it a practice. Say no for one week to anything or anyone that drains your soul. That takes away your energy. Watch how this transforms your mindset. Number three, Tactical schedule time for you. Put yourself on your calendar. I have a color coded calendar where I have business and family and self and in studio and remote. I really like color coding. This is a great strategy for you to do this. So put yourself on the calendar. Like a meeting. You can't cancel. Don't cancel on yourself. Use this time to charge yourself. Maybe it's cold plunge. Maybe it's sauna, maybe it's walking. It's typically going to be. I'll share with you. It's typically going to be a physical practice. A lot of our world is sedentary and so nourish yourself with time on your calendar that's color coded so you can actually practice feeding you, feeding your body, feeding your heart and soul. Number four detox from comparison in 2025. I unfollow any accounts that make you feel less than that make you feel like shit. There's no reason why you need to be following people or consuming content. Curate your digital space for inspiration, not insecurity. Have the awareness to know when something's making you feel insecure, that you don't actually have to feed yourself with it. Just because you feel insecure about something does not mean you have to keep banging your head against it till you feel secure. Security is an inside job, not an outside job. And number five in the tactical ways we can practice these skill sets Celebrate small Wins this is a big one for me. I've been so focused in my life on going to the next thing, going to the next thing that I have lost track of celebrating my small wins. So for myself and everyone, keep a journal. Like write in a journal where you're doing one thing that nourished you that day, one thing that you're proud of. Celebrate it. It's not selfish. It's about transcending survival. Self love is not about being selfish. Self love is about transcending this vibrational stuckness where we get caught in merely survival. I hope this has been really helpful. The last thing I want to address is the resistance. I've mentioned it before. The resistance will come. You might be thinking, I don't have time for this. If you don't make time for this now, you'll be forced to do it later by burnout, by getting emotionally beat, or even by illness or severe unhappiness, depression or anxiety. So anticipate this pushback. Know that resistance is coming because the resistance is there as a guardian of your growth. I talked about this a few weeks ago on an AMA that I believe Guardians actually are there to protect your growth and because they want you to earn it. They want you to know what it's like through experiential wisdom, through experiential learning, what it's like to actually do the work and earn the growth. Growth isn't something that happens on its own. When you feed a plant and you water a plant and the sun nourishes a plant. There's growth in that plant just like there is in you and I. But if we're not guarded by the guardians of growth and the growth isn't held by those guardians, but then we'll never develop the strength, the courage and the capacity to be free to be liberated. Because we can't get growth in a five step PDF. You can't get growth by just consuming one piece of content. But you can start. That's what today's AMA. That's what this podcast is all about. In 2025. If you are really going to do and be and have self love, these are the ways in which you can start. It's this starting place that honesty is born. It's this starting place where you can really take action. So here is your call to action. Take action. Take Inspired action in 2025. Do not let self love just be a check mark on your calendar. We went over so many beautiful strategies today that are both spiritual and practical. From my heart to yours. This is your year. Believe it. Believe it even with your eyes closed. And if you believe it enough with your eyes closed, when you open your eyes, it'll be real. This is the work that I'm wishing for you and all of us is to believe it with our eyes open and believe it with our eyes closed. Just the same. I hope this is helpful. If it was, please subscribe and comment and share this with somebody who's on a journey of self love. This is both spiritual and scientific. We're a beast and we're a spirit. We must pay attention to both if we are to be liberated in 2025 and beyond. Until I see you on another AMA, please send your questions to joshtrent.com ama They're 90 seconds or less if you want to speak your word into the microphone. If you want to send a question for the AMA, it's podcastellnessandwisdom.com until I see you again on the next video, I'm wishing you love, wellness, peace and power. We'll talk with you soon.