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It Is Time to Be Nice

There is no other relationship that affects your wellness more than the relationship you have with yourself. If you don’t like yourself, you’re less likely to feed yourself food that is helpful for your body. If you don’t value yourself, you’re less likely to carve out time to do the things that bring you joy. If you don’t think you’re worthy, you won’t make time for the healing sleep that you so need. If you put everyone else’s needs in front of your own, you won’t make time to move your body and exercise.

Have you heard of the importance of liking yourself before? Maybe a therapist has pointed out how you might benefit from working on your negative inner voice. Maybe a coach has suggested you work on your inner critic. Maybe a friend has commented on how mean you are to yourself. Or maybe you’ve started to notice it yourself. Maybe you’ve started to do some of this mindful work and noticed: “wow, I say some really mean things to myself”, or “wow, I have really negative views about my body or my actions”. 

Why not work a bit on your relationship with yourself? Chances are, you’ve worked on your relationship with other people in your life: your spouse, your kids, your parents…..Why not pour some of that attention on yourself and your relationship with yourself? I promise you that the work you do will exponentially affect your life for the better. The more of a friend you are to yourself, the better care you’ll take of yourself, the better you’ll feel, the more confident you’ll be. #selflove #innercritic Click To Tweet The more you know about yourself, your patterns, your triggers, and the way you show up in this world, the better you’ll be able to craft a life you love. Knowledge truly is power dear warrior.

How to start?

In other podcasts I’ve given you lists, steps, suggestions, and options of things to choose between. Today I’m giving you two things to do. Just two things. The kicker is that I’m asking you to actually do them. Please.

I’m giving you two areas to begin with today and I 100% promise you that if you do these two things, you will notice some shifts.

• A shift in your energy.
• A shift in how you care for yourself.
• A shift in your stress level.
• A shift in your overwhelm.
• A shift in the quality of your relationships. 
• A shift in how you care for yourself.

Am I going to ask you to meditate for 900 minutes a day and eat only kale? Nope. These two things are much easier than that. These two things aren’t monumental things. In fact, they’re not even complicated things. They’re quite simple. Yet simple does not mean easy. If making changes in our inner programming were easy, we’d all be walking around doing the things we know we should be doing. It has taken that many years to embed some of your thought patterns. While you can’t erase those overnight, you can make massive strides with small daily shifts. I am always amazed at the power of our mind. Let’s go!

Thing One: Get Conscious: How Bad Is It? 

Just how bad is your relationship with yourself? What do you tell yourself? What is that voice saying in your head? Is it mostly nice or, more commonly, unbelievably cruel? 

We have 60 to 80 thousand thought a day. Thoughts are just sentences in our head. They are not necessarily true. Thoughts are things we tell ourselves. Where do these sentences come from? Mostly our past. Our thoughts can be the voices of our parents, our teachers, our siblings, our friends, or our colleagues. It’s important to acknowledge two things: (1) Thoughts are not necessarily true and (2) we get to choose which thoughts to focus on.

The thoughts we focus on create the way we feel. The way we feel drives the actions we take in our lives. The actions we take produce the results we see. As we foster a close relationship with ourself, it’s important to become very aware of that voice in our head. What is it telling us? What is it saying? How do we feel when we think those thoughts?

Experts say that about 96% of what we do during the day is unconscious. Unconsious! Think of this step like you shining a flashlight inside your head. You want to become conscious to what you’re routinely telling yourself. Begin paying attention to what thoughts you’re thinking and getting curious: It that thought true? How do you feel when you think that thought? How would you act if you didn’t think that thought? It’s time to call yourself out on your BS. Would you talk to someone else the way you talk to yourself? Who’s voices are in your head? Who are you allowing to drive your day? Are you allowing your critical mother to occupy a lot of your mental space? Or are you still allowing that deranged ex-boyfriend to drag you down into self-doubt and loathing?

Thing Two: Take Charge: Build You Mental Muscle

Start to take back control of your mind. Up until now, most of your thinking has been automatic and based on old programming. Your role now is to notice (step one) and take charge (step two). How do you want to think of yourself? What do you want to feel most days? If you want to feel differently, you must think differently. This is that step. Instead of coasting along and thinking whatever thought your pre-hisotric brain puts in your consciousness, choose. In fact, notice what it wants to think and choose differently. Begin to shift it subtly. 

I like to think of our self talk on a continuum with -10 being on one end and +10 on the other. Using this scale, where are you when you think of different areas of your life?

• How you speak of your body and your weight?
• How you speak of your parenting?
• How you speak to yourself about the work you’re doing?
• How you speak to yourself about how you show up in your romantic relationship?

Seriously, rank yourself. Why? Then we can start to shift. It’s not reasonable to think that you’ll go from a -10 to a +10. I’d like you to work on going from a -10 to a -7. 

Example One:

How do you think of your body and your weight? What do you tell yourself? Which thoughts are you routinely thinking? If you’re at a place where you often think “I hate my body” or “I am so gross”, I’d rank those at -8 on the thought scale. My goal for you for the month would not be to get you to +9 of “I love my body, I’m so amazing”. Ideally, sure, yet there are neurological reasons why making that extreme a shift doesn’t elicit success. If it’s not believable to you, you actually would come up with reasons to fight against it and thus, you wouldn’t be able to take the necessary thought shifts to get there. Rather, my goal would be to get you to a neutral thought of “I have a body” or a +1 of “My body is functional”. 

Example Two:

What do you think of yourself as a parent? Do you notice your thoughts are really negative around your parenting and mothering? If you tell yourself you stink as a mom and have no patience, I’d rank those at about a -6. Sure it would be nice to shift to thinking a +6 thought that you’re a great parent yet  again, that’s too large of a shift. This step is all about choosing a thought that is a bit better than the one you’re currently thinking. It will lead you into a bit better of a relationship with yourself. 

Small Hinges Move Big Doors.

Use that mental muscle. If I sat around thinking about all the things I’ve done wrong in my life as a parent, as a wife, as a person, I’m not going to feel too happy about myself. Yet, that’s what so many of us do. We act as if we have no control over how we’re feeling when we have all the control warriors! It all lies in these two things. Thing one: use our human power (homo sapiens sapiens) to think about what we think about and then thing two: start to consciously shift the thoughts we routinely think. I get so excited by this because once you start this process, the change is swift. 

Enough Already: Be Nice!

As I said at the beginning,  I promise you that if you do this, you will notice a shift. These won’t seem like monumental things. The beauty is, they aren’t. They are things we all can do. Any income level. Any amount of time. Any amount of stress. It doesn’t matter how many kids you have. It doesn’t matter how heavy your work load is. It doesn’t matter how overweight you think you are. It doesn’t matter who your mother is or your past history. You can do these two things. The question is: Will You? I hope so.

The changes happen quicker if you have someone to help you and I’d love to be that someone for you. If you’re reading this in real time, my most popular program begins September 15th. Sign up now because I will close it when I enrollment is full. This program helps women see where their thoughts are holding them back, where their thoughts are causing them pain in their lives, and best news? It helps women feel better in their every day lives. I have walked many women through these two things and I would love to help you. Find out more here: www.SMBwell.com/bestself This is much less expensive than one-on-one coaching and yet provides amazing results for each and every person. I guarantee it or your money back. 100%. Come join the excitement. Your best self is waiting.