Hi, it's Gabby here, and in today's episode I'm going to be talking about self-love. Self-love. That's a phrase that triggers a lots of people. So I'm gonna be talking about what is self-love and why is it important that you heal the relationship with yourself, and why is self-love so difficult for all of us?

If you're struggling with this concept, what can you. Okay, so I'm gonna start off by saying this is something that I've only recently learned, I would say in the last few years. Just how important it is to love and accept yourself. And I've come to realize that most people I meet don't even like themselves.

Nevermind love themselves. And before we can talk about healing or changing anything in our life, we need to come from a place of self accept. , and that means sometimes looking at the things that you've done in your life, maybe thinking about the mistakes that you've made and realizing you know what you are.

Okay. Okay. I'd like to invite you to think about self-love as maybe not being the self-indulgent, you know, introspective thing that you think it may be. And just think about it as being kind to yourself, treating yourself with the same love and respect as you would do to anybody. , especially somebody that you love, somebody that you can think of that is close to you, how do you treat them and do you treat yourself in the same way?

It's never too late really to change the relationship that you've got with yourself. and it is one of the most fundamental things that you can do for your health and happiness. And there's research that's been done quite recently about behaviors and attitude and what changes you could make to your life to improve things.

Okay? And they look to everything changing your diet, meditation, having a gratitude. Exercise, seeing friends and having a good community. All the things that I'm gonna talk about in further episodes, about being important to creating a, a healthy, uh, balanced lifestyle. But the most simple and the most profound impact on the quality of your day-to-day life is simply being kinder to see yourself.

Okay? It's the one we practice the. , and I know for many years that little nagging voice in my head, and we all have that little monkey mind or that little voice inside that picks us up or pauses up and tells us when we've done something wrong. Oh, you're stupid. Oh, you made that mistake again. Oh, you, oh, you always get that wrong.

And I've now learned to stop that little voice in its tracks. They still have it, still have those thoughts, but I, I refuse to listen to it anymore. Okay. because I understand now the importance of self-love and being positive and, and talking to myself in the same way that I would talk to a good friend.

If I had a good friend who was struggling with anything, I wouldn't say to them, well, you mess that up again. Oh, you always do that? You'd a bit stupid, aren't you? But we think nothing of thinking those things to ourselves. And why is that? Sometimes, if we think about it, it's self protect. We don't want to be arrogant, we don't want to be overbearing.

We don't want to be, um, the sort of person that other people don't want to be around. And why is that? So for me, as a little girl, I was conditioned, if you like, uh, from people. They did this with all good intentions, but I was told that little girls should be seen and not heard, I was told it's very important to be a good girl and to listen to other people and think about other people who know better.

So your elders, your teachers? For me, it was priests at the church. It was all these people that I was told were more important to me, that knew more than me and I should be quiet and listened to them. And that's fine when you're a small child and you do need to learn things. But when you grow up and you still have that subconscious belief that other people know better than you, it's time to look back in the eye and say, that's no longer serving.

Okay. And it goes back really if you believe in this thing, you know, generational, um, history. Some people say, if you think about, um, when we lived in caves and we lived at, you know, we hunt together as, as a community, it was really, really important for the community to love and protect you. And so you didn't want to be different.

You didn't want to be ostracized, certainly because that could lead to death if the rest of the village stopped talking to. You would be left alone, you wouldn't be fed, you wouldn't be protected. So it was really, really important and that sort of primal instinct that we have is that other people must like us, other people must include us, is sort of ingrained in our psyche without us even being aware of it.

And I know, I can remember it's. Quite a long time ago now, but as a teenage girl at school, that is a time when it really comes to the thought that if you are not in the in crowd, there's something wrong with you. And for me, you know, my family didn't have a lot of money. I didn't have the fashionable clothes, thank goodness it was before social media.

But it, even at those dimm and dark days back in the seventies, I knew that those things were important and those things made me different. And for a while I thought those things made me less than other people. And now looking back, I can think, well, it doesn't actually matter what you wear. It doesn't matter what car you've got.

But at the time, again, it was a subconscious message more than anything. Other people were better than me and I wasn't quite good enough. And when I went into the world of work, I left school and now I was 16. Uh, I didn't go into further education, but when I went into work, I worked really hard and I studied and I got promoted and I worked my way up to being a senior manager.

But I also very subconsciously, I think at the time, thought that the other people that I worked. Were better educated than me. Maybe they were more well-spoken, maybe they'd been to, you know, came from a better family. In other words, a, a richer family. And again, self-consciously, I had that message that I wasn't quite as good as them.

And so I overcompensated by. Working really hard by going the extra mile, by proving myself, by being the first one in the office, by being the last one to leave at night. And that's great. If you think about that from a positive point of view, yeah, it got me promoted, it got me the jobs that I wanted. It got me the big salary.

But what was it doing to my sense of self worth? Self-worth, my relationship with? That to me, looking back now was much, much more important than what other people think of me. And so I'd invite you to think about self-love and accepting yourself and the relationship that you have with yourself as being the most important thing you can do for a happy and healthy life.

And so one of the things I've learned, and I've learned this by studying other people, by reading lots of books, but what I've learned is what other people think of you. It's not your. and that took me a while to get my head around that. That's their business. Not everyone is gonna like you in life. I'm sorry to break this to you, but that's not a reason for you to try and please everyone, you know, you can't please all of the people all of the time.

You may have heard that saying, and why should he want to? . I want to please the people that I love and respect the people that, uh, around me, the people that support me, the people that are gonna help me. And so I can't be all things to all men and I don't really want to be. But if you just be yourself, if you can just find that confidence.

And I'm gonna talk more about confidence in future episodes. That confidence of knowing that you are good enough, and this is where it starts of realizing you are good enough, you are not perfect, nobody's perfect. You may have made some mistakes in your life, I'm sure you have. I've made plenty. That doesn't mean I'm gonna keep beating myself up about the mistakes that I've.

I can look at those mistakes now and think, okay, what can I do about that? Can't change the past, but I can learn the lesson. I can go forward and make sure I never do that thing again. I may decide that's something that I was such a painful lesson, which is where I am now. I wanna teach out to other people.

I wanna teach them that the consequences of not loving yourself are that you live a very, very small, insecure life, and is that really where you want to? because for me, I am all about helping people to live a happier and healthier life. And so many times it starts with loving yourself. My son, my eldest son, uh, suffered for many years with addiction and obviously that was a terrible, terrible time for our family and I'm very fortunate we've come out the other side of it now.

but for over 10 years, my son was lost in addiction. I'm not an expert in addiction, but I know what our family went through and I know why it started. It started from my son coming from a place. of not loving himself. I'm not thinking he was good enough. And to me, you know, as his mother, I look at this child that he was this teenager that he was thinking he had everything.

He was good looking. He was athletic. He was sporty. He was clever. He went to grammar school. He was sociable. He had lots of friends. He was funny. He's witty. . And yet to him somewhere in that deep place that we all have in insides, he felt not good enough. And that's really what started him on the path to addiction.

And I'm not gonna really unpack that today, but I, I would think about just any of this resonate with you. Are there areas of your life that you are not happy with? And I know for me, I've in the past lack motivation for things that I wanted to change about. And that sometimes came a place of thinking, oh, well, I'll be happy when I'll be happy when I lose 10 pounds.

I'll be happy when I paid that debt off. I'll be happy when I get that next promotion. And I'd invite you to think about the only thing we have at the moment is the here and now. So what can you do to be happy in the human now? And the most fundamental thing you can do is realize you are enough. You deserve to be.

The right people will love you. But it all starts with love in yourself. And if that feels like a stretch too far, maybe think about just being kind to yourself and accepting yourself because you are enough. Okay? And I'm gonna talk more about self-love. We're gonna come back to this because you my love.

You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be healthy. So let's start by just being a little bit kinder to ourselves. Thank you for. Have a great day. Speak soon. Stay safe. Stay san. Bye-bye.