Ep. 128 – Loving Yourself: Embracing the Past, Present, and Future

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Hello everybody out there. You know they always tell you in case of emergencies, put your mask on 1st and then you’ll be able to help someone else. Well, today we’re going to be discussing loving yourself before you can truly love and help another person. So if you’re ready, let’s get started.

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Episode 128.

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Are you ready to create a life that’s better than ever before? We are Doreen Yaffa and Jeff Wilson, and we are here to give you the strategy you need to create the life after divorce that you deserve and desire as partners, both in marriage and coaching, we use our expertise.

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As well as our own.

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Personal experiences to help you make the next chapter of your life the best chapter.

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Yeah, looking awfully nice today.

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Thank you so to you. So today we’re going to talk about self love. So that’s really hard sometimes after divorce.

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Well, I mean.

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I think that I think that a lot of our listeners, well, at least my clients out there have beat them, beat themselves up, you know.

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Well, that’s why we’re doing the subject. That’s why we’re talking about it.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, really hard on themselves and I like to always say.

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Speaker 2
You know, think about when you think about how you treat yourself and how you think about yourself and how you love yourself.

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If you would talk.

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To your best friend that way because you are.

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Your best friend, right?

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Well, that reminds me. We, you know, did episode 20 on being your best friend of yourself, and we’ve talked about this subject, you know a few times because it is so important to the to healing process, especially after divorce.

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But you know we.

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All need reminders and the and how important.

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Self love really is. But first let’s talk about what self love is and what self love isn’t. You know, a lot of people think self love might be in the romantic term of it all and it’s it has nothing to do with romance. It has more to do with showing yourself respect, showing yourself love.

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Showing yourself a commitment to yourself.

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Yeah, but there.

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You know there’s.

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Nothing wrong with flirting with yourself in.

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The mirror.

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Is that kind?

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Of weird. What do you think it takes me so long in the mirror, in the bathroom sometimes.

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Now listen, there was there’s a an author by the name of Mel Robbins. I’m sure a lot of our listeners and she talks about about that giving yourself a high five and things like that. I read her one of her books but.

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I think you should always give yourself a little link in the mirror, right? Just a little flirtatious thing that you do with yourself. Let yourself know that you’re being seen and that you care. It’s kind of weird when you it’s kind of weird when you look at yourself in the mirror. No, but when you look into your eyes like oh.

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Yeah. And then I got you. I got you. I got your back.

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Right.

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Well, and and then.

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You can also talk to yourself and I I have.

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Your back, you know.

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No matter what happens to us, no matter happens at all. I have your back. I got you covered. And it’s important to know that.

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Yeah, for sure.

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Sure. So let’s keep diving in. So your relationship with yourself has three main parts. There’s the relationship with you in the past. There’s your relationship with you in the present. And then there’s a relationship with your future self, right?

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Yes, yes. And all of these relationships take on different forms of action and communication and thoughts. I like to think of them in kind of a three separate categories. So when you go to evaluate yourself, love with yourself.

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Self your relationship with yourself. You can see the kind of kind of how you’re doing with each. It’s important that they all kind of go together, but it’s important that you evaluate each of them separately.

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And I think it’s really important that when you are healing from divorce, recovering from divorce, getting past your divorce.

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That you know, you take a little time and do this self love exercise. How many times do we just go through life? Our day, our divorce, whatever it is.

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We don’t take the time to really.

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Care about ourselves, right?

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Yeah. And it’s not just taking the time, but I know we take a lot of time being critical.

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Of ourselves. Yeah, but I want to go back to the taking the time one of the.

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Reasons I’m not.

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In the best mood this week, I.

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Haven’t been giving myself no self love.

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Really. Because my self love for me is time in the gym. I go to the gym.

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OK.

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Time doing yoga. I’ve been not giving myself myself love. Right? So I need to probably listen to what you’re going to teach us today about this.

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OK, well, all ears. So let’s start with your relationship with your past self because your past self includes your childhood, your past and your teenage years. It could be in your 20s, your 30s depending on of course how old you are, you’re 40s, you’re 50.

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Me, of course. In my 60s. It’s your relationship with yourself yesterday and it’s your relationship with yourself. Even 5 minutes ago.

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You know, when we look at and we evaluate our relationship with our past self, it’s not always.

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That’s true. As we were talking about.

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Right. It’s actually I would like to.

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Say for many of us out there, it’s it’s actually very mean. It’s actually very dismissive. It’s actually very critical or it’s even indifferent. And we see this a lot with our clients from divorce.

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But you know, it’s it’s amazing how often we work with clients who avoid who even don’t get to that part. They just avoid their past self.

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And they avoid the relationship with themselves. Kind of like what I’ve been doing this whole week. I’m serious. I need to do a check in about this because I can tell you it’s just not good. It’s just not good.

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Yeah, I mean.

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No. Hey, just.

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Footnote for a second, everything that we teach in these podcasts.

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And our coaching isn’t just for people after divorce or people going through the divorce, it’s everybody all the time. That’s exactly right.

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Including us. Exactly right. Right. We, we, we we do what we preach as I say, right. We walk the walk.

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Yeah. So, let’s, let’s talk about.

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Our past, because we should think about it as an opportunity for growth, for development, for cultivation, we see it as something that’s over and kind of done with. And thank goodness, you know, it’s, you know, and filled with regret and blame and guilt.

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Yeah, like the divorce. Thank God it’s over with. And it’s very common in our coaching. After in the divorce arena.

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But what we don’t?

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Realize is that our relationship with our past self.

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Is going to.

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Create our present emotional state with ourselves.

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That’s kind of deep, but it’s true.

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Yeah, this is where it really gets interesting, you know, so we can’t hate our past self and then love yourself in the present because as we all know, really time doesn’t actually exist. This is where it gets this is where it gets a little heavy.

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Right.

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I know you’re going to get.

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Into it’s our thoughts about the past, but go ahead.

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Exactly, you know, so you can only have a thought.

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I don’t want to interrupt.

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You can only have a feeling in this moment, even in your past self.

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Right.

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You know, so we can use the constructive time in order to evaluate these relationships, but know that everything is happening in this moment. So you can’t disparage.

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Right.

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Your past self and try to be really loving with your present self just doesn’t.

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Work right, I think.

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I think what you’re suggesting is.

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You really have to.

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Find peace with your past self. Love your past self before you can be in the present self. To love your present self. So we kind of have to give ourselves a sense of forgiveness and like we’re OK. We did OK. So the first thing we need to do is to begin with our most immediate.

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Last and for a lot of our listeners, we know that’s going to be your divorce and what happened during divorce. So how are you feeling about something you did maybe during the divorce? How did you, how did you? How do you feel about something you did yesterday or last month? How about 20 minutes ago?

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So how are?

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You feeling about your immediate past self? How are you thinking about yourself in those thoughts? You have to sit down and really?

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Think about that.

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And really kind of take the time to evaluate.

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Right, right. You know, and then really, when you cultivate within yourself as a serious as the seriousness when it comes to having your own back, because to me that’s the purest, purest form of of self. Love is having.

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Someone that is there consistently and you can really only count on yourself. OK, so if you know about the human brain, which of course, if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know a little bit about the human brain and how it loves to criticize and find fault and scare the CRP out of you.

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You can say, scare the crap out, yeah.

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Scare the crap out of like spelling in.

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Cases you know and you.

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Should in case.

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There’s any kids out there listening and you should be committed to yourself to find that counteract.

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That counteracting peace with yourself and the argument that you love yourself. You’re worthy and you support and you have compassion for yourself.

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Yeah. And when you start, you know beating, I just want to go back, if you start beating yourself up for something that you did in the past?

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It is your responsibility to stop the fight.

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Right. So when you sell it phone, when you find yourself criticizing yourself, being yourself.

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It’s a fight with yourself. It’s an argument with yourself and it’s your think about this. It’s your responsibility to say Nope, we’re not fighting right now.

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That is the work that you have to do to love yourself in the past.

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OK.

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OK, so now let’s.

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Turn to what?

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Yeah, let’s shift our attention to the present. You know, now again, as I said before, everything really is only in the present. The thoughts that we.

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Have about our past.

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Even the thoughts about our future are.

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All being experienced here in the present. Yeah, but when we start looking at our relationship with ourselves in this moment, we can find a very powerful source of emotion.

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And I think it’s also a very powerful gift to ourselves. You know, if we wake up in the morning and as a gift to ourselves, we have a positive thought.

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About ourselves and positive emotions for ourself, we’re going to vibrate on a much higher emotional level throughout the day. And when we vibrate on that emotional level, it’s easier to be kind to ourselves. It’s easier to be loving, it’s easier to be compassionate.

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To our past and our present and our future selves.

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You know, so a lot of times.

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Some will come on a coaching call with us and they’ll just start unloading all of their negative thoughts and this is kind of a beautiful thing, you know, this, this is kind of what, like what coaching is for this is.

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It’s a safe place.

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Exactly. Yeah, it’s.

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Exactly what they should be doing on a coaching call, but what happens is as they’re talking about.

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Right. Let it all out. Let.

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It all out.

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All these negative thoughts.

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Right.

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You know, they don’t even realize that these negative thoughts are going on in their brain without their permission.

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Well, they don’t.

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Realize that they have an option. You have an option to have a thought. You could have a positive thought. You could have a neutral thought. You can have a negative thought or anything in between.

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Right. I mean you?

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Thoughts are truly optional, right? Because whatever has happened in the past is over with and you’re thinking about it today. Whatever happens in the present, you have the ability to have a thought about the circumstance, which is a fact, right? And that thought you can you control that.

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Yes, it has to be.

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Conscious decision on what your thoughts are going to be, whether they.

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Right. So one of the things right, because one of the things we do in coaching is we help our clients work through their thoughts, their negative judgments against themselves, their negative criticism.

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And you would not believe some of the things we can think? Well, maybe you can about our own Souths right things. We would never think about other people that we end up thinking about ourselves, ways in which we think and treat, you know, I say be your best friend, right. We would never talk to probably a stranger the way we would.

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Talk to ourselves and not even being aware of the negative impact this is having on us. Can you imagine if we said these things that people are?

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Allowed to other people, right? And it’s relatively easy to come up with thoughts that are positive and that you believe it really is.

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And this is.

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A huge difference and I want to make sure we understand this difference between this idea of just affirmations for the sake of affirmations, because a lot of.

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Times. They’re like, what are you just?

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You know, have an affirmation or think or this toxic positivity, you know, where you’re kind of pretending to be positive, but you’re not really being positive, like, that’s not what we’re talking about because I have my own opinions about all that, right?

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OK.

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I mean, I believe I believe affirmations have a place.

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I do.

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And you know, if you say something enough, you you start to believe it because you want to believe.

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That. But however, it’s not really going to be changing your deep thoughts. You’re deeply.

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Well, we’re talking right now about how you shift your thoughts from negative to positive. So I’m talking about finding thoughts that are true that you believe now. Now that you find.

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Then yes.

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As as truth.

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So affirmations to me are more about the future and what you want and the great.

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Goal setting, but I’m talking about thoughts that you create that you find belief in today and this is something that coaching really helps with because we can.

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And help our clients reach for that space that, that place space in place where there is something that’s real, right, because it’s really hard I think for some of our clients to many of our clients to look from outside themselves, right.

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You know the brain will. The brain will tend to find an argument with that, you know, for an example, you might say to yourself the marriage was horrible. The marriage was terrible.

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Or you might say something like. You know, we did have a few good times and we had a few bad times.

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Well, I think you could also keep.

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The negative but say you.

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Know there were there were. There were terrible things and parts of the of our marriage, but not the whole thing. Like our marriage completely. 100% was a failure.

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Right.

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Right. But there were, we’re we’re probably good times and probably good things that make the sentence more believable to your subconscious.

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If you wanted.

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And turn it from a negative to a positive.

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Because if you have.

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The thought my marriage was is was.

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Available right? What is that going to? How’s it gonna play on you today? First of all?

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It’s not true. I would venture to say it’s not true. You may want to right now have the thoughts all.

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About the negatives.

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But you could just as easily have the thoughts about the positives. Maybe you had children together. I’m sure that was a positive thing, just as an example.

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Exactly and and and I I I like to. I like to say that I think it’s more than turning a negative into a positive it’s more of turning a disbelief into a belief because the point is you have to believe in your thoughts.

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Correct. Like in your positive thoughts so that you can turn from that negative?

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Give to that positive it can be a small belief. It doesn’t have to be huge, OK. And it’s amazing how just a small shift, something like, I don’t know. I’m thinking of another example like maybe you think that you’re unkind. Well, that’s that’s a big.

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Right.

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Negative statement, right? I’m an unkind person, but you right, you could. I’m sure that you have been kind, right? So you could say I’m kind at times.

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It’s very general.

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I’ve been kind to people in my life.

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And then there’s our relationship with our future self. I think this is one of the most important relationships in the expression of self love.

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And I think one of the reasons that it’s most important, especially as you’re moving forward, creating your new life after divorce is your self love of discipline and respect for yourself, which is to me, the highest form of discipline, discipline, right. It’s deciding with the.

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Highest form of your brain.

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Pain. What you want for your life moving forward and then committing to doing it right. So it’s not just about redesigning who you’re going to be in the future after your divorce and your life and what it’s going to look like. And we talk a lot about goal setting.

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It’s about respecting yourself and honoring yourself with such love.

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That your commitment to yourself and your discipline to yourself to get there is going to be something you’re going to honor.

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You’re not going to say to yourself when you wake up and you have whatever your goal is for the day. I’m not getting out of bed today and I’m just going to go watch Netflix.

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And eat a.

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Bag of chips.

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Speaking of that, that’s one example I want to give you that you know because.

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The New Year’s.

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A lot of people have made commitments.

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To eating healthier and it could be for your body and This is why you’re actually going to this is what you’re actually going to eat. Then we eat the healthy food.

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And we are paying it forward to our future self because our future self is being affected by our present sense, our present self.

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Yeah, I just had that. I just had that conversation with the girls because we watched in Netflix series, we I.

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Think we have.

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The last one.

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You are what you eat.

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You are what you.

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Eat, oh boy, I.

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I recommend it, but be ready to.

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Give up some things you.

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Might like to eat. That’s yeah.

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We cleaned out the refrigerator.

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We I we used to.

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Be vegans and and that. And then we were vegetarians and then, you know, we drifted away of certain, you know that for certain reasons whatever.

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It is and after you watch that series, you might rethink things like we did. But no. I was talking to the girls about.

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Right.

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My goals about being being aware what they’re putting in their mouth, and I could hear them saying, for example, if I encourage them and that’s just me and I’m not telling people to do this or not to buy organic, you know, fruits and vegetables and things of this nature as much organic as you can, right.

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Among other things, and I said, buy organic, please like each other. You know this and that. And they said, well, it’s more expensive. And I’m like, we’ll pay it, pay less now and pay later. Like, you have to love yourself enough now to put the work in today for what? Your future life.

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Is going to look like right?

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Also think about it, you’re having a relationship with your present self and your future self.

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So your future self is going to look back at your past self and say hey, thanks for taking such great care of me.

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Yeah, well, that’s what I said to them. I said, you know, you want to be able to be our age and say, you know what I did? I look good. And I feel good. And I’m well and I’m healthy because I took care.

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Of my body.

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As an example, but whatever your goals are, right?

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You, your your self love for yourself to reach those goals. The future love is by far first you have to come turn to terms with the past, the present, and then you can really go forward with the future, right?

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Yeah. As I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, they all are synonymous. They all work together. They all have to have that synchronicity at your working on your future self in the present. Then you can have a better past because you worked on your future. It’s kind of it’s kind of interesting.

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Correct catch 22.

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Yeah, it is.

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So the important thing is that to remember from this is you can stand up tall right now in this present moment.

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With honoring all those components of yourself, and that is a choice, you can start making right now. It doesn’t matter if you’ve always been mean to yourself. If you’ve always let yourself down. If you’ve always been critical of yourself, if you’ve always questioned yourself worth, you can start right now. In this moment, say.

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OK, from right now on I’m going to have my own back.

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I got you. I will love you no matter what. I will practice unconditional love with you. I will practice loving you and the strategic byproducts of that. My friends is you will get better at loving.

00:22:13 Speaker 1
Yeah. And if you can love yourself past, present and future, hard and meaningful, you will have so much more to love, to give everyone else in your life, which is what the world needs more of. I think there’s enough songs out there that kind of remind us of that.

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That’s true.

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You know, so.

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You you can’t get good at anything with.

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Out practice practice doesn’t make perfect perfect practice makes perfect. So same with loving you won’t get good at loving and if you don’t practice loving.

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That’s true.

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No, it’s.

00:22:48 Speaker 2
That’s true though, but when you do love yourself in this way for some reason, it’s just a whole lot easier to love other people.

00:22:57 Speaker 2
Right. So practice thinking, loving thoughts, practice, feeling loving feelings. Our friends and practice doing loving things for yourself first, like me getting my ***** up tomorrow and going to the gym before I start my day. Right and feeling.

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More loving about myself then I’ll be in a better mood and you’ll.

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Be happy.

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What the world needs now is once we love.

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Bye, everybody. Have an amazing week.

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Alright, everybody and love yourself, we’ll talk to.

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You next week? Bye.

00:23:38 Speaker 1
You you have the vision of what you want your life to look like after divorce, but maybe you just don’t know how to get there. So if you’re ready to take control of your life and want to find out more about our coaching, visit us at LAD Dash.

00:23:55 Speaker 1
Coaching.com. That’s lad as in lifeafterdivorce-coaching.com.

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Until next time, have an amazing rest of your day. And remember, yes, you can have an amazing life after divorce.