Your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship that you have. Why? Because your relationship with yourself is determines everything else in your life.
When was the last time you asked yourself how your relationship with yourself was going? How long has it been since you took an honest look at how you are treating yourself?
This episode and the companion self-reflection tool is designed to help you do exactly that. I invite you to take time over the next 30 days to reflect on the five key indicators of a healthy self-relationship.
How you think about yourself
How you feel about yourself
How you talk about/to yourself
How you act toward yourself
How you allow others to treat you
This episode and the self-reflection tool is designed to help you become aware of how you are treating yourself in each of the five areas and then begin healing that part of your relationship with yourself.
At the end of each week, you will have the opportunity to reflect on lessons learned, areas that need improvement, and adjustments you might need to make to your “one thing” goals.
By the end of the 30 days, you will have gained new insights into your relationship with yourself and clarity on what you need to do to have a healthier relationship with yourself.
You can have the life you want, and it starts with healing your relationship with yourself. I am excited for you and cheering you on as you go on this journey.
Your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship that you have. Why? Because your relationship with yourself is determines everything else in your life.
When was the last time you asked yourself how your relationship with yourself was going? How long has it been since you took an honest look at how you are treating yourself?
This episode and the companion self-reflection tool is designed to help you do exactly that. I invite you to take time over the next 30 days to reflect on the five key indicators of a healthy self-relationship.
How you think about yourself
How you feel about yourself
How you talk about/to yourself
How you act toward yourself
How you allow others to treat you
This episode and the self-reflection tool is designed to help you become aware of how you are treating yourself in each of the five areas and then begin healing that part of your relationship with yourself.
At the end of each week, you will have the opportunity to reflect on lessons learned, areas that need improvement, and adjustments you might need to make to your “one thing” goals.
By the end of the 30 days, you will have gained new insights into your relationship with yourself and clarity on what you need to do to have a healthier relationship with yourself.
You can have the life you want, and it starts with healing your relationship with yourself. I am excited for you and cheering you on as you go on this journey.
You know you can get everything that you want, but yet not want everything that you have, because when you don't have peace with yourself, you don't have anything. Why is it that you can get everything that you think you want be at the place that you've always dreamed of, but yet internally, you're miserable. You walk this planet wearing a mask. You walk this planet chasing after things that you think will make you happy, that you think are going to give you what you want. You walk around looking like and pretending that your life is together, and you know that it's just a mask, because internally, you know how you feel, and the problem is you can't get away from you. You can't get away from the way that you feel, and the problem is, you can't get away from you. You can't get away from the way that you feel, so you try to find more and more ways to escape you. Hello friends, it's Jerry and welcome to the Permission to Love podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to helping people understand how to heal their relationship with themselves, because when we heal our relationship with ourselves, everything in our life changes how we feel about ourselves changes, the relationships that we have changes and what we manifest in our life totally changes. You can live a life where you're at peace with yourself, you have healthy relationships in your life and that you're manifesting the things that you so deeply deserve and desire for your life. So I'm glad you're here and I hope you enjoy today's episode. Today, when this podcast episode is being released, it'll be April the 1st, 2024. And that will mark for me six years since I had a heart attack and open heart surgery, had a quadruple bypass, and each year around this season, I take time and I reflect. I think about all the things that were going on in my life that led up to me having open heart surgery, and then I also think about where I've come from, the journey that I've been on since that time. And as I reflect on it, as I reflect on what was going on and what has been happening since then, I'm filled with a deep sense of compassion for who that person was, for where I was at at that point in my life that I had such a deeply broken relationship with myself. But on the outside I looked like everything was okay. I was successful, had a great career, great pay, was in the process of building a dream home. I mean, everything was going my way externally, yet internally I hated myself, I hated my life, I wasn't happy. You know you can get everything that you want, but yet not want everything that you have, because when you don't have peace with yourself, you don't have anything. When you have everything but you don't love yourself or you don't feel good about yourself, or you feel like you're constantly wearing a mask and you feel like a fraud, an imposter. You're self-sabotaging and you're just waiting to be found out for the fraud that you think that you are.
Jerry Henderson:
And everything in your life seems like it was what you wanted, but yet internally you're still miserable. Why is it that you can get everything that you think you want be at the place that you've always dreamed of, but yet internally you're miserable? You walk this planet wearing a mask. You walk this planet chasing after things that you think will make you happy, that you think are going to give you what you want. You walk around looking like and pretending that your life is together, and you know that it's just a mask, because internally, you know how you feel and the problem is you can't get away from you. You can't get away from the way that you feel, so you try to find more and more ways to escape you.
Jerry Henderson:
That's why, in the work that I do, I always work with people on healing their relationship with themselves. And if you've listened to this podcast for any time at all, you've heard this statement from me, and the statement goes like this you have a relationship with yourself and that relationship is determining everything in your life how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself, what you say about yourself, how you act towards yourself. All of that is determining the relationships that you have, what's manifesting in your life. And if you don't heal and fix that, nothing in your life is going to make you happy, nothing in your life is ever going to bring you peace. You can chase money, you can chase relationships, you can chase success, you can try to escape through addictions, through distractions, but nothing is going to work until you address the relationship that you have with yourself.
Jerry Henderson:
So let me ask you a question how is that relationship going for you? Now, most people, when I ask that question, they're like well, it's not good or it's okay or it's great, but how do you know what's the measure? How are you evaluating and assessing your relationship with yourself? So today, that's the topic I want to talk about. How do you assess your relationship with yourself? You know we assess so many things in our life. We can take a look at our bank account and we can take a look at at our budget and we can understand am I in financial health, are my finances in shape? But when it comes to our relationship with ourselves, we're not assessing it, we're not looking at it, and it is the most important relationship in your entire life. But yet how many of us take time to sit down and actually ask ourselves the question how is this relationship going? I would bet that most of us don't, because if we did, we'd be in a lot different place than we are. This planet would look a lot different if we really took the time to understand where we're at with us.
Jerry Henderson:
I want to take a quick moment and talk about my book Returning. It's a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing. I designed this book to help you on your journey of moving from shame to self-love. It's divided in three sections. The first section is about seeing seeing that you're not alone. The second section is about understanding that healing is possible. And the third section is designed to remind you and to show you that loving yourself is the path back to yourself. I've heard from a lot of people that they're using it as a daily reflection guide, where each day they're selecting a passage, reading it, meditating on it, journaling on it, and it's really helping them in their healing journey and helping them understand that they are worthy of love, that they can heal, that they're not alone, and I know it can do the same for you. So if you haven't picked up a copy yet, please take a moment to do that. And if you have picked up a copy already, it would mean a lot to me if you'd take a moment and review the book, because the more positive reviews the book gets, the more likely people are going to become aware of it and benefit from the work. So thank you, thank you for picking it up, thank you for reviewing it and thank you for passing it along. Maybe, when you're done with it, you can pass it along to somebody else or pick up a copy for somebody else that you know could benefit from the work. You can get it on Amazon or you can simply see the show notes in this episode to get your copy.
Jerry Henderson:
So today I want to go through some really practical ways about how you can assess that relationship with yourself. It's really simple, there's nothing complicated about it, and by the end of this episode you're going to learn how to do that and you're going to learn how to measure it. You're going to learn how to reflect on it and you're going to learn how to make changes in that space. What you don't measure, you can't change. If you want to change something, you have to measure it. If you want to go from here to there, you have to know where here is. Where am I today? Where am I at in my relationship with myself? So I know this episode will really help you with that. Just take the time to listen, dig in and apply the principles that you learned today.
Jerry Henderson:
So why don't we measure our relationship with ourselves? Well, it can be hard to measure. We don't have tools around it. Like I said before on the other areas, we have tools. We can do things and we can look at things to understand just objectively where that's at.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, measuring our relationship with ourselves can feel very subjective and the challenge is a lot of people don't understand that they do have a relationship with themselves. I remember meeting with somebody a few weeks ago and as we were talking, the person said you know, I've never even thought about the fact that I have a relationship with myself. That's never come into my consciousness or to my mind. I have a relationship with myself. That's never come into my consciousness or to my mind. And so now me understanding that I have a relationship with myself, what do I do with that? How do I begin to measure that?
Jerry Henderson:
And I think that's a common thing among many of us. We're just not even aware of it. We're not even thinking about it because we have so many other things that have got our attention. We're dealing with work, we're dealing with family. We're dealing with work. We're dealing with family, we're dealing with finances. We're dealing with all of these things, trying to get our hands around that, and we are left to the last. We're left for the leftovers of our life and taking the time to understand that what is happening with ourselves is the thing that's manifesting all of that stuff that's out there. It's the thing that's causing the chaos or causing the goodness or causing whatever.
Jerry Henderson:
So if something externally isn't going our way, I always encourage people to first start by looking at what's going on inside, what's happening internally. Where's the belief system that's manifesting that. Where's the feeling about ourselves that's causing us to accept that other thing that's going on in our lives? So once we understand we have a relationship with ourselves, we get to that fundamental thing right, that baseline that you have a relationship with yourself. You might still be saying, well, what do you mean? So let me just go over that again real quick.
Jerry Henderson:
Have you ever sat with yourself and said something like why do I talk to myself that way? Huh, why do I allow people to treat me that way? Who's the I? Who's the me, who's the I? Who's myself? What's this interaction that's going on, that's being discussed in your head? So we have these conversations that go on inside of us that reveal a lot about who we are. So when we say things like I don't like the way that I feel about myself, or I don't like the way that I talk to myself, who's the I who doesn't like the I? Who's talking to you that way? You see, there's a recipient who doesn't feel good about the way that some other part of you is treating you that way right, and so that's the important place to get to, to understand that there's this constant relationship that's going on with you, and it's going on 24-7. And so ignoring that, not putting work into that, isn't the wisest way to live. So let's get into how do we evaluate our relationship with ourselves, and it's going to be five things that I'm going to discuss in this episode, five things that you can begin to evaluate. And you make progress in these five areas, everything in your life is going to change, promise you, without a doubt, because these five things are going to begin to tell you about your relationship with yourself, and when that gets changed, all the other things get changed as a result. As a part of this episode, I've created a free worksheet for you about how to evaluate your relationship with yourself. So just go to the show notes in this episode and you'll be able to get access to that worksheet. Or you can go to my website at jerryhendersonorg, and that worksheet will help you evaluate the five areas that I'm getting ready to discuss.
Jerry Henderson:
And the first one is how do you think about yourself? I mean, what are the thoughts that you have towards you when you think about yourself? What's the common narrative that's going on up there about you? Are you thinking things like I'm so stupid? Or every time you mess up. You just beat yourself up over and over, or you think that I deserve the way that that person treats me, or I am an imposter and people only knew me, or whatever. What is that narrative? What goes on up there? What are you thinking about yourself?
Jerry Henderson:
And on the worksheet you'll see there's a scale of 1 to 10. And if you take time and evaluate, where do you feel like you're at on that One being, I'm just terrible. I think terrible things about myself. 10 being, I'm good, I'm great. I'm always thinking that I'm great. I have no problems with it, the way that I think about myself.
Jerry Henderson:
Where are you on that scale? And beneath that scale you're gonna find a question that asks you why did you rate yourself that way? And underneath that question you're going to find the question of where would you like to be able to rate yourself? And underneath that question is the question what would need to happen in order for you to improve that rating? And the final question is a part of the worksheet is what's one action that I can take to move the needle forward? What's one action that I can take to take me from a three to a four, from a four to a five, a seven to an eight, whatever. It is just one action at a time that you can begin to work on. So it's a really simple worksheet in these five areas.
Jerry Henderson:
Number one where do you rank yourself? Number two why did you rank yourself that way? Number three where would you like to rank yourself? Number four what would need to happen, what would need to be true in order for you to rank yourself higher and then look at that action that you want to take around that. So now let's go ahead and move on to the second point of how do we evaluate our relationship with ourselves, and it's how do you feel about yourself? Like, when you just think about how do I feel about me, what's that first impression feeling that comes up? Is it a three, is it a seven? Is it a five? I mean, how do you feel when you look in the mirror and you look at yourself? What are the feelings that arise when you sit with yourself and you're alone with yourself? What are the feelings that come up? Are they good, neutral, negative? What are they? Go ahead and make a note about that and then move on to why did you rank yourself that way? Then move to what would you want that ranking to be what would need to be true, and then look at that action that you want to take around that Okay, so you're getting the pattern of how we do this, that action that you want to take around that Okay, so you're getting the pattern of how we do this.
Jerry Henderson:
And a quick note on doing this evaluation do it on what is kind of the average of how you feel about yourself. Right, let's not take when we have our darkest moments and say, oh, I'm always a one and that's how we always feel about ourselves, or those moments where we're just on cloud nine and everything seems to be wonderful and go, hey, it's always a 10. Now, what is kind of the average? Where do you see a pattern? And try to rank yourself in that way, okay, so let's go on to number three, about how do we evaluate our relationship with ourself, and it's how do you talk to yourself? What are you saying to yourself?
Jerry Henderson:
The words that are coming out of your mouth or the words that are internal? But I like to make a separation between words that come out of our mouth versus the chatter that's going on inside of us. Why? Because the thoughts lead to the feelings and the feelings then usually lead to the words, right, or it can be thoughts, that's then words, that's then feelings, but a lot of times it's thoughts, feelings, and then we begin to say things, and the important thing to note about what we say about ourselves is that what we say is almost the cement, it's the hardening of that core belief into our systems, from what we think and what we feel. That then becomes words, and those words are then heard by our ears. That then go back into our brain and that loop begins to develop a core belief. Okay, thoughts, feelings, words that all begins to ingrain a core belief that we have about ourselves. And so rank that. What are the ways that you typically talk about yourself? On a scale of 1 to 10 and then do the rest of the exercises. Now let's go ahead and move on to the next thing that we need to evaluate. It's the way that we act towards ourselves. Okay, thinking, feeling, words that all then begins to develop core beliefs. All of that then begins to manifest actions.
Jerry Henderson:
How are you acting towards yourself? Are you shaming yourself? Are you putting yourself in unhealthy relationships and unhealthy environments? Are you harming yourself? Are you putting yourself in unhealthy relationships and unhealthy environments? Are you harming yourself? Are you involved in addictions? Do you sabotage yourself? What are the things that you're doing, the behaviors that you're actually acting towards yourself? Do you feel unworthy of doing kind things to yourself? So you have an inaction towards yourself? Remember, it's not just the way that we act towards ourself, but it's the inaction. Inaction is an action. It's a conscious choice to not do something for yourself, and so if you're not giving yourself the rest that you need, if you're not setting boundaries, all of that is an action, because it's a choice to be inactive around those things. So what are the actions that you're taking towards yourself? Evaluate that.
Jerry Henderson:
Let's move on to the final way that we evaluate our relationship with ourselves, and it's how we allow people to treat us.
Jerry Henderson:
That can be a key indicator about what we feel worthy of. So you might be asking how is somebody else's behavior towards me reflective of the relationship that I have with myself? Well, the way that you let people treat you is typically the way that you're treating yourself. The way that you feel about yourself is typically the way that you allow people to behave towards you. The way that you see yourself is the way that you think that people see you and for me, this is one of the key evidences and manifestations of how your relationship with yourself is going is how people are treating you in your life, the people that you allow to be around you. See, we can try to fool ourselves by doing positive affirmations or just having positive thoughts and really not feeling any different about ourselves, but the true test is often about how we're allowing people to show up in our life and how we're allowing them to treat us. What are we tolerating? That's a huge evaluation about how your relationship with yourself is going, because as long as you feel like you're unworthy of healthy relationships, you're going to keep choosing toxic relationships. And as long as we're blaming the world for the way that they treat us and the fact that we got into another unhealthy relationship.
Jerry Henderson:
And aren't there any good people out there? Are there no good men? Are there no good women? Are there no good people? Well, instead of asking that question, it might serve you better to ask the question why am I continuing to attract those type of people into my life? Why do I feel comfortable being treated that way? You might say well, I don't feel comfortable being treated that way, I hate it. Well, why are you then in a pattern of getting treatment that you hate? Somehow it's serving you, and the way that it typically is serving you is by reinforcing the relationship that you have with yourself. So the reason it's such the relationship that you have with yourself, so the reason it's such an indication of your relationship with yourself is because it shows what you've decided to allow in your life, and what you've decided to allow in your life is what you feel about yourself and the type of relationship that you have with you.
Jerry Henderson:
If people are not respecting your boundaries and you're continuing to tolerate that, you're telling yourself that your boundaries are not important. If you're allowing people to speak to you in certain ways and you're continuing to tolerate that, you're sending the message to yourself and you're reinforcing the way that you feel about yourself that that is acceptable to you, that that's something that's okay, and you're negotiating that in your head and you're having that conversation with yourself. You're justifying somebody else's behavior, you're beginning to paint a picture of why it's okay, and all of that comes down to you yourself, your relationship with who you are, and that narrative that's going on inside of you. So now take time to go ahead and evaluate. How are you allowing people to treat you? Let it speak to you, let all of this speak to you as you go through all five of these areas how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself, how you talk to yourself, how you feel about yourself, how you talk to yourself, how you act towards yourself and how you allow others to treat you.
Jerry Henderson:
As you go through evaluating this, don't shame yourself. If you have a lot of circles around a one or a two and that's where you've rated yourself, that's okay. That's not a reason to beat yourself up and shame yourself. Remember, we're trying to beat yourself up and shame yourself. Remember we're trying to heal our relationship with ourself. And if you want to feel better about yourself and move the way that you feel about yourself from a two to a four, the best place you can start right now is by not beating yourself up for how you ranked yourself. And so just let this be a truth teller to you right now. Let it just speak to you, okay. Let it just be a source of information dot on the map of your relationship with yourself, of where you are right now. That is going to empower you to get where you want to go in the future, because, once again, we can't get there if we don't know where we're starting from and what we don't measure, we won't change. And so you might be surprised that you have a lot of twos or threes and you are ones, and you thought, wow, my relationship with myself was good, but now that I look at it, it's not so good. That's great information. That's information now for you to work with and begin to make changes from.
Jerry Henderson:
Okay, so now let's talk about next steps. You've taken time to evaluate your relationship with yourself. You've looked at all those areas. What do you do? Well, the first thing is I want to encourage you to take time every evening for the next 30 days to do this evaluation, to go through those five things. Okay, how do I think about myself, feel about myself, talk to myself, how do I act towards myself and how do I allow others to treat me? And then, every evening, rank that from one to 10, and then go ahead and answer the following questions why did you rank yourself that way? What would you have liked to have ranked yourself as? Et cetera, et cetera. So do that for a solid 30 days.
Jerry Henderson:
Now here's another part that's important around this evaluation process and it's to not put all of your stock in just one day, right. So if you had a bad day, that does not paint the entire picture. You might have had a day where something happened and you just beat yourself up all day about it, okay. And so at the end of the day, you're ranking yourself as a one, but as you look at yourself on the week and you go, you know what, on the average it was like a five. So on average, I want to move myself from a five to a six, understanding that, yes, I'm going to have good days and bad days, but what we want to do here is deal with the baseline of the relationship that you have with yourself. And then the third thing that's really important, as I've shared already, is to not shame yourself or to feel bad that you're not making progress. Once again, remember, it's just a set of information for you about how you feel about yourself. And then, finally, an important part of this is to readjust, to reassess. So if you see that that goal that you set for yourself, that you want to do this one thing right, this one thing that's going to move you from a five to a six. Whatever that is for you. If you need to make some adjustments on that, maybe you overreached on the goal that you set, or maybe you didn't set the goal high enough or big enough for yourself. So make the adjustments on a weekly basis.
Jerry Henderson:
So let's take a quick recap, okay? So our relationship with ourself. The most important thing how do we evaluate how it's going? Five areas how we think about ourselves, how we feel about ourselves, how we talk to ourselves, how we act towards ourselves and how we allow others to treat us. And we're going to evaluate that on a daily basis, on a scale of one to 10. We're going to ask some important questions about that evaluation. We're going to look at that on a weekly basis. What's my average on that week? And we're going to do that for 30 days.
Jerry Henderson:
And once you've gone through this evaluation, you might see some areas that are really glaring to you. Right, you may be a six on how you feel about yourself. You may be a seven on how you allow other people to treat you, but you see that you're a two on how you think about yourself, the thoughts that you're having towards yourself, and then that's the area that you might want to really begin to dial in on and put some effort around for a while and get that to move up, and that's why this can be such a helpful tool and you beginning to identify what needs to heal, what needs to be worked on in your relationship with yourself. Well, thank you so much for joining another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'd love to hear how this evaluation tool is working for you. So you can reach out to me at jerry, at jerryhendersonorg, or you can DM me on Instagram. My handle there is jerryahenderson. Feel free to reach out and let me know how it's going Now.
Jerry Henderson:
If the content of this podcast is really serving you and helping you in your journey. I want to encourage you to take time to follow and to subscribe to this podcast, because that's going to keep you updated on when new episodes come out. I'd also ask you to feel free to take time to rate it and review it, because that's going to get it more visibility and help people to discover it and to learn how they can heal their relationship with themselves. And then, finally, please share it with somebody else. Let somebody else know about the show. If you're getting value out of it, they will get value out of it as well. And, as I close, I want to remind you as always, you are absolutely, without a doubt, worthy of your own love.