EP 144: Embracing Self-Love: The 5 Secrets to Loving Yourself More

Research shows that when we love ourselves more we have more overall life satisfaction. In this episode, join host Lisa Tarkington as she dives into the research behind self-esteem and overall well-being and reflects on her own self-love and confidence journey. Lisa shares her story of how she learned to love herself more, sharing her top  5 tips for building self-love and a better relationship with oneself. Tune in for an inspiring episode that will help you kickstart your journey to building more self-love and confidence!

Chapters:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 03:40 - What is Self-love?
• 07:13 - The Research Behind Self-Love
• 12:33 - 5 Ways You Can Love Yourself More
• 26:42 - Outro & Key Takeaways 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I want you to visualize if you loved yourself more. What would that feel like? What would the emotions that you would have? What would you be doing? Does it feel warm? I just want you to pause and reflect on that for a second.

Speaker 2: 0:22

Welcome to the Confident Podcast. I am Lisa Targinton, your host of this podcast. If you found yourself hitting play on this podcast, it means it was meant for you. My goal is to help, empower and guide you to become a better version of yourself through conversation, advice and tips that are real, vulnerable and authentic. I am excited to have you join this journey with me, so let's get started.

Speaker 1: 0:45

Hi everybody, welcome to the Confident Podcast. I am Lisa Targinton, I am the host of this podcast and I love sitting in the seat weekly to talk to you guys about all the things around confidence, around self-love and just helping you become a better version of yourself. Today I'm solo here because I have some really great things that we're going to be talking about today and it's going to be pretty fun. So this month is all about love, with it being February, so sometimes that could look as from a romantic partner standpoint with Valentine's Day, but it's also a reminder sometimes to just take a little bit of time to focus on ourselves, to give ourselves a little bit of self-love. Which I am all about and that is what I teach people on a daily basis is to really help them on their confidence journey, to help them on their self-love journey. So I thought today we would talk about all the things to help you learn to love yourself more. So recently I've been getting a lot of messages from people which I do on a daily basis, which really helps me put together these podcasts. So thank you to everybody that continues to entrust in me in helping you on your journeys, and one of the things that people have been saying to me is Lisa, I do not love myself. I don't know how to love myself. What do I do? And, as someone who teaches confidence and self-love, that is something that's really hard for me to hear, because I just want people to see all the good that I see in them, but I know to get there it takes work. When I think about my own journey and what I've gone through when it comes to self-love, there were many, many things about myself that I didn't love for years, as someone who was an extrovert. It's very easy for people to think that you have it all together, that you have the confidence, that you have the self-love and I'm an extrovert, if you were wondering and many people just thought I had it all together, but there was this inside of me piece that was just struggling to love themselves, and I didn't for a long time. Self-love to me looks like respecting yourself, about talking highly about yourself, to see your worth and to really know your boundaries, and so today I thought it was important that, since we're underway just a little bit with 2024, that this be the year that you love yourself. If you haven't already started, this is the year that I want you to fully embrace, taking care of yourself and loving every aspect of yourself, and I know it's not going to be easy, especially if you haven't even started on this journey, but that's OK, because that's why I'm here to help you and guide you. So today we're going to be talking about the five ways that you can love yourself more this year, and so I want you to get into a comfortable position, if you can.

Speaker 1: 3:30

I always say I am a multitasker, so you might be listening to this multitasking, and I just want you to take that deep breath in and that deep breath out, and I just want you to take a moment and, if you can, I want you to close your eyes. If you can't, that's OK, and maybe you can even just kind of pause if you're multitasking and just listen for a little bit more, but if you're driving, please keep your eyes on the road, because we want you to be safe. But I just want you to visualize something for me. I want you to visualize if you loved yourself more. What would that feel like? What would the emotions that you would have? What would you be doing? Does it feel warm? And I just want you to pause and reflect on that for a second, because many times we want to love ourselves, but we don't even know where to start. We don't even know what that looks like. And first off, I want to say that that's OK, right, like that's OK if you don't know where to start. That's why we're here today. But the biggest thing is that visualization, the visualization of what do we want for ourselves, what does loving ourselves even mean, or what does it even look like. And so, for me, I think about that a lot, because it's very easy to get caught up into what everybody else wants for you, and so it's easy to say, oh, that person has self-love. I must have to do everything that they're doing. Well, the steps might be, in the play, a little bit the same, which we're going to dive into here in a little bit, but how they do it is going to be up to them, and just like it's going to be up to you.

Speaker 1: 5:12

Self-love literally has the word self in it, because it's all about the self. It's all about you coming first and you loving yourself. And so self-love is a deep personal and individual experience. It's about embracing different practices and different perspectives that align to your own journey, and it's also about understanding what it means to take care of yourself. However, when I think of self-love, I also have to explain the elephant in the room that sometimes comes up, which that self-love has a lot of misconceptions to it. Over the years, as someone who runs a company called Self-Love Beauty and teaches people to love themselves on a daily basis and become the best version of themselves, I hear a lot of different misconceptions when it comes to self-love and, honestly, it's super disheartening for me. It's something that I probably get a little bit more strong mindset on, because I know and I have seen when people love themselves more, that there is a game changer in their lives. So I wanted to just share something that I find so important. So it's important to distinguish healthy self-love from self-centeredness or ignorance.

Speaker 1: 6:29

Genuine self-love involves recognizing one's worth, practicing self-care and fostering a positive relationship with oneself without diminishing the value of others. Embracing self-love can lead to improved mental health, increased resilience and stronger interpersonal relationships. It's pretty powerful. When we embrace self-love, it can lead to stronger and improved mental health, it can increase resilience and it can help us with stronger relationships. And, like I said, self-love is really about people's own journeys. It's about your own journey.

Speaker 1: 7:11

However, there's a lot of studies and research that shows how loving yourself is really, really important and actually has a lot of benefits. So I figured, since we do have some people that listen and that love to hear the research behind things, I'd share some different studies that have been out there. So there has been studies published that individuals with higher self-esteem tend to experience lower levels of stress and have higher overall mental health. Wow, right there, those that have higher self-esteem have lower levels of stress. Who doesn't want that? Another researcher, who is the pioneer leader for self-compassion, suggests that practicing self-compassion, which is very much linked to self-love, increases our life satisfaction and decreases symptoms of anxiety and depression. So again, when we show ourselves self-compassion, we are showing up better for ourselves, we have better life satisfaction and we are decreasing our anxiety and depression. Another researcher who I absolutely love, martin's Sugglman, has explored many different factors of contributing to well-being and happiness and a lot of times when we have a positive self-regard for ourselves and a positive self-conception, it is also it is many times associated with high levels of well-being. So when you think positive about yourself, you're gonna have higher levels of well-being. And one more piece, because I love talking about mindfulness. Mindfulness is something that I teach a lot in the programs that I'm self-love, beauty and myself teach is that when we practice mindfulness, when we are present in the moment, it can contribute to higher levels of self-awareness and self-acceptance. And that is so important because really those are components of self-love. And so when we're diving in today, I want you to think about what do I want for myself when it comes to self-love?

Speaker 1: 9:07

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Speaker 1: 10:31

You know I'll share a story really quick before we dive into the five different areas to help you love yourself. More is, I think, a lot of times. I shared in the beginning about when I didn't love myself. But what I didn't share is a lot of those moments where I let people take advantage of who I was. I didn't set boundaries. Myself respect kind of went out the window a little bit. So I thought I loved myself, I was doing some of the right things, but I wasn't respecting myself at all. I shouldn't say at all. I should say I was not respecting certain aspects of my life, and the more that I put these practices into place, the more that I recognized that I needed to love myself more and see my own worth, the more that I was able to say no to things that didn't serve me well anymore. I was able to find better support systems, I was able to set better boundaries and, in the end of the day, my life is a lot better because of it, and I'm not going to sit here and say that it was easy.

Speaker 1: 11:34

Frankly, it's been a long time coming. It's been a lot of work to get to where I am today, to be sitting in the seat, being able to even say that to you guys, and the journey's not over, right. I still have my days where I struggle to love myself in every part of my body. I still have my moments of negative mindset that creeps in every now and then, but, more importantly, I've never loved myself more. But it took work, it took tools, it took me being intentional about putting those practices into my life to make those changes, and so if you are really looking to love yourself more, it can happen, I promise you.

Speaker 1: 12:12

There are so many things in your life that will get better if you start to love yourself, and the research shows it right there. Right, it shows that when we love ourselves more, we have more life satisfaction, we have higher levels of well-being and, overall, just better relationships in general. And so, as someone who has really felt all the feels over the years, it is a way different lifestyle that I live now because I love myself and I'm able to respect myself more and, honestly, I was able to get into a very healthy marriage because of that as well, because I don't think I was ready for relationships because I didn't love myself. And I also think, from a professional standpoint, I had to learn to love myself in order to find that happiness within my careers as well. And so that's why I became a coach is because I wanted to help people on their confidence journey to really know that they are worthy of the confidence that they deserve and the self-love that they deserve, and that is what all of you guys deserve as well. So we are going to dive into these five things, because I know that you are just like come on, lisa, like let's get to it, let's talk about these things, because I'm ready to add these things into my life, and so we're going to dive right into it.

Speaker 1: 13:27

So the first step to loving yourself more is adding positive self-talk into your life. You're like, well, da Lisa, of course that's number one. You always talk about affirmations, but it sounds so easy, right, it sounds so easy of, okay, adding positive self-talk into my life. Check got that one, but what I have found is that many people don't stick with it. We say it for a day and then we're like, okay, that was nice, but then I'm just going to move forward and what I have found? That when people actually stick to this, it is a game changer in their self-love journeys.

Speaker 1: 14:04

So this is actually something that the first thing that I tell any of my clients when they tell me that, hey, I'm struggling with self-love, I'm like well, how do you talk to yourself? How are you talking to yourself on a daily basis? And one of the best ways to remind yourself of this and this is something that I tell people a lot is if your 12-year-old self was hearing how you were talking to yourself right now, at your age, would he or she be happy to hear how you're talking about yourself? And if the answer is no, that's kind of a moment right there of awareness that that that self-talk needs to change. And research also shows that for every one negative thought we have about ourselves, it takes five positive thoughts to overcome it. And so I'm going to repeat that again so for every one negative thought we have about ourselves, it takes five positive thoughts to overcome that.

Speaker 1: 14:55

So if you are starting your day off already saying something negative about yourself, it's going to take a lot more work to overcome that negative thought. You're just going to continue to run into that. That negative talk to yourself is going to continue to go down that rabbit hole and it's going to take a lot more positive thoughts to overcome that. But if you start your day off thinking positive about yourself, having that positive self-talk, it is going to have a big transformation on your life. So you have to think about it also as treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding that you would offer to someone else, so someone in your life. You would never talk as bad about them as sometimes we do to ourselves.

Speaker 1: 15:34

And so this is just a lesson in its own that when we are faced with challenges, we have to practice self-compassion and we have to recognize sometimes things aren't going to go perfect, but it's about having that mindset of okay, I'm going to make this switch. I'm going to start talking more positive about myself because I know that I am worthy of it. So the easiest way to do this is with affirmations, and so positive self-talk can start just with that as a simple aspect. So if it takes one negative thought to over I'm sorry for every one negative thought it takes five positive thoughts to overcome it. I always say start with five positive thoughts. Why even start with one? Let's start with five. And so repeating affirmations is going to be so important. I was going to have you guys repeat after me, but I think what I also want to do is I'm going to give you guys the five. That will be great for you to do, but I want you to start to think about what are your affirmations.

Speaker 1: 16:27

So mine is I am confident, I am brave, I am smart, I am strong and I am uniquely me, and those are just some that really resonate with where I am in my life right now. I think for a long time the smart one, I had to continue to say and see my intelligence when it came to my expertise and what I teach, and so the affirmations that I had for a while. Some I truly believed, some I was working on, but I had to embody them both because both were important to my life. I had to take on the okay, this is what I already know about myself. This is where I want to go. How do I combine these into sentences that can really help me start to believe this and have this positive self-talk? And so, guys, it takes one minute a day. I said mine pretty quickly, right, but it's about embodying that a little bit as well.

Speaker 1: 17:17

And so if you can start to add these into your life, or adding these into your family's lives, if you can encompass this into your culture of your day, you are going to have that one step down where it starts to just kind of be part of your life, and then, when that negative thought comes in, you're already going to be like, nope, I got these positive thoughts about myself that I'm going to start to think about. So when we think about that, that's just one step, right? That's number one is how that you need to add positive self-talk into your life. The next one is step two engaging in activities that bring you joy, and so this is going to be all around doing things that make you smile, things that bring you joy, things that really bring you alive.

Speaker 1: 18:00

The other day, I was teaching a workshop and I asked the question what brings you alive? And a lot of people struggled with that because but they were very easy to talk about the things that annoyed them. They were able to talk about the things that they have challenges in, but not things that brought them alive. That's really important to note that, if that's a struggle that many of us have to notice about things that bring us alive, that we need to start to engage in activities that bring more of that love for ourselves. And one of the things, too, that I want to point out too, is that these activities it's great to do with other people. It's okay if you want to do them alone, but it is great to bring other people into the mix, to laugh with people, to do an activity together with people, because that's how you're going to find people that support you in your life as well.

Speaker 1: 18:48

You know, I hear a lot of people say, well, I'm just doing me right now, I don't have time for that. But what I hear a lot of times when people say I'm just doing me right now is that they're trying to hide away from the real issues that are happening in their lives right now. Don't get me wrong. I'm all about working behind the scenes. You don't have to put it all over social media to let people know. But I also don't think it's okay to hide away because it's a very good, it's a very easy excuse to not actually do the work, and I share that, because I hear that a lot from people that it's just easier to hide away and just going to do me, but they but they're actually not practicing self love. And so what I want you to think about is what are some exercises, what are some hobbies, what is some meditation or readings that could really help you recharge? And so I've noticed, when I'm in doing things that I love, I start to get more excited, I start to see myself in more of a positive light because I'm doing things that I love. I'm doing things that I'm good at, and so engaging in activities that bring joy to your lives is going to be important.

Speaker 1: 19:54

Step three, this one, is going to be writing down how far you've come and your accomplishments and then also noticing right where you are right now in your journey. And so this is really about taking that deep breath in, like we did in the beginning, and noticing and acknowledging how far we've come. So many times when we're on our journeys to self love or maybe we're just starting out, or maybe we're midway through, or maybe we've had self love and we've just kind of backtracked a little bit the biggest thing is is what we don't do is see how far we've come. We all just notice all the flaws and the things that we want to work on. We're like well, I got to meet this school. I got to meet this school, but what we don't do is slow down, get out that sheet of paper, that pen and paper, that kind of old school way, quote unquote and if you want, you can do it on the computer as well is writing down the accomplishments that you have for yourself and how far you've come. These don't have to be huge accomplishments that have money connected to them or status connected to them. They can be as simple as look at what I did today I got out of bed when I was struggling or look at that time when I just didn't think I was gonna make it anymore and I moved forward, the more that you can acknowledge how far you've already come. It really helps you kind of center in. I've done this before, look how far I've come. I'm gonna do this again, but I'm gonna do this better this time. I'm gonna be stronger, I'm gonna be more resilient, and when we reflect on our successes and the progress that we've made, that positive reinforcement just really helps us with our self-esteem and have more of a positive self-image for ourselves as well. So I know that it's easy to make a list of things that we need to grow in, right, like I said, like the flaws, but that is not this practice. This practice is acknowledging how far we've come, and this is something that I have all my clients do, and I remember one of my clients and I do this as well. Reflecting, saying, wow, I've come really far. I can't wait to see where I go in the future, and so when we can reflect on where we are right now, how far we've come, just gives us this like motivation to keep moving forward.

Speaker 1: 22:07

Number four is self-respect, and so this one is actually something that I already shared, that I struggled with for a long time, and this is something that I don't see a lot of people talk about either. Is that we have to set clear boundaries when it comes to personal and professional life. We have to learn to say no when needed, when to prioritize your time, what energy you wanna spend on activities and relationships and that contribute to your own positive well-being. And then how do we set boundaries to actually practice self-care? So self-respect looks a little bit different for everybody, but my biggest thing is is if you are practicing self-love, you're practicing loving yourself.

Speaker 1: 22:48

It is so important to be also having those boundaries of wow, I felt really disrespected here. Maybe that is not what I need right now, or okay, at least I'm having that acknowledgement about how this is how I feel. What am I gonna do about it? And sometimes it's just recognizing it, sometimes it's taking that action, but regardless, self-love equals self-respect. So if we start to talk positive about ourselves, engage in activities that we like, make that accomplishments list, it is also important that we start to see how to respect ourselves and I think for a long time I was respecting myself in many aspects of my life, like I shared, but there was one in particular area, when it came around relationships, where I was just kind of letting people kind of walk all over me and I was like it's fine, it's all good, but that wasn't self-respect, that wasn't having that self-love that I was giving myself in other areas of my life. And so it is so important to when you, if you really wanna love yourself more, is to practice that self-respect.

Speaker 1: 23:54

Now, I'm not saying that everybody's gonna understand it all the time, right, it's. I'm not saying to say no to everything, I'm just saying become well aware of when you were kind of getting stepped over or maybe talking, getting talked harsh to and realizing like, okay, how is that affecting me? But then what am I gonna do about it? And the last one step five is practicing mindfulness and self-awareness. So when we cultivate mindfulness, which is all about being present in the moment, without judgment, and paying attention to our thoughts and our feelings, without getting overwhelmed, and it is kind of a game changer I shouldn't say kind of a game changer I feel like all of these things are a really big game changer for ourselves. But when we have more mindfulness in our lives and we have a deep understanding of ourselves, it can really help us reduce stress for ourselves.

Speaker 1: 24:44

And there's a thing called the IAA, which is intention, attention and attitude. So what is my intention? How do I wanna show up today? What is my attention for the day? Where am I gonna be present? And then, how is my attitude? How am I showing up? The more that we can practice self-awareness, which is all about being aware of how we're making other people feel, how we're feeling ourselves, maybe we have these emotions that are coming up that we need to do something about. All of that stuff is really important to understand and mindfulness is really being present in the moment, when we're starting to focus on loving ourselves more. It's really easy, like we kind of already shared. It's easy to kind of look at well, these are all the things that I need to work on. But if you just look in the moment right now, I'll be like hey, like I showed up today, hey, I'm showing myself some gratitude, hey, let's go try our best today. Hey, this guy tried his best today. And the more that we can have that gratitude, that self-love for ourselves, the more that we are gonna show up to be the best versions of ourselves.

Speaker 1: 25:50

When I said the IAA, which is intention, attention and attitude, it's really about your choice. What is the intention, like I said, that you're gonna set for the day? So, when you think about mindfulness, it's starting your day off of. What is that intention? And then what's my attitude going to be, or my where's my attention today? That's what I was supposed to say first, the intention or the attention that I wanna give today. And then that third one is the attitude. Like I said before, it's understanding to be in present, not being judgmental on yourself and to other people.

Speaker 1: 26:20

And when you think of self-awareness, this is a really great exercise that I do a lot with the people that I work with is a journal prompt, and so if you are struggling, where you're like my mind is all over the place today just want you to grab a sheet of paper. I want you to write down three questions. Maybe the questions are how did I show up for myself today, what do I love about myself today and what brought me joy? And maybe the fourth one I'm just gonna throw this one is what are my challenges for the day? And I want you to just set a timer for two minutes. I want you to write down whatever comes to mind and after that two minutes is done, I want you to look at that sheet of paper and notice what was really easy for me to write down what was really hard for me to write down, and the more that we had that self-awareness of what was easy, what was hard, and then being able to take that and be like, okay, I'm just gonna sit on that for a little bit, or you know what, I'm gonna make some action around it either, or is great, but it's about having that starting moment of that self-awareness, of being present in the moment, to be able to take that, to make that change, to really love ourselves more.

Speaker 1: 27:25

And so, with that, those are the five areas that I really want you to all understand that these are five steps to really love yourself more. And if you can add these things into your life, guys, even if it's five minutes a day, it's better than nothing. And self-love is not a destination. It's a journey of acceptance, compassion and growth. And the more that we can embrace the journeys of self-love, we can embrace who we are as people. And I want for all of you guys to know how worthy you are of loving yourself. You are worthy of your own love Because, like I said in the beginning, we would never talk about ourselves or we would never talk about other people the way that we talk about ourselves.

Speaker 1: 28:07

Sometimes we try to show up for everybody else, but it's time for you to continue to do that, but also show up for yourself as well, and so, when this podcast ends, when it closes out, I want you to think about what is one positive thing about yourself that you can say after this. What is that one thing that you know that you need to hear for yourself today? So that is my action for you guys to think about, as you're starting to love yourself more. So all of these steps will really help you to love yourself more, become the best version of yourself, and just know that I am here along the way with you. So, as I always say, continue to spread love and kindness to everybody that you meet. Thank you for tuning in, and if you have not subscribed to our channel yet, please be sure to, because I wanna help you become the best version of yourself. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 29:06

Thank you for tuning into the Confident Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, follow the Confident Podcast on Instagram and TikTok and share it with those who might benefit. Also, if you are looking to work one-on-one with me, message and follow me on Instagram at Lisa Tarkington official. Stay confident, stay inspired and until next time, keep striving to be the best version of yourself. Take care.