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Today's Studio Hacks - Your relationships - primarily with yourself.
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Studio Hacks
How is the relationship with yourself going?
A Step-by-Step in real self-respect.
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I have 3 questions for you:
How is your relationship with your past self?
How is your relationship with your present self?
What are you doing now to ensure an incredible relationship with your future self?
These are urgent questions.
Here's the secret many folks don't know. Your relationship with yourself - past, present, and future - depends on your thoughts about them.
The LCS Self-Caoching Model teaches you that you don't actually have love for yourself. You have thoughts of love for yourself.
You don't actually have respect for yourself. You have thoughts of respect for yourself.
You can't be mad at yourself, or have long-clung regrets. You have thoughts that make you feel mad... feel regret.
People can't hurt your feelings. You have thoughts that cause you to feel hurt.
If you can truly wrap your mind around these ideas - you will begin to have a level of freedom you never thought possible.
Sure, we all have things we have done we feel regret about when we have negative thoughts about them. But once you can identify that it is these negative thoughts about them that are actually causing the feelings of regret when we think of our past selves, you will never be the same.
Today is the day you can change your relationship with your present self. You can do this by beginning to identify the negative thoughts you continue to carry around with you about your past self - the thoughts that constantly have you living in the mud and mire of your past.
What kind thoughts can you think instead towards your past self? What self-compassion for them can you conjure instead that creates a different feeling in your body than negative, self-depricating emotions?
Regardless of whatever may have happened, what your strong and powerful self may have lived through and endured - and dealing with actual past trauma will be a different installment - but regardless of anything you may have survived or the choices you may have made you think today were just terrible, I believe you can 100% find a way to reframe those awful thoughts of your past self in more empathetic and loving ways that the reactionary thoughts your brain just loves to spit out at you.
This freedom comes in allowing your present self, today, to create a brand new relationship with your past self. That relationship can be self-loving, self-accepting, full of kindness and compassion, a new sense of empowerment for the resiliency and toughness you have displayed trudging through your own unique story.
Look at all you have been through, and instead of letting the thoughts your brain loves you to spend your life dwelling in and ruminating on, try on some new thoughts that embrace the strength your past self drudged up from the very depths of your soul as they fought for you through difficulty, despair, what you continue to identify as "terrible choices," all of it.
Sure, you may have made terrible choices. What younger version of ourselves doesn't.
Yes, you endured difficulty - some significantly more than others. Your past self got you through them and you are still here. With us. And we are so grateful for that.
I am grateful for your past self because your past self ensured your present self is with me right now. Today. That is a blessing and a miracle considering what so many of us have gone through in our own specific stories.
I will give you an example from my own life.
Here’s something about me:
Today, as I write this, I am 24 years, 253 days, 10 hours sober.
Yes. I am a recovered alcoholic, recovered today from a hopeless condition of mind and body, and I am now nearly two years sober longer than I was when I had my last drink. 🤯
I was young when I found myself in the midst of alcoholism.
I have pretty terrible alcoholic genetics on both sides of my family, sad stories of ancestors who truly wrecked their lives. This family trauma was passed down to me and my genetics.
The first drink I had was when I was 17. I had already set up my college career, won scholarships, had a plan for success. Then I took that first drink and was off to the races. I didn't know I had a physical allergy to alcohol until I first consumed it, and by then, it was too late.
I drank for 6 years straight through. I often joke I not only went through all of my life's drink tickets, but, at 23, I had a long tab of drink-ticket debt.
The night of my last drink, I probably shouldn't of survived, but that is a story for another time.
Instead, I found myself, by the grace of some divine higher power, still alive and in the rooms of recovery.
I never quit drinking. It was removed from me and I haven't had a drink since.
It took alot of hard work, don't get me wrong, and still today, when I think back on the parts of those 6 years I can truly remember clearly, I have a visceral reaction in my body that can spin me out into feelings of hopelessness and despair at the choices I had made as a young adult.
Even today, my brain loves to default into beating me up for such "stupidity," such regret for opportunities I really screwed up.
Here's a good one you will love.
I was "discovered" my senior year in college, an acting conservatory, by a prime-time TV scout who thought I would be perfect for a new character being introduced on one of the big Daytime Soap Operas.
I just had to show up, read some copy on camera, and I had a really good shot at landing the gig.
I convinced myself I needed a drink the night before to calm my nerves as I rehearsed the copy. I went out with friends - just for a little while.
My disease took over after that first bourbon & Coke, I was out all night, didn't sleep, and showed up late to the audition of a lifetime, still drunk, in the clothes I had worn the night before.
No, I didn't get the job being handed to me on a silver platter.
Even now as I write this to you, my default thinking is regret.
This is a more tame example of my stories during my active alcoholism, but I hope it conveys that I get it.
The worst of it.
And it is still hard work to start from a place of compassion for my past self. When I get too caught up in the negative thoughts of my past self and the truly cringe-worthy moments and what I still beat myself up at times for "terrible decisions," I can get stuck there. And it feels terrible.
But when I think about that vulnerable young woman out on her own in New York City at 20, suffering from the disease of alcoholism, a disease she didn't ask for but was passed down to her through genetics she never chose - when I sit in that space - I suddenly feel such gratitude for her because of the strength and resilience she showed to get me through that devastating time when I was so out of control, so that I am now here, today, alive, strong and fierce, writing this to you.
When I go there with love for her, with awe and wonder, with kindness and "heck-yes's," I am immediately so full of thanksgiving that she, somehow, got me, with a little help from the divine, through that. For that, I am so thankful to her. She ultimately gave me a life beyond my wildest dreams today.
Since then, 24 years, 253 days, 10 hours sober, I have helped countless others, primarily young women with stories similar to my own, get sober. Most have stayed sober. A day at a time.
Yes, alcoholism is a disease.
It is a 3 part disease.
It consists of:
A Physical Allergy.
A Mental Liability.
A Spiritual Malady.
As an aside, if you or someone you know or love suffers from overdrinking or alcoholism, know there are solutions. Solutions that work and save lives. Reach out to me if you want to know more about free resources that work.
So, yes friend, we have all, in our own unique experiences, lived through some really tough stuff. Stuff we cannot compare to one another because those stories are ours, ours alone, and the only experiences we know. I do not know the feelings yours bring up. You do not know mine.
But, what I can tell you is that way too many people live in the belief that your past self is set in stone. That your past failures are a fact that predicts your future; your past is the only thing that will dictate who you will inevitably be; that you are powerless and not in control of ever changing the course because your past is too engrained in how you live, the decisions you make, the pain you still might carry, and the lack of agency in your own life.
This is not true.
It was never true.
The question to ask yourself today is... are you in past-focused or future focused thinking?
Do you know that it is absolutely possible to rewrite the past by simply changing the way you think about your past self?
Yes, I know. But it is true.
It is that simple.
You are not powerless or out of control because of what your past self may have done, how she acted, the choices she made, or what circumstances she endured. You have not lost your agency.
Quite the opposite.
Ask yourself, who do you want to be?
What do you want for your future self?
What can you do today, right now to begin a relationship rooted in love and care for your future self?
You are not allowed to answer "I don't know." I don't know simply blocks you from your own internal wisdom, all of the brilliant things your past self has taught you, that your present self can implement, to lay an incredible foundation of joy, success, and happiness for your future self.
Today, rather than living in past-focused thinking, try on what it would feel like to be someone who is living in future-focused thinking.
Who do you imagine your future self to be and what can your present self do and think today to prepare you to meet that version of her in the future? She is waiting for you and so desperately wants you to do today what she needs so you can reap those rewards when you meet her.
I leave you with this.
You are 100% lovable.
There is nothing you can do to earn or lose that lovability because it belongs to you already. It is you.
If you do not feel true love for yourself today, it is only a reflection of your choice not to love yourself, past, present, and future.
My coach Brooke taught me early on when I balked at this that, although it sounds simple, it often seems so hard. Why? Because our brains are conditioned to constantly judge and look for the bad in ourselves. That's because our brain still thinks in herd mentality and wants us to be so perfect and compliant that we get to stay in the herd, stay safe, and be not dead.
One of my favorite quotes from my own coach is:
We spend so much of our brain energy judging ourselves that we have very little energy to love ourselves on purpose. This is an unconscious habit that’s tricky to break. Society doesn’t support self love much. People might look at you funny when you say you’re amazing, but it’s not bragging. We are all amazing, and we should spend more time talking about how amazing we are and less time talking about how we aren’t. We can’t take credit for our amazingness. Whatever created us gets that credit. But we can take responsibility for recognizing how amazing we are. Because of this, we can have an amazing relationship with ourselves. We won’t spend time arguing and putting ourselves down. We can spend time loving and encouraging and acknowledging ourselves. It’s so much more fun than the alternative.
How you treat yourself is a reflection of what you think about yourself. If you treat yourself in ways you would never let others treat someone else that you love - your family member, child, parent, best friend, partner, fur baby - then why on earth would you allow you to treat yourself in such a way?
Why?
When you have unconditional love for yourself, all three of yourselves, past, present, and future, it allows you to feel the emotions about yourself you want to feel. Reframe the thoughts about yourself and begin to experience a whole new world of self-confidence, self-esteem, self-love, self-worth, and the value you contribute to the world.
Create self-compassion for your past self, acknowledge her pain and struggle, but also, celebrate her power, stength, and resilience to have gotten you here today, so that we can all celebrate getting to be with you.
You cannot change your past self.
What you can do today is ask yourself how you would rather feel about her? What have you always wished you could feel about her but have always felt powerless to? What feelings can you put down about her that will not serve you today or you - the future you?
When you begin to believe - and most have believed this their entire lives - that how you feel isn't a choice, you continue down that road of a perpetual relationship with your future self that constantly disappoints you each time you meet her.
This is not a platitude. It is based in science.
By changing your thoughts, you change the neuroplasticity in your neurowiring. When you catch yourself stuck in those past, icky-yet-often-comfortable thoughts of self-deprication, practicing changing the thought will slowly become habit until that old thought is simply a thought of the past.
How would you rather feel about your past self? What small, true, and believable change in your thought can you start to think when you catch yourself berating her that will begin to inch you towards that feeling you would rather have?
A thought that might be…
Kinder
Gentler
More loving
More forgiving…
Here's your homework for the week:
Spend some time alone with your past self.
You don't have to go there with any trauma stuff. There is no need to relive any of that. You have spent way too much brain energy there. Just don't even go there.
Rather, spend time with that being you know so well, your past self.
Simply make a list of those negative thoughts you have about her. If you start with the "I don't knows," consider what feelings come up when you think about her. Put those in the F-Line of the Model and trace it back to the T-Line. Leave the C-Line be. The C-Line cannot be changed so leave it alone. Focus on your thoughts and feelings about her and write them down.
When you have a good, exhaustive list, spend some time with that. Look at these thoughts and/or feelings and, with your present self, identify the ones that no longer serve your long imagined self. Consider which ones are truly unkind, yuck, and lack a sense of self-love, and compassion for her.
Start reframing these yuck thoughts into true and believable thoughts that create, rather, the feelings your present self would rather be feeling.
Then put your future-self hat on and imagine how you hope she will think and feel if she wasn't bogged down with this awful self-deprication and, at times, maybe even self-loathing.
She doesn't deserve that. Neither do you today, nor does the memory of your past self.
I am here to tell you that you are fierce, powerful, strong, and resilient, and it is because of your past self that you have flourished into you today. Celebrate that. Revel in that. Be in awe and wonder of that.
And when those ick thoughts creep up, kick them to the curb with a pair of steel-toed boots, and practice this list you have created for yourself of how you would rather be feeling. Implement the list of true and believable thoughts you need to think in order to bring these feelings into fruition, smashing the others to pieces.
Give that a try and let me know how it goes @charliehornescoaching or you can leave me a note HERE
Remember, this is not a "blame the victim" process.
Together, with you, I acknowlegde you have been through difficulty. Yours may be much worse than mine and I honor that. Yet, at the same time, it is this difficulty that you will never be able to change.
There is no coaching or science or self-help book that can change the C-Lines of your past.
BUT, how have you always wanted to feel despite those C-Lines?
Just OK?
Just surviving?
Or AMAZING?
Don't you want to feel amazing, at peace, excited, full of hope? Don't you want to feel love for not only others, but truly, madly, deeply for yourself? I learned from my coach that love is honestly one of the greatest emotions we can feel and it is always available to us. Always. At anytime.
So, let's start to work on the most incredible feelings you would rather be feeling today.
Go spend some time with your past self. She could use a big hug.
Talk soon,
~C
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