Take Your Own Advice

Highlights

• When we begin to open our hearts, we start to discover what we truly deserve and begin to treat ourselves with kindness. When we make a commitment to ourselves, when we begin to open our hearts and find freedom, the feelings of self-doubt and despair will fight back.”
• I know you have a similar voice of kindness inside you that is just waiting to break free and tell you, “I love you. Thank you. I’m so glad you’re here.”
• There is no spiritual growth until you understand that you are a good person who deserves spiritual growth.
• While you’re trying to be authentic, you might have an unexamined assumption that you aren’t doing it “right.” It is much more important to build on your own experience of self-acceptance and concentrate on speaking your truth in each moment.
• What if you were able to live the rest of your life without punishing yourself for all you’ve done “wrong”?
• Going forward in your life without doubt is a false and impossible goal. But you can learn to stop the endless punishment and self-judgment for anything you do.
• Authority figures required you to police yourself, to do a parent’s job for them.
• Any time your idea of confidence or your concept of self-worth (or your goal in life in any way, shape, or form) is tied to someone else, you are in deep trouble.
• As a child, you were set up to doubt your own worth and undermine any natural confidence you may have had. So, let me give you an alternative definition of confidence: self-kindness, inner beauty, self-acceptance, soul grace, heart delight, self-care, and self-respect.
• That is confidence. That is how to be confident: Be kind to yourself, no matter what happens, no matter how life goes.
• Having confidence doesn’t mean you no longer experience nervousness.
• The beautiful thing about not having an extremely comfortable life is that you have an excellent chance to become an entirely compassionate person.
• If you can build an unwavering self-compassion, an enthusiastic love for yourself that becomes your default, that is the confidence you seek. And that will never leave you.
• choose to stay with yourself. Prove that you can stay with yourself in the most challenging circumstances. That is the ultimate power.
• I want my whole life to be devoted to being kind to myself.
• Don’t let insight become a new standard for self-hate.
• Our lives are a series of stories we tell ourselves inside our heads.
• The evil and cruel way that society trained you—how you learned to treat yourself—is habitual. The system will not give up its power without a fight.
• It’s okay to lose the narrative of yourself. Be careful that the stories you tell yourself about yourself aren’t rehashes or lies you’ve been told about who you are.
• Ditch the systems of self-punishment and guilt instilled in you in your childhood. Guilt is 100 percent useless.
• Confidence is shorthand for the opportunity to love yourself unconditionally. If you hold yourself to an ever-changing standard, you will never achieve anything like confidence.
• Self-cruelty is a habit. Habits can be broken.
• Authority, in my mind, is something you give yourself. Authority is something you already naturally have.
• When you are fully authentic, you are also open about what you need, who you need it from, and when.
• What would change for you if you regularly assumed that the natural you was wanted everywhere?
• If you’re going to be truly authentic, you’re going to speak your mind. You’re going to say a truth that you have observed. People are going to dislike you. Not always, but a lot of the time!
• If you’re too busy trying to seem authentic or even trying to be a version of authentic, you are not sharing the absolute truth of what it is like to be you as a human being.
• You don’t have to have a good reason for anything in particular.
• It’s a good rule of thumb to assume you have a reasonable motivation for anything you do.
• Your presence and value are not dictated by your “worth” or “use.” Being “useful” is not a prerequisite for your respect or value as a human being.
• Authentic is not the same as perfect. Your journey to authenticity can be messy and meandering.
• Coming to terms with your version of authenticity is worth it, even if others judge you or try to make honoring your version of authenticity an unpleasant choice.
• Reasons for our patterns are often less wrong than we think. Get out of thinking that reasons can be good or bad. Your unique reasons can be beautiful and fully human.
• I know that I can stay in a beautiful, gorgeous, and affirmed place without seeing or caring that other people are metaphorically (or actually) laughing at me.
• Holding on to “should have known better” keeps you busy fearing outcomes instead of listening to your heart. You don’t tune in to what you can know; you don’t see what is crystal clear and accurate for you.
• If you use “I don’t know” as a hiding place, you’re not being fair to yourself. You deserve the freedom to make a mistake. You deserve the freedom to speak your truth as you see it in one minute, and to see a different truth two minutes later, and then voice that one.
• When you were a kid, you were taught or shown that the choices you make have to be the right ones. You had to be perfect to survive.
• mistakes were stolen from you when you were a child.
• There is no such thing as an outcome that means you are deficient. There is no such thing as an outcome that means you are unworthy. There’s no such thing as a place you can get to, a thing you can produce, a thing you can say, anything that happens along the timeline of your life, that means something about your worth.
• The middle way promises that you can find another option that is compassionate for all. But it is also an option that breaks the matrix of right/wrong, good/lousy, mistake/success.
• You already have the instincts to make the most critical decisions in your life. Follow and trust your heart. You give the best advice, after all.
• It’s never too late to do nothing.
• We got the message growing up that belonging is not our birthright. So we set out on a path of trying to belong, but it doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work is that we belong already. You can’t fix what no one broke.
• Waiting for other people to give you a sense of belonging is a passive response, but creating the communities yourself is active. It’s time to take charge.
• belonging means, it will always be about other people. If you’re not careful, belonging will always be about (1) helping others feel good or (2) obsessing over whether or not someone else will decide if you belong.
• You want to shift your focus to using your smarts, ideas, and inspiration to create the community of belonging you have always wanted.
• And if the only spaces, the only sense, the only mimicking of a community you’re getting in your life is through social media apps, that might compound your preexisting problems with how you view belonging, or how you view communities.
• For many people, family is chosen. Find your community and select healthy people to invest your energy and love into.
• Forget using work or achievements to determine your value. Your humanity is more than enough.
• You made a deal at a very young age—it’s a deal made with your family and your community: Abandon yourself thoroughly and devote yourself to pleasing others; only then will you belong. You’ll be safe. You made a deal before you even knew you were making it. You couldn’t possibly have made a different choice. So, the time has come for you to let go of this deal and be free.
• Learning to stop worrying about what other people think of me and to stop trying to control what other people think of me has been a journey of learning to tell the truth.
• You don’t have to be mean to tell the truth, but you also don’t have to worry about being liked.
• The way to get out of this habit of hiding your truth is to begin to see yourself the way you wish others would see you.
• It’s imperative that you relax and shift your focus away from whether someone likes you or not. And that you shift your focus onto how to be yourself fully. There is no need to keep trying to survive your childhood.
• We all have times when we fall back into our old patterns. Try not to beat yourself up over those times when the mask-self—the habitual people-pleaser side of you—comes up again.
• A huge part of giving up on people-pleasing (and giving up on being obsessed with what others think of you) is exploring what it means to have needs. It is imperative to be open and honest with yourself about your needs, and it can be a big step to be honest with others about what you need.
• When you were a kid, adults convinced you to act like you didn’t have requirements. It is why so many of us were told, “You’re very mature for your age.” You might think that this was a compliment that implied you were a kid who was acting like an adult, but we weren’t acting like adults. Adults were training us to act like people without needs so that they wouldn’t have to address them. Being a person without needs is impossible. Your parents may have encouraged you to act out an impossibility.
• Once you begin to voice your needs to others, you will learn who respects your needs. You can use this as a barometer to decide who you’d like to have in your life.
• But if you’re running around pretending you don’t have needs, you are going to surround yourself with people who are either (1) attracted to the fact that you don’t have needs or (2) attracted to the fact that you keep pretending you don’t have needs. Or they might be attracted to the false, “likable,” need-less you. And one day, they will find out that you have needs. What will you do then?
• love has surrounded me with people who can “handle” my needs.
• When you give up on what others think of you, you can focus on what you feel about yourself.
• Dad.” As a nonbinary person, I’m basically designed to upset people in this society.
• Learn to identify the behaviors you adopted to survive. Drop any habit that is no longer supporting your self-compassion.
• Start showing the kindness that you give so freely and in abundance to others to yourself.
• It takes courage to be needy. Build up that courage and, when it is safe, confide your needs in your friends and family, and also don’t forget to tell yourself!
• One of the keys to spiritual practice is divorcing a behavior from an emotion. Almost every emotion has an attached behavior. Emotions make the stories in our heads seem real. And once specific stories seem real, certain behaviors feel inevitable.
• Anger is a friend who can help you heal.
• With anger, we have sensations in the body. We have a word and a narrative story, and then we have a behavior.
• The part of the equation that usually gets our attention is the behavior. The feelings and the story cause us to do something we “must” do, and it usually isn’t pretty. It’s usually “not like us.”
• Identify and familiarize yourself with the contours of your anger. Embrace your anger, but don’t let it control you. Anger can be the first sign that you are taking your own needs seriously.
• If you know that you can be gentle and loving with yourself before, during, and after any stressful moment in your life, you don’t need to fight with life so hard.
• I would rather feel the problematic pain of life than spend another minute trying to cut off all my feelings.
• And then, one day, I woke up. I realized that if anyone believes that a single person represents an entire group, that person is in more trouble than I can help them out of.
• Always trying to have your life together will put you in a constant state of unhappiness.
• The real problem with getting your life together is that no one’s life is together, and no one’s life could ever be together because “together” is a standard that doesn’t exist.
• You deserve to flow with the unexpected and not “have it all together” or have “good excuses” for existing. You deserve the chance to face bullies unarmed with the perfect answer but carrying a quiver of self-dignity. You deserve unprepared adventures.
• You don’t need to know what you’re doing. None of us do. You don’t need to have it all together, but you need to be kind to yourself and continue to speak your truth.
• Unpredictability is part of the true beauty of life.
• You don’t constantly need a reason, schedule, or agenda to justify your existence. Find a centered life in the things that bring you joy.
• Your pain is the gateway that has helped you to feel compassion for the pain of others. It is handy for spiritual growth because compassion for others can teach you to feel sympathy for yourself.
• I would ask you to celebrate your pain as part of the beautiful, complicated tapestry of your life story. From the beginning, your life story is a painful, beautiful patchwork.
• Culture is broken if a good-hearted person like you grew up being taught that you need to be fixed.
• You are worth any effort. Period. You get to decide. Will your life be about others’ reactions to you, implanted standards, and self-hate, or will you concentrate on healing?
• The fact that you are a compassionate, good, and kind person who is innocent enough that tragedy makes you feel pain is one of the best things about you.