True Self-Love Requires Some Tough Love

It's so easy to get confused and think self-love is all about following your moment to moment feelings, only doing what feels good, always choosing what feels comfortable.

But it's not!

Self-love requires the balance between gentleness and nurturing AND truth and aspirations - reaching for what you want to create in your life. Tough love isn't bad - when we consider the bigger picture...WHY we're doing what we're doing, we sometimes need a little tough love to do what it takes to get there.

Sometimes it can be HARD and scary and those hard and scary things are the only way we will get from here to where we want to go.

How can we stay connected to ourselves and also be disciplined?

How can we make sure what we're doing is aligned with the life we are here to live, the life we're creating?

That's the most important part. Not to be doing what someone ELSE wants us to do. Not to be succumbing to pressure and shoulds.

Follow your own soul's path and then be disciplined enough to get there....while loving yourself along the way.

Tune in below to dive deeper into this concept:

Transcript

Today, we're going to talk about what tough love has to do with self-love. My name is Deb Blum and I'm a self-love and authenticity coach, and I'm really committed to helping women find inner peace and happiness. I mainly work with women who do too much and never feel like are good enough. And in fact, I've created a membership group called self love base camp. And it's for women who do too much, never feel like they're good enough to finally feel like they are good enough. And to feel like they're thriving, even when life isn't actually going the way that they were hoping it would go. So if that interests, you just check out selflovebasecamp.com. The link is below in the show notes, and let's talk about tough love. All right. So this, I am just going to give you one little narrow glimpse on this self-love - self-love work is so multifaceted.

One of the things that I do notice that happens sometimes when we talk about self-love is in those beginning stages of, of self-love work it's often especially with the women that I work with, who tend to be very, very hard on themselves. It's really cutting ourselves a lot more slack and starting to tune into how we feel and to start to be guided a little bit more by what we want rather than what the external world is telling us we should do or should be. And so it's this journey toward self exploration. And often what happens is we do get more in tune with like, what does and doesn't feel good. So feelings were never meant to be the guide. Okay. I know some people talk about feelings and intuition and they're the guide and that's what your primary guide should be.

I think everything's just information. Okay. So feelings, bodies, sensations, thoughts, they're all super important. And I don't want to discount them at all, but our feelings and our thoughts and our sensations in our bodies. I mean, they're often fleeting. And so we may feel like we don't want to do something right now, but that doesn't mean that we'll feel that in, in a couple of minutes or an hour, but not only that, sometimes we have to do something that doesn't feel comfortable or easy because it's going to be in service to something that we want in our life. Like if you want to be a certain, like, say you want to be a doctor, you are going to have to do things that don't actually feel comfortable. A lot of things you're going to have to do. You're going to study hard. You're going to have to sometimes not get good sleep because you have to study, you're going to then have to be doing a residency. And you're going to probably work a ton of hours. You're going to have to be constantly put in new situations that you're uncomfortable with. And you're going to have to get comfortable with, you're going to make mistakes that you get embarrassed by. These are things that have to be done in order to be able to achieve your goal. So the often what we do is we do it by kind of shutting off the body and the feelings, and we just kind of like cut off and we just power through. So it's this learning how to hold like our whole experience to be able to be present with our experience, but not let our experience hold us back from those things we want to achieve in life. So if you have a goal of maybe it's building a business, or maybe it's a goal of raising children in some idea that you have like maybe children who stand up for themselves. If you have a vision for your, for your family or a vision for your you and your work or a vision for you to become a person who is a source for your own safety and happiness and inner peace, if you want something in the longterm for yourself, it is incredibly likely that everything along the way, those steps, they are not going to always be comfortable. They are sometimes going to be hard. Sometimes they are going to be painful. And so if we only do what feels good, we won't get there. If we only honor the feelings that we have, and we don't look at the bigger picture of what we're trying to get to and be courageous and push ourselves through some of these things, engage a little bit of tough love, right?

We're going to get there. So same goes for things like, you know, waking up in the morning and like, you know, just not feeling like doing something that needs to get done or that you committed to getting done. Sometimes we just have to take a few breaths, get centered, remember why we're doing the thing we're doing. Like, I really believe one of the most important things we need to do is not be hyper-focused on the minute to minute feelings that we have. I mean, feel them experience them, but don't let them be in the driver's seat. What's in the driver's seat is your bigger, why your bigger vision for yourself now, the bigger vision for your self doesn't have to be some outwardly impressive thing. It can be that you're learning how to be more inwardly focused, for example. And so your practice might be a constant vigilance around around that practice about around the practice of turning inward.

That might mean you have to say no to a lot of people because you don't have enough time and space in your life because you're so busy. So you might actually be reining things back in. It might be a time when you actually are more internally oriented. Right. That's awesome. It's about being intentional, what you're wanting. So it's, it's about not letting the moment to moment feelings and desires for comfort and, and kind of like that sense of like, Oh, I just don't. I was too, I'm just too tired today. Okay. That might be true. Might be true, but it might not mean that you have to cancel your entire day. You might be able to take a nap. It might be that you need to go for a walk tire doesn't mean do nothing. So it's how do you and your view.

So it's like when you have children who you, you want to love and honor, and acknowledge the person that your child is, and also help them to become who they are, who they're they're, they're here to be live into their potential. So you have to be holding both. And that's where tough love comes in. So there's the gentle, absolute, like, radically accepting love yourself every single moment where you are follow kind of like those inner feelings. That's really a very important thing. As long as it's balanced with kind of truth telling to yourself, like, we're never going to get to that point. If we don't do this, like, I don't feel like working out right now, but can you, can you like, like we talk, I've talked in other videos about parts, like, can that part that doesn't want to do it right now, maybe the other part that knows and remembers the goals and has a little tough love says to that part.

Like, Hey, listen, I don't know. I know you don't really want to do it right now, but let's just put your sneakers on and see if that gets you feeling a little bit more motivated. So then together put our sneakers on that. Part's kind of like, I still don't really want to go, but I'm a little bit closer to going then this part over here, the part, remember we really want to be healthy and strong because we want to be able to go do those Hills you know, or out mountain biking. We want to be able to do those Hills and make it and keep up with everybody else. Or, or maybe it's like, I really want to lower my cholesterol and be a healthy person in the long run. And so then we talked to the part in, okay, okay, we'll go, we'll get in the car and we'll go. And if we're not having, if we're not enjoying the workout, we can leave in 10 minutes, you know, and you kind of keep guiding yourself along the journey. You don't stop doing things because they don't feel good. All right. That's the tough love part of this. You must have tough love and discipline. Discipline is probably the word for it. Discipline is not about not anything bad discipline, not bad. Discipline is beautiful. How do I balance discipline with kindness? How do we discipline our things to ourselves to do things, but without it being a cutting off and also just being, making sure you're not doing the things that you're, that that other people are expecting from you. So much of self love and authenticity is about being discerning about like, who is this? You know, am I, am I working out because am I doing, you know bike riding because I like bike ride riding, or because someone else told me that it's a good thing to do.

And they liked doing it. And so I'm like thinking I should do that. Or, you know, are you learning to play an instrument? Because somehow you edit in your head that you were going to learn how to play that instrument, but yeah, deep down inside, you don't even like it. And you try to force yourself doing it for God's sakes, either find an instrument and you do like, or maybe music isn't for you, or maybe you like to listen to music, but not play music, or maybe you would like to dance, you know, finding your way and then go for it. Okay. Thanks. I hope this was helpful for you. I would love for you to like the video if you like it. And please as always, if you haven't already subscribed and you like these videos, please subscribe and click the bell. And you'll be notified when I drop new videos. I am not a consistent video creator. I tend to video. I tend to create videos in, in bulk. And so I can't tell you to come here every Monday and there'll be a new video. So if you subscribe you'll know, and then also, if you can share this with another person that you think might love it, please do that.