how to stop being so hard on yourself 💗

hello my loves welcome back to lavendaire let's talk about how to stop being so hard on yourself how to heal this inner critic that you might have inside how to let go of this unnecessary pressure or expectation that you're putting on yourself all the time today i'm going to break down a few different types of foundations and reasons that will lead to you having this tendency of being hard on yourself and hope that you can have greater awareness and some actionables by the end of this video first of all raise your hand if you feel like you have any self-destructive habits being hard on yourself being your worst critic and putting yourself through the pressure and stress when it's not always necessary i'm sure too many of us do this myself included and this past year has really been an exercise in undoing these old beliefs that i have understanding why i tend to push myself so hard why i put such high expectations on myself why do i stress myself out why am i hard on myself for no reason at all the first exercise you can do is to journal to this simple straightforward question why am i so hard on myself so write that on your journal and start to answer and i encourage you to ask why at least four or five times the reason why you want to keep asking why is because usually your first answer is a surface level practical answer and so you have to ask okay why does that matter why do i do that and then you just keep peeling back the layers and i think this is a good first start to gaining awareness of why you are hard on yourself why are you making life harder than it should be your goal is to try to uncover these old beliefs or stories that you've told yourself that are the foundation of how and why you are the way you are if you dig deep enough i find that the underlying thoughts and belief that causes you to be this way is i'm not enough i'm not doing enough i'm not good enough i'm not pretty enough i'm not blank enough fill in the blank with whatever you tend to tell yourself this underlying belief is what causes us to feel terrible about ourselves it ruins our confidence and it really puts us down and holds us back for no reason because we are doing it to ourselves and if you dig into the reason why you believe this belief i find that at the deepest levels it has to do with your notions of love worth safety and survival so as you journal and as you dig deep ask yourself how is this related to either my feelings or desires of love worth safety and survival don't worry if you don't have like an aha moment after this journaling session because you really are like an onion and you're peeling back the layers one at a time and sometimes it takes years to peel back these layers as you go through life but the first very important step to change is awareness so that's what we're trying to do for the first step is to just build awareness and i shared those guiding posts to help you find what that belief or what that story or event is to you i'll share a little bit about my story and the reason why i've discovered i can be so hard on myself this is actually something that i've been working with a therapist with and my healing meditation yoga instructor with as well and i've had so many newer revelations in this past year so before i get into my story i do want to thank better help for sponsoring this video so better help is the tool that i use to speak to a therapist on a weekly basis i just do a phone call but you can also do video calls or chat so better help is professional counseling done securely online once you sign up betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist the service is available for clients worldwide and you can log in anytime to message your counselor i like that you get to schedule sessions on your own time you don't have to deal with commuting or waiting in waiting rooms like with traditional therapy better help also makes it easy and free to change counselors if you don't like yours and you can cancel anytime if you don't like it i've switched therapists a couple times because it took me a little bit to find someone that i really vibed with like i really like my therapist energy and i like her approach better help is more affordable than traditional offline counseling and financial aid is also available betterhelp wants you to start living a happier life today so if you're interested you can try betterhelp at betterhelp.com eileen and join over one million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional so that's betterhelp.com ileane to get 10 off your first month all right on to my story so to tell you in as brief as possible because i don't want this to be too long i realized that i needed to make a change in my mental health when i got to the point where i was successful enough i had enough subscribers and views and money i had more than enough in my life to keep me happy and safe and yet i found myself still stressing out about the numbers and pushing myself to work so hard and i would ask myself why am i still stressing so hard why am i feeling like i have to work so hard to keep achieving and achieving and get to the next level oh this level's not good enough let me keep doing more and more like why can't i just be peacefully content with everything that i've built so far like i found myself just pushing myself unnecessarily and this tendency to push and work so hard leads me to burnout so i just started questioning why what's the reason i'm doing this because i have everything i need why am i suffering so for the past two or three years i've been exploring this topic of how can i slow down how can i do less even when i'm trying to do less why do i feel guilty for doing less why do i feel guilty on days i'm not productive and really like unraveling the inner reasons of why i push myself so hard so if i'm being honest the popular negative self-talk that constantly plays in my head are the thoughts of i'm not doing enough i should be doing more i could be doing more and when you have a career in social media the amount of things that you could be doing is non-stop you could be making more videos you could be making more tick tocks you could be doing a book and this and this and this and it's just never ending and working through therapy and healing has made me realize that this has been a lifelong habit ever since i was a kid to push myself to always want to do more and be the best and overachieve and it goes so deep essentially i realized that the reason i am this way is because i was raised with a dad that has super high expectations on both me and my brother and when we were young there was even like fear injected into that like you have to be a good student you have to get straight a's you have to go to a good college you have to get a good job blah blah blah you have to excel and be the best and if you're not good enough and you don't get good grades we're gonna send you to china to live with your dad and go to school there and that idea was terrifying i did not want to live with my dad in china i liked my life in america when i was young so there was that fear there was also fear around if you don't succeed in life your dad will cut you off and you will have to support your mom your brother like financial reasons like put into me like you have to be the one to support the family those two reasons were tied to my sense of survival so i had to be a good student i had to achieve in order to survive because if i didn't do it it threatened my life it threatened my feeling of safety and survival and growing up with a dad with such high expectations anything that we did it just never felt good enough for him and obviously because he left our family there's that abandonment issue and so i do know that the feeling of achieving and showing him that i was successful showing him that i was worthy that's also tied to my sense of self-worth and also my need for love and acceptance and so success to me when i was growing up success equaled my worth and success equaled love and it becomes the cycle of positive feedback where you do well you get praise for it so you're like oh my god i like that feeling of praise and love so let me do well again and get more praise and more and it just keeps building on top of each other so i kind of grew up that way where i fed off that acceptance and approval from others and anything that threatened that was terrifying and so my self-worth was not rooted in myself nobody taught me that you are worthy no matter what so i think a lot of people's worth is displaced and they don't even realize it and it's only up to the point that this whole system breaks down and you realize that you're mentally unhealthy operating that way that's when you start to realize okay i have to heal this it's funny because this tendency is often celebrated in our society because it works people who tie their sense of self-worth with their productivity or success they tend to do well in life because that's what they need to survive that's what they're living off of and the people that you see who are successful making a lot of money doing big things and they can't stop a lot of them have this roots of insecurity and they're worth being tied to something it's not supposed to be tied to and of course there's still ways to succeed in a healthy way but there's also a lot of people who are driven by fear by this negative way that is not good for the long term so let's continue exploring this topic more exercises you can do let me break it down further for you the first step to healing your inner critic is to recognize what is the broken record happening what is the negative self-talk that just plays over and over and over so start to write down and make a list of the typical things you tell yourself because it's different for everyone like i said mine was you're not doing enough you should be doing more you're not good enough and i think other people's might be you're worthless you can't succeed you don't deserve this so write down the typical things that you play on repeat in your mind and for each thought ask yourself where does this come from is this my thought or did i get this from somebody else did i get this from media did i get this from society where did this thought come from because it definitely didn't come from you like you didn't have this thought when you were a baby so it must have come from somewhere outside of you so dig and figure out where that came from i found out that my negative thoughts came from the high expectations of my parents and after you recognize that it comes from somewhere outside of yourself you can start to be like oh okay it's just a thought that came from outside of me like i don't have to believe this who said it's true nobody said it's true the next exercise you can do is work with your child self so close your eyes imagine yourself as a child like five years old if it helps maybe you can just look at your baby pictures and put it in front of you and imagine that child telling herself these negative thoughts that you are telling yourself now then as an outsider what would you say to that child version of you knowing that she's thinking these thoughts and feeling this way so whether you want to talk to yourself in your mind or whether you want to journal this out is up to you but this is a very powerful exercise because it helps you see yourself and your thoughts from a more objective point of view and to recognize that these thoughts are irrational and they're not helping you likely you'll find that the way you speak to a child is much more gentle and loving than you would typically speak to yourself so why are you being so harsh on yourself you are still that inner child you still want those things that that child wanted when she was younger so speak to yourself tell yourself everything that you wanted to hear and let me know if you do this exercise because i'd love to hear your thoughts after doing it like i alluded to in my personal story healing the overachiever in you or the part of you that has expectations and puts pressure on yourself has to do with understanding where your self-worth is rooted in where your sense of love or survival safety or security are rooted in the first thing i want to say is it's not your fault this is likely rooted in your childhood and if you grew up in the u.s or any competitive nation like the us you likely hold a belief where productivity and success is tied to worth and value this is just part of society and how the culture of industrialization capitalism have kind of ingrained these beliefs into us the fact that you have to be productive to be deemed valuable and worthy a book that i highly recommend that explains this is the book called do nothing it explains that it's because the industrial era that we started to see time was money and productivity was worth and we started to teach people to squeeze as much productivity as you can out of people in order to gain the most output because it was literally about manpower and labor and the way our school systems are structured are still based in the industrialization era because that system and schedule was meant to prepare you for work in factories and to prepare you to be the most productive and rule-following people aside from doing the mental digging and reflection unraveling and understanding yourself and why you are the way you are the next exercise that i recommend for high achievers overachievers is to make time to relax it's super simple but we need to carve time into our schedules to do nothing and to relax and to physically relax our bodies of the tension that we hold in our bodies like i don't know about you but you probably have tension in your neck and your shoulders and your back that you hold on because you care so much and you're pushing yourself so hard so i highly recommend yoga going out for walks physically moving your body in a way that can help you relax deeper breathing exercises meditation these are things that i talk about often on my channel it might sound you know typical and cliche but you gotta do it are you relaxing every single day sometimes we're hard on ourselves because we have low confidence and a lot of insecurity and having those two things can really you in life because it's a negative cycle you're not confident and so you don't show up as your best self and then people don't see who you really are and then you feel less confident you're not allowing yourself to be your fullest most authentic self because you have a level of fear that you hide behind i find that this level of insecurity comes from how you grew up whether your parents were really hard on you and didn't think you're good enough or you experienced bullying growing up like a lot of things as a kid can really hurt your confidence and cause you to be insecure for the rest of your life and it's really sad to see that it's really sad to see someone not understand or see how beautiful and powerful they are if you can relate to this it's likely that you haven't built a habit of celebrating yourself celebrating your wins you probably like brush off any achievements or wins like oh that's that's not a big deal that's small i'm still not that great so on the flip side my exercise for you is to start celebrating yourself make a list of all the things that you like about yourself all the things you want to celebrate about yourself rather than focusing on the things that you don't like make a list of all the wins that you can be proud of in your life even though they may be small it doesn't matter how big or small it is like celebrate it and recognize it see value in who you are and the things that you've done a mindset that's super powerful is to be able to look back and see how far you've come and be able to be proud of that if you are watching this video you have lived a life up to this point so there are so many things that you can be proud of looking back maybe you just haven't paid attention to it another exercise you can do is something i'll just call shine brighter as your true self the first part of this is to look to all the people that you admire in the world whether they are alive or from history and make a list of all of their personality traits and characteristics that are the reason why you admire them so maybe you admire people who are smart who are creative who have integrity honesty courage right so make a list and keep that somewhere where you'll know that list of personality traits that you admire and then the second part is to make a pinterest board or a mood board of visuals of people and the lifestyle that you admire whether it's in the clothes they wear or the places they go the things they're doing with their life just make that vision board mood board of visuals that inspire you these two exercises will give you a good clue to the ideal person you want to be like you want to be the person that embodies all of these personality traits and characteristics and you want to be the person who looks visually like the people that you admire and the life that they are living and then after that is okay how can i start embodying these things in my life and that will be step by step maybe it starts with something simple like buying this outfit that i really like on this person let me find something similar so i could feel more confident about myself i hope you see what i'm getting at you're essentially making a blueprint for your ideal self your truest self that is shining bright because likely your current self is like a muted version of yourself so it's a lifelong exercise of trying to shine brighter as your truest self the underlying goal and lesson on how to stop being so hard on yourself is to learn to love yourself unconditionally with all of the things that i talked about today all of the exercises i shared today at the root of it is learning to love yourself and that's it being loving is being gentle with yourself it's being supportive of yourself it's being positive with yourself these are things that we've talked about self-love is not a new thing now you guys should know by now how important that is but it's a journey in getting there it's a journey in transforming because you're essentially like releasing peeling back and throwing away these old beliefs these old layers of you that are not serving you anymore it's not serving you to put unnecessary pressure on yourself it's not serving you to have an inner critic it's not serving you to just be hard on yourself why be hard on yourself when life can be so hard already right the ultimate commitment to self-love is recognizing that i am not going to put myself through any suffering that i don't have to put myself through because if it's unnecessary i can let go of it from my life having true love for yourself is doing everything you can do to support yourself and allow yourself to thrive our goal is to thrive in life and shine as our best selves because only then will you be able to feel confident and free when you're loving to yourself you can be more loving to others and the world and we all know we need more love in this world as cheesy as it may sound it's very true so i'll end it at that let me know what you thought of today's video my exercises and my story let me know if you can relate comment down below and i love you so much i will see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Lavendaire

Views: 370,664

Keywords: stop being hard on yourself, self worth, how to heal your inner child, inner critic, self love, healing self worth, confidence, stop putting pressure on yourself, self love tips, self confidence, self love journey, how to love yourself, personal development, how to practice self love, self improvement, how to love yourself and be confident, practice self love, self love habits, self love affirmations, how to self love, self love practice, healing self love, self awareness

Id: nrlPcGpKMFo

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021