How to Nurture Self-Love | ep53
About this episode:
Listen, Valentine's Day is a tough day for many of us regardless of whether we're single or in a relationship. So, today we're talking about love, but not just any love - Self-Love (truly the best kind of love there is). If you struggle with how to love yourself, this is going to create a lot of clarity for you.
**psst: If you’re looking to nurture a romantic relationship this year, my new love manifestation course Manifest Them is open for enrollment!
This course is a combination of all of my favorite tools, ideas and concepts that helped me manifest my partner.
A year before I met my husband I wrote a Valentine’s Day card to myself.
I went to the store, and picked a card that I loved - two otters, arms entwined with the caption “There’s no otter like you.” I love otters and a good pun. So it was a pretty easy choice.
To be honest, I felt silly purchasing a card just for myself. I was surrounded by shoppers who were obviously buying cards for their significant others. And there I was, otter card in hand, with no one to celebrate Valentine’s Day with...well except with myself.
And the truth hit me right there - I was someone worth celebrating and showering with love.
You don’t have to wait on anyone to tell you how amazing you are.
You don’t have to wait on anyone to be showered with love.
You don’t have to wait on anyone, love. Because you will always have you.
Practicing self-love can be such a difficult thing to do. Often all we can see is our flaws, where we are falling short, and what we could be doing better.
But you know that love that you’ve been giving so generously to everyone around you? That love that uplifts, inspires and holds others?
You deserve that love more than anyone, love. YOU.
Learning how to love yourself is truly the greatest gift you can give yourself. But where do we start?
I struggled for so long with the term self-love because I had no idea what it meant. Let’s be honest, how many of us were exposed to strong examples of self-love growing up? To go even further, how many of us grew up with healthy examples of love?
So if we’re going to talk about self love, we need to define it for ourselves, before we can actually practice it.
When I first tried to define it I fell into the trap of defining it how I thought it “should” be defined.
Meaning that self-love is about feeling good all the time, thinking you’re the best, constantly congratulating yourself, and filling yourself with positive affirmations. And while this is true in some ways, it doesn’t really encompass what love truly is.
I knew from my experience loving others, that love does not always mean feeling good. Love can be difficult. It can be messy, challenging, and so incredibly hard.
The truth is, love is not just a feeling, but it’s also a verb. A verb that requires action.
For me, it’s easy to love others and to show that love. It’s not so easy however to love myself.
And so, I asked myself, “If love is a verb, what actions would I take to show my love for someone?”
Instantly I thought:
I would listen to them
I would respect them
I would accept them for who they are and where they are at
I would communicate with them
I would support them fiercely, kindly and unwaveringly
And sometimes, when things are overwhelming I would take a step back and take a break.
That is what love is to me.
That is the love that I show to my friends, family and my beloved. And that is love that I deserve from myself.
You see, loving yourself doesn’t mean feeling amazing all the time. It’s about the actions we take daily to check in, to support and to respect ourselves.
It’s a process that takes time and patience.
It’s an act that will be easy at times and sometimes the most difficult thing to do.
And if you want to go deeper, listen to this episode where I talk about what holds us back from loving ourselves and how we can start to nurture more self-love today.
A quote to take with you:
“You deserve that love more than anyone.”
This week, I invite you to…
Ask yourself:
If I love myself I’m afraid I may…
In my household love was….
Want to dive deeper through the full journal prompts?
If you want to be in the know and get each Mindset Monday straight to your inbox complete with journal prompts to take you even further, get on my email list.
About your host, Shirin Eskandani
Hi, love! I’m Shirin.
Coach, speaker, writer, and life alchemist.
I teach you how to trust your intuition again, tune out all the BS, and let your heart lead the way.
Because once you strengthen your inner GPS, decisions become easier, boundaries become clearer, and belly laughs become a daily thing.
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME:
I’m a certified life coach (accredited through the International Coach Federation)
My husband and I met on Instagram and we live in Brooklyn, NY with our plant babies
I have a masters degree in Music and was a professional opera singer for twelve years. I worked all over the world singing on stage at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera (more on that later…).
I believe in the woo just as much as I do the work (internal and external). No amount of crystals and affirmations will make up for a lack of a healthy mindset and aligned action.
I love all the Real Housewives franchises. Don’t make me choose one… seriously, don’t.
+ Read the episode transcript here
Welcome to wholehearted coaching the podcast. If you're looking for more purpose, more passion, more joy in your life and you have come to the right place. Let's create your dream life while living your dream life. Okay love. Hi love. Welcome to wholehearted coaching the podcast. This is where we take a deeper dive into my mindset Monday post, which you can read on Instagram at wholehearted coaching or you can get the full post plus journal prompts when you sign up for my email list. You can do that in the show notes. Or you can head to my website. wholehearted dash coaching comm if you are listening to this podcast live, then we are post Valentine's Day. This episode is dropping on February 15, which is the day after Saint Valentine did his thing, which like now that I'm thinking about it, I have no idea what he did. I think I'm mixing up with St. Patrick, because I'm like did he lead snakes away from a town? I'm not really sure y'all. But I know that Valentine's Day can be a really heavy day for many of us. And I really wanted to talk about love In this episode, but from a different perspective. So on this day, on this post Valentine's Day One, I hope you're heading to your local grocery store to buy out all of your favorite discounted chocolates, okay, do that. And to know that you are not alone, whether you are coupled up single, whatever form of relationship you are in right now, this can be a really hard day for so many of us during a really hard and challenging time. So in this episode, we're going to be talking about self love. We're going to be talking about what self love exactly is. Because it's a word that's used so often in the world of coaching, wellness, self growth. And I feel like we're constantly being told to love ourselves, but not being told how to do that, right. So I found myself struggling with this concept of self love for a really long time. Because let's be honest, how many of us were exposed to strong examples of self love growing up to go even further, how many of us grew up with healthy examples of love. So if we're going to talk about self love, if we're going to tell people to love themselves more, then we first need to define it before we can actually practice it. In this episode, we're going to break down what self love is and looks like and we're going to look at some of the reasons why you may be holding yourself back from loving yourself. Now we're not just talking about self love because of Valentine's Day, but also today February 15 is the day that my manifestation course my love manifestation course that I created with Alia lovely drops, so manifest them is open for enrollment. Manifest them is a self directed online course that will show you exactly how to manifest your dream partner. We talk about mindset work, how to change your frequency, what your frequency means, and the course is full of practical tools that you can use to call in your love. Now both Aaliyah and I have gone from having pretty terrible dating lives to manifesting incredible partners into our lives. And this course includes all of our favorite tools, concepts and ideas. You can save $100 until March 1. For more information head to manifest them.com that's manifest with two T's them.com Alright, so now let's get into this week's Mindset Monday. It reads. self love is not the act of feeling good all the time. It's the constant practice of meeting yourself exactly where you are. It's the continual attempt to accept and embrace every single part of who you are. self love is messy. It takes effort. But like all love is worth it. so worth it. You deserve to be loved by you. So self love. This really incredibly important thing is something that we really have not been taught how to do. How many people do we know in our lives growing up That we feel now that we look back practice self love had a healthy sense of self love. And to go even further, right? What was our family dynamic, like just love within our families. And for many of us, we kind of grew up in what we would now label as possibly unhealthy households when it came to giving love showing love, and what that all meant. So when we talk about love, we have so many misconceptions and misunderstandings about what it is there's confusion there, there's, there's also judgment there. When I think of how I grew up, self love was mistaken for being self absorbed, or having a big head, thinking you're the best at everything. Right? That if you loved yourself, that meant you were full of yourself. And that was a bad thing. In Iranian culture, the culture that I grew up in being humble is a really big thing across the board, male, female, whatever, you identify just being humble, you always had to downplay your amazingness. And if you did share what you were proud of what you really loved, then that was bragging. So the narrative that I grew up with was that being proud of yourself, thinking, you're amazing thinking you're great, that's not okay. As I'm talking about this, I want you to think about your household, the community you grew up in, and what the narrative around self love was. Were you allowed to love yourself? Was that shown to you? Was self love mistaken for something else? Did it feel comfortable to claim that to love yourself? And honestly, even as I asked these questions, we really first need to break down what loving yourself means which which we're going to do. But I think it's telling that even as I talk about this, right, asking yourself, you know, were you allowed to love yourself? It's like, wait, what does loving yourself mean? Like, does not compute? I don't understand, right? Just that question of like, Huh, what does that even mean? loving myself was I allowed to love myself when I was younger. And how telling is that, that as children, this idea of self love wasn't explained wasn't shown. And now as adults, I feel like we're just searching in the dark. But first, before we define what self love is, I want us to get clear on what our misgivings around self love are. So maybe take a moment, grab a pencil a paper, just think about these if you're out on a walk. But I want you to reflect on these questions. Ask yourself, if I love myself, I'm afraid I may. In my household love was loving myself makes me feel people who love themselves are. Now I really wish I could hear what you said, or thought to yourself. And I'm going to share with you what I often hear from my clients when we work on this idea of self love. You know, a lot of us are really afraid to love ourselves because we're, we feel unworthy. We were afraid that if we love ourselves, we're gonna get these big heads and egos, we're afraid that we're not going to be motivated to change, right that if we love ourselves, then we won't want to evolve and to transform. We believe that we're not perfect enough to be loved, that we haven't done enough things to earn our own love. Are these resonating? Because I know a lot of them resonate with me. And the household question is an important one, right? Growing up what was love like in your family? Was it hard that it has to be earned? Did you have to work for your love. I know a narrative I created for myself was that I had to earn my love. And so when it comes to self love when it came to self love, I felt unworthy of my love because I hadn't done enough to earn it. Now, this is some really deep stuff, y'all. These aren't just journal prompts. This is like deep introspective stuff. But this is where the gold is, right? These are the keys the keys to unlocking your self love. Because if you can understand what is holding you back from doing it from practicing it, then you know that's where you start to do the work. That's where you shine that light of awareness. If you episodes ago, I shared with you all a favorite quote of mine by Nikki Giovanni which reads, show me someone not full of herself. And I'll show you a hungry person. We should all be full of ourselves. We are starving ourselves of our own amazingness. So let's break down what self love is. When I first tried to define it for myself, I fell into that trap that I think many of us fall into defining love how I thought it should be defined, right? Meaning that self love is about feeling good all the time thinking you're the best thinking you're amazing. Constantly congratulating yourself and filling yourself with positive affirmations. And while this is true, in some ways, it doesn't really encompass what love truly is. Because let's think about what love is like with our friends, our family, our partners. When we think of love in that way, we know that, you know, love isn't always about feeling good. Love, can be effort, it can be difficult, it requires patience, it can be messy and challenging. So we started to break down, okay, what is love by looking at it through the lens of my relationships? For most of us, and I'm guessing this is true for you, it's really easy for us to love other people, right? Like, I am so generous with my love towards the people around me. So I started to look at that I started there. And I began to ask myself questions. And the first question I asked myself was, when do I give others love? When do I give other people love? And the question for me was such a big breakthrough because I realized, I gave my love all the time. I gave my love when it was needed. I just gave my love because that was who I was. I give my love generously and openly. And I realized that I never withheld my love. If my nephew made a mistake, I didn't stop loving him. With my husband, I so easily love all parts of him. He doesn't have to earn or work for my love. There isn't a part of that human that I don't love. And this was such an aha moment for me because I could see how I didn't do the same things for myself. My love for myself had to be earned. My love came after I did things accomplished things. I mean, imagine being in a romantic relationship like that, which honestly, I know some of us have been in and some of us are in right now. But we would define this as a toxic, unhealthy relationship. All right, withholding love until the other person did something. I also realized that I only love certain parts of myself. Like at the time, I love the perfectionist in me, and I hated the procrastinator. I love the high achiever in me, and I hated the self doubter. And that's not how love works. You can't be like, Well, you know, I love this part. But like this part totally sucks. Again, think of a romantic relationship and how toxic that would be how unhealthy that would be. But we all do this, we take certain parts of ourselves. And I'm not even talking about our bodies, our physical being, I mean, like, our inherent souls, the ways that we are. And when we do this, we are denying our innate wholeness. We're rejecting parts of who we are. And our wholeness is made up of all of our parts to some of you contains both the good and the quote, unquote, bad. Right? Love is embracing those things. Right? In the mindset Monday, it says the continual attempt, because this is a practice. This is something we get up every day, and choose consciously to do. Because the truth is, when it comes to how I love others, I love all of my husband, I love all of my nephew. So when we deny ourselves, love, because certain parts of us aren't good enough, and we're denying our wholeness. The second question I asked myself was, how do I show others my love? The truth is Love is not just like a feeling. It's a verb, a verb that requires action. And so I broke down the actions I took to show others my love for them. So how do I show love to others? Listen to them, I respect them. I accept them for who they are and where they're at, I communicate with them. I support them fiercely kindly, and unwaveringly. I'm patient with them. And sometimes when things are overwhelming, I take a step back, and I take a break. And so I saw this list. And every day, I started to journal about this, how to love myself really breaking it down into these actions, these verbs, right, so I would write Okay, self love, how do I practice self love today? And I would ask myself, what am I feeling today? What do I want to say today? Where am I at today? What do I need to do for myself? What support do I require? And I started to generously without question, give myself all the things I was asking for. And that is how I slowly learned how to love myself. And let me tell you, as I said, it's a constant practice. I always say that the longest relationship you will ever have is with yourself. So you have to tend to it, nurture it and really prioritize it. I want to end this episode with a quote from Bell Hooks book all about love, which is an incredible book that you should read, if you haven't. So this is what Bell Hooks writes about self love. One of the best guides to how to be self loving, is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over 40 body saw myself as too fat to this or to that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it? That I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim you can never love anybody, if you are unable to love yourself, made clear sense. And I add, do not expect to receive the love from someone else. You do not give yourself such a great quote. You know, this episode is dropping post Valentine's Day. And Valentine's Day is all about being coupled up. But though, but really the most important and steady source of your love should be from you. It's when we learn how to love ourselves, that we can show others how to do it as well. For so long when I was dating, I was hoping that the person I was in relationship with was going to teach me how to love myself that they had some key that I didn't have. But the key is within all of us. No one gives us that key love. You deserve your love more than anyone in this world. You deserve to be loved by you. Until next week, I'll talk to you then. Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you liked this week's episode, please share it with a friend. comment and rate this podcast until next week. See you later. Love