Take Charge to Write Your Unique Story for Yourself

Self-acceptance allows us to be in the moment, to acknowledge each moment. The key is to do what we can do, what makes sense for our situation and context.

Finding Time for Your Priorities with Diane Randall

So what if you’ve accepted yourself, identified some areas for growth, and want to take some action? Where do you find the time for this?

Diane Randall is an expert:

I was a single mom with two children. finding the time, time management, working a lot and how do I fit that in? So along the way, I learned how to take the time I did have and incorporate something healthy, like maybe I have 10 minutes that day, or at that moment I can walk for 10 minutes. I can just sit in silence for 10 minutes. I can just listen to some soft music on the radio, just some nice music to bring the stress levels down, for example. So time had been the biggest thing. And then I reassessed my priorities as my life changed, as my kids grew up.
I learned how to make changes. So let’s say they were in high school, I had more time. So it was just setting intention and being focused on goals that could and support me in being a healthier person.

She followed this process to take stock of her life and realized that she needed to take control of her time to improve her health. My favorite quote from this episode is “Start where you are, right where you are.” With that one sentence, Diane makes the case for self acceptance. To be able to start where we are, we have to accept where we are. Only then can we figure out our new direction.

Take Control and Responsibility of Your Own Decisions with Mark Butler

A difficult topic for people is money. We may want to avoid it or we can have so much judgment around it, thinking that we’re behind or looking to other people to define our needs. That’s why I wanted to talk to Mark Butler.

One of the hardest things for people to do is stop looking at other people for their most important information about what to spend, what to buy, how much to spend on it, how to earn and how much is the correct amount to earn, et cetera.
The healthiest place I think we can be is where we still are able to refer to people, but at arms length, meaning we use them for a reference points in our lives for information but we don’t make it a source of anxiety or self-criticism or feeling behind or any of that. We’re truly just looking at it as, Oh, that’s an option. Do I want that option? Why do I want that option? Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. I think that’s the hardest thing for all of us. I think it’s the hardest thing for me.

Money is Neutral in Our Lives

Often, we beat ourselves up over the money we spend or save. Mark’s message is simple:

I don’t believe in one size fits all personal finance advice. The only personal and financial advice I feel is pretty much universal is that if you spend fewer dollars than you earn and in the long run, if you steadily increase your income, that sets you up to do whatever else you want to do with money in your life, but exactly how you do that is completely up to you.
So owning a home, not owning a home, buying used cars, buy new cars, leasing cars, any of these other things, I don’t care so much about. I want to help people to learn to make decisions confidently. So then they can decide whether a home is a good fit for them, or whether becoming a lifetime renter is a good fit for them because either one of those could be great depending on a person’s life plans and priorities.

Get to Know Yourself with Elizabeth DiAlto

This sense of personal agency, of being able to think through our stories and our values is a common thread in many interviews. Elizabeth DiAlto stresses the importance of knowing yourself:

Take the time to actually get to know yourself, like, who are you? How are you built? What are your values? What are your priorities for real? And to just question what we think they are and then what are they really, and notice if there are any disparities and if there are, what those are. That’s how we know. That’s how we start to find out.

It’s important for each of us to know ourselves. This is necessary on the path to loving yourself.

You Are Enough

Elizabeth reminds us that we all have inherent worth:

I am enough. I have enough. I do enough. And what I love about that mantra is it starts to bring your awareness to, yes, where is that true? Where is that already true? How can it become truer?

Celebrate Sensuality and Romance with David Brower

To spice things up and make life fuller, David Brower introduces the concepts of sensuality and romance for everyday life.

At the end of the day, if you don’t put yourself into the arena of real living and experience and start experimenting, it’s like the rubber is not hitting the road. It’s just an intellectual concept. Even if you get really good at that, and you can manifest and all these kinds of ways of using the brain to trick the brain so it believes it’s in that experience. But what’s the fun of that really. I mean, life is happening around us. And so I would advise looking for small experiences that you would like to have and go for the low fruit, like you want to learn to dance, but you’re a little afraid to go sign up for the classes. Don’t sign up for a year. Go to three classes. Once is not enough to get an experience of something.
Go and try things. Decide over the next 12 months that once a month you’re going to go try something that will stretch you. This could be with food maybe there’s things you haven’t tried or a style of cooking that you haven’t tried.
Make some different choices. Don’t take the same street home every day. Once in awhile take the scenic route. Once a week, call somebody you haven’t spoken to in a very long time and tell them you want to hear what’s going on in their life. Instead of sending email and text messages, send a literal video of yourself to people so they can see you and feel you and hear you in a different fashion. Maybe that’s uncomfortable for you to be seen like that.
I think everyone knows where their limit is. You may want to sit down and write where would you actually like to grow and what areas would you like to have more depth, more experience? What would you like to try? This goes for everything.

David talks about pleasure being a doorway to a richer, fuller life. This is something that many children know, but we lose it along the way.

Mentor and Support the Young People in Your Life with Aisha Addo

We can help build up the young people in our life. Aisha Adoo advises us to consider the young people in our life and ensure that we are speaking to them in ways that build them up and support their self acceptance rather than bring them down.

Be very mindful of the words that you impart into the lives of the little ones around you because words in itself are our life and are powerful and your words have the power of building up or breaking up.
So just be very mindful of that and be conscious of how some of the things that you say, although my be jovial to you, can actually be detrimental to a young girl’s self-esteem. So that’s always the thing that I say is be mindful of your words. Be mindful of the words that you’re saying to them, but also be mindful of the words that you’re saying to yourself and ask yourself where some of these things come from.
The things that we might not necessarily think of as important or the things that we might not necessarily think of as vital is actually shaping them up to becoming the person that they’re going to become in the future.

Nurturing ourselves and the people in our lives can help with overcoming trauma. You can do the work to overcome trauma and live the life that you want.

Overcome Trauma and Find Ways to Be Yourself

To wrap up the season, I spoke with Nisha Mody. Often we need to remake ourselves after some sort of tragedy. Nisha’s wake-up call came after her father’s death.

What does Nisha want? What fulfills her soul? And that’s when I can return to myself and be like, oh, that to me is self-acceptance like, what do I need? Maybe that person needs that and that’s great, but I don’t need to be that way. And that for me puts them like on the same level or just puts them in a different place. That’s where they are.
I also try to see myself as like, instead of on this flat, linear kind of path, like we’re in this sphere and we are. The world is a globe; it’s a round object. And all the planets are around. So we’re within the sphere in different spots. When you spin that around, there is no superiority; there is no inferiority. It’s just we’re in a different place.

I wanted to end the season with the idea of what’s possible. I want you to remember that the world is expensive and abundant. You get to choose.

If you want to know more about the individual episodes, visit the links to the posts below.

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