I Heart Me (5 page)

At this stage we don't feel any need to prove our worth, we don't feel compelled to agree with everyone, nor do we need people to like us. We're much more resilient to shame. We're not afraid to show our weaknesses, wobbly bits or vulnerabilities. We also take care of ourselves. And life becomes more fluid.

Sometimes this stage creeps up on us. One day we just realize that we've been feeling different for a while. It can even occur overnight, with the sudden realization and solid conviction that we're going to live life in a new way, from a new mindset.

Many people reach this stage in the later years of their life, although that doesn't mean we can't reach it at any time. It's just an observation that I have made that most people take some time to believe they are
enough
. Some reach it through a release; they feel battle-weary. Others just gradually
emerge
into it.

It's a state of contentment. We cease to resist life and in doing so actually have more influence over our life. It's also a state of gratitude, both for the people and for the content of our life.

In many ways, we resemble our child self. Young children don't question their worth. They don't even know what worth is. But their behaviour shows a complete acceptance of themselves, which we adults know as self-love.

When their daughter, Alyx, was about 18 months old, my friends Bryce and Allyson brought her to visit us for a few days. One night after dinner, Bryce asked her, ‘Are you brilliant, Alyx?' She responded, ‘
Yeeeeessssss
.' Then she hugged herself. Next, she stood in front of our full-length mirror and gave her own reflection a kiss.

People who know they are
enough
don't question their worth either. Self-love is an assumption that comes across in their nature. And, just like children, some of them play more.

You can easily spot a person who knows they're
enough
. Usually, they're very likeable. They don't expend any effort convincing you of their good points and achievements but often take an active interest in yours.

In this book, I'm going to offer you some simple tips and strategies that will help you live from a state of
enough
. I'm going to take you to the self-love gym.

There are lots of exercises spread throughout this book. You don't need to do all of them, but I'd advise you to do the ones that resonate with you and also the ones that stretch you or push you out of your comfort zone a little. I think of this as going to the gym for your soul – a self-love gym.

The key with going to the self-love gym is consistent practice, just as consistent workouts in a physical gym are the key to building physical fitness. There are a few exercises that require you to repeat the same thing, just as you might do 10 reps of a leg curl,
for example. Other exercises are more reflective or ask you to make choices or decide on action steps. All of the exercises are designed to help you attain the mental and emotional fitness of ‘I
am
enough.' They place your mind and emotions into that state – even if just for a short space of time at first. The effect of this is to wire that state into the networks of your brain. You'll learn more about that later on.

One of the many things I'll remind you of as you go through this book is that you're only human. No one goes through life without making mistakes. No one goes through life without having a bad day. Most people have lots of them in fact. So, if life is tough for you right now, you're definitely not alone. It's tough for a lot of people. Sometimes, just knowing this can make it a little easier. It can make you feel a little less alone. And you
aren't
alone. You are, after all, a member of the human family.

Part of being human is being entitled to be happy. We don't need to earn the right, just as we don't need to earn sunlight or oxygen. We're also entitled to love and health. And we're entitled to thrive. And when I say ‘entitled', I mean that there are no questions about this, no arguments, no debates. It just is!

Remember this as you set out on your self-love project. Also remember that there's no hurry to complete that project. I worked on mine for nine months before I submitted the first draft of this book and I still had a long way to go. So, don't put yourself under pressure. Just remind yourself that it's OK to be exactly where you are right now. That will make it easier to move forward.

Chapter 2

Meet the Parents

‘Research indicates that parenting is a primary predictor of how prone our children will be to shame or guilt.'

B
RENE
B
ROWN
,
D
ARING
G
REATLY

Have you ever noticed that most adults behave like children?

I once worked in an office which, if I'd closed my eyes, I could have mistaken for a room full of children. There were tantrums, door-slammings, name-callings, just about everything you'd expect in a schoolyard apart from having your lunch money stolen or your underpants pulled up your back in a ‘wedgy' (although most grown-ups act out an equivalent). Most of the time it was just a normal environment containing kind hardworking people. But when pressed in the wrong way, some in the office reverted to being children.

I suspect you've lived or worked in the same kind of place. I'd be surprised if you haven't. Few adults grow out of that kind of behaviour. You only need to watch a room full of politicians arguing to know exactly what I'm talking about. On the surface,
we appear to be grown-ups. We've learned how we're supposed to behave. But push or prod us in the wrong way and maturity goes right out the window.

Some people try to hide their childish behaviour in an effort to be respectable or professional. But behind closed doors, their husband, wife or children get to see their juvenile tendencies play out in their emotional behaviour.

The reason for a lot of this is a particular blend of brain chemicals.

The brain gets used to things, just as we do. While we might get used to a job, a husband or wife, or even a certain blend of tea, the brain gets used to a certain blend of chemicals. One of these is cortisol, a stress hormone.

This mostly occurs during the first six or seven years of life. It's the result of our most consistent emotional environment. By the age of about seven, the brain has a pretty good idea of what's ‘normal', so it ‘sets' that level of cortisol and the overall chemical blend.

We take our setting and our blend with us into adulthood. As we move through our adult years, it flavours how we tend to feel about ourselves, how we interpret the world around us and the behaviour of other people, and how we respond to stressors. It's why most of us behave like children.

The cortisol setting and chemical blend aren't genetic, even though a lot of people assume they must be. It's common to
believe that genetics are always in charge. This is made worse by large genome programmes being given billions of dollars in investment so that we can identify the ‘gene for cancer' or the ‘gene for Alzheimer's'. These projects make headline news, but the scientists working on them know it's not nearly as black and white as that. They know that the environment plays a huge role in how a gene behaves.

Unfortunately, by and large the public doesn't know this. So people get the idea that if something's in their genes they can't do anything about it. That's not true at all. With the exception of a very small number of genetic diseases, how a gene behaves is largely down to its environment.

A gene is a bit like a light bulb with a sensor on it that measures how much natural light is around. As the natural light fades in the evening, the light bulb comes on. It's responding to its environment. Our genes do that too. They've always been doing that. That's how they work.

Don't get me wrong – genetics plays a role too, but when it comes to setting the chemistry and even much of the neural architecture of the brain, it's only a minor role. Our environment is much more important. And as small children, our environment was created, most of the time, by our parents.

Let's give the self-worth setting a scale of one to ten. If your mum had a self-worth setting of, say, seven, and your dad four, and you were closer to your mum, you'd probably have a self-worth
setting of seven as well, or maybe six, depending on the amount of time you spent with your dad. This is because in your early years, when your brain was growing fast, you would mainly have been in an environment created by your mum. It's what I call ‘self-worth contagion'.

It's not always quite so black and white of course, because other people influence us as well – grandparents, for instance, and even schoolteachers. And sometimes just a one-off event, or even a sentence, resonates with us at a deep subconscious level and has a significant effect. So there are always exceptions. There's always the person who grows up in a houseful of twos but emerges as a nine, or grows up in environments of eights but moves through life as a three. But most people, most of the time, will have a self-worth setting pretty close to that of their parents.

If you're a parent and you have low self-esteem, don't worry! Now you understand the self-worth contagion effect, you can help your children have a much healthier level of self-esteem. It starts with simply being aware of it. Then you can put into practice some of what you learn from this book. And as your own self-esteem rises and you meet the world in a whole new way, you'll help your children further, as they'll learn from your words and actions.

Like most parents, my mum and dad didn't know anything about self-worth contagion. Personally, I'd estimate that my mum met the world as a three and my dad as a four. At such low levels, the concept of high self-worth can be hard to grasp, regardless of what you're doing in your life, because there's no frame of
reference, no experience of high self-worth, available to you. It's like trying to imagine a colour that doesn't exist.

Meeting the world with low self-worth has become a habit for many people and I'll take a guess that you count yourself in this. Regardless of what's happening around you, what's being said or how people are behaving, your brain is so used to interpreting the world in a particular way that you've never thought to question it. If good things are happening or nice things are being said, your assumption will be that these are one-off events or people are ‘just saying that' or it'll blow over you without resonating with you at all. Low self-worth will even cause you to misinterpret people's words and intentions, because your brain is trying hard to maintain the levels of chemicals it considers normal. Many people with low self-worth will go to the ends of the Earth to find the insult behind the compliment.

Quite often people marry a person with a similar level of self-worth to their own. We attract people who will bring us the kind of experiences and validation that our brain chemistry is most used to. It's not at all uncommon for a person with low self-love to shun a mate who will help them to have a happy life in favour of one who will bring them the levels of stress, anxiety and depression that their brain has been conditioned to expect.