S1:E16 Loving Yourself Helps You Live Beyond Yourself!
SHOW NOTES
For my heart centered listeners who worry that self love is all about gazing at your own belly button and never thinking about anyone else, consider this: when you have authentic and overflowing love for yourself, you are able to be much more generous with others! Listen in to this episode to fully understand how this works.
Warmly,
Linda
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Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] Intro by Linda:
Hi, I'm Linda, emotion coach and hypnotherapist, who also loves a good sunrise yoga class, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and high-performing women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life. I'm here to give you practical tips and mindset shifts that will help you to put your self-love skills into action. Welcome.
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The Core Connection
So how many of you have made the connection between loving yourself and living beyond yourself, or having influence, positive impact on the people and the situations around you? This is so key to understand because if you are a person who is either just very heart-centered, big-hearted, and loves to take care of people, or if you're someone who wants to have more of an impact and influence things that are going on around you for the good, this is an essential piece to make sure that you are not missing. And it's a connection that not everyone quite understands at first. So self-love really is one of the biggest keys to generosity and having impact. And I want to explain in this video why that is.
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[01:26] Self-Love Is Not Selfishness
A lot of times we can equate self-love with selfishness. Maybe even you don't do that. Maybe other people hear you talking about self-love and they're like, "Oh, that's so selfish." Or people who say that are really just secretly selfish people. Or maybe they see it as you being a brat. Or maybe you have a fear that you could be a terrible friend or lover or partner if you were to take your self-love, your self-care more seriously. These are all concerns that people can have, concerns that you might have. And it's valid to wonder about this and to be curious about that. That's totally okay.
I want us to get a grasp of why saying yes to yourself doesn't have to mean that you're necessarily saying no to everybody else. It's not like this direct relationship. It doesn't mean that you have to put everybody else last and be like an obnoxious princess. That's not what self-love is about.
So let me ask you something. This will help you to begin to get more of a picture of how this works. When you think of someone who struggles to love themselves, or care for themselves, what kind of images come to your mind? Are they more likely to be happy or unhappy? Are they more likely to be connected or disconnected? Do they look and feel healthy or unhealthy? And lastly, do people who struggle to love themselves or care for themselves make great leaders?
Okay, what about the opposite now? When you think of someone who is comfortable with loving and taking care of themselves, whose image comes to mind? Is this person more happy or unhappy? Do they have great relationships? Or do they struggle with connection? Are they thriving or not? And do they find it easy to influence others?
Now I'm guessing that whoever you thought of, or whatever images came to mind, you would much rather be a part of the second, self-loving group than the first group. Right? It's very clear that when we stop to think about which people are actually living the lives that we admire or look up to, or the kinds of lives that we would want to create for ourselves — learning to love ourselves is actually really key to being able to do that.
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[04:10] — The Cost of Neglecting Self-Love
So if you're wanting to find a way to steer yourself powerfully in the direction of the life that you want to create for yourself, this is why not missing out on how self-love works for you is really vital. When you're in the habit of not practicing self-acceptance, self-validation, self-care — all these things that go into self-love — it's going to come out in very predictable ways. Lower the quality of your life. And I'm speaking here again as someone who's worked in the mental health field for over 14 years. So these are things I see repeatedly, over and over again.
When you are not practicing self-acceptance, self-compassion, self-validation, self-love, you are more likely to struggle with your confidence. And that prevents you from taking healthy, appropriate, and necessary risks in your life. I'm not talking about negligent risks — we're talking about risks to be seen, to have your voice heard, risks to go after romantic attachment. These kinds of risks. When you struggle with your confidence, you are not able to take those risks that would improve the quality of your life. And that prevents you from actually taking full advantage of the opportunities that you have available to you.
You're also more likely, when you neglect these different areas of self-love, to neglect your health — both your physical and your emotional health. You will see these things as being non-essential. Other things will seem more important, and you will feel obligated to put everyone else's preferences and requests ahead of your own actual needs. And you'll suffer further pain as a result — on top of already ignoring the initial pain of the emotional impact of your own personal needs that you needed to take care of. And then it's going to add on to that. This is what I've seen repeatedly over and over again. What I've experienced too, by the way.
Also, when you are not practicing all these components of self-love, you deny yourself your own assertive voice. And that keeps other people from knowing the real, authentic you in your relationships and in your communities or environments. So this guarantees that any deeper, lasting connection will not happen. You won't have connections that thrive, and your relationships will fizzle out or even potentially grow harmful over time. I'll let you kind of do the math on that. If you're not able to speak up for yourself in situations where harm is starting to be done, if you're not able to recognize patterns of manipulation, or someone putting you down, or taking credit for things that you've done at work, and you're not able to speak up with your assertive voice, that's going to have harmful impacts on you.
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[07:30] — What Changes When You Practice Self-Love
These are just some of the common natural effects that I've seen over many, many years. But what's really exciting is the kind of change that's possible when someone starts to put into practice the kinds of core self-love skills that I've talked about and teach to my clients.
When the way that you treat yourself actually matches the true value of who you are, everything begins to change. You recognize the good that you already have in your life, and you willingly begin to receive the good that was already available but that you weren't able to let in before. You'll get clarity about what you currently are and where you're stuck today. You'll release the shame, embarrassment, and self-doubt that have been holding you back.
It means drawing people to you who are more grounded and positive themselves. It also means that you're repelling people who want to remain negative, stuck in a victim mentality, or even narcissistic kinds of traits. You're going to naturally repel more of those people — not necessarily perfectly. There's always that one person who slips in, right? But you're going to be able to repel them more often than not, which will save you a lot of grief.
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[08:58] — Self-Love Makes You More Generous
So the last example that I'll give today, because there's so many, is that you'll actually become more generous. And that's what this video really is kind of drawing you to. If you have a heart to be generous, first of all, I applaud you, I admire you. We need more of you. So please keep being who you are.
But if you have a heart to be generous, it's actually really important that you, in particular, get this right. Because self-love, if you don't have it, what's going to happen is that when you're not meeting your own needs, you're going to actually burn yourself out. You're going to flame out as you're trying to take care of everybody else and stick up for all these causes and do all the marches and the things. I've seen it. If you're not filling up your own cup, you're going to burn out. If you're starving, it's really hard to feed somebody else who's hungry, right? It's hard to pour from an empty cup.
And I'll also point out that it's hard to inspire others when you struggle with your self-love and you don't make it a priority. And then you begin to exhibit patterns of someone who struggles to accept themselves, someone who feels ashamed to be their full selves. It's going to be hard for you to inspire or lead others in the very good things that you want to do. Your core needs have to be met in order for you to be as generous and as effective as possible. So when you're able to fill up with that self-love, you actually become more creative, you have more capacity to give, you have more internal resources to reach into in order to give out of that and to influence other people.
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[10:55] — Closing & Call to Action
So to wrap this up today — please hear this. You need to learn to better love yourself in order to live beyond yourself. In order to go from navel-gazing and shrinking inwards, having this sort of posture in your body and your spirit — you need to be able to exhibit that self-love towards yourself and be in the practice of caring for yourself so that you can have an abundance from which to give and to serve. Perfection is not required. Just consistency is the key here.
So if you want guidance on how to achieve this for yourself, and you'd like to save yourself the time and the energy and the money that you would otherwise potentially waste trying to figure it out yourself and learning it the hard way — make sure that you click on the link in the description below, because I have a program that really helps set you up for success with this. It gives you all the nuts and bolts and all the goodies that help you to get there faster and to maintain your growth with your self-love after you get there. So start with those free resources, you'll see that link in the description, so that you can start making progress on this today.
Start changing your experience of your love for yourself and your care for yourself today, because everyone who's in your sphere of influence is going to be influenced by you, and is waiting for you to have that kind of impact on them. I'll talk with you soon.
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this episode, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time!
[Editing Note: The Love Yourself Liberated! group program is not currently available. If you are interested in this content and guidance, it is now exclusively provided through my concierge psychotherapy practice, Satya Counseling & Yoga.]
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