Why is your inner critic so much harsher than anybody else's? Because it has inside information. It knows what you actually think, and it uses all of it.

If a child came to me talking that way about themselves I would not stand for a second of it. Self love is not standing in front of a mirror saying you are great. It is being less harsh. It is opening your heart to the fact that you are human, with crazy thoughts and fluctuating energy. I am not the most amazing human in the world. I am here and I am doing my best.

One thing to try: Say the next critical thought out loud, then ask whether you would say it to a child.

In this episode

• (0:02) The inner critic having a go, and what self love even means
• (4:49) It has inside information. It knows what you really think
• (7:05) If a child said that about themselves I would not stand for it
• (8:41) Self love is just being kind about being human
• (10:58) I am not the most amazing human. But I am showing up
• (13:28) Giving yourself space to be yourself without the criticism
• (15:28) Maybe I am projecting. Maybe others are not worried at all

Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk

Thank you for listening.

Steven

Links to Steven Webb's podcast and how you can support his work.

• Donate paypal.me/stevenwebb or Coffee stevenwebb.uk
• Steven's courses, podcasts and links: stevenwebb.uk

So do you have an inner critic that's constantly in your head, having a go at you, like telling you

and knocking you down? And when you think about self-love, that inner critic's like, well, who are you to love

yourself?

That's a bit narcissistic. That's a bit overconfident, isn't it? Do you have that voice inside of your head?

Well, on today's podcast, I want to talk about that. I want to talk about how we embrace self-love and

how we dismantle that inner critic. and we have more of a life of freedom and maybe live a life

of purpose. So that's today's podcast. Embracing Self-Love, Dismantling the Inner Critic for a Life of

Freedom and Purpose.

I'm Steven Webb and this is Stillness in the Storms and it's a podcast that just helps you to see

life a little bit differently to hopefully have a little bit more inner peace in life. Now then don't forget

I've got a different podcast called Inner Peace Meditations where I will link to it in the show notes, but

basically it's just meditations that will help you to have more inner peace and more joy and just more

calmness in life and we all want that in this busy crazy world at the moment? Just seems like there's

no let up constantly. If it's not the if there's not the external world constantly barraging us with something,

it's social media, it's work, it's something's going on, There's no let up. I I long

for the days when news was just half an hour in the evening and work was just a so many

hours a day and you had so much downtime. Whereas now there seems to be no let up anywhere. And

that's not talking about the inner mind. So the external world doesn't let up. And the inner mind certainly

doesn't let up. You know, you lie down at night for just five minutes to go to sleep, and then

the inner mind starts. So yeah that's what we're talking about. So just before that I want to thank a

couple of people that have treated me to a coffee. You are absolutely awesome. Let me just go over there

a moment and have a look.

And there has been a couple of anonymous people and Paulo and Alicia and Mia. Thank you very much guys.

You are awesome. You guys help me to host this podcast to get the podcast edited and to

well get the equipment and things like that to up my game. You guys are absolutely awesome. And if anybody

else would like to support this podcast, just head over to thankyousteven.com and you can support the podcast. If you

don't have the spare money or anything like that to donate a coffee, you can always support the podcast just

by leaving a review. That makes a huge difference as well. So thank you guys. You are awesome. But let's

get straight on with today's podcast. Let's talk about self-love. What does it mean? How can it make a huge

difference in your life? And as always on my podcast, I'll share my story of how I learned to love

myself and how I still find it difficult now sometimes to love myself. So let's get on with this.

One of the biggest challenges I think in today's world is is our inability to love ourselves. It's almost like

we've got to love everybody else and we've got to give our love out to everybody. We've got to have

empathy, we've got to have caring, we've got to have compassion, you know, be kind, that whole mantra in the

world. But when we turn it on ourselves, we're often judged as narcissistic or overconfident and things like that.

But is it really that bad to love ourselves? You know, there is a real low confidence, there's too much

overthinking. There's so many struggles now, we struggle with meditation, we struggle with the relentless inner critic. You

know, stick your hand up, you know, I don't know what you're doing, you may be driving or something, you

may not be able to um but sticking I think you might go on a public train or something, stick

your hand up and everybody will wonder what you're doing. Anyway,

just metaphorically stick your hand up if you've got that inner critic that if you try to love yourself it

turns it all back on you you know No look I'm trying to love myself I'm trying to have a

little more acceptance for who I am and then it just goes yeah but look at you see what you

did last week see what you like And here's why I think it's so difficult to love ourselves. It's because

we have inside information, don't we? We know what we're really like, we know what we really think. You know,

we know what's going on inside of our heads. Whereas it's easier to love somebody else, because you only see

the highlights in their life. You know, you see social media and you see these other people, they're doing these

wonderful things and all that. You know, it's easy to love somebody else sometimes, much easier than it is to

love ourselves because we have all that inside information. I know what I'm thinking sometimes and my thoughts are

not always that nice. You know, if I see somebody walk past me and I'm like, my my

mind I'm trying not to do it now, but my mind might jump to something that's not that positive about

that person. Because that's what it does. It thinks things up. The mind is designed to think scenarios up to

protect you. It doesn't mean you're a nasty hireable person it just means your mind's doing what it does. But

because that happens, it's so difficult to then look at it and go, well, do you know, I am a

loving, caring person. Because it's really hard to push that aside, isn't it? And my personal experience, I didn't

have a family that said, I love you. And I can't remember ever saying to my mum that I love

you. You know, I'd never felt not loved for my mum, but we weren't a family that did that as

children.

I don't think I really had that other extreme that we had to be stiff upper lip and we had

to be really strong and all that. I don't think I had that either on the other hand, but I

certainly don't remember feeling like as if I could express my love for myself

growing up.

That makes any sense?

So when embarking on a journey of self-love and acceptance of who I am, my critic

just gets louder and louder. So

it's really really difficult. And how do you do it? Do you sit down and practice self-love? Do you like

stand in front of the mirror and go, oh, I love myself and I love my scars and things like

that. You know, I don't really know. But the way I've learned to love myself is just by been less

harsh on myself. You know, if a child came to me and they're talking about

some of the things they did wrong, I'm like a little kind to them. I'm like, don't worry about it.

It'll be fine. We all make mistakes. Let's look at it differently. But I don't do that with myself. When

I make a mistake, I'm really, you shouldn't have done that. You know better, how dare you do that? And

I think that's where self-love comes in. It's realising that you don't have to be so hard on yourself, that

you're human, you make mistakes. Things, it's not the end of the world when you make these mistakes and everybody

does it. But we just don't see it, do we? We think we should be better, we think we should

be perfect. And the reality is, we're more accepting of other people than we are ourselves.

And that's really difficult. And that's where I am. Mainly. I just don't seem to accept myself nowhere

near as much as I can accept other people. I can almost accept when they make a mistake, but when

I do it, how dare I do it? I should know better. And I think that's where we get mixed

up between self-love in a way that it

Should self-love be a narcissistic, oh I love myself and I'm awesome and I'm amazing? No, I don't believe that

self-love I think that's an ideology that just isn't real. But I think self-love just means

be kind to ourselves, opening our heart to we are human, we have

crazy thoughts, we have fluctuations in energy and feelings, you know, when we're really tired just, you know, okay,

we're tired, embrace that, when we're really stressed, we're tired, embrace that, Instead of trying to think

that we have to be this amazing, loving, awesome person that is just a gift to the world all the

time.

I just don't think that's realistic, I don't think that's possible. And I think this is what Buddhism mean by

the middle way. It's have that balance between, on

one hand there is times when I feel radiant inside and I feel like a massive empowerment of self-love

normally when I'm listening to a good 80s 90s rock ballad and I'm feeling really good and the sun's out

and we're travelling down the road. And I feel like this like heart orgasm all over. It's like, ah, this

feels really good. Easy to love myself then. But what about when I'm really struggling in a room with a

few people that I just really don't get on with. And I'm being critical of them and myself in my

head, and I'm feeling awkward. I leave that room and I immediately put myself down, say I've done a terrible

job. That's when the little bit of self-love just, it's in that instance, what do I

need? I need someone to put their arms around me and go, it's okay, Stevie. You're okay. Don't worry about

it. It's fine. I'm here for you. And that's what I mean by self-love. That's what we need to do

to ourselves. We need to somehow cuddle ourselves and go, do you know what? You're awesome,

you're cool, don't worry, we all make mistakes, it's okay. And I think that's what a healthy self-love does.

And it gives us the ability to make mistakes. It gives us the ability to try things and be confident

in the world. To walk into that room and go, Hey, do you know what? I'm not the most amazing

human in the world. And I haven't got the confidence and look at me I'm great but I'm here, I'm

showing up, I'm doing my best and do you know what? I'm proud of who I am, I'm proud of

where I am and I think that's the healthy self-love that we need to put ourselves on the back and

that's what we need. You

know, that's to me, I could give you 10 tips on how to have self-love but the main one is

how would you love somebody that you have a real deep caring for? What would you do to them when

they make your mistakes when they fall? You help them up. You're not critical of them. You don't have a

go at them, do you? You

hold your hand out. You give them a hug. You you just help them in the best way possible. And

that's what we need to do. That's what I mean by self-love

And I think the more you do that, the more the critical mind and the negative thoughts that come and

go will be, okay, there's a critical thought, I can embrace it. There's a negative thought, well that's just,

you can't turn negative thoughts into positive thoughts. I've done lots of podcasts about that, it's impossible. There's no thinking

positive all the time, it doesn't exist. You know, negative thoughts are not negative thoughts, they're there to protect you,

so really they're positive thoughts. But if they're there all the time, we miss the positive thoughts. So you can

head back to other podcasts in my podcast library to help you with that. I think it's one about a

train metaphor which is really brilliant about turning the negative thoughts into more positive thinking patterns. But

the main thing is go easy on yourself, learn to just have

a little um I don't know, compassion for yourself. That's a good way of doing it, Compassion for yourself. What

does that look like? And

when you do have this compassion, you create this safe space for yourself to play and be a little more

adventurous with yourself. When you have this, you know, how do you love someone entirely? You give them

the space to be themselves selves So if you were to give yourself self-love, ultimate self-love, what would that look

like? You're giving yourself the space in order to be yourself without being

very critical. You accept yourself for who you are so that's what self-love is. It's not about

telling the world you're amazing, It's not about blowing your own trumpet and saying to the world, look how awesome

I am and look how much I can love myself and look how much better looking I am than anybody

else. That's not self-love. That's arrogance and that's the confidence and narcissism that only comes with a fool

a few days later, if not hours. It's

about acceptance, creating that space. So

that there's the technique I would say is Create the space in your heart for you to be perfectly who

you are.

Flaws and all, you know, all the good stuff, all the bad stuff. Put it all in there into a

safe container. Jumble it all up and realise that's the beautiful beautiful mesh you are, that's the beautiful joy

you are, that's the beautiful human we are I've I've yet to come across a human that's not deeply

flawed and deeply perfect in the same breath. You

know, we're all trying our best. We're all doing what we can. We see others and we see them in

a way that they're doing amazing and they're winning out and they're doing this incredible things in life and they're

never making a mistake. They're making loads of mistakes all the time. They haven't got the confidence. You

know, they're wondering whether or not they should show up or they had a crisis earlier that day that they

didn't want to go or they wanted to cancel these events or things like that, you know, it doesn't matter

what it is in your life, but we feel like we want to run from things all the time. Or

maybe I'm just projecting maybe, maybe many people have got the confidence out there that they're not worried about any

of those things. But anybody genuine that I know worries about these things. I've yet to come across anybody that

isn't genuine, that when I look up and go, do you know what, I was really worried about this, And

they went, Oh my God, so was I. And it's so nice to have that refreshing conversation. When I look

up and I've been to many, many events in the past two years because I was the mayor of Truro

for the last two years and I haven't been now for the last two weeks because I've done my two

years and the amount of events I went to and I didn't know all these dignitaries and all that and

I would be there talking to a dignitary, somebody that I'd never met before and I'll look up and say

I I have no idea what that food is there. I've never seen food like that before. I wouldn't even

know how to eat it, let alone what it tastes like. And they look up and go, oh, me too,

that's why I haven't eaten anything.

And it's just like refreshing, you look up and go, well, you know, but aren't you hungry? No, we went

Mcdonald's on the way over here. And I'm like, and I can't say who this person is, because they're quite,

you know what I would say in the hierarchy of dignitaries, they're quite high up. But it was so

refreshing. I was like, oh, I can be human around you. So every event I went to, I made a

beeline for them. I'd be like, how are you doing? And I go Oh, I've had such a dreadful day.

It hasn't been this, we don't want to be here. It's like, oh, wow, you're human and I love you

for it. And I think they embraced the fact that life isn't equipped for us all to be,

feel perfectly safe and perfectly well. But if we can be ourselves in that space, that's

love, the ability to be ourselves. So embracing self-love is giving ourselves

the permission to be ourselves and completely accepting it. That's

pretty awesome, right?

It's so simple yet profound. How many of you genuinely give yourselves

absolute permission to be exactly who you want to be and

have a deep breath, that's my podcast this week and I hope it helps. If it does help, look, leave

a review. That'd be awesome. That's one way you can help me loads. If you want to download the five

simple practices for inner peace, you can do that by going to thankyousteven.com. If you want to help me with

equipment, editing and hosting of this podcast, so I can grow it and promotion of it, you can treat me

to a coffee. I love you, you're awesome. Love yourself by accepting who you are.

Flaws, joys, the perfect of who you are and everything. Take care. Bye.