Hey, welcome, everybody. This is Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show, and today we're going to talk about how to radically accept, believe in, and love yourself. Easy topic, not much of a challenge, should be a 10 minutes episode, right? Or maybe there's some depth to this topic. Buckle in, buckaroos. So first of all, I want to talk about why do this in the first place? Why should you accept yourself, believe in yourself, and love yourself?

The why is actually really, really important. It's one of the key steps in goal achievement, is that you believe the goal or the pursuit thereof is valuable and worth continuous investment inherently. Note that what's mentioned there is the pursuit thereof. So it can't always just be the results that you're after, because things might not play out in the way that you think they're going to play out.

And you would really want to have decided that the investment is valuable to you, regardless of whether or not you reach the exact destination or get the results that you're actually looking for. There might be results, might be six-packs abs or a degree or hot sex or a billion dollars, but it's not guaranteed to happen soon or at all. And the best goals actually are the ones that you invest in regardless, because it feels right to you.

It's in line with your values, which I've spoken about before. And it fits the narrative for the life. And that is a narrative that you actively construct your hero's journey. And that really ties in to your life being worth living. At least that's the case that I'm going to build. So the topic that we're talking about is a goal, just like the goals that I just spoke about, like these meaningful goals that require belief in that the investment is worth it.

And it's actually one of the greater goals, because it's not a goal that is quite attainable, because the goalpost constantly moves. How you love yourself today, what that means for you today, is not what that means tomorrow. You change, circumstances change, you may temporarily fall off the wagon. So it's also a goal that is a continuous choice. In order to embody it, you'll have to dedicate resources to it the rest of your life.

Like with eating healthy, working out, stress reduction, mental health in general, it's always a moving target. You always have to dedicate, not just time, like sort of automatic pilot time, like you're doing the dishes or something like that. No, you actually have to invest conscious effort because the goalpost is constantly moving. But this is not a plain vanilla material goal, right? So compare that to a goal where you want to live in a house in a certain neighborhood or drive a car with a certain amount of horsepower.

And although you can get that and lose it, there are more check boxes, right? So another thing with these grander goals that I'm talking about, where the goalpost continuously moves, is also that there's chapters in your life. So meaning here is that you don't have to be on the entire time, right? So I was mentioning before, there's sometimes like an automatic pilot you can get into. So that's more like the routine.

And that can actually be really, really important for a lot of these goals that are continuously changing. It is really important to get into a routine, a structure where you're addressing some of it on the automatic pilot. But you can take a vacation from a conscious effort or even from the automatic pilot at times. The important thing is that we come back to the investment, right? And keep investing resources.

And the why is important to that, because without a why, you're going to get distracted and you're going to go after shiny things or other things. And some situations for good reasons, but let's peel this onion a little bit more. So, how do we decide on the most valuable fulfilling goals? I've spoken about that a number of times. We can go back to my episode on values and beliefs.

I believe that one of the ways that we look at our lives, like we don't have perfect memory. We don't remember everything we did in the past. We create a narrative of our life, right? We tell a story. We tell a story about ourselves. And conscious, I would recommend, because otherwise it will happen unconsciously. And values, beliefs, and your life narrative are like interwoven, like different strands in a tapestry.

Together, they build something of substance. I like to refer to it as a life worth living. So they work together. So one question regarding if accepting yourself, believing in yourself, and loving yourself is something that, you know, there's a strong why for you to do that. It has something to do with going to do a values exercise, as I talk about in my episode about values. And if acceptance, belief, and love, or truth make it high on the sort that you do, you're listening to the right content.

But I also want to inspire you a little bit. And tell you why, for me, these goals or these sub-goals are important. So we're going to switch from why is the why importance, or really meta, to let's go to the actual why. So why is acceptance important? Accepting yourself. So really, it's if you reverse it, why would you not accept yourself? There's not really like a great answer for it.

Like these are one of these common sense things that everybody, if you analyze it, would agree with it. But then again, if it's really about yourself, things get a little bit more complicated. So how do you accept yourself? Pimples and all. Why would you do that? If there's perceived imperfections? And even you might agree with what I previously said, that there's no good reason to not accept yourself and to agree that that's the common sense way of going about it.

But then really, if you try to practice that, if you put the rubber to the road, and you want to accept yourself fully, at least for me, there's a little voice that says, accept that one thing, that one thing that you have, and just picking up some arbitrary examples like, but my nose is too big, or I've got a gut sticking out, or I have a low-key alcohol or porn or junk food addiction, or I'm unable to maintain a relationship, I'm unable to run a mile, I'm not healthy enough.

No, those are ones that also need to fit in the acceptance. Why is that? So why is it important to accept these things about yourself that you don't like? Like from a narrative in your life perspective, the fact that you, let's say, well, let's take the inability to run a mile, that that doesn't fit in your life story, you don't want that for you, so you reject that aspect.

Why is it important to accept it anyways? It's because what you resist subsists. It's basically means that whatever you push away, it will just keep coming back again and again and again because it's not being addressed. So actually, if I link this to dialectical behavioral therapy, which I talk about a lot, is it one of the key tenets of this methodology, this therapy modality, is that it is seemingly opposite that you have on one side, like on a seesaw, accepting, just radically accepting yourself or things, reality.

And on the other hand, there would be change. And partially intuitively, you would say, it's like, no, I want things to change. I'm not accepting how things are. And that's not quite true. So if you look at mental health research and psychology, the first step of actually, it's not even the first step, they go hand in hand. But with the radical acceptance, the space for change appears.

So why accept yourself? Why is that the right thing? Because it's effective. Do what works. So this is a big major thing in mental health as well. Do what works for you. We are all unique individuals. And of course, I'm telling you this from my perspective and the anecdotes that I see around myself. But I really see that that works. That accepting yourself fully means making more authentic choices.

Because making inauthentic choices, because you reject something and you don't want it, and you're pretending like you, you know, that doesn't apply to you, it leads you to places that you don't want to go. So the main highlight here is like around, and this is, of course, a DBT point, is accepting yourself. I find that most important. The why behind that is because it's a really effective way of building a life worth living.

It's going to help you achieve your goals, because the reverse, it's like there's good evidence against it, that you're going to be stuck. So this is partially that something that you might question. You might not believe me. How do I know that? Have I read all the papers? Do I have all the knowledge? No, of course I don't. So this is one of the things that you might want to verify for yourself.

Sit down. Write about it. Think about it. Journal about it. Pause this episode. Verify it for yourself. Read a book about it. Maybe you reach a conclusion that's contrary. That is possible. We have our own unique perspectives, right? So let this serve as an inspiration, but that you still have the responsibility to not just accept this as dogma. Having said that, let's move to the next piece.

What does it mean to believe in yourself? Why is it important? So what does it mean to begin with? It's to be confident that you are able to build a mastery in what you want to achieve, that you are effective, and that you are able to determine what you want to achieve, right? And the way that I got to that is again, I try to reverse it.

What does it look like when I don't believe in myself? I say like, oh, I mean, if I have a goal, I'm just, I'm never going to achieve it. I'm just, I'm just going to fuck it up. If I don't believe in myself, I immediately find reasons why I can't achieve a goal. And of course, that's not really going to help me achieve my goal. It does give me some kind of like perverse feeling of being right.

Because if I don't believe in myself, and I don't achieve my goal, I was right. So then I'm miserable, but at least I am correct. And that's an egoic trick, because the ego loves to be right. Even if it's a bad truth, it loves to be right. So. Since we were flipping it around, why wouldn't you believe in yourself? You might have evidence where you disappointed yourself, where you chickened out, you got embarrassed, you have an example of a lifestyle change that you've been trying to do.

Maybe it's like eating clean, or working out, or getting more, like better relationships, not getting triggered by your family members, various patterns that you're stuck in. And maybe you have evidence that shows that, hey, I'm stuck in the loop. I can't do any better. So here is believing in yourself is not necessarily, it doesn't mean that we have to lie and that we get all narcissistic. And we think that we're the best things in sliced bread.

That's not really what we're talking about. It's the belief that we'll eventually get where we want to get, with the occasional detour. It's part of the process. So believing in yourself is partially a recontextualization. You can believe in yourself, and you can be stuck in a pattern, right? That is possible. You might have to go through this pattern a number of ways. A number of times. Maybe you have to do this, like this is your karma.

You have to do this two, three times. Maybe that's how it is. But you can still believe that going through that pattern, consciously, builds up a momentum, so at one point you can emerge from it, right? So this is something that I know from addiction recovery a lot as well. I'm going to mention this somewhere down the episode as well, is the perfection fallacy. If I can't do it perfectly, I'm not going to do it at all, right?

And that is partially a belief problem. It's also contextualization of that belief. It's partially. You don't have to do it perfectly. I'll have some water. Another thing that is really important when it gets to like why it is important to believe in ourselves is that we tap into a different energy. So you might have heard of the five functional ego states. I know it from the book Fuck Your Comfort Zone by Margie Haber, I think.

I'm actually doing a course at her, she's an acting coach, so I'm actually doing a course at her studio. That's the reason I read this book. But I've heard of it before. So what are the five functional ego states? It's basically the different voices like the ego, the different voices of the ego. And gosh, there's the critical parent, judgmental voice. We probably know it. Like give yourself a moment to hone in what that voice is for you.

There's the nurturing parent as well. There's the fearful child. There's the playful child. And then there's the adult. So those are the five ego states. I'm not going to go into those in details. Maybe that's a future episode, but I did want to pull out the critical parent. When we don't believe in ourselves, oftentimes we speak to ourselves with that critical parent voice. What we really want to do in this situation is speak to ourselves in terms of the nurturing parent.

In some situations, the adult. More about that later, because depending on where you are in the process, I can mention it really quick. I'm going to repeat myself, but beginning of a process is much more important to get encouragement than correction. And compare that to building up any type of skill set. Like I always think of judo, for example. In the beginning, it's so much more important to just encourage people to keep coming, to keep trying things, than to say, oh, well, that throw that you did is not correct.

At that point, it doesn't matter. It's going to demotivate you. More about that later. So, getting back to the main thread. So, even of the first iteration of believing in yourself is accepting some truly toxic pattern, and believing there's acceptance in there, but also believing that you play it out a few more times, but you get there, it's still belief. Believing in yourself is not an irrational belief.

So again, why would you believe in yourself? It's really because it's effective to getting your goals met. There's nothing really truly there to gain if you don't believe in yourself. The only thing that you get there is self-pity, which can sometimes feel right, or something like that. This is another thing that I remember from actually the acting course that I'm doing, is that oftentimes in movies, TV series that we watch, it's very rare that self-pity is portrayed.

And it's interesting to think about why. There are some situations where you do, where there's a reason in the story why you're doing that, but oftentimes you don't. And why is that? It's because the audience doesn't want to see it. It's not a good look. And you might be like sort of disdainful of that and be like, oh, that's Hollywood, screw that. But there's something, so what does Hollywood do?

It makes stories. It's narratives. So if there's something that you could put in a story, like self-pity, that audience doesn't want to see, why would you show it to yourself or show it to your loved ones? Does it fit in your hero's journey? Where is the hope in there? Where is the belief in there? So I found that insightful. I always like it when I get these like little tidbits of wisdom from different angles, like that you read something in a self-help book, and then you see something similar, maybe when you're reading about Buddhism, et cetera, et cetera.

So I like these things coming together. All right. Speed up a little bit. So I talked about why believing in yourself is important. Third thing, how about loving yourself? Is loving yourself terribly airy-fairy to do? Like why would I dedicate resources to that? Shouldn't we love sex, money, cars, achievement, or, if we're more spiritually minded, thy neighbor, humanity, animals, the planet, the impoverished, the helpless? Yes and.

So. Remember the old adage about putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others and pouring from an empty cup. I know it's cheesy, but there is wisdom in that. Although, if you're really going deep in loving yourself, it ultimately will collapse in just one capital L love. Now we're really going more into the Buddhism, sort of like things that are often taught in guided meditations. There's just love, right?

And it can be pointed at different things, right? And even you could say, hate is a form of love. It's just a more pointy version, because if you hate something, that really means that you love the opposite, right? If you hate Republicans or Democrats, that means that you love the other side. The other side, right? So, capital L love doesn't exclude ourselves. And in fact, we'll be able to be more loving to others if we are more loving towards ourselves again.

You could interpret this as dogma. How do I know that? Verify it for yourself. Run an experiment. I notice that for me, resentment doesn't grow if I do it this way. Again, on the other side, so on team, if I play devil's advocate, trying to find reasons why I shouldn't love myself, the only reasons that come up for me personally, we're going to address a little bit further down.

And that's about deserving it. Do I deserve to love myself? Why would I deserve it? And the guy over there wouldn't. Things like that. All right. So a little tangent here. I do find it really interesting to look at the religious traditions as well. So I took a look at Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and they generally discourage self-loathing and instead advocate for self-awareness, repentance, in the case of Christianity and Islam, and the pursuit of wisdom and inner realization, truth, as seen in Hinduism and Buddhism.

The emphasis is often on love, compassion, and self-improvement, rather than self-deprecation. And that might not provide a direct why, except God wills it, but don't poo-poo the wisdom in Scripture. Remember, church and state used to be one. Society was run in that way. We don't do that anymore, at least in the Western world, anymore for good reasons. But maybe we shouldn't question why God wills something, but it probably isn't because it's ineffective.

So the downside of diving into any religious scripture is it cuts off a little bit of the exploration process, because it's written, and then we're done. So there you go. I have unequivocally demonstrated to you that you should in fact accept, believe, and love yourself. You're welcome. Of course, there's lots of personal exploration to do there. But I hope that I got some creative juices flowing there.

All right. Now, the topic that I promised you, believing that you're worth it. So another key ingredient of achieving a goal, and this is a goal after all, is to believe you're worthy of pursuing this goal. This is actually more of a roadblock or a pitfall. Maybe you think that accepting, believing in, and loving yourself is perfect for everyone else, but not for you. You are the special black sheep to which none of it applies.

That shit in this context, of course, can't fly. So this might be actually a roadblock for you. You crash into over and over again, although it's not particularly rational. What is so rotten about you? Why are you more evil than, I don't know, murderers and rapists and whatever? Probably that's not the case. So when you inspect that belief, it can't really withstand the light of truth. But still, if you don't expose it, it might still be pervasive.

So before you accept, believe in, and love yourself, you also need to make a decision that you are worth it. And this might be a very personal process, and it can be painful to sit with. But I challenge you to journal on this. Yourself, because there's not that much, because it's such a personal belief that I particularly can say, except that it's ridiculous, to state that you are not worth it to accept yourself.

That is an irrational point of view. But we all offer a rational point of view, and what does rationality mean to begin with? But when you're journaling on it, also write about why you wouldn't be worth it. And be real about if those would be actual reasons for it. And my prediction is that you will find out that they're not. So, this may require time. And it may be one of these things, like I said.

It's an obstacle, it's a pitfall. You might start on this journey, and then at one point come upon this limiting belief that you're not worth it. So, I'm telling you now, this is a pitfall you can expect. So, expect it to happen. Be on the lookout for it. Now, of course, this comes from my perspective. These are sort of like my vulnerabilities that come up. So, this might not be relatable to you.

You might have had a very different upbringing or childhood experience or whatever I had that makes that pop up for me. That makes this something that I really want to call out, which would be absolutely wonderful and great. So, cool. All right, let's get into the meat and potatoes. How do we actually do it? Because the third step is of goal achievement, is that you believe that the continuous investment and the process that you are following moves you closer to achieving the goal.

Remember that that's actually really, really important. And we oftentimes get into situations that maybe we believe the previous two points, that it's worthwhile to invest in and that we are worth it, but we don't quite know how to achieve it because it's such a big, hairy audacious goal. So what's the process? And of course, this is an abstract point, is that this applies to all different goals.

So we're going to make it more specific to the goal that we were talking about. So I like to do this. Let's say that I have a magic wand, and if I wave it, you would instantaneously accept, believe in and love yourself for the rest of time. Poof. And maybe it's a time-travelling wand, maybe it's a brain-changing wand, maybe it's a perception-changing wand, maybe it's a reality or environment-changing wand.

You don't know. You just know that it worked. Nothing externally necessarily is different. It just worked. So if you imagine that situation, ask yourself, what is different? How would you conduct yourself now? How would you make all your decisions and your choices? So some of the examples that I came up with, of course, colored by my biases, that looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing a gut and calling yourself like bad things, disgusting fat, like you probably not do that anymore.

You probably have a compassionate response from your nurturing parent. Goofing off and procrastinating at work because you're just lazy? No, no, that's a critical parent voice as well. There's a different way to frame that. Not working out because you're just not the workout type. Doesn't fly as well, right? That's limiting. Not working on your creative endeavor because your ideas are crap anyways and they never turn out.

Nope. Working on your creative endeavor, if that's a goal. Just pursuing the process, that's the reward in itself. Jerking off to porn because you can't get a boyfriend or girlfriend or can't connect with them or whatever. Same situation, you would probably not do that when you believe in, accept, and love yourself. Binge drinking and being sick the next day instead of socializing, working out, living your life, because either this is just who you are, my genes are wrong, my circumstances are wrong, probably also not the case.

And this reminds me of a, gosh, I don't remember which motivational speaker this was. Might be ET, Eric Thomas, who says, I hear a lot of you people complaining about the hand that you were dealt. You know, your daddy walked out on you, your mama wasn't there, you couldn't finish high school, there was no money. The reason that I'm in this situation is I got dealt a bad hand.

But I bet that there's someone out there that with that exact same hand that you have, same circumstances, same everything, they would be a lot more grateful and get a lot more done with the exact same hand. But we don't need somebody else, do we? Because we've got you. Maybe a little corny, and I'm sure that I don't do it as well as Eric Thomas, but it hits home for me.

It does hit home for me. Anyways, moving on. Staying in that dead-end job because you just don't like taking risks, probably taking risks is part of loving yourself, believing in yourself that you will handle the risks. Appropriately. Generally, not doing something, although you want it, because excuse, you're not the type for it. You don't have the money. You weren't dealt the right cards for it. Probably not in line of what the person would do after that magic wand has been waived.

Not thinking anything, just unconsciously going through life, numbing out with drugs, alcohol, whatever, where you can, doesn't work either. That's not what a self-loving person would do. And you know that. Eating junk food all the time because you don't like to cook, or you don't have money, or whatever the excuse is, wouldn't fly either. So these are pretty, pretty clear. There are some of the things that might be in the gray area.

I do recognize that, but a lot of these things are very clear. So, we know now with the waving of a magic wand and looking at a couple of examples, we can probably get a little bit of a feeling how one who believes in, accepts, and loves themselves would treat certain situations versus in the situation where that's not the case. But how do we do it without the magic wand?

First of all, self-care. It all starts with self-care. And of course, I borrow a lot of these things from dialectical behavioral therapy. It's so essential. It's the oxygen mask again. You can't pour from an empty cup. And it's also like one of these things that seem to be opposites, right? Like in order to do proper self-care, you must first do self-care. And it feels like you can't.

Like it's a paradox. But some of the greatest things in life are paradoxes. So that's really where it starts. Self-care. Deciding that self-care is important, knowing how to care for yourself. And you can probably already tell, like if you accept, believe in, and love yourself, self-care is part of that. Why would you not care for something you love or someone you love? You want to care for them.

You want to prioritize that care. You want to believe that they are worthy of that care. Alright. Second is awareness. So without awareness, nothing changes. So having a mindfulness practice, practicing some kind of faith, spirituality, like you don't have to join any cult, but opening yourself to the universe, to the greater self, having some kind of faith, can be really, really important. And really, spirituality could be a separate point, but the point around awareness is that awareness alone can be curative.

So that's worth exploring by itself at one point in the future, but you might have heard that saying before. The same thing applies here. I would say is that sometimes, even just being aware of a toxic pattern, not even changing it actively, just being aware as you go through the motions, can already take care of a certain type of autocorrection. So that's also very, very important. So I recommend, I mean, I'm a fan of morning rituals.

So I really recommend journaling meditation in the morning. You might prefer to practice mindfulness in a different way, not in the morning. I also like to practice mindfulness a lot, again, related to DBT skills, while walking, preferably in nature, but really engaging the five senses, being aware of thoughts. But mindfulness is very, very deep, definitely a topic by itself. So partially this episode is like different road signs.

So I'm like now pointing you towards the next thing, and I do realize that I definitely want to do more, like of an expansive episode, what mindfulness has brought me, because it's such an easy word that can mean so many different things to so many different people. Some people just immediately rolled their eyes at it and are like, oh, it's woo-woo stuff, just like sitting in a lotus pose and chanting om, and they don't want to have anything to do with it.

So it's deeper. So another personal tip that I have, and this would apply to any type of goal really, is accountability and surrounding yourself with growth-oriented people. It can be meetups, Facebook groups, therapy groups, like people that are interested in personal improvement. And these people are trying... Not everybody is like that. Like some people are just not interested in living life consciously in that way, and that is okay.

That is fine. And probably a lot of your family members, friends are like that, I know because a lot of my family members and friends are like that. And you don't have to throw them away. But it is important to be able to surround yourself with like-minded people. And when you have that, express your commitment. Let it be known. And sometimes you can't tell that to your family because they don't get it.

They don't get where you are exactly. So the moment that you then just spout up some goal or you want to say like, I want to love myself, your mother is not going to understand that. Maybe she is, which would be great for you. So make sure that you find accountability in a group with like-minded people. That's also work. That's work finding a group of people. But again, to reiterate, meet up, Facebook group, therapy groups, can all be great.

AA or Narcotics Anonymous, these people tend to be focused on personal improvement. And generally, any type of addiction is to cover up something that requires personal growth. Like it's honestly, most of the time, not really about the addiction. The addiction is just putting a bandaid over some pain. So that means that when people turn away, from the substance or the addictive pattern, that they then in that group where they have the support, talk about their personal improvement as well.

It's not just about not taking the substance. If it would just be that, it would be easier. Next is planning. Be efficient and use unstructured time well. So this is for me one of the energy sinks. So if I have unstructured time, and we need unstructured time in our lives, but in a way you can plan the unstructured time and set up like sort of guardrails for the unstructured times for yourself so that it doesn't expand into the entire day.

That's the challenge. The challenge is to do it with moderation, even moderation itself. So what I can recommend for planning ahead is both planning unstructured time, planning relaxing time, but also, for example, trying to follow a methodology like getting things done. You can Google from, gosh, David Allen, I believe the name of the guy is. You can also look at, if it's more emotional topics that you get stuck in, coping ahead.

So DBT has the coping ahead strategy that I've talked about before. So those are two very great resources to help your planning out. This is a deeper topic. It's, of course, easy to say, oh yeah, plan better, but I do want to re-highlight it. It's not just about productivity porn just being super efficient. No, it's also really about planning the unstructured time, so the time after relaxation.

It could fold into self-care, but I thought it was important to mention separately. So one of the other things that I'm super fond of is another, I borrowed DBT terminology for that, building mastery. Right. So building mastery is all about getting that feeling of self-efficacy, as they call in the mental health field, the belief in yourself, basically. And whatever the mastery you want to build up in, that depends on you.

And there is many, many great speakers on different types, like goal setting and achieving goals. And of course, this is an episode that focuses on a specific goal, I would say, and we talk about some of the abstract principles as well. But there's great resources online for that as well. And I'll definitely be contributing to the wealth of information that's online as well. But the way that I see it, I like to split up the building mastery in sort of roughly two categories.

One are the big goals that can't ever be finished. And so the big hairy audacious goals. And an example of that is live according to my values. Because today my values are this, and tomorrow my values are that. So it's an ongoing thing. But it's still hard. It's still something that every day I can ask myself, hmm, am I living according to my values? And it requires upkeep.

It requires me to determine what my values are every quarter or half year or year or something like that. They're not super dynamic, obviously, right? And also small goals, second part of the category, that are constantly achieved and recognized as well. So for example, do a values discovery exercise. You can put that on your calendar and go and do it in an hour or two hours or something like that.

The important thing there as well as to also celebrate it. So it's really easy to not remember the small goals that we're continuously achieving because they're easy. But we have to remember that the small goals contribute to the big goals. So it's like the analogy of the small flywheel that is building momentum for a much, much larger wheel. So you have to turn that small wheel like a hundred thousand times for the large wheel to even do one revolution.

But still, every easy turn of that flywheel that you do, it still helps. And I find that very important. Whenever we're putting energy into something, this does get a little bit into productivity porn. I will admit that. So productivity porn being like the movement right now that everybody is so much focused on being productive all the time. But I do think it's a moment that if it comes to goals, which is of course productive stuff, to be working towards goals that fit within your bigger goals.

Because then you're working on your narrative. So that's why I like so much to spend some time thinking about what your goals are, instead of just arbitrarily spawning new goals. And probably if you're earlier in life, that happens to you more, at least it did for me later in life. Things of like that suddenly some of your friends are getting into, I don't know, Pokemon or skiing or whatever.

You can then think, where does that fit in my narrative? Do I just want to like do that? And there's a difference here, because earlier in life, you want to expose yourself to massive experience. So if you're early, if you're like in your teens or twenties, I would say, go do it, go ski, go play Pokemon, go do the thing, go, you know, later in life, it can change a little bit because you know yourself better, you know better what you like and what you don't like.

So I like to frame these small goals in contributing to the bigger goals, depending on where you are in your life phase. So there's much more on build mastery as well. So I refer to, gosh, I don't know off the top of my head what my, it was, I think, Emotion Regulation, part one or part two, where we talk about building mastery. And building mastery is just super, super essential for our mental health, for our feeling of self-efficacy and building our self-esteem, very, very, very, very important, and a manifestation of our accepting ourselves, believing in ourselves, and loving ourselves.

So, I do want to talk about as well as like, you won't always know the desired answer or the desired behavior, right? So, there's a lot of gray in the real world. And there's chapters. Like I mentioned before, there's experience to amass, mistakes to make. There's also a ton of self-deception, worthy of an episode by itself, where you think you're doing something in line with acceptance, belief, and love in oneself, but actually is not.

But that's a discovery process. That's where we need that awareness for. We can't always predict. We can feel it out and be like, okay, if I do this thing, it's probably going to be fine. If I go to this party, if I sleep with this person, that doesn't contradict my love and myself. But then we can discover, well, actually, no, it did. But we need awareness for that.

So quite important. What you can do today is stop doing the obvious things that go against your new decision of acceptance, belief, and love in yourself. Even if that doesn't change a ton of the actual actions, remember as well as that you can do an action, same exact action, with a different mindset. So you might not immediately change something out there. So my example that I came up with is you might look in the mirror, notice a gut sticking out, and simply affirming to yourself that you believe that you are learning how to prioritize your health.

You need knowledge for that. You are investing 15, 20 minutes, half an hour every day researching that, maybe, whatever you're doing. And if you do that, even if it takes a week to build up some momentum, you have a lot more momentum than if you would have been hating on yourself for a week. You would have noticed that and called yourself like a fat slob or something like that, because then you're just reinforcing the same pattern, and you're probably going to pick out on ice cream later because you already don't believe in yourself.

So, if this stuff was instant and guaranteed, everybody would be doing it, of course. And these things tend to be tough. That's why we have to be very deliberate in thinking about why the why is important, the why and the how. So, I already talked about this earlier. The common way to embody this is to talk to yourself from a nurturing parent place. So, how you would like a parent to have talked to you.

And I don't know how it is for some of the other people that are listening to it. But there's definitely differences that like ways that I wish my parents would have spoken to me in regards to some of these things. Of course, times are different. And also realize the different voices. So, you can have the nurturing parent versus the critical parent, but also, who is that parent talking to?

Is it talking to the fearful child, playful child, or even the adult in you? And I know I have not explained these exact ego states ad nauseum, but they're pretty straightforward, right? The fearful child, you kind of probably can feel the energy in yourself. Playful child, you can feel the energy, you can feel what those things would enable you to do. And adult is mentioned as well as what I like about the five ego states is that it recognizes that you're adulting sometimes, but not all the time.

It's a mindset you switch into and that you want to turn off as well. It's very important to limit your adulting, I think. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So if this is really relating to you, or resonating, I should say, I recommend you to explore IFS, Internal Family Systems Therapy. I actually don't know that much about it. I have a friend who does and talks about it regularly.

It's one of the topics that I want to go deeper into. But what I understand of it is basically where you focus on giving yourself the parenting that your parent never gave you to recognize where, you know, the critical parent voice is talking to you and replacing it with the parenting that you actually would have wanted. And that can be very awkward because you are familiar with the critical voice, of course.

Note that it can be super hard to not get overwhelmed with all of the changes you want to make. We can't do it perfect, therefore, let's not do it at all. The perfectionism fallacy. So, be aware that that might happen and know that it is a fallacy. I want to go into somewhat of a personal story. Well, the entire thing, of course, is a personal story, but this might relate to some of you or resonate, and to others it might not.

But for me, what comes up is the following. My critical parent voice or whatever says, well, whoop-de-doo, that's a nice magic trick you did. You waved your wand, you did whatever, now you accept yourself, you believe in yourself, you love yourself, great. But what if everybody would do that? And who would clean up the toilets at McDonald's and pick up the trash? Who are you to do that?

And that is very similar to perfectionism or nirvana fallacy again. We can't do everything, therefore we should do nothing, right? Although that voice might be, like there's some kind of, it makes sense to a certain extent, or we could suspect that we, in that state, our society would break, right? If we just suddenly all, like, you know, we might think that our society actually runs on some toxic beliefs, and we don't want society to fall apart.

But remember Hume, I talked about him earlier. You can't derive an ought from an is. So even if true, that the fact that no one would be picking up the trash or whatever, society would collapse, doesn't mean that one ought to do something. And maybe not picking up the trash is just fine, because if everybody would believe in, accept and love themselves, litter would not be a problem.

Or people that have to pick up the trash, you can still pick up the trash and love yourself. That's not necessarily an ought with each other. Who knows? I think that this partially has to do with deserving it as well. So they're very, very closely related. So whenever your mind is coming up with those kind of like tricks to try to make it not relevant to you, beware of what's going on.

Don't believe the fallacies. The point is you are not responsible for fixing the world. You are responsible for consciously establishing your own values, your preferences, your beliefs, and acting in accordance with them. That's it. That's all what we got to do. And the more conscious you do that, the better. Cool. Well, I want to move to a conclusion, route this up. I do want to reiterate the different steps that I just spoke about.

So, specifically, if we want to bypass our human non-short-term dopamine goal attainment system, so just going for the little goodies that are right in front of us, which is what most of us are doing. We're not setting intentional goals. We're just following the shinies. For goal achievement, we have, we can call them the three noble truths for mnemonic purposes. The first one that we talked about is, you believe the goal or the pursuit thereof is valuable and is worth continuous investment, inherently, not because of the results.

Not that the results are not valuable, still. Second is you believe you're worthy of pursuing this goal, which we identified as more of a roadblock or a pitfall that you can fall into, not feeling like I'm not going to do it because I don't feel worthy of it. And number three, you believe that the continuous investment and the process you are following moves you closer to achieving the goal.

So believing that the process works and that the investment helps you to get there, those are very, very important here. So that's more the abstract goal attainment principles that we learned. Those can be applicable to many different situations in life. And I think the goal that we talked about is sort of like the biggest goal in life. Accepting, believing in, and loving yourself really boils down to living a life worth living, the good life.

That does not mean the easy life, but the good life. So the ultimate goal in a way. According to me, and you can, you know, how do you say that? Qualify that goal in different ways. For me, that feels like one of the most important things to do in life. It's concrete enough that I can do like these small steps toward that, and I can see the value in it, very, like I can see that there's a lot of value in it.

So it's a really great combination for me personally. But it might be different for you. So wonderful. Thank you very much for tuning in. This has been Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show. Like always, I'm grateful that you made it to the end of the video, if you did, but otherwise you wouldn't hear that. Excellent. All right, well, I'm signing off, and I will be looking forward to seeing you next time.

See you later! Later!