81. Having Better Relationships in Your Life

Hey, Hey, Hey, my curious friends, welcome to episode 81. You know, I've been thinking a lot lately about relationships and how they affect life. And what I want you to know is that the most important relationship in your life is with yourself. Think about that for a moment. Your relationship with yourself is the cornerstone. It's like the building blocks the foundation upon which all other relationships in your life are built. And before I get started with today's topic, I wanna ask you a favor, like if you're a fan of intentionally curious, Go ahead and click that five star rating on iTunes now. And then after the episode, ride review, intentionally curious. Only grows to reach other listeners when awesome humans like yourself, take the time to rate and review. And when you share it with others who you think would benefit from our community, so help the community grow rate and review us, and then let's get started with today's topic. When I say your relationship with yourself is the cornerstone upon which all other relationships in your life are built. What's the first thing that comes to mind. Uh, yeah, that's a no brainer, Jay. Right? Of course, of course. I have to have a good relationship with myself in order to have relationships with other people that are solid. And yet the question is, do you. do you have a solid relationship with yourself where there isn't one thing you can improve upon in your life? Let that sink in. There's not one thing in your life you can improve upon so that you have a better relationship with yourself. I'm gonna go out on a limb. And so your relationship with yourself is probably not as rock solid as you think. Because as humans, we all get stuck. Sometimes we worry sometimes. We focus on, what we think other people think of us sometimes. Well, probably more than that, right. And that means we have work to do so. When I say that, having a good relationship with yourself first is a cornerstone of all other relationships in your life. I'm not just talking about a relationship with other people in your life. There's more to it. I'm talking about your relationship with yourself. By that, I mean, your relationship with your health. So your physical health, your emotional health, your spiritual health, right? If that's part of your life, and what about your relationship with money or food or alcohol or drugs? Like, how is your relationship with your thoughts and your feelings? There's so much to having a relationship with yourself. There's a lot that goes into it and all those areas at some point need work. All right. Here's what I love about being a coach. At the core, it all comes down to relationships. And for me, that's helping people, just like you have the best possible relationship you can with yourself, with yourself, with your money, your health, your family, your friends, your coworkers, your boss, your kids, your parents, even strangers. So often when I hear about relationship advice, right? I think we immediately think of advice for our relationship with our partner, our spouse, and that everything else doesn't even enter into the equation. Is that what goes through your brain, right? It's about, oh, I gotta have a better relationship with my partner. I have have to better relationship with my spouse, my kids. Right? All of those relationships at the core. At the core are built on your relationship with your money, your health, your thoughts, your wellbeing, and the key is to having the best possible relationship with your partner or spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, right. Whomever. It may be whatever it may be. There's there's 12 places you need to consider starting to have a better relationship with yourself. And number one, number one is. Nutrition, rest recreation, activity and positive thoughts. It's like a big, all inclusive one. There. Those things are the foundation to having a better relationship with yourself. So when you're you're properly in tune with your body, the other 11 things I'll mention today, they become much easier to focus on and they become much easier for you to get alignment with in your life. When you allow negative thoughts to enter your life. Or when you don't get enough sleep or you don't fuel your body? Well, it makes it hard to have a solid foundation upon which to build anything. It's really hard to build on an UN solid foundation. Right? If it's crumbly, you're not gonna have a strong life. And I know it's easy to kind of put it off and say, well, you know what this, okay. It's all right. It's it's good enough. And listen, if you start here and you make small improvements, pick one of the categories we talked about, right? Sleep nutrition, rest, whatever it may be. Start with small improvements. You could even start with drinking more water each day and staying hydrated that can have drastic benefits for you as a starter. And you could start that like, literally right now you could press pause, get a cup of water, drink it, and you'd be on your way. Number two, try creating awareness. About what needs to change and then set an intention to improve that aspect of your life. Right. I get it. I get it. This is possibly could be number one, but even still, it is hard to be intentional about having anything in your mind if your body isn't properly prepared. So make sure it, like, in order to take care of your mind, keeping an awareness around what aspects of your life you need to improve before you do that. Create awareness about the other areas I'll mention by taking care of your body. Now, just a gentle reminder, you're gonna want to change a lot of things. And from my experience, that can be overwhelming. So be thoughtful and be intentional and do that, you know, goals that make that like one or two goals at a. Don't try to do everything at once. Go slow to go fast. And speaking about setting goals, set those for the short, middle and long term. So in order for you to develop a good relationship with yourself, prioritizing goals for a variety of timeframes will help you be realistic about the milestones you can. You can create. For instance, in the short term, motivation is like adrenaline. It lasts for a short period of time. and like, it's great when you see a short term smaller goal, but over time, the motivation wanes, especially when you hit the middle and long term goal. So it's important to build the proper habits in order to get you to hit those longer goals. And those proper habits go straight back to number one, right? Your physical and mental wellbeing. If you keep going there, your middle and long term goals will be easier to reach. now, number four, it's kind of like this show's title. You gotta get curious. And I would add, maybe develop an attitude of acceptance. We oftentimes don't do that for ourselves. Now. I know change. And you know that we've talked about it on this show before change change is the one true constant life. So when you recognize this is a done deal and you recognize it as inevit. As something that will always be true, you can embrace the notion of change with, with, with just a little bit of fear. Okay. Because you know, you know, change is gonna happen and it's okay to be afraid of change. And we wanna move through that. So when you create habits and choose a different path for your life, those new habits can define who you become and all right. And it's a really big one that, and is a big one. There will always be areas in your life that you haven't fully explor. Too often when you want to make changes in your relationship with yourself, you, you try to do it quickly. It's like a, a checklist item, right. Opened up. Got that done. Get it off the list. So let's say you conquered your relationship with sweets, for example. Sweet. Right? Sorry, that kind of got me there. All right. So what about your relationship with other foods in your life? Were sweets just the most important or just the beginning. And what happens if you think you conquer your relationship with sweets, but haven't fully explored why that's important to you. If you go deeper, when you think you've checked that mark. You do it to make sure you're, you're not onto yourself for a quick change. So often we just wanna be like one and done, check it off, move on. That's not how our brains work. It takes time for you to get over old habits for you to fully explore something and move on from it. All right. Number five, kindness, kindness, my friends, big believer here. Kindness always wins. And in this case in particular is being kind to yourself. Now, I'm not talking about being kind to the point. I'm not doing the work or saying, you know what? Oh, that's not a big deal that I conquered my own relationship with sweets, but then I just ate half a cake or a box of Oreos. Cuz I'm being quote unquote, kind to myself. You still have to take personal responsibility for the actions for your actions. And one of those is being kind to yourself, especially when you do self-evaluations of your behavior. Do you do it without blame? Do you do it without, without criticism? Do you do it without self-judgment? The more you judge yourself, the less effective you will be in your ability to change. So give yourself a break, be kind to yourself, but again, don't be so kind to yourself that you don't do the work. You have to be candid. You have to take responsibility and say to yourself, whenever you take a step backward, what could I do better next time? Do the evaluat. Number six, find your people find your tribe. Like if you spend the majority of your time with people who did not have a good relationship with themselves, you'll be really hard pressed to create a good relationship with yourself because you'll be afraid of losing those people. Listen, you are who you surround yourself with on a daily basis. So if you want to create change for yourself, find others who wanna do the same things. Having similar minded people in your life provides accountability for you. And those people also serve as an example of what you can accomplish. If you see somebody who has made a change in their life, get to know them, better, become friends with them, ask how they did it, let them guide you. Okay. Number seven. Optimism is good, but be realistic. Be realistic in how you create optimism for yourself. If you haven't listened to episode 76, made a, make a note of it because I deal with perfectionism and in this case perfectionism is the enemy of sustainable change in your life. And perfectionism is especially the enemy in your relationship with yourself. All right. I deal with change management with my clients. So I know they, and you want to change, right? And you want that change to happen like yesterday, you wanna be done with it, but fixing what's been ingrained in you doesn't happen overnight. So when you want things quicker and faster, it leads to negative self talk. It leads to cycles of, I can't do it, especially when you don't achieve the change quicker. So be careful. Be careful with being overly optimistic and set realistic goals. And if you need to right, go back to number three in this list and remind yourself about short, middle and long term goals. Number eight, please, please make a plan for when things go off the rails. There will be times when life wants to take you on a different track. Take you on a, take you to a different place than what you had planned and your brain will want to slip back into being comfortable when it does that. When life does that to you, your brain will remind you about being comfortable. Your brain will want you to rekindle your friendship with those old habits. So having a plan in place for everyone that happens will help you get back on track easier. First and foremost, you have to always expect that life will D. Remember what you know about change? What do we know? It's the one true constant. Whether we create it or not. So expect things to get messy from time to time. And that's okay. One important tool right here you can use is doing a thought download. And if you don't know what that is, is it really is you just spend five minutes writing down how things might go off track. Imagine what those would be. Imagine the worst case scenario. And when you do this, And when life goes off track and it's nowhere near the worst case, right? Your mind says, see, not so bad, right? And the less likely and unexpected D development will actually derail you from your goals. If you know what to expect. And you imagine the worst case scenario, don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about the worst case scenario. Just say, this is what's possible. And then anything short of that is like, ah, that's not too bad. Okay. Number nine, create massive action in your life in a meaningful way. And what do I mean by massive action first? What does success look like to you? Take a moment, take a moment to think about what that means. Okay now scrap it and toss it out because having a static or generic definition of success keeps you from creating regular activities in your life, regular activities that can provide you with a sense of accomplishment. Your definition of success might be some far away thing, which will make the day to day of creating a sense of accomplishment, difficult. It might be, it might be out there. It might be the, it might be your idealistic version of it, right? Whatever your idea of that is. When you take massive action in your life, it means doing the things that can give you a sense of accomplishment. Okay. Here's an example. Think about your task list at home or at, or at work and just crossing items off the list is what I would call passive action. It really doesn't provide you with any forward momentum because you will always choose the easiest things to cross off the list. And that's idle work. Massive action is taking action that helps to improve your life. So let's say one of your tasks is to clean your home. So you do that each Saturday, it takes two to four hours, depending on, you know, how deep of a clean you wanna do. That's actually passive action because it completes a tax, but it doesn't improve your life. What if instead you found a side hustle that created enough income, where you could pay for someone else to clean your house and you gain those two to four hours back on a Saturday. What could you do with that time that could improve your life? Meaningful massive action leads to better things in your life. Number 10 create and maintain good habits. So how do you start your day? Do you wake up late, cram food down your throat or worse yet? Like stop and get some sugary coffee and fast food. Or do you start your day with creating a better relationship with yourself? Are you intentional about journaling? Are you intentional about eating? Well? Are you intentional about getting up early enough to create space for yourself? When you create space for yourself in the morning, you'll be ready for what the day throws at. And remember your goals and the intentions you set for yourself are the number one priority in having a better relationship with yourself. Number 11, how do you talk to yourself? Right? Are you a harsh harshest critic? We're your greatest champion too often? We are our harshest critic. We beat ourselves up, right. We don't know how to buoy ourselves in difficult times, but we should be our become our greatest champion. Ask yourself, like, how do you feel when you say things like I'm an idiot. I can't compete. I'm lazy. I'm an imposter. Oh, I'm all smoking mirrors. I'm not a good parent. I'm a failure. You feel pretty crappy. Right? And you don't feel like taking massive action to improve yourself when you feel crappy. But if you're kind to yourself, if you're gentle with yourself, if you're supportive of yourself and if you think of it that way, things get better. And also, would you talk to your kids or your friends the way you talk to yourself and probably not. Right. You probably wouldn't do that. So support yourself. And if you find it helpful to talk out loud to yourself in a positive way, find the space to do that each day. Number 12 last but not least. Number 12, self care. My friends is not self ish. You were raised to do things for others. Look out for your brother. Help me bring in the groceries, clear the table, bring your wash downstairs, mow the lawn. You were taught at an early age that helping others was way more important than helping yourself or doing what you wanted to do. And I'm, and, and today you have a hard time with the concept of taking care of yourself. First. Now I'll never say, I'll never say that you should be self-centered selfish or focused on yourself to the exclusion of others in your life. Not that's not. But taking care of yourself first allows you to have a good relationship with yourself, which ultimately leads to having a better relationship with others and it can improve how you care for them. It can improve how you care for them. All right. My friends. Woo. I've given you a lot to think about in this episode. So here's what I'm going to ask you to do head over to jasonramsden.com/episode81 and drop in the comments. What's the one thing you want to change in your life, right? So when you make a comment there, you're making a commitment to yourself and you're having me join you as your accountability partner. So go ahead and stop this episode, head there now. jasonramsden.com/epsiode81. And I'll personally respond to your comments and support you on your journey. I wanna support you in having a better relationship with yourself. So hop over there now. Okay. My friends, that's a wrap on this week's episode and as always, please remember, be willing, be curious and be intentional and until next week, keep doing the work. You've got this.