I truly believe that confidence doesn’t begin with changing yourself — it begins with understanding yourself.
There is so much self-improvement advice online telling us what we should do to become better versions of ourselves, but sometimes we skip the most important step: understanding who we are, why we think the way we think, and why we behave the way we do.
In this episode, we’re talking about how to understand yourself on a deeper level and why self-awareness is the foundation of real confidence, healing and personal growth.
We explore why your journey is not meant to look like anyone else’s, why trying to fix behaviours without understanding the root cause can only take you so far, and how learning to listen to your emotions can help you build a stronger relationship with yourself.
We also dive into Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow, the hidden parts of ourselves that we often avoid or suppress, and how becoming aware of these parts can help us understand our thoughts, feelings and behaviours on a deeper level.
In this episode, we talk about:
✨ Why confidence starts with understanding yourself
✨ Why what works for someone else might not work for you
✨ The difference between fixing a behaviour and understanding the root cause behind it
✨ Why your emotions are valuable information, even the uncomfortable ones
✨ Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow and how the unconscious parts of ourselves influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviours
✨ How understanding yourself can completely change the way you experience life
✨ Practical ways to start building a stronger relationship with yourself
Whether you’re working on your confidence, healing old patterns, struggling with people pleasing, or simply wanting to know yourself on a deeper level, I hope this episode reminds you that the most important relationship you’ll ever build is the one you have with yourself. 🤍
Chapters
00:00 – Why Confidence Starts With Understanding Yourself
02:20 – Your Journey Isn’t Meant to Look Like Everyone Else’s
08:02 – Stop Fixing the Behaviour, Understand the Root Cause
13:43 – Learning to Listen to Your Emotions (Even the Uncomfortable Ones)
17:09 – Shadow Work: The Parts of Yourself You’ve Hidden
22:21 – How Self-Understanding Changes the Way You Experience Life
35:51 – Where Do You Even Start?
42:27 – Become Your Own Best Friend
Resources Mentioned
🤍 Carl Jung’s concept of The Shadow Self
🤍 Level 2 Certificate in Counselling Skills
If this episode resonated with you, I’d love if you shared it with someone who might need to hear it too. Your support means the world and helps these conversations reach more girls. 🤍
Start Your Self-Understanding Journey 💓
If you want to start building a deeper relationship with yourself, here are a few places to begin:
✨ Take 10 minutes at the end of your week to check in with yourself. What emotion did you feel the most this week? What situations brought that emotion up?
✨ Pay attention to your interactions with others. What behaviours, thoughts, or feelings come up when you’re around different people? What might they be showing you about yourself?
✨ When you notice a pattern you want to change, instead of asking “What’s wrong with me?” try asking “When does this show up, and when does it not?” Look for the contrast. For example, if you see yourself as quiet, explore the moments where you are more talkative. Who are you around? What feels different? These moments can reveal so much about yourself.
If this episode resonated with you, I’d love if you shared it with someone who might need to hear it too. Your support means the world and helps these conversations reach more girls. 🤍
Transcript:
To All The Girls (00:00)
Hey beautiful, welcome back to another episode of To All the Girls Out There.
I hope you guys are having an amazing and beautiful day. And as always, it is an absolute blessing to have you girls here with me. I hate when I do this and my voice sounds raspy because then it’s like, Ugh. I hate when I edit it back and I have to listen to it. But anyway.
Guys, I really do believe deep down in my heart that every woman deserves to love herself, have that confidence, and be able to, you know, just take up space, become the best version of yourself or of themselves, because they deserve to know what life looks like if.
they operate from their highest self, if they chase their dreams, you know, and
And I really do wish that every girl sat there and decided, hey, you know what? Like I am going to pursue myself. I am going to try my best and become the version of myself that I know that I can be, achieve the things that I know that I can achieve. And there’s so many things out there for women and I’m so happy that it is. And I hope that that message can be spread and there’s so much content online.
Which is great and can be very overwhelming. But something I noticed about that content is that a lot of it focuses on what to do. And I think some of us we have skipped the foundation of underneath that. And I believe that when you understand yourself and truly build a strong relationship with yourself, the way that you experience the world changes.
And that deep-rooted confidence to embark on that journey of exploring, becoming your higher self, changing the patterns that you have, achieving your goals, it starts from within, it starts from the understanding. So what do I mean by change or understanding yourself?
You see with life like not everything is one size fits all. And a lot of the content and a lot of the things that we see online, there’s so many things and you would think this is her story, this is what she did, and this is gonna work for me. But the thing is is that’s not always the case. What works for one person might not necessarily work for you.
And what works for another person might not work for another person, but sometimes there’s something that can work for a person that does work for you. And we can take advice from other people’s experiences in other people’s lives, but everybody’s life is perfectly curated for them. Your life is your own story and every day you get up you are writing your own. And so because of that, because of
the past experiences that you have, the personality that you have, the family that you have, the place you grew up, your ways of thinking, every single thing that has been put in your path and is yet to be put in your path, means that you’re not gonna have the exact same story and the exact same outcome as someone else. This is not me saying that you can’t take advice for someone else. Other people’s advice isn’t gonna work. That’s far from the truth because
we learn from each other and why would I be having this podcast if I felt like you couldn’t learn from other people. But it’s important to understand that your story is different. It is your own story. So you cannot try to take someone else’s and try to make that yours because it won’t work. You have to understand yourself. Understand that, okay, look, this person has given this advice, maybe I can try it. If it doesn’t work, accept it.
If it does, then great. But even before that, you can sit there when you have that understanding of yourself. There’s some advice and things that I see online and I’m like, you know what? This is not for me. And it’s not in a way that this person is wrong because it works for them. It doesn’t mean that I’m better than them or that’s beneath me. It’s just that I know that I know myself and I know that this
is not for me, it’s not gonna work for me. It doesn’t align with me and it doesn’t align with where I’m going either. And I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t actually understand myself. And sometimes we are so desperate and eager to make that change and I understand it and it can feel like, why is nothing working? But sometimes it’s because we are trying to apply other stories to our own and we don’t actually sit down
and listen to ourselves and understand ourselves and there’s so much noise from the outside world. Like I said, there’s so much content out there, which is beautiful. I love that as humans we are sharing our experiences. But with that means that there’s so much. There’s just so much information and it’s like I don’t know what to choose. ‘Cause someone can sit there and say, Hey, you don’t have to work hard and then there’s another person who says, No, work hard, do this, do that and you’re like, crap, what do I do?
That’s why it’s so important when those things happen to then turn and tune back into yourself. Because that’s when it’s asking about, Okay, I’m writing my story. This person was their story. How do I want it to look? And you might choose one and think, Okay, this doesn’t work and then go to the words the next one. That’s fine. But it all comes down to trial and error sometimes and like I said, going inwards and constantly
checking in with yourself, is this actually what I want? How is this making me feel? Does this align with me? we’re always learning something new about ourselves. There’s always information out there and for example, like I said, you might take a piece of information from someone and realize that no, you know what, I tried this and it doesn’t work for me. Now you know trial and error, like I said.
Now when someone recommends a piece of advice or similar piece of advice, you’re like, nah. But you know, sometimes there’s advice that people give and you listen to and you’re like you know when you kinda like smile and you’re you know what? That actually sounds good. Like it lights you up on the inside. You’re like, you know what? What’s she saying? I actually want to try that. There is a reason that your body feels like that. Go for it, listen to it. Doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily gonna work, but
For the most part it probably will because if your body’s lighting you up and telling you, I like this piece of information, let’s go for it, it probably will respond to it well. And there’s always something that you can learn from it. Always something that you can learn from it. that’s why understanding yourself is so important. Because if you don’t
the noise from the outside world will confuse you and it will leave you stuck and we won’t move forward. I think understanding yourself allows you to fine tune all of that noise and understand, okay, this is the one that I’m gonna pick. This is what aligns for me. And it will help you to move forward in your journey a lot quicker than always being confused and thinking and just following
everything out there because not everything out there is for you.
I think something
with the content that’s online and a lot of self development content and the content that helps to inspire girls and people in general is that it shows you how to change but it doesn’t tackle the deep rooted issue. So it shows you a lot of five ways to change your life over six months. tips that I learnt being in my twenties. Da da da da da here’s how I will go from A to Z or A to Z.
or whatever it is tips telling you how to do this, how to stop becoming a people pleaser, but We’re not getting to the deep rooted issue.
And understanding yourself instead of just trying to fix the issue or whatever it is that you are trying to work towards is like it treating the cause rather than the symptoms. And I think right now w a lot of the content is treating the symptoms rather than the deep rooted cause and
when you can treat the cause, you stop it from happening in the future, right? Whereas if you just treat the symptoms, great, it’s gone, but that underlying issue is still there. For example, you might see a video online or something online, how to stop becoming a people pleaser. And they give you amazing tips And it might actually work for you and it’s like great. But then again
Sometimes we’re sitting here and you’re like, okay, how to stop being a people pleaser? But then have you actually sat there to ask yourself, Okay, but why am I people pleasing? Because sometimes it’s not just people pleasing on the surface level, sometimes it’s your fear of being perceived, your fear of being judged, that fear of conflict or disappointing people or abandonment.
See, and when you just take these steps to so quote unquote fix the people pleasing, have you actually dealt with your fear of rejection, your fear of conflict, your fear of abandonment? And sometimes yes, because sometimes those are the things that they covered, but sometimes no. And that may show up in other places.
But when I’m saying understand yourself, I’m not talking about trying to fix yourself. I’m just saying getting to that understanding of yourself and understanding your habits and your patterns, your thought trails, understanding, hey, I show up as a people pleaser, but that’s because I’m scared of conflict.
And now you know that about yourself. And so you know that that fear of conflict is the specific thing that you need to battle. And the other thing that I wanna say is as well though, is you don’t always need to know the root cause of everything.
Sometimes it’s like do we really need to dig deep into everything that happened in my childhood or everything that happened beneath the surface? Not everything needs to be dug into. Also, because it’s like when you go to I don’t know the doctors, sometimes you don’t need to know why this thing happened, you just need it to be cured, right? Like to fix a broken bone, the doctor doesn’t really need to know why you broke how you broke your bone, they just need to fix it.
And just recognizing the pattern and working towards making that change is enough. It can be I understand sometimes like wanting to always sit in the past and dwelling on the past can be annoying. However, I do say that it is valuable information.
And it helps you to build a relationship with yourself. Think about it. When you listen to someone speak and someone shares you their story and shares that vulnerability, naturally you just feel a lot closer to them.
You feel like I know you now, I understand you. There is that connection between you and the other person because you don’t just see the person, you don’t just see how they show up, but you see the story behind them, right? That closeness you feel to another person. When you understand yourself, when you understand your story, the things that led you to being the person you are now, the deep rooted
patterns in your behaviour when you understand that you develop a relationship with yourself, you develop a closeness with yourself and a compassion with yourself as well. Because it’s not just, hey, I’m a people pleaser. Why do I keep people pleasing? I don’t want to stop people pleasing. It’s my gosh, I actually understand now. I know that I’ve reached this point because of me being through A B and C or me feeling A, B and C and so
Now you treat yourself with a compassion and a closeness and a trust.
that you wouldn’t have had if you didn’t understand yourself. If you didn’t get to the deep rooted issue behind the things that you’re trying to work towards.
And that’s why it’s so important to listen to yourself. One of the best things you can do is be in tune with your emotions, your thoughts, your behaviors, patterns that you pick up, you know. And when things when you’re feeling happy, when you’re feeling sad, when you’re feeling frustrated, those kind of things and listen to it and your behaviors when you encounter those emotions. And your thought patterns as well.
when you interact with others, when how you speak to yourself, those kind of things are important because they’re lessons, they teach you about yourself. Those are the big indicators basically of understanding yourself, of understanding how you operate, right? Those are the things that you want to pay attention to.
And a lot of us we try to brush them to the side. We don’t sit down with ourselves. We distract ourselves and push our emotions away. But your emotions, like I said, are valuable information. And explore it. Explore it more. Instead of how do I stop feeling this feeling? Ask yourself, why am I feeling this feeling? What led to it?
You know, and it can be very difficult. It can be really hard, especially with certain emotions that we might feel shame around feeling. Things like I don’t know, anger, jealousy, embarrassment, certain feelings we don’t wanna feel and it depending on who you are, I don’t know what emotions that you might feel shame about, but I know
There’s a lot of emotions and feelings that we feel ashamed about and not just emotions, even thoughts. There’s certain thoughts that we have but we feel weird about those thoughts and behaviours that we do that we don’t want to admit that we don’t want to sit with because we are, you know, ashamed of. But at the end of the day, emotions, feelings are universal, right? We shouldn’t feel ashamed of them.
Everyone in the world has these emotions. People feel angry sometimes. People feel
upset sometimes people will feel that emotion of jealousy
but it’s just how you navigate those emotions, right? And there’s this one powerful thing that Thierry Henry said and he was saying how emotions are emotions, just don’t become it. So like anger is normal, just don’t become angry. Jealousy is normal, just don’t become jealousy. And I felt like that was so powerful.
separate your emotions from identity you can feel an emotion and ask yourself and you know kind of like explore that emotion but you don’t need to be that emotion you don’t need to stay angry forever you don’t need to be an angry person but if you’re feeling anger in that motion in that moment explore that sit with that the only way you can avoid
being that person is to acknowledge those emotions, to sit in those emotions. You cannot change what you aren’t willing to acknowledge, And this circles back to something called the shadow.
bringing in a little bit of psychology because as you know I love psychology. But one of my favourite psychologists, his name is Carl Jung, and he believed that we all have what’s called a shadow. Right? And it’s the hidden unconscious parts of ourselves that we’ve pushed away because somewhere along the way we decided that that wasn’t acceptable or they weren’t acceptable. And
That could have been because of our upbringing, society or past experiences, or simply because they just don’t fit with the image that we have of ourselves. And it’s not only about the bad parts. It can be things, yeah, like jealousy, anger, insecurity, or whatever. But it can also be parts of ourselves that we’ve learnt to suppress. So for example, confidence, assertiveness, ambition, or creativity, those are also parts
That we might suppress because, again, it doesn’t fit in with the image of ourselves. If you see yourself as quite a logical person, operating from a place of intuition doesn’t sit with yourself, so you’re not even gonna let yourself embody that person, embody that version of yourself.
If you’re shy, you’re quiet. That loud outgoing side is something that you suppress. Not because it is a bad part and not because that doesn’t exist in you, but because it doesn’t fit in the image that you have of yourself.
And here’s the thing, just because you’ve pushed something into your unconscious, it doesn’t mean that it disappears.
it still influences your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It’s just that you don’t realize that it is. For example, maybe you think you’re just a nice person, but underneath you’re actually terrified of rejection. So what you do is you people please. Or maybe someone’s success really irritates you. But underneath is highlighting an insecurity that you haven’t acknowledged yet.
So shadow work is simply just becoming aware of those hidden parts of yourself. Not to judge yourself, but to understand yourself. Cause once you can see them, then you have a choice to work on them. And that’s why Carl Jung said until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And I think that that quote
perfectly sums up what self-understanding is all about. until we become aware of what’s driving our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, they will continue to influence our life without us even realising it.
So we need to sit with our emotions. We need to become aware of our shadow, aware of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Become one.
And I wanna remind you and let you know that healing doesn’t need an audience.
When people are on the healing journey, sometimes a lot of people go online or share, you know. I noticed that I was feeling jealous about this and people feel like you need to share that. I want you to know you don’t need to share it. It’s a journey with yourself. You can have conversations that are between you and you. You don’t need to go to other people and say, Hey, I actually realized I was feeling embarrassed in this moment.
That is a brave thing to do. So to people who do do it, I give my kudos to you, hats off to you, because it is very brave to do, but it’s not something that you have to do. It is already hard enough to admit to yourself that you feel these things, that you think these things, that you behave in this way that you don’t. We wanna see ourselves as perfect. So to admit to yourself that hey, I do this is a hard
You really don’t need to go report it to BBC News, sit there and say, Hey, my gosh, I discovered yesterday that I’m jealous. Great, now I’m working towards not being a jealous person. No. It doesn’t work like that. Growth doesn’t become more valid just because you made it public. And so I understand that this is a private journey. If you want it to be, you can acknowledge yourself, you can make the changes, and it will show up.
Let it show up in your life. It’s a journey of you and your growth. You don’t need to share your discoveries. You don’t need to share everything. If you feel like it’s gonna help, great. If it’s something you want to do, great. But I want you to know that the journey is with the intention of growth and showing up as a better person and experiencing life in a better way for yourself.
And when I say understanding yourself changes the way you experience life.
I mean it changes the way you experience life. The thing is is a lot of us don’t realise that we are living life on the defensive.
we’re we are getting triggered all the time basically. Online, someone says something, it hits the nerve in you. Bam, I need to clap back, I need to say something, there’s a reason that this person is wrong, someone says something that hurts you, you need to argue back, you need to say something to defend yourself, to make yourself feel better. And what happens is is when you are constantly getting triggered when
Because we live in a world where people share so much information, so much opinions. Opinions that we don’t always need to hear, but anyway, share their opinions and their ways of life and certain things. We get triggered as humans. The it will ignite certain feelings in us. What happens when you are triggered? You fight back, you clap back, you defend yourself, you argue. I need to argue, I need to
Make myself feel better. That’s what your brain is trying to do, make yourself feel better. So you need to either inflict pain on this person or say why this person is wrong, defend yourself. When you are constantly doing that, over and over again, your mind is searching, your mind is scanning. You put yourself on a mood of right, who’s next? Who’s coming for me next? Who’s attacking me next? Every single day you’re in another battle because someone else has done something, someone has said something that’s triggered you.
Constant battle, constant battle, what does that do? You’re basically in war. If you’re always battling, always battling, your mind is at war, your body is at war. You are unsafe. You’re constantly scanning for danger and when it comes you’re ready to clap back all the time.
What does that mean?
You are constantly on the edge of your seat scanning for danger in that survival mode, which means
you don’t have the chance to experience life, to enjoy the beauty of it because you’re in war. You’re not safe. I’m looking for who is about to attack me. I don’t have time to enjoy this this stuff. I don’t have time to have a nice conversation and have an engaging conversation and learn about something different. Why would I? I don’t have time to actually understand why this person thinks this way. People are attacking me.
I need to stay safe. I need to keep myself safe.
And I understand it because some of us, everyone, we all have different upbringings, we all have backgrounds and stuff that have shaped us to live life on the defence. Right? You might have an experience where you’re underprivileged person or
Things have been attributed to you in a way where you’ve always had to get up and defend yourself. People have always been against you and you have been conditioned to think everything everyone is against you. Everything that someone else says means that they’re your enemy. Means that you are now
At war with them, you’re now in a battle with them. And this is why I’m saying understanding yourself is so important. Cause what if we didn’t need to always feel like that? What if we didn’t need to always be in war? What if no one was always actually against us and we chose to see it differently?
When I started understanding myself, and trust me, I still have a long way to go. I have so many patterns that yes, I’ve picked up, but working on them, a long way to go. But I’ve still come a long way too. And when I started understanding myself, I started realizing that.
There was experiences that I had with other people where I took so much more from the experience than the other people. But that was because of how my brain was operating in terms of the fact that I realized that.
I always chose to learn something, to be inspired by something. What can I take from this? And it wasn’t me actively actually trying to do that. It was so natural. It was just generally speaking, when I had an experience, I always felt like there was something that I took from it. But I think because that was something that I had from a while ago trained my brain to do, to always find inspiration, to find something to learn from.
Whereas other people would always point fingers. They will come out of the same experience having disliked it because point fingers. This person’s to blame. This is why this didn’t go well. This is why that didn’t go well. And don’t get it twisted, like sometimes people are at fault for other things. I there have been moments where I have had bad days, where I have been hurt, or where things didn’t necessarily go the way that
I wanted them to. However, when I entered an experience, I just learned so much from that experience. And my brain’s default conditioning now is what have I learnt from this? What inspires me? And when I say that I don’t sit there and ask myself what have I learnt from this, but
I take what I have learnt. So when I sit here and I talk to you guys about my counselling experience, my counselling course and the experience and the things that I’ve learned from it, I think I was able to take so much because of my conditioning and because of how my brain decided what can I learn, the things that I learned and those things, how can I then use it in my life, rather than taking the
Taking my finger to point it at this person, this person, trigger, trigger, trigger.
And believe me, a course like that is triggering, it brings up things in you that you might not like. And when people are stressed and overwhelmed and in that mode of survival, that’s what we do. We point. And we find someone else to blame. We find another reason. And that’s not me saying that someone else cannot be at fault. It’s true, but what can we do, right?
And that’s
why I feel like it was so powerful to change your default
understanding yourself and choosing to embark on that journey of understanding yourself, it allows you to take those triggers and explore rather than take those triggers and fight and sit on the edge of your seat and right, who’s next? Square up, who’s next? No.
And I understand, like I said, it can be hard because we life is life. Like it can be so stressful. Some people might be single mothers, some people might be single mothers with a partner. some people have partners and are struggling. Some people aren’t even mothers, but you know, There’s so many different issues that we are
faced with and I understand so I understand that conditioning and it’s not your fault that you went through the things that you went through. But one thing I can say is is that you can come out on the other side of it and it is your choice to make whether you want to sit here and let that hold you back and keep you on the defence or you can acknowledge that and say, okay, you know what now
I realise that I am on the defence and I don’t want to stay this way. So what can I do to then make that change? And choose to understand yourself and choose to use triggers as an opportunity for growth.
Because I could have had a completely different experience. I could have pointed the finger, could have said I hate it. but I chose to learn. And it it wasn’t it wasn’t a conscious thing this time. I know in the beginning it’s something that has to be conscious, but because I’ve been on this constant journey of learning about myself, I naturally
just started taking from it and learning from it. And that’s not to say I’m perfect. I’m not triggerless. I still get tri Believe me, I still get triggered. But
Not as much as before and I don’t think I’m constantly living life on the defense. I don’t think I’m constantly like, what, who’s next? And that is what I mean by when I say understanding yourself changes the way that you experience the world. Unfortunately, we can’t control how the world works.
We can’t control the odds all the odds that have been stacked against us. We can only control how we operate and how we move towards the things that happened to us. And that’s why I must reiterate, you know, a lot of the things that there’s so many powerful women who have been through so many things and it’s not your fault that you had to go through whatever it is that you went through. And
you are strong and you have been chosen for that battle, although I know there’s so many battles that like I I don’t want to be chosen. And I understand that
But unfortunately we can’t control it. It was just the circumstance. But how we then decide to move from it, that is your choice. And I prompt that you to make the choice, I think it’s a beautiful choice to sit here and decide, you know what? I’m going to move forwards and upwards from here.
not saying to bury anything or forget about things but to choose to what’s the word?
Not to surrender as in like as in like, okay, this is what happened to me. Now my life is ended. You can choose to take control over what you have control over. You can operate. And I know a lot of the time when things has happened to us and people speak about triggers. I mean, I’m sorry, people speak about trying to change and like like I said, like you can only
control what you have control of and so it’s your choice to then control. But you might sit here and say, But this, this, this and that happened to me and I understand that.
Us as humans we naturally do it anyway. We naturally adapt to things that change, but you do it when you think you don’t have a choice. So for example, if you go to the shop and buy milk. When I was a little girl, milk used to be one pound. I could go to the shop with a one pound coin and buy milk, yeah. Now milk is one pound sixty.
You have to adapt to that. You either pay the £1.60 from the c the corner shop, go to another shop because that’s what you can afford, or you don’t buy milk, or you buy a smaller carton of milk. Whatever it is, you still adapt. But you can’t sit here and say, Okay, well, it’s your fault now. You change the price of milk, da da da. Point finger, pointing the finger.
Sometimes we still point the finger but you still adapt. But that’s because you think you have no choice, right? You say I don’t have no choice but to adapt. I have no choice but to pay the one pound sixty extra. And so we have the choice in our lives when things happen to us to now adapt to the circumstance. It’s not always fortunate, I know.
But it’s a choice that we make.
And it’s a choice that I wanna make because I know that my so called setbacks and adversities and what people have told me should hold me back. I don’t want that to be my story. And I won’t let that be my story and I won’t let it end there. It can’t. And so I choose to take control over what I can control and put my trust in God.
So
Where do we even start? Understanding yourself. it’s everywhere. Understanding yourself As is like how do you even pinpoint it? Because it can be a scary thing.
we don’t sit with ourselves as humans. A lot of us. Me, I spend I sit with myself too much, I think. I think I’m on the other side of the pendulum. I need to s to distract myself more. But anyway, a lot of us we don’t. We find distractions. We always want to go out. We don’t want to be on our phone. We’re I’m sorry, we’re always on our phone. We we’re always stimulated. We don’t actually sit down with ourselves. And so I think
Sitting down with yourself, even if it’s just for five minutes.
There are so many different places to start.
Interactions, your interactions with people are one of the best ways to learn about yourself because so much comes up when you interact with others and
you discover things about yourself when you interact with others, when you go out with other people, your habits, your thoughts, when you see other people, when you are around them, how you behave, you know, do you speak a lot? Are you more quiet? Are you more observant and sitting down with those kind of things to understand yourself and asking yourself why?
And sitting with it.
So
Yeah, interactions with other people help you so much. But then also exploring those exploring your emotions, your feelings, your behaviours and asking yourself why and approaching things with a curiosity. I think that moment of sitting down with yourself is so important.
At the end of the week, sit down with yourself, reflect on your week and think what did you feel the most this week? Did you feel stressed the most this week? Did you feel happy the most this week? Did you feel whatever? How did you feel the most this week?
Why did you feel that? And how did you feel about feeling those things? Start small, it doesn’t need to be big, it really doesn’t. But it can also start with your journey, right? If you are someone who is shy and you want to become a more confident person, sit down and ask yourself. You know, in what scenarios am I shy?
what scenarios do I find myself that you’re not shy? Because usually shy people they’re not always shy, right? There’s certain people that they’re comfortable around and there’s certain scenarios where they’re more shy around. Understand the difference. Why is it that I’m shy here and I’m not shy there. So what I would say is basically to narrow it down is is
If you have a specific part of yourself that you want to work towards, like one thing, for example, that be people pleasing, confidence, being shy, if you have that, then I want you to sit down with that and ask yourself when you feel those emotions, when you see yourself acting shy, and contrast that with when you
Don’t because we have a contrast. So for example, if you feel like you’re unconfident, contrast that with the confident version of yourself. And understand there’s moments where I know you feel confident sometimes. And what is it that differs? If there isn’t that, if you have if there’s not something that you know that you wanna work towards yet, but you feel like I want to understand myself more
Then I suggest pick out one day within the week. If even if it’s just ten minutes, it could be ten minutes on your way to work, on your way to school, whatever it is. Sit down and ask yourself what emotion have I felt the most this week? What emotion have I felt the most this week and what led me to feel this emotion?
Even if it’s a good one, even if you think, okay, but it’s not that deep is I just felt fine. What led you to just feel fine? Why was it not just h why was it not happy? Why was it not sad? Why was it just fine?
give yourself ten minutes at least. If it’s longer, then it’s fine. But see what comes up and get curious. Not what’s wrong with me? Why did I feel stressed this week? See, this is my problem. No. What have I learned from this? Okay, I’m constantly stressed all the time. Cool. That’s interesting. How long has this happened? Why do I think I’m always stressed?
What can I do about it now? Keep it simple. It doesn’t need to be that long. That’s where I would start. But if you can again I I know I suggest things like the counselling course, but I just feel like you if you go in it is about counselling others, but you learn so much about yourself as a person and how you coexist with others. And so
I highly recommend finding something like that where you can just learn about yourself and your patterns. Because what happens in the courses, right, is every week you have to reflect. You have to write a reflection. And because you are forced every week to write a reflection, you end up uncovering so much about yourself that you don’t realise. Sometimes you know, but when you’re writing it, you’re like,
Makes so much sense. like ughh
And so yeah.
If you can go for it, but again I know it’s not for everybody but i even at least just a level two counselling certificate in counselling and studies, whatever it’s called, sorry, I’ll probably put it in the description for you guys, but yeah, it changed my life a lot, a lot, a lot.
But yeah guys, I guess what I’m trying to say all comes down to become your own best friend.
Understand yourself so you can build a strong relationship with yourself so you can support yourself, you can challenge yourself, you can know yourself. When someone out there tries to trigger you and tries to say something about you, you don’t need to clap back to them because you know yourself, and when I say you know yourself, it doesn’t mean that you have uncovered every single thing there is about yourself, but
you are so close with yourself that you can go back to yourself and be like, Hey, you know this person said this and it kinda triggered us but is it true? Like do you think it’s true? Like
is what this person said, how do you feel about it? You can actually sit down and have that conversation. Whereas when you don’t have a strong bond with yourself, what someone else has to say will trigger you because you can’t sit there and be vulnerable with yourself. It’s like when you have a strong relationship with your friends, when people say other things about your friend, it’s like, okay, so what? I know my friend. And if they told me something that I didn’t know, I can go back and I can have a conversation with my friend.
even if it might been upset me, I can say, Hey, what you did kind of upset me. Have that conversation, grow. Same thing with yourself. Someone might say something that trigger you, Okay. Cool.
Back yourself if you need to back yourself. But after you’re going back to yourself and sitting with yourself, if you need to give her compassion, give her compassion. If you need to have that difficult conversation, have that difficult conversation. But at the end of the day, you know you and you got you and you can be compassionate with you, but also there’s a time when you know you need to sit down and say, Hey girl, you do this, this is not cool, what can we do about it?
Because no one should know you better than you know yourself. And that’s not to say people won’t know things about you that you don’t know. We have blind spots. There’s things that people can see in us that we actually might not realise about ourselves. It’s true. However, that doesn’t mean that they know you as a whole better than you know you.
Yeah. Strive for growth, strive to understand yourself.
Really and truly like don’t make it about the world. Make it about yourself. Everything that happens to you isn’t about the world. And I don’t mean it in a selfish way. I just mean it in a growth focused oriented way. Every situation becomes another opportunity to know yourself a little better. It’s not about hey, it’s the world is such a crap place, da da da da da and it is
There’s so much BS and so much crazy stuff I’m not even gonna overlook. Yes. I understand that. But I’m just saying that as much as we can point fingers and hold people accountable, there’s also stuff about yourself that you need to hold yourself accountable to too. And you need to understand too. And we need to stop
Pointing fingers and trying to go to war with everyone and make it about yourself, understand yourself. That is how you’re going to experience the world a lot better. Because, like I said, you’re not fighting, you’re not on survival mode. You’re learning, you’re experiencing, you’re seeing the beauty in things, and you’re giving yourself time.
So yeah, thank you for listening. I hope that you feel inspired and
Are you going to if you haven’t already embark on that journey of understanding yourself? I I’m super grateful for you listening to me today.
And please remember, understanding yourself will change the way that you experience the world. Anyway, I’ll see you guys next week. Love you. Thank you so much for your support. Bye.
