How To Live Your Best Life

1. How to Live Your Best Life Introduction: Hey, nice to meet you. I am what you all. And I created a course on how to live your best life. I'm really happy you're checking it out. It is on the four most important skills that you can focus on in order to live your best life. And those skills are self-compassion, curiosity, listening, and awareness. This course teaches you how to bring those skills into your everyday life so that you can be more present and aware and enjoy it to the fullest. 2. How To Live Your Best Life: It's time for you to live your best life. Today, I'm going to be teaching you the four most important skills that you need in order to coach yourself through living your best life. Without further ado, let's get started. There are a lot of skills that are important to practice when you're coaching herself on how to live your best life. Self-compassion, curiosity, listening, and awareness are the four we're going to focus on today. Because living your best life is an ongoing practice. It's important to teach yourself how to make these skills part of your daily routine. Let's start with self-compassion. Self-compassion is the ability to show empathy, love, and support towards yourself. Before you jump into working on building self-compassion, it's helpful to understand why self-compassion is important. Think of a time when you are hard on yourself. What was the results of treating yourself this way? Think again of that time when you were hard on yourself and consider what would've happened if you gave yourself compassion instead, saying something to yourself like, this is really difficult for me right now, but I'm doing the best I can. It's understandable if this is tough for you to imagine, especially if you've been critical of yourself your whole life. If you're struggling, try taking the approach of talking to yourself as you would a friend. Imagine your friend was in the situation you were where you were hard on yourself. What would you say to support your friend? Hopefully that exercise allowed you to experience the positive feelings that come from being self-compassionate. Every time that you can coach yourself using self-compassion, you're supporting yourself no matter what. You're showing yourself, that you are your own best friend, which leads to trusting yourself and making decisions that have your best interest at heart. The second skill that you want to practice to live your best life is curiosity. Curiosity is so important because it allows you to look at things from a non-judgmental perspective. When you can remove judgment from your thoughts, you're giving yourself the opportunity to meet yourself where you're at, which allows you to fully process how you're feeling. And that leads to progressive movement. To make this scale part of your daily routine, getting the habit of using the phrase, I wonder. This is a great phrase to use to expand hope, and create encouraging thoughts to help you move forward. So far we've talked about the skills, self-compassion and curiosity. It's one thing to use encouraging words, and it's another thing to listen to those words you're telling yourself. Listening to yourself plays a huge role in living your best life. Because if you're not listening, you're unaware of what's going on. And if you're unaware of what's going on inside your mind, then you won't be able to shift your thoughts towards something better. Listening, like all of the skills I mentioned, is something that comes from practice. The best way to listen to yourself is to give yourself space and time to be alone with your thoughts. Journaling, meditation or a walk in nature are all ways that you can practice this skill. Listening takes a lot of patients encourage because oftentimes the message that's trying to present itself is, feels like a hard reality to face. This is why self-compassion and curiosity are important to practice alongside listening. So that when you do start to feel discomfort from what's arising, you can use those other skills to help you be present with what's happening, instead of continuing to ignore what your inner self is trying to tell you. The last skill to practice to live your best life is awareness. Awareness essentially means to have knowledge. The reason the skill is so important is because you can't make choices that I have your best interests at heart. If you're not aware of what you want, who you are, and what needs to happen for you to create more joy in your life. Your awareness grows when you take a non-judgmental approach and pause before you respond. Combining pausing with curiosity leads to the answers that you have within you. We all have the answers within us. It's the act of hearing the answers that makes the difference. Living your best life takes work. But once you have these skills in place, it becomes more natural to give yourself support and difficult moments and praise in the best moments. When you can do that, your best life doesn't feel so far away. Thank you. 3. Self Compassion: In the previous presentation, I talked about the four most important skills to living your best life. Today we're going to focus on the first skill, self-compassion. Self-compassion is the ability to show empathy, love, and support towards yourself. None of these skills are skills that can happen overnight. Rather, they take an ongoing effort from you. Recognizing the benefits can be a great motivator for you to make these skills part of your regular mindset. To create change, you need to have a clear idea of where you're headed and where you currently stand. Before we go any further, take a minute to listen to this first question and pause the video to answer. How much compassion do you give yourself on a regular basis? Remember the goal of this isn't to call it yourself down because you're not doing enough. It's to gauge where you're at so that you can start shifting your narrative towards a better life. Now that you have an answer it to where you currently stand, Let's figure out where you're headed. How would you like to treat yourself moving forward? It's likely that a lot of the reason why you treat yourself the way you do is because you don't believe you're worthy enough of treating yourself any better. Our beliefs are created from the experiences we have growing up. And so let's give self-compassionate try right now by recognizing that you have little control over what you were taught as a child. Those experiences that taught you that you aren't worthy enough of being kind to yourself. We're not experiences that you had control over who you are. Only wants what's best for you. And that person that you are led you here to recognize that the way that you get better at something is practice. Because self-compassion is a skill that many of us weren't naturally taught to have. It's important to create reminders to help support this new mentality that you're working towards. Reminders can be quotes you put around your house or on the background of your phone. Seeing the kindness and others, or journaling about accomplishments that you're proud of. Whatever you decide to use to remind yourself to practice self-compassion. This is an important part of shifting your mentality. Focus on how it feels when you treat yourself with kindness. One of the issues people have with using compassion is the idea that it will become an excuse to settle. I like to use the analogy of a friend in this case. You can be kind and compassionate to a friend and not let them walk all over you. This is where setting boundaries comes into play. Boundaries are a way to create safety within yourself by setting guidelines of what you will and won't allow. You can create boundaries in a supportive, compassionate way. Here are some ways that you can do that. Remind yourself that you matter. How worthy do you currently feel? Get to know yourself. What are your likes? What are your dislikes? What brings you joy? What do you value? Get clear on what makes you feel safe? When you feel safe, you feel free to state your needs. Lastly, ask for help. If you're struggling to set boundaries, don't be afraid to reach out to somebody for help. Developing a healthy relationship with yourself starts by creating boundaries and being kind. Here you'll see book recommendations and free downloadable backgrounds for your phone to help you on your journey. You can find the links to the phone backgrounds in the discussions portion of this course. 4. Curiosity: You can live your best life by developing a relationship with yourself where you feel supported no matter what you're going through. Taking a curious approach is important because it allows you to remove judgment from yourself or a situation so that you can enjoy the experience and enjoy who you are. Judgment is like putting your own imagination in a prison cell. The moment you start to judge yourself, you shut yourself off from the potential of what could be. If you allow yourself to be curious in those moments. Instead, it eliminates some of the fear and opens the doors to new insight. Developing a curious mindset takes awareness. You need to pay attention to what your current response looks like. Here are some questions you can ask yourself in the moment to help you bring in more curiosity. Is the way I'm thinking about this right now, supporting what I truly want. What would happen if I took a non-judgmental approach right now? I wonder what would happen if dot, dot, dot. To bring more awareness to where you currently stand. Take a minute to answer this question. On a scale of 0 to 1010, being incredibly curious, where do you land on the scale on a regular basis when it comes to the way you think about things. Did you land where you want it to land? Being curious means having an open mind. It means questioning your beliefs to allow more room for different perspectives. When you're curious about things, the curiosity creates more knowledge around different possibilities, which then allows you to feel more confident in what you choose to believe in the end. Being curious does not mean that your beliefs or initial thought process is wrong. Let's say you have one puzzle piece that you really love. You have no idea what the other puzzle pieces look like. But because you were given this puzzle piece initially, you feel like it's the best one for you. Now let's say you allow yourself to be curious and see what the other puzzle pieces are about, you end up finding a different puzzle piece that you enjoy more. And in fact, multiple pieces bring you joy. That is the point of allowing yourself to be curious. Living with one puzzle piece your whole life doesn't sound nearly as fun as exploring the others. Let yourself be free from the judgment or idea that exploring other possibilities is wrong. It's human nature to wonder. Let's talk about judgment. Judgment is forming an opinion about a situation or experience. The way that you come up with the opinion can come from facts that you've acquired, previous experiences you've had that relate or how it makes you feel. Taking a judgmental approach means coming to a conclusion. How do you feel with the conclusions that you've come to so far in your life. If you're not enjoying those conclusions, take a step back and give yourself permission to be curious about the situation moving forward so that you can have breakthroughs. Curiosity can be a great way to bring more fun into your life. Just simply listening to this video shows how curious you are. You have great potential to create any life that you want to create. This scale has the power to lead you to places you've never been before. 5. Listening: Listening is a skill that allows you to create change. By using what you hear, you can decide how you want to proceed. It's important to listen not only to others, but most importantly yourself. You cannot get clear on what you want in life until you listen to your own needs and wants. Inquiring about what it is that you desire is one of the best ways to get to know yourself. If you don't know what you desire, get clear on what you value most. At the source of your values is presence. At the source of presence is joy. To listen means to allow something or someone to share while being fully present. When you are present with yourself and give yourself opportunities to hear what's going on inside their relationship with yourself strengthens. As you may have recognized by now, all the skills in this course are important for developing a better relationship with yourself and with others. But really we can't have valuable relationships with others if we don't value ourselves, valuing your own voice and what it has to say means allowing yourself to be with whatever it is that it's showing up for you. In other words, meet yourself where you're at. You can become a better listener by giving yourself time alone to be with your thoughts. Having an inner dialogue going can also be helpful. For example, if you're feeling anxious, you can say out loud or in your mind, I'm feeling anxious right now. Imagine that there is another smaller version of you inside of you that is listening and let them share their thoughts back to you. Be interested in what you have to say to yourself. Your voice and needs matter just as much as everyone else's. And if you're struggling to believe that, get that inner dialogue started to figure out how you can move forward. 6. Awareness: Awareness is a skill that is acquired by an individual through the practice of being present. Presence creates a space for awareness to evolve. Awareness makes it easier to accept what you can and cannot change because you can't be aware and be judging something at the same time. One-year aware you're allowing. When you're judging year resisting. The more awareness you create, the easier it becomes to accept life as it is. The faster you move, the less you're going to notice. It's like a moving vehicle. You'll never see all the tiny details. If it's going 50 miles per hour. The more you slow down, the more room you give for your awareness to grow. I can't show you how to be aware. Rather, when you practice bringing more awareness interior life, there will be a moment in your mind where you'll start to notice something different. You'll notice the judgment has been dropped and you're more curious about what it's like. You're seeing something through a looking glass or from an outside perspective, you become the observer. To become the observer, you need to create moments that allow you to observe without judgment. Here are some practices that can open the door to bring in more awareness. Meditation, deep breathing, movement that connects the mind and body, such as touchy and yoga, or spending time in nature. Awareness allows you to create a change in a way that it supports your highest good. Because you're taking a broad approach, it becomes easier to enjoy the moment while releasing the fear that you need to control the way your life unfolds. Presence and awareness exists within one another. And the awareness which can feel like empty space, is everything that we are. 7. How to Live Your Best Life Conclusion: That wraps it up. Thank you so much for following along and listening to my course on how to live your best life. I hope that you learned a lot. And if you have any questions at all, please reach out or you can give me a follow at SWOT underscore FEM, form more inspirational videos.