Your primary relationship in life is not with your spouse, your children, or with your parents or closest friend.
Your most intimate relationship is with your own self. This is the filter through which you’ll experience your life, and how others experience you.
Reflect on what messages you send yourself through your thoughts and feelings. Do you validate yourself? Do you like yourself? Do you invest in yourself?
Here’s an example of what I mean.
I was working with a client; a physician working in a hospital who is sometimes on call.
This is not a young woman right out of medical school. She’s approaching middle age, has children, and is married.
In terms of sleep hygiene, being on call even once a week is ruinous. Sleep deprivation has grave consequences for physical and mental health.
I asked if she had to be on call.
She hesitated a bit and said, “Well, probably not.”
“Then why are you on call? Would there be negative repercussions if you were not?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “No.”
“Then why are you causing harm to your health, your well-being, and your family by suffering terrible sleep deprivation at least once a week?”
We talked about this for months before she finally got to a place where she felt comfortable addressing the issue with her supervisor.
She had the meeting, and she is no longer on call.
Here’s the Shocker
What followed was shocking to me, even after conducting over 30,000 hours of therapy.
I thought this change in her schedule was cause for celebration. I asked her how she felt about herself, and if she gave herself a pat on the back.
She looked at me like I was speaking another language. “Give myself a pat on the back; feel good? No, I’m too busy to do that. I don’t have the time.”
I proposed that of course she has the time. It only takes a moment’s reflection.
Her indifference to her own self was startling.
Moving from one task to the next without acknowledging your own self is living like a cog in a machine with no inner relationship.
Depriving yourself of opportunities for happiness, going blindly through our day-to-day life like a hamster on a wheel, can lead to depression. At the least, it assures a life without meaning and purpose.
Can You Feel Proud of Yourself?
In the interest of demonstrating the importance of a healthy inner relationship I shared the following personal story with this client:
I had never really devoted myself to being in physical shape, rarely working out. I’ve never had any issues with weight, so the motivation was not there for me.
But as the years go by, I’ve come to clearly understand if I want to be healthy, live an optimal life, thwart disease, and slow down aging, I need to be fit. I already take great care of my nutrition, but I needed exercise.
So, I got into the habit of power walking. It looks silly. I’m walking, but fast as I can.
To help track everything related to my fitness, I recently purchased an Oura ring. I have a one-mile path I take, once a day, and I time it.
I had been doing 15 or 16 minutes to power walk the mile, but I got competitive with myself. I wanted to get my heart rate up. I wanted to get into better shape. So, I kept knocking 10, 15, 20 seconds off my time.
Then, intermittently through the power walk, I begin to jog. Ultimately, the jog turned into a bit of a sprint. So, over that mile, three or four times, I would sprint for maybe a hundred yards. I was having a hard time, however, breaking my personal barrier of a 14-minute mile.
Finally, one weekend, I did it. 13 minutes and 55 seconds. I was proud as a peacock. I came home, I told my wife, I texted my children and my brother.
I was proud of myself.
That’s the key. I felt good about me.
Would I say I was too busy to feel good about me? That would be ridiculous. In fact, it just took a moment to share it with those I loved and cared about, starting with congratulating myself.
I asked my client to think about her life’s purpose.
Is it simply her productivity?
How about her primary relationship, her inner relationship?
A relationship with yourself is a mirror to your relationship with everyone else.
I was curious about this absence of allowing herself to feel good about herself. We explored her childhood. I learned that affirmations from her parents were usually to do with moving successfully from one achievement to the next.
But she never felt special as a person.
She never learned how to nurture herself, whether it’s her health, her nutrition, her parenting, or her work as a physician. She’d been going through life robotically, and her only takeaway ultimately was, “I don’t matter. I just have work to do. There are things to get done. I’m off to my next task.”
Inner Success
You can be successful and productive and value yourself at the same time. That’s what I call inner success.
Happiness requires inner success. You can have all of the external success and achievement and rewards in life, but it’s going to leave you incomplete and shallow if you don’t allow yourself inner success and feel good about yourself.
Look at yourself. Think about yourself. Smile to yourself. “I did well.”
My client stepped out of the straight jacket of conformity and let her supervisor know she just couldn’t be on call anymore. Doing so, she could open up to treating herself well.
The next step was an opening up to rewarding herself.
When you do that, you also build a reserve of happiness, gratitude, and good feelings you can share with others… and they’ll experience you entirely differently.
Life is about much more than work, business, challenges, and the tasks. The source to a life well-lived is a joyful, healthy, inner relationship with yourself, where the first person to feel good about you is not someone else… it’s you.
Give it some thought. Are you kind to yourself? Do you have thoughts and feelings in which you embrace yourself and take a step toward your own well-being?
If you don’t, ask yourself what’s in the way, and get started.
If you do… great! Keep it going and give yourself more.
It’s joyful.
Feature image courtesy of LollaDesign.
