MOMENT | How to break the habit of hating yourself with Mel Robbins

0:03Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's Motherkind moment. Thank you for being here. Thank you for pressing that little play button. I really appreciate you. This is your place on a Monday for calm connection and maybe even a shift in perspective before the crazy week ahead. This week's moment is with the one and only Mel Robbins from an episode back in December 2021. I love this clip. It's incredibly powerful. I hope you love it too. Here it is. But it wasn't until I discovered the high five habit in April of 2020 that I came face to face with what my actual problem was. And I think the problem that I had is the exact same problem every single human being struggles with.

0:51And it is the habit of hating yourself, of criticizing yourself, of focusing on everything that you're doing wrong instead of the thousand things you do right. It's being relentless in your perfectionism, relentless in your comparison, relentless in your self-doubt. And if you're kind of sitting there going, oh, I don't know. Yeah, it's relentless. You know how you have a friend who's texting you and you see those three little dots and you feel the surge of, oh, my God, what are they going to say? That's a form of self-rejection because you automatically think you're going to be in trouble. You know how you rewrite every email, you put emojis in there to soften it like you can't quite draw boundaries.

1:36You're worried about how people are what's going to happen. Your friends go out to lunch and they forget to invite you and you suddenly think the world is. this is all habits of self-criticism, self-rejection, constantly questioning what you're doing as a mom. And as busy as I was, as successful as I was, as fulfilled as I was with the work that I was doing, I looked in the mirror every morning and I saw a woman who had not done enough. And I think so many of you are struggling with perfectionism because you don't believe that you are worthy as you are. And I want to unpack something because one of the reasons why women in particular marry our self-worth and whether or not we're deserving of love with being perfect, having the perfect hair, the best makeup, the best birthday party, the best looking marriage on social media, whatever it is, the body, the nails, the whole thing.

2:44is because we believe that it's not until we achieve that thing that we are worthy of being loved or celebrated. That it's not me that deserves to be celebrated. It's the fact that my nails look good. And what happens when you marry achievement of anything with your own validation and worth as a human being is you end up feeling exactly how I did, which is nothing's ever going to be enough because the second you have the perfect nails, now you got to go get something else. The second you get the gorgeous balloon spray and the just right photo and you post it on Instagram, now you got to do something else because you've matched your worthiness as a human being with achieving.

3:33And I'll tell you why we all do that. It's because you get positive praise when you get good grades, when you look cute. When we were all little girls, Our parents are like, you look so adorable. You know, I love that dress on you. When you get good grades, everybody celebrates and pins it up. When you make the, you know, lacrosse team, everybody's excited. When you get into university, people are cheering. And so we naturally start to go, oh, if I'm doing all these things, then that means that people love me. So when you're now a new mom and you're home and you've got milk stains on your shirt and you haven't read a book in a month and you feel like you've lost a sense of yourself because you're not doing anything except for the most important job in the world, which is taking care of a human being, you start to feel lost as a human because what you actually feel you need is some sort of validation.

4:31And I'm here to tell you, your entire fucking life will change if you can learn how to look in the mirror and validate yourself, complete with the milk stains on your shirt exactly as you are. There is something else that's possible. And because you're a mom, I can explain this to you. It doesn't matter what your kids do. They could take their diaper off and take a poop on the living room floor. And they do. It's happened. Yes. And in that moment, you feel two things. You feel annoyed because you got to clean this up and you still love your child exactly how they are. And now that I have a 23 year old and a 21 year old and a 16 year old, I will tell you that doesn't change.

5:26They piss you off more, but you never stop loving them. You never see them and go, I don't love you because your hair sucks or you know what? You don't want to go to medical school. Well, I'm not going to love you anymore. You never, ever, ever stop loving them. And when I had this profound breakthrough, when I became a parent and I started doing this high five habit is I realized, oh my God, the profound unconditional love that I have for my kids, no matter what they do or what they're not doing. I love my son the exact same when he was getting D's and failing out of school because we didn't know he had dyslexia as when he's now getting the proper tutoring that he needs and he's getting straight A's.

6:15Hasn't changed how much I love him. Either one, either one. What I never understood is that you can have that relationship with yourself. Like imagine if you had the experience of standing before yourself in front of the mirror. And first of all, being able to look at yourself, which 50 % of men and women cannot do or will not do because they are disgusted or disappointed with where they are in life. And 91 % of we women based on research do not like how we look. And so when you look in the mirror right now, what you are focused on, if you're looking in the mirror is you're focused on all the shit you need to fix.

6:58The reason why we put on makeup is not additive. You're covering things up. You're making yourself look better. That is a form of self-rejection. Makeup and hairstyles are amazing if it's additive, if it's a form of expression. When you're covering up, fixing, it's a form of self-rejection. So what I'm here to tell you is that conditioning of seeking approval outside yourself and marrying achievement with worthiness has been conditioned in you. And that habit and pattern that is relentless of only seeing what you need to fix, criticizing yourself, hiding in the back of photos, not accepting who you are and where you are now, that has been conditioned in you and you can break these habits and you need to.