Embracing Solitude and Building Meaningful Connections | Kati Morton EP 301

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:10Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection, I've got an invitation for you. Join me at this year's Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to unleash your true greatness. This is the one time a year that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful, transformative weekend. People come from all over the world and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Jospree Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Sincero, and many more. You'll also be able to dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials.

0:53socials. So if you're ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com slash summit 2023. Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I'll see you there.

1:16my entire childhood i had a sense of deep loneliness deep insecurity loneliness worry fear that no one was ever going to like me and no one was ever going to love me and i'm assuming that it was a number of the instances i experienced in my life the number of stories, the number of things I witnessed and experienced that built the story in my mind that no one's going to like me or love me. When I started to have friends, when I was a teenager in high school, I started to still feel a sense of loneliness with people around me and people liking me. I still felt a deep sense of loneliness and the need to get people to like me.

2:00And I took it upon myself to overcome that challenge by spending a lot of deep alone time and falling in love with myself and falling in love with like who I am and writing letters to myself, taking myself out on dinner dates, but alone movies all the time to the point where I said, you know what? I really enjoy my own company. I don't need to feel good around other people anymore. And it's a bonus. I love people still, but it's like, I love being alone. So, but it took me having kind of the vision to break this mold. It took me like creating challenges for myself, like experiencing deep pain of, you know, figuring out how to love myself.

2:43What are your thoughts on loneliness? Why do people feel lonely in general? And what do you think is kind of the root of loneliness? Yeah, I love that. First of all, that's like all the homework I give my patients all the time. Like dating yourself. Really? Yeah. Like writing letters. I mean, if any of my viewers are listening to this, they know how often I talk about writing letters to yourself. But I think loneliness happens for a lot of reasons. Loneliness occurs, I think, for some people. It's because we never let people truly know us. Either because it doesn't feel safe or we don't truly know ourselves.

3:20Oh, how do we get to know ourselves? You have to be curious. being open to being curious about that. Like, why am I uncomfortable? What is so wrong with me? So often we just accept something's wrong with me. And then we take that as a fact. That's what I thought. My whole life, I was like, something's wrong with me. No one, you know. Yeah. No one's going to understand it. I'm wrong. I'm bad. You know. Oh, totally. I'm stupid. All this stuff. We have those thoughts. They're probably like fear-based, of like worry-based, of am I looking good? Or is this, you know, what do they think about me, right?

3:49Yeah. And that's because our brain is wired to seek out threat, right? It keeps us safe, make sure we're okay and good things aren't threatening. So of course we're going to focus on like, Hey, that person was whispering when I walked in the room. I think they're talking about me. I don't think they like me. Say someone's feeling really lonely right now. Like what can they do? You know, three to four things they could do for the next 30 to 90 days to help them discover themselves, to help them become a little less lonely and fall in love with themselves a little more. Yeah. There's a couple of things.

4:19Um, first kind of going back to what we were talking about originally is noticing your thoughts. Because I do believe if we are able to change our thoughts, we change our life. It's miraculous. And it's very simple, but it's also very difficult. So if they notice those thoughts and track down your top five, okay? Because remember we're saying most of them are repeat thoughts. So those could be things like, I'm not good enough. They're not going to like me. I'm a loser. I don't know. Trust me. We've all had those thoughts. No judgments. Write down your top five. And then I want you to work using bridge statements, I call them, into more positive because I mean, I'm sorry, but if I think I'm stupid, I can't be like, I'm smart.

4:56I'm smart. I'm not going to believe it. Even in my head, I'm just like, that's a lie. So bridge statements, what does that look like? It lives in possibility land. It's like, it's possible. Like maybe I'm not as dumb as I think I am. It's possible that I could have other gifts and other ways that I'm intelligent. I'm open to that idea. So we're not saying I am or I'm not. We're just like, it's possible I'm not 100 % correct on this. And then we just kind of live in that land and start moving a little bit more. Then the next step would kind of be something like, you know, I do think I have some street smarts.

5:33So it's possible that I'm intelligent in that realm. Maybe. I'm going to look into that. you're kind of building your evidence along with these bridge statements into the space of you know i'm super smart gotcha okay so that's the second step what's after that what's the next phase then once we've done that that kind of work i think um the letters to yourself super helpful i love that you did that as short and simple as a way i can explain it um you know we always hear that old adage like you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but you can. Every day our brain is learning. In our hippocampus where memories are formed, it creates these new neurons every day and those neurons get together with each other to create memories and learnings, right?

6:20So each and every day, whether we recognize it or not, we're learning new things. And instead of taking that opportunity to teach ourselves nasty things, like I'm horrible, I'm stupid, take that opportunity to teach ourselves things that are helpful, supportive, you know, maybe I can get to know myself because I've never taken the opportunity to actually learn about what makes me tick. I've just numbed out and zoomed through life. And I would encourage people to try to do this. If you can every day, awesome, but at least every other day, just so you're checking in with yourself to see how you're moving along and how you're doing.

6:51And I think that will give you the thing that's cool about journaling is we can go back then and be like, Oh my God, me six months ago would never have thought that I could do this. Or, you know, we lose sight of our own growth and development because we're with ourselves all the time. Is there a next step in this process of loneliness and getting to know yourself if you're doing the daily letters for tomorrow? What would you say are the next kind of steps? Yeah, I think the next thing, and this is going to be the hardest for people, and they're probably like, but I want you to tiptoe into social land in an authentic way.

7:23so if we have friends that we already talk with and we think hey they don't know me i want you to be more authentic i challenge you to pick one person that i'll give you like two weeks to do this one person that you're going to be honest with about how you're doing or what's going on and that doesn't not just say i'm fine everything's good exactly i'll just repeat the same thing you always say like yeah everything's great when it's not instead we need to say something to the effect of, yeah, it's been kind of hard. You know, I've been going through a tough time, you know, and we're just tiptoeing.

7:57We're not sharing a bunch. I don't want you to like what I call like verbal diarrhea. So we just want to start with little things like, hey, last week was, was, was kind of bad, but you know, I'm trying again this week. How have you been? You know, we share a little bit, we reflect. So don't spend an hour just, you know, going down the deep end, but open up some. Yeah. Letting them know that it's not all peachy keen all the time. What does that do for you and other people when you open up a little bit? First of all, it allows you to be your authentic self so that people can slowly get to know you.

8:27Not to mention at the same time, you get to know yourself. And then that little bit of vulnerability leaves space for real relationships. And I think that that's why a lot of us are feeling lonely is because we don't really either know ourselves or allow other people to know us.

8:53Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

9:44Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.