Embracing Solitude and Building Meaningful Connections | Kati Morton

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

0:14my 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.

0:58And 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.

1:41What 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.

2:18Oh, 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 that's what i thought my whole life i was like something's wrong with me no one you know yeah no one's gonna understand it i'm wrong i'm bad you know oh totally all this stuff we have those thoughts but they're probably like fear base of like worry base of am i looking good or this is you know what do they think about me right yeah 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.

2:55So 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. Um, first kind of going back to what we're talking originally is noticing your thoughts. Because I do believe if we are able to change our thoughts, we change our life.

3:26It'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. I'm smart. I'm not going to believe it. Even in my head.

3:57I'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 that the next step would kind of be something like you know I do think I have some street smart so 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.

4:46So 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? So each and every day, whether we recognize it or not, we're learning new things.

5:22And 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 how you're doing and 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?

6:10What 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. So 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 mean - Not just say, I'm fine. Everything's good. Exactly. Don't just repeat the same thing you always say.

6:46Like, 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. We'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, yeah, 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.

7:17What 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. Not 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.

7:48I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier. You want to make it flow. You want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and thank you for listening to this episode of the Daily Motivation show.

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