Ep #183: How to Love Yourself Like a Boss

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who has never felt athletic, but you still dream about becoming a runner, you are in the right place. I’m Jill Angie, a certified running and life coach and I teach women how to start running, feel confident, and change their lives, and now I want to help you.

Hey Rebels. So it is February, which means it is Valentine’s month. It’s romance month. And I want each and every one of you to start a torrid romance with yourself because you know what, learning how to love yourself unconditionally, to absolutely fall head over heels in love with you is the absolute best gift you can give yourself.

It’s so much better than chocolates or roses or a massage. And now, this is going to be a very personal episode, much more personal than usual because I’m going to share a lot about my own self-love journey. And I know that figuring out this self-love thing is something a lot of other people have a hard time with.

And if you can relate to this, let me know. Write to the podcast and let me know. I want to know if you struggle sometimes to take the very best care of yourself, or to always show love for yourself. Or maybe you’re like, I don’t even know what that means. What the hell is self-love? Or you just think it’s dumb, like oh my god, another airy-fairy idea, why do I need to love myself? I’ve kept myself alive for several decades, so clearly, I understand self-care.

Or maybe you would love to learn how to love yourself, but you don’t have a fucking clue how to even start. So if any of that sounds like you, my friend, this is your episode. It is the first in a series I’m going to do on self-love. The first one, definitely not the last. I’m going to be bringing on some fun experts in the coming months to talk about different aspects in more detail.

But today, I really just want to talk about my own journey and help you see how you can apply some of my lessons or things that have worked for me to your own life. Because guess what? I have not been loving on myself the way I want to. And I didn’t even realize it until something specific happened, which I’m going to share with you later in the show.

So let’s take a wander back in history. I’ve been working on loving myself unconditionally for, I don’t know, probably decades. Ever since I knew it was a thing, I guess. When I was in my 20s and my 30s, I didn’t really have the understanding that my thoughts were separate from me, that I was not my thoughts.

I thought it was just a fact that I was fat and unlovable and lazy and if I could just fix those things about myself, then I could just be happy, right? I don’t even think I could have told you how I felt about myself because I literally didn’t have the language for that. I didn’t understand that those things were opinions. I didn’t know I could think differently.

And so I was constantly trying to lose weight, find a boyfriend, be more productive, whatever. Absolutely none of it worked. I’d try and I’d try and I’d try and I’d fail and I’d fail and I’d fail. And every time I failed, I made it mean I was even more fat and unlovable and lazy. Delightful. I’m sure I was wonderful to be around back I those years.

But I just didn’t realize that those were thoughts. I thought they were facts. I thought fat, unlovable, lazy, these are just universal qualities I guess, or objective qualities that I could put on myself. I had no idea I could think differently without changing my body. I thought, okay, I have to change my body so that I can be lovable.

Instead of thinking differently, I just despised myself. I said the meanest shit in my head, my friends. I said stuff like, “What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just be thinner or more attractive or have a better personality?” I thought everything was wrong with me. I thought I was a walking disaster.

And I mean, here’s the funny thing; on the surface, I looked like a great catch. I was smart, successful, well educated, owned my own home, my friends would say to me like, “I don’t understand why you’re not married yet.” And I should clarify something. I thought that getting married would prove that I was lovable, that I was worthy. I thought I needed the validation of another human agreeing to be my life partner to let the world know that I was okay, that I was lovable.

And hand to heart, I had no idea I could just love myself without validation from anyone else. And I think this is actually a really common problem, especially for women. We are taught we need to partner up and having someone who loves you is validation that you’re a worthy human. It’s not like we’re formally taught that.

I mean, yes, probably people have used those words here and there, but really, that type of messaging is just everywhere, and we absorb it. When you’re a teen and your relatives come over for some kind of dinner, and they’re like, “So, are you dating yet?” We’ve all been there.

Then when you’re in your 20s, everybody’s like, “Is there someone special? Are you going to get married?” And my favorite, “You know you’ve only got so many good years on that uterus. You better get busy if you want to have babies.” Or my mom, my wonderful mom, bless her heart, always doing the best she could.

She had the same faulty thought errors in her thought patterns in her mind, but she taught me, and I believed this until I was at least in my early 40s, you better lose weight or you won’t find a husband. That was number one. And number two, you need to be more poised and graceful or the boys won’t like you.

Proved her wrong on both of those accounts eventually, but for a long time I tried to be somebody I wasn’t so that I could find somebody else to love me because I didn’t know how to love myself. So yeah, it’s no wonder we don’t even realize we have the option to love ourselves when it seems like everybody else believes that love needs to come from someone else.

I mean, I was born in the 60s, kind of went through middle school in the 70s, graduated from high school in the 80s. Self-love was not a thing that we talked about, at least not in suburban New York State. Now, I’m also not saying that seeking a partner is a terrible idea, obviously. I’m married. I’ve been married twice. I love being partnered up.

And I think there are lots of reasons to partner up with somebody, but none of them have anything to do with validating your worth. And you can love yourself fiercely and still be delighted when someone else loves you. So that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

We are here to talk about what self-love is and how you can get it, how you can learn to do it. So I think that when most people think about self-love, they imagine you buy yourself flowers, or you take bubble baths, or you learn to stop criticizing yourself and saying shitty things to yourself in the mirror.

And for sure, those are actions that one takes when one feels love for themselves. But my friends, you all know your actions do not create your feelings. Can’t take a bubble bath to create love, right? The bubble bath comes from love, or maybe it comes from sore muscles, right? But your actions don’t create your feelings. Your thoughts do.

So you can buy yourself all the flowers in the world, but if you don’t change your thinking, you’re not going to feel love for yourself. Self-love means having the highest regard for your own wellbeing and happiness. Self-love means believing you are valuable and worthy and important, simply because you exist, because you are you, regardless of your appearance, your personality traits, your accomplishments, whether or not you’re partnered up with somebody.

It means you don’t love yourself on the condition that you lose weight or run faster or make more money or get a nose job or whatever it is. You don’t say I’m going to love myself more if I do those things. Self-love means you love yourself right now as is.

And lest you think – I think that’s the first time I’ve used the word lest on this podcast, so yay for that. Lest you think that loving yourself as if without changing anything somehow means you won’t be motivated to change, that you’re just going to end up an amorphous blob on the couch, I promise you the opposite is true.

First of all, you can’t hate yourself into the body that you want and expect to keep that body, right? It’s really hard. But when we love ourselves fiercely, we are continually looking to evolve and live our best lives, whatever that looks like for you.

But also, sometimes when we love ourselves deeply, the things we thought were important for our happiness, like losing 20 pounds or getting married become a lot less important. So you know what, yeah, you might lose the motivation to change your body once you love yourself, and I promise you loving yourself is so much more rewarding than losing 20 pounds.

You might choose not to do those things when you become your biggest fan because you might say, oh, I was wrong. I don’t need to change my appearance to love myself. Now that I love myself, I want to put my energy into other things. But you might say, you know what, I love myself so deeply and I still want to change my body and I’m going to change it from love.

The point here is self-love means you decide with your long-term wellbeing at heart. Not a panicky feeling that you got to change something just so you can feel better about yourself. Because you might change, you might not, and when you love yourself, you know which one is the right choice for you.

So here’s the personal part of my story. I guess part two of the personal part of my story. So recently, I decided, you know what, I want to start dressing differently. I mean, especially thanks to COVID, which as an introvert, I’m not all that mad about it. But I have found that over the past year, I got a lot of yoga pants and my cute little skirts and all that stuff is just sitting in the closet.

I don’t wear skirts and put on tights and high heels to hang around my apartment and we’re not going anywhere, so they’re not getting a lot of wear. And honestly, I’m just not real happy with the way I’ve been dressing. I just feel schlumpy. I feel like I’m always in loose yoga pants and sometimes pajamas. And to be honest, there have been more than once I have worn a nicer top with pajama bottoms to show up for a Zoom call.

I just kind of feel like, no, I want to start dressing myself differently. I want to have those cute outfits that I used to love. So to tell this story properly, I need to back up about five years. So in 2016, I lost a bunch of weight. I lost about 70 pounds. I worked really hard on it. I worked really hard on changing my thoughts about my body as I was losing and I got down to about 194 pounds.

And damn, I loved what I saw in the mirror. I was still plus size and I was like, this is hot, this is sexy. And thanks to the thought work I was doing, I found myself just delighted by my curves. Seriously, I could not take enough pictures of myself. I’m like, oh my god, will you look at this body?

And I was a size 16. I was not traditionally thin but I was just like, damn girl. I had so much fun buying clothes to accentuate my curves, especially my cleavage, and I really thought like, I’ve found myself. I’d be happy at this weight forever.

I had confidence oozing from every pore. And around this time, I got divorced, I started dating, I went on dozens of dates. My confidence grew. My friends, I was like, oh my god, 49-year-old fat girl has so many dates. I can’t even tell you, it was just ridiculously fun.

And then I met Andy and well, he just – he swept me right off my feet, and of course now we are married and I’m just like, kind of blown away at the next level of relationship and the amount of love I feel for this human, the amount of love I feel from him. It’s amazing.

But here is what happened between when we met and I got swept off my feet, which by the way, it was a really wonderful experience. But here’s what happened between when we met and right now. So sweeping of the feet happens and we’re dating and I’m like, kind of ever so slowly regaining some of the weight.

And I’m thinking, “Well, you know, we’re going out a lot,” we were going out for dinners a lot and stuff and I’m like, it’s okay, it’ll settle down and I’ll lose the weight. We’ve all been there. Over the past three years, I did not lose the weight. I put it all back on and then some, and I started to feel my body confidence slipping away.

I stopped feeling that confidence of like, damn girl, you’re banging. I would look in the mirror and sometimes I would say some pretty unkind things about myself. And every time I’d catch myself and I’d be like, “No, that’s not how we talk to ourselves in this house Jill.”

And about half the time, when I see myself naked, which is a lot, I see myself naked all the time, I’m like, “Yeah girl, look at that ass.” I’m definitely not critical. I don’t say, “Oh my god, look how disgusting you are. You’re so fat, you’re so gross.” That is not in my vocabulary. I literally expunged those phrases when I lost the weight the first time.

But I was looking at myself and I would say I really wish I was smaller because I was still basing my body confidence on my body size. I had still kind of linked those two together. So I lost the weight and I felt all this confidence. I was like, oh my god, you look amazing. And I don’t think I had really fully done the work to believe I looked amazing just because I’m me and I thought you look amazing was tied to the size of my body.

And as a coach, I know that confidence is a feeling that comes from my thinking, not the size of my body. But as a human, sometimes I forget and sometimes I get confused. We all do.

Now, the other thing that’s kind of been going on over the past couple years is that I started dressing in big comfy clothes all the time because I gained weight, I was like, trying to fit into my old clothes that didn’t fit. And you try to put on a pair of skinny jeans that’s two sizes too small. It hurt, it was uncomfortable, I didn’t feel good.

So I was like, that’s it, yoga pant. Yoga pants is it. COVID came along and I’m like, all in. But here’s the thing; when you’re wearing big sweatshirts and yoga pants all the time, you look in the mirror, I would just see schlump. I would just be like, nothing fits me right, I look like a giant pillow, and those are some of the things I was saying to myself.

And of course none of the super cute clothes that I’d worn a few years ago were fitting. But my attempts to find clothes that I loved and that fit my current body were just failing. I didn’t completely give up but I was like, I got to buy bigger clothes, I’m going to buy stuff that’s comfortable, but I also wanted to have a few cute things that I could wear out and I just couldn’t find anything.

Everything, I would just be like, this looks like shit, this looks terrible, this looks awful. It’s terrible. So I was like, there’s got to be a way for me to find clothes that look cute at my current size because I see all these women on Instagram my size looking cute.

I’m like, alright, I’m going to hire a stylist. So I hired one. Her name is Judith Gaton. She’s amazing. She’s going to be on the podcast soon by the way, so stay tuned for that. And I’m like, okay, she’s going to teach me how to best dress myself at this weight while I work on losing because that is a goal for myself.

I do want to get back to that 194 pounds because I was running better then. I just physically felt better. And despite the fact that I have this thought error that I look better at that weight, because I think you can look amazing at any weight. I’m just being confused. I had that thought error. I also still want to be that weight again because I liked how my body felt. I felt lighter, and again, running was easier. It was easier to find clothes. I just prefer that weight.

So, I’m going to work on that weight loss and I thought, okay, Judith’s going to come in and she’s going to teach me how to dress myself the best at my current weight and all the way down while I work on losing because I thought that was the problem. I thought the problem was I just didn’t know what clothes to wear at 260 pounds to look good.

So I was like, alright, if I don’t know the answer, I’m going to bring in an expert to help me. So I also subscribed to her podcast, which we’re going to have a link to it in the show notes. And in the very first episode, she said, “The quickest way to know what’s going on with you is how you’re dressing yourself.”

And Rebels, I fucking lost it. I just started to sob because it hit me so hard in that moment. I’ve been dressing the way I feel, and I don’t feel great about myself right now. And it was about – it was more than just gaining weight. I fell out of love with myself somewhere over the past few years and it’s showing up everywhere in my life.

And one of the big ways is the weight gain because I’ve been eating in a way that doesn’t fuel my body, but rather fuels my feelings. And the other main way it’s been showing up is how I’ve been dressing myself. And I mean, I’m getting teary right now thinking about it. It hit me so fucking hard.

I mean, seriously, everything made perfect sense. And so I’m kind of noodling about this like, wow, when did I fall out of love with myself? And recognizing that the surface problems I thought I was having, which was I just need to get myself to eat better, or oh, I just need to find the right clothes that fit, the reason I was trying to solve my problems with that was because I wasn’t recognizing that I wasn’t in love with me.

And then the next day – so this happened a while ago. The next day I was listening to a podcast from one of Corinne Crabtree’s No BS coaches, and again, we’ll have a link to Corinne’s podcast in the comments. I think the coach was MJ. I love her. She’s got the loveliest voice to listen to.

Anyway, I think she said – I know she said, “Think about someone in your life that you absolutely love unconditionally, you would do anything for that person no matter what. You just love them so much. You would help them bury a body. You’re their biggest cheerleader, and you’re also the truth teller when it’s necessary because you love that person so much you would never, ever lie to them.”

And then think of someone who sort of annoys you. You’re like, I tolerate them but they’re not my favorite. And if they ask for your help, you’d find reasons to avoid and not help them, or if you did help, you’d be rolling your eyes the whole time, right? And to this person, you might tell some half-truths or lies just so you don’t have to spend too much time with them.

So we got the person we love so much, the person who really annoys us, and she’s like, “Now think, which of those people are you to yourself?” When you need something, are you right there showing up with love, doing whatever needs to be done, digging the hole to bury that body? Or are you annoyed and dragging your heels and trying to avoid her and just kind of telling lies?

And so again, you guys, I’m sobbing listening to this because guess which one I’ve been to myself lately. Yeah, I’ve been that annoying half-assed friend to myself. And right in that moment, I understood what self-love really is. It’s not online shopping, it’s not Netflix binges, it’s not buying yourself cupcakes after a bad day.

It’s showing up with love in every decision. It’s treating yourself like you’d treat your bestie. It’s thinking thoughts on purpose that create the feeling of love. Thoughts like, “I love my body at every size. I love myself so fucking much. I take exceptional care of my body and mind because I love myself and I’m the most important person in my life.”

I have a whole list of thoughts like this that I write out every damn day now because my number one goal in 2021 has changed. It used to be I wanted to lose 100 pounds. Now it’s to have a torrid love affair with myself, to fall head over heels with my amazingness.

Self-care is my love language. And the first thing on my self-care list every damn day is to start talking to myself like I’m the most important person in my life. Because you know what? I am. And you are the most important person in your life.

Self-care is not selfish. And it does not have to take hours and hours and cost a lot of money. It doesn’t have to take time away from your family. You can put yourself first and still have lots of time for your loved ones. I just want you to start counting yourself as one of your loved ones.

Self-care is an action that’s driven by your thoughts. Massages and bubble baths are awesome, they’re actions, but self-care is a brain thing. You got to care for your mind first. You got to start there. Notice those thoughts that block you from feeling love and start working towards the thought that generate different feelings.

Here is the thing; you might not be able to go to love right away. That’s okay. This is a practice. If this is a new thing for you, might take a while. That’s okay. If you’re feeling disgust for yourself, we’re going to work towards neutral.

What thoughts do you have about your body that are neutral, rather than thoughts that create a feeling of disgust? If you’re feeling neutral, if you’re already there which is kind of where I was, I was at a point where I was in love with my body. My body changed and I allowed that circumstance to change my thinking and I got down to sort of neutral, to maybe a little bit of dislike but mostly neutral.

But if you’re feeling neutral right now, let’s work towards like. And then when you get to like, you can work towards love. So I’m going to do several podcasts on this topic this year. It is going to be a year-long project for all of us. I promise, self-love is going to make you a better runner, in addition to making the rest of your life more awesome.

So if you’re thinking, “Look, I’m here just for the running tips,” self-love is probably the best running tip you’re ever going to get. So let’s work on it together. Are you in? Tell me, write to me, let me know.

And here’s the other cool thing. If you liked this podcast, if you loved it and you said this made a difference in my life, I want you to screenshot it, share it on Instagram, share it on Facebook, tag Not Your Average Runner, let people know because self-love is so important, you guys.

Alright, my rebellious friends, that is it for today. I want to know what your self-love list looks like. Hit me up on Instagram @notyouraveragerunner and let me know. Meanwhile, I love you, stay safe, get your ass out there and run, and I will talk to you next week.

Oh, and one last thing. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you have to check out the Rebel Runner Roadmap. It’s a 30-day online program that will teach you exactly how to start running, stick with it, and become the runner you’ve always wanted to be. Head on over to rebelrunnerroadmap.com to join. I’d love to be a part of your journey.