Embracing the Power of Self-Love - With Shruti Goel

Hello and welcome to another episode of Building Confidence with me. Sue Reed, here to help you build your self confidence by talking to guests every week on a wide variety of topics relating to confidence. Now, as well as hosting this podcast, I am also a confidence coach and writer. I now have a free weekly newsletter called Confidence Matters, and I'll put the details in the show notes in case you're interested. So now, with no further ado, let's jump into the episode. Today I have a returning guest. Shruti Goel first joined me for the July the 19th episode this year, 2023, when we discuss the concept of mother hunger and how it can affect our self confidence as we grow up. So Shruti is a Jay Shetty certified life and success coach who specializes in self-love and empowerment, and Shruti, like me, believes that self-love can be our superpower. So she works with families that have suffered dementia, helping them to adapt and find meaning in the new chapter of their life. Shruti is also the co-host of Create your Joy podcast, and she does that along with Evanya Leung. So welcome to the show, shruti. It's lovely to see you again. You're looking really well. Thank you right back at you, su, and I've been following your podcast and I just find so much inspiration in hearing the topics that you discussed and I just am so thrilled to come back for a follow-up and kind of connect the dots between mother hunger and self-love today Brilliant yes, yeah, I mean, yeah, I love doing the podcast and I love the fact that there are so many aspects to confidence that we can talk about, you know, from talking about self-love to talking about things like hair care, which is my episode, which will come on before this one, so it'll already be have been on when I launch yours. So, yeah, so lovely to see you again. So, just for any listeners who maybe didn't listen to the Mother Hunger episode or haven't listened to it yet, because I'm sure if they haven't, they'll go back and have a listen because it was very good and very popular, so just explain again what is mother hunger?

Okay, so mother hunger is basically a concept that describes a sense of lack or feeling not enough that many of us carry well into our adulthood years, and it can be linked to the lack of one of a few things that normally a mother fulfills in our life, and so it could be things like nurturance, or protection or guidance, and for many of us, we did not have a chance to experience all three from our mothers in the way of our mothers being able to fulfill these needs for us, and, in fact, it goes back generations, because their mothers may have very well not have those needs met either. And what happens, though, is that, in a state of mother hunger, we are left in a frozen state where we're not able to really feel our emotions, we're not really able to to move on with our lives in terms of thriving. We're just surviving through life, and so, for those reasons, it's very important to acknowledge and address. So I really do hope that your audience will have a chance to go back and listen to our previous podcast, and I'm just so excited to dive into self-love together today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, do go back to the, the original episode on mother hunger, because it is so interesting. I learned a lot from it and, yeah, and I think, thinking about self-love if you didn't get enough love, well, not just your mother, but either of your parents, for whatever reason, if you didn't get enough love from them, what I've learned is we were totally responsible for our own lives, so we are 100 responsible for the life we've been given. This is what I believe and therefore, if you didn't get the love from your parents yes, that is unfortunate, but there are things that you can do to address that. You cannot spend your whole life carrying that baggage around with you, because it then becomes almost an excuse for not doing things not maybe intentionally, but it will hold you back. Do you agree with that?

Yes, I definitely agree that it leads to a life that is smaller and contains fewer possibilities than it could have, and it holds you back in the sense that the person involved doesn't feel confident enough to take the risks that are necessary to live up to your full potential. And I just wanted to share that. The psychologist, kelly McDaniel, who came up with this concept, talked about how, for many people, being able to work with a counselor or a coach is a great way to begin.

What I'm saying sounds a little bit harsh to say. You know, take control of your own life. You're 100 responsible. You can do something about it, because you can't go back to the past. You can't change how your mother was, because again she may have suffered the same. Like you said, it could be generational, so it could be that she didn't get the love she needed either. So you cannot change that. The only thing you can change is your life and that of your daughters, and you know, generations to come. So by looking at, how, then, do I develop my self-love, how can I love myself and how can I take that love from inside myself and put it out into the world, because that is how we learn to a, build our confidence, create joy, have a much better life. That's, that's the way I'm, I'm coming from.

Absolutely, and, my gosh, you've given me such an easy question to to work with what I can share from my own journey to self-love, as well as the work that I do with my clients and our message through our podcast create your joy is that self-love is this beautiful journey that you have to embrace, and you have to be willing to walk that path one step, one day at a time, and, just like the conditioning brought us to the point in our life where we are, you know that conditioning took years to happen, and so to change that conditioning, to step into self-love and to develop self-confidence is going to take time too, and so one of the most important things that I share with my clients is that you have got to be patient with this process, and there's going to be a general trajectory that you're going in an upward spiral. However, you will hit both pauses and um plateaus in this process, and there may be frustrating setbacks as well, but all of them are leading you towards this beautiful journey of self-discovery, and I really think that it's everyone's birthright to allow ourselves to focus on this journey, and I think that sometimes there's such a narrative in our societies where the entire focus that we have is on the outside, and I think one of the most radically beautiful things that you can do for yourself is to bring the shine, the light of your compassion is how I say it Shine the light of your compassion onto yourself.

Absolutely, and so your podcast then Create your Joy. What are you doing with that then? What's that about?

Yes. So Create your Joy podcast is part of the way in which Ivania and I generate our joy, in the sense that it came out of this idea where we wanted to make coaching principles and the idea of being able to hear other people's viewpoints accessible to people just like us. And you were thinking, what is going to be unique about it, what is going to be unique about what we do? And we found that each of us independently had a little self-love section in our YouTube playlist, and these were songs that we used as reminders for ourselves when we were going through a crisis. Sometimes they were in our own native languages Mine were a lot of Hindi songs, hers were a combination of Spanish songs and English songs. What an amazing thing to do to choose from some of these songs that have inspired us over the years and to really look at the lyrics and give ourselves those reminders that we need to take one more look and give one more chance to self-love. And so each week, we essentially pick a new song that has inspired us, and again, the podcast is available free of charge on YouTube and people can listen along to this song. But also we try to bring the difference of our viewpoints, to allow people to stand in different perspectives and also encourage them to develop their own, because the world needs our uniqueness and when we can honor and cherish our uniqueness, that's when we begin to kind of stoke the fire of self-love. Yeah, and for us as women, yeah, for us as women. I just have to say this it has been a marvelously empowering tool for us to get our voice in the room. I'm able to be before you and have this interview because I developed that confidence, knowing that my voice matters and, just like other people have their perspectives, I have mine and it's worthy, and I think that really has helped me step into a lot of self-confidence that I longed to develop over the years.

Brilliant, yeah, yeah, and like you say, it is a step-by-step journey building your confidence, building your self-love. It's all a matter of thinking well, what can I do? That's just going to challenge me a little bit, but it's not going to frighten the life out of me. And so just pushing that boundary very, very slightly every so often, or as often as you can, every day in fact, if you can, will help you slowly, slowly build up your self-confidence. Self-love and self-confidence match each other. So the more your self-love grows, the more your self-confidence grows, and vice versa. So what would you say was the most inspirational one of your songs then?

Oh my gosh, I think that's a tough choice. I don't think I could choose one, but I'll tell you a group that we found that, whose songs were just so deeply moving, and it's a group called Fearless Soul. Ok, and there's challenges that we face as well as the ways in which we can remind ourselves, and the choruses of these songs in particular are so insightful, and that's how we know what is the core message, and often the message is, oh my gosh, my answers lie within, and that I am complete in every moment, and so I wanted to share that. That's one way that someone can just begin to cultivate a little more self-love in their life is by listening to songs that are a reminder of that, and just to touch on that a little bit further. So I told you that we bring the fullness of our wisdom and knowledge to our podcast, and part of that is our backgrounds, and so I'm originally from India, and there's a very famous mythological story of the monkey god named Lord Hanuman, and Lord Hanuman, when he is going to rescue Lord Rama's wife, sita, from Lanka, one of the things that happens is he has forgotten his own brilliance, and so he's sitting by the beach at the Arabian Sea and wondering how could he possibly make the leap to cross this ocean, and at that time his friends sit down and sing to him phrases of his strength, and that's what finally gives him the confidence to make this giant leap to get across to this ocean that people can't even see the other side of. And so I want to say that that's the effect that these kind of songs have on us essentially is that we as human beings so often forget our own magnificence, and so the daily reminders so help with that, and songs are one way to do it. But I have a few other suggestions so I'd love to share if you're open to that.

Absolutely yeah, carry on.

So something interesting that worked really well for me to both address the mother hunger that I felt, as well as begin to shift the negative self-talk that often occupied my mind and heart is that I wrote and frequently do now write, a letter to my inner little Shruti. And this is such a simple practice, but it is staggeringly powerful. And I wondered. I have the letter with me that I have written recently and I won't read all of it out loud, but I just think that being able to tell that little person inside you that you're going to love them and protect them and will be there for them is a lot of the validation that we're seeking from our primary caregivers in the world, whether that is our parents or when we're in a romantic relationship, it's our partner. And I hold on to these letters as almost a time capsule to come back to, to get a sense of, well, what did I need on that particular day and how did I feel after I wrote and read that letter to myself? And I often find that there is a real sense of fullness in my heart when I have both written and then read that letter. And sometimes this is a little secret. Sometimes I write these letters before I'm going to spend time with my family, so that I don't go to them thirsting for validation and approval of my life choices, but rather I have given myself that gift before I ever arrived to their door. So anything that they share that's positive is then a bonus, but it doesn't leave me with any lingering sense of resentment, like why couldn't I get more approval or validation from them?

Yeah.

Have you ever done something like that? So I'm just curious.

What I do is two things that are similar. I meditate every day and if I'm anxious about anything or worrying about anything, I do have a conversation with my inner self, so my younger self. So, rather than write it down, I'm actually talking and we sit down and we hug. So I'm actually with my younger self because I go back to when I was around 14 and I was very, very emotional. I cry in myself to sleep so unhappy. So that's the me that I need to comfort. So I do quite often go back to her and I've also gone back to a much younger me as well. It's whatever the enemy needs at that point in time, and I don't do so much journaling now, but I used to do a lot of journaling. I do my journaling within my meditation now, so it's kind of combined, but yeah, so very similar. I also think that, talking about the self criticism and the negative self talk which we do all the time, and we probably I don't know whether we did discuss this at the last episode, but we would not speak to our best friend the way we talk to ourselves, and if we don't have a best friend our sister, our children, anybody that we really, really care about, we would not talk to them the way we talk to ourselves. We almost bully ourselves sometimes. So I have stopped talking to myself, I've stopped telling myself off, apart from sometimes you'll do something and you'll go oh God, you're so stupid and you do it automatically. But you shouldn't, because you are training your brain to believe that you are stupid. So I now, if I say that, if it slips out, I now say no, you're not, you're just silly, and silly is a nice word. I think it's a childish nice word. You're silly. So I just say no, you're not, you're just silly, and it doesn't mean that I've done anything wrong. So I do a lot of that. I correct all of myself. Talk now I catch it in one hand and correct it in the other hand, because I think that's really important and I think the more praise you and this again goes back to taking responsibility for your own life the more praise you give yourself, the less you need externally, because you've got what you need. You've given it to yourself and, like you're doing, you're giving it to your younger you, who really did need it. So you're supplying that love that they really needed, which is amazing.

Yeah, oh, that was lovely to hear you discuss and it brought up two things for me. One was I just wanted to share my favorite analogy around self-love that my clients really love to hear is. I talk about self-love as kind of like digging your own well that's full of the water of joy, and rather than going door to door with your cup saying can you fill up my cup of joy please? And thank you, can you please fill up my cup of joy what you do is you go to your well, you drink that sweet water and then you flip that cup and you take it to the people around you and you give them a cup from your joy, rather than waiting for them to give it to you. And I tell you, I see the light come into someone's eyes when they realize the significance of this analogy of what we have actually been doing to ourselves. And the other thing that I just wanted to mention I love the fact that you talked about kind of the journaling can happen as a conversation within us and it is such a radical shift to begin to just remove our attention from the outside and begin to turn that inward. And in my coaching one of the coaching kind of mantras that I use is a beautiful Sanskrit phrase that says Sampurna Hum, and Sampurna Hum means I'm complete. In every moment I'm complete. And when you're able to kind of give yourself these reminders on a daily basis and point to the evidence to the good that you have done, it not only begins to, it does two things that positive mindset is gonna move you forward, but also you begin to lose the drag that comes from the negative self-talk. So I was gonna say it's almost like a secret formula if you think about it. By doing positive self-talk and the meditations and some of this, what I call self-love hygiene I've written an article about this too. If we treated our self-love like a hygiene practice, like brushing our teeth, then you're doing both those things. Just like you remove plaque while brushing your teeth, you remove the negative resistance that's holding us back. That's all the negative self-talk. And then you add in the positive, which is reminding yourself how magnificent you are, shining that light of your compassion on yourself, and that generates a massive boost in the direction that you want to head. You have the clarity with which to think about where you wanna go, how you wanna navigate in this journey in life, and I also find personally that it also leads to a more resilient you, in the sense that you're building capacity to hold more joy, and so you're digging that well deeper, and when that happens, if something comes to shake your life, it's not gonna drain that well right away. You have some reserves that you can call upon, and I think that's not necessarily often talked about is that being joyful in your life. It's not just something optional that you should have, but rather it is very fundamental to creating a life that is thriving and full, and by anchoring into self-love you can then see the tree of your self-confidence begin to flourish. So it's gotta be anchored there.

Absolutely yeah. So this is why it's the foundation. Yes, yes, anchoring yourself into it, yeah, that's always gotta be the starting point and I think the more self-love you have, the more, the more you attract people to you, because you are sending out this beacon of light. So love is light. So you're sending out this beacon of light that does attract people to you. And then, like you say, if you're digging your well because I love that analogy I'm going to pinch that and use it. It's so good. But when you're digging your well, if you dig it deep enough and you get enough water out, you are going to be able to share that water, like you say, around to everybody. So there will be enough water for everybody. And this is what we need in the world. We need to let that light shine, let that water be given to everybody. We really need to let it flow. Let it flow, let the love flow, which is a song.

I agree exactly, and I was going to say one of my favorite kind of self-love practices. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this, because ultimately, I find that for a lot of us, self-love is about taking time to really embody our own bodies, and I know it sounds a little strange when I say it this way, but so many of us live by the dint of our intellect. The intellect is how we make money in this world, it's how we have fame and fortune and what have you, and yet when we remain stuck in our mind, it really leaves us disconnected from our larger life, and so I did want to share that. One of my favorite techniques for tapping into self-love is to do activities. They could be simple breathing techniques. One of my favorites is what I call a self-hug and a butterfly hug, and maybe we can talk the listeners through that. I don't know if we can do a quick practice together, but it's a great way to just use our breath, which is our constant reminder of the present moment, and allow ourselves to integrate our heart and mind together, rather than being this disconnected state stuck in our mind, which is how we often exist. And once we do this little practice, I want the audience to be able to just check in with themselves. Do they feel more embodied? Are they able to feel sensations Within their bodies? Because, yes, we go around not really knowing how we're feeling on the inside, so if you're open to it, absolutely yeah, you carry on, yeah. I say we try a little butterfly hug and we'll combine it with a self-hug. So the butterfly hug is all about just connecting your thumbs together and a little butterfly towards the top, just under your neck.

Okay.

So you make just warm, gentle contact with your body, and here we begin with some alternating taps, like the wings of a butterfly, just warmly contacting you, and begin to take slightly deeper breaths, attuning yourself to the gentle taps, and you can adjust the rhythm of the taps to whatever feels comforting for you. Breathe out with a sigh, you can, and after a few breaths of doing this, if you can gently now uncurl the thumbs and just make warm contact with your shoulders and imagine yourself shining the light of your compassion onto yourself, a warm, golden light, and then just cross your hands at your heart for a moment and slowly, in your own time, begin to come back to the room Lovely.

That's beautiful. The thing is, when I do anything like that, I never want to come back.

I know, and that's a good sign, that's a sign that you're connecting with the deeper parts of yourself and you know we forget what a beautiful, wonderful world of intuition and insight and love is hiding right here within us.

Absolutely yes, yeah, and yeah, I love things like that, anything that slows you down and takes you inside yourself, and meditation I just I've been meditating now for about five or six years, so I think I think I'm pretty good at it and it's just a beautiful thing. And I know a lot of people when they start out they think, well, I can't sit still, I can't stop thinking about stuff. But just don't worry about any of that. Just focus on your breath and every time your mind wanders off, just bring it back. And just if you do that for five minutes every day, you will notice a difference. After 30 days, you'll definitely notice a difference and you will want to expand the time.

It's like any skill you have to practice to build it up Absolutely. And you know, something that a meditation teacher shared with me once is that you know you have to kind of let go this idea that a meditation is good or bad, or that in a way that you're developing a skill. Because they said, even on the worst day, if you're sitting and meditating and you have fire engines going around you, that's your meditation that day. If you have another day when you just feel so composed and able to sit through whatever time without feeling distracted, that's your practice for that day. And I find that for me, what meditation has come to mean is just an opportunity to witness my life as it's happening and accept the ebbs and flows of it, rather than what we tend to do in our ordinary lives, which is that we judge everything as valuable or as something positive and negative. So I find that that is a beautiful idea that enters your life when you're able to meditate, and then it doesn't matter so much. You know whether it was good or bad. It is always something you're learning from Absolutely, it's embracing life.

Yes, absolutely yes, yes, All you're doing is going inside yourself. So you know, it's just you, just if you take up, take away the label meditation, if you like, and just say I'm going to close my eyes and relax a minute, that's it. That's all you have to do, exactly.

Exactly. Well said, Sue.

So what would you say then to somebody who wants to improve their self confidence, their self love? What would be their starting point? So what are three things that somebody who is just starting out? So three first things they should do.

Yeah. So I would say that it's important to just begin to expose yourself to materials that are out there on self-love, and I would say the first, most important thing to do is to trust that you will find things that resonate with you, and there is no one magical thing that will work, but over a period of time, you will begin to develop your own toolkit, and in my coaching work, I call it the self-love spice box, and the self-love spice box is something that each of my clients walk away with, and it is unique to their needs. It is unique to how they best step into self-love work, and so the second thing is then to really access a wide array of activities to do this. So for some people, it's really creating art that brings them into self-love. Begin to pay attention to, in your current life, what are things that bring you joy? Well, for someone it might just be playing with their grandchildren. For another person it might be reading a lovely book. For someone else for me, for example, it's $5 pink lemonade roses that I arrange in a little antique cup and take pictures of. For someone else, it could be something that the rest of us can't fathom why they enjoy it, but they do, and so it's so important to find what begins to generate joy for you, and when you're doing that, then you can notice the flow. It would be a kind of activity in which you lose track of time. Essentially and part of number two is to actually make time in your schedule. Give it the same priority as you would a work appointment and I say a work appointment or a medical appointment, because those are things that we would do anything not to miss and so give it the importance that it deserves in your schedule. And I would say that when you're working with a coach, for example, your coaching session, or if you're working with a therapist, your therapy appointment, calendarizing those activities are going to ensure that you are able to do this as a daily practice. Because that's the third tip is that you must find a way to engage even in something simple on a daily basis, and when you have a spice box of activities to choose from, then you can decide oh, my goodness, I can't write a letter to my little shruti every single day. That is way too emotionally charged for me. What I can do is I can wake up and I can do a butterfly hug for myself, or maybe one of the days it's just doing some lymphatic work or a little massage for my hands and my face, because that feels like I'm giving myself some compassion, some nurturance. So I think that's key is to, number one, kind of begin to explore what are things that are out there. Number two, really give them the same importance that you do your work commitments. And number three, try and find at least one small thing or three small things that you can do. And I'll tell you that one of the easiest things that I've found for anyone, if they just want to get started, is we exist in such usually a judgmental state of mind. Begin with gratitude. It is the simplest thing that I can imagine someone doing and just begin to write down one or two or three things that you are grateful for. And I'll tell you, I've seen a technique recently somewhere on the internet that is really phenomenal for this and that is to just draw a little spiral and say I am grateful for and it really works with the mind. When you look at those words I am grateful for, your mind wants to fill in the rest of it. So if you're having a hard time, as I did in a stressful moment recently, I could not find a single thing to be positive about. And I drew that spiral and I said I am grateful for and I just had a bunch of dots for a while there. But eventually something started turning in my heart and that inner critic started to calm down and give way to this deeper part of me. The beauty of this work, sue, is that the more we go inwards, we begin to create a deeper relationship with those parts of our self, our intuition, our higher self, and when that happens, those voices become louder in our heart and mind, as opposed to the voice of the inner critic that typically drowns everything else out. So I just wanted to share that. Maybe this is. Tip. Number four is, if you're just feeling like nothing else is working, see if you can step into gratitude.

Absolutely Good one? Yeah, definitely, definitely. So best way to contact you then I'll put the details of the podcast in the show notes and you're on Instagram.

Yes, best way to find me is through Instagram. Send me a direct message there and I'm happy to you know we do. We do discovery calls that allow us to begin to understand the challenges that that a client is facing, and I tell you it is my purpose and my joy Each time that I work with a client and typically I work with people who are entrepreneurs, because I think this is how self love is a superpower is for people who want their business, their brand, to be themselves. They first have to look deep within, and when I see an entrepreneur gain the confidence to put themselves out there and do something that they never would have done before, it just it makes me feel so joyful and it's one of the ways in which I find that I'm living up to my purpose. And, of course, I then also turn around and there are ways to approach this work to help people with dementia and and their care partners as well, and I'm stepping into that work more and I feel like coaching, especially, has enhanced my ability to deliver that work and bring joy into the equation in caring for someone with dementia and supporting their care partners as well. So, there's many dimensions and many ways in which self love tapping into and flourishing yourself. Love can have an impact on your life, whether you're a business owner, whether you're someone who's caretaking for someone else, or if you're just wanting to have a better relationship with the one person who is going to be with you as long as you're alive, that's right, you're never going to get rid of them. Exactly.

Make friends, make friends, absolutely. Be nice to them because they're going to be with you all the time. You don't want them to hate you, exactly, exactly. Well, it's been lovely talking to you again. Is there anything that I've missed that you wanted just to add in before we finish off?

Oh, I think, Sue, this has been such a lovely conversation and extension to to our previous discussion and I would just say you know, for anyone that is feeling frustrated at any point in their self love journey, that you'll find that one of the most redeeming things about this is that you can always come back to it. You know, it's not something that just your connection with yourself doesn't just disappear because you haven't done a practice or, let's say, if you've fallen into a bit of a downward spiral. You know this is something that you can always tap into and wherever you are today and I think that's probably the most positive message that I can that I can share there. And if all else fails, find yourself a song. I think there's something so powerful about songs and, you know, just allow yourself to listen to some reminders of what self love is all about and draw inspiration from the people, from the environments around you and, and if you can do that, then you will find and reconnect to that self love, because it's just a moment away.

Really lovely. Thank you so much, that's really nice. So, yeah, lovely to see you again and good luck with everything, and I'm sure you'll be back on again in the future and we'll continue our conversation.

I would love that, so, and I'm wishing everyone here an almost happy new year. We're coming to the end of this year, and I hope everyone has a chance to reflect on their their accomplishments and the ways in which they have grown in this past year, because, again, that's, that's yet another way to tap into self. Love is to acknowledge what you've already done. Absolutely yeah, yeah.

Brilliant. Okay, lovely talking to you. Take care, then, thank you. Thank you for joining us today and I hope you enjoyed the conversation. All contact information is in the show notes for you. Have a lovely week and tune in again next Wednesday, thank you.