- All right, so I've got a bit of a problem.
So we've just hit 2 million subscribers on this channel,
and my team has doubled in size,
and I've just moved to this nice new place in London,
and by all accounts, life is genuinely pretty great.
But I've recently been reading a lot
about the concept of self-acceptance
and I realised that I don't really have a good relationship
with that.
Apparently, true self-acceptance
is about embracing who we are
without any qualifications, conditions or exceptions.
This doesn't mean just embracing the good, positive things
about ourselves, but also accepting and embracing
the less desirable, the negative,
the uglier parts of ourselves.
Now if you're watching this channel,
and you're probably a bit like me
in that you care about self-improvement
and becoming a better version of ourselves
and all that fun stuff,
but as Robert Holden famously writes,
"No amount of self-improvement
Anyway, here are the five methods
and they conveniently spell out a nice little acronym
which doesn't quite match
with what the words are, but whatever.
Method number one is to practise relaxed awareness.
The first exercise is all about building
an awareness of our existence
and the stream of phenomena happening at this moment,
including our thoughts and our emotions and outside stimuli.
I read that one line.
That all sounds like really, really wishy-washy,
but basically this is about meditating and recognising
and just sort of generally being more aware
of our own thoughts.
To practise,
the idea is that you close your eyes for a minute
and instead of pushing thoughts away
or trying to focus on your breath,
just softly notice your thoughts and feelings and body.
You might see negative thoughts or emotions,
that's totally okay.
Just notice them, watch them.
Don't try to turn them into positive thoughts
or push them away.
This is sort of meditation, at least in my current like,
new beginner level understanding of meditation.
I've been dabbling with Headspace
and with Sam Harris's Waking Up app.
I haven't yet got a proper meditation practise down,
but it's on the cards.
One of those things,
one of those habits I really wanna build,
and I have genuinely found that on those few occasions
where I actually actually bring myself to meditate
or to just kind of sit in silence for like 10 minutes
and just kind of think about my own thoughts,
that's been like genuinely helpful
and it's made the rest of the day feel a bit better.
Which begs the question of why don't I do this more often,
but hey, it's something I'm working on.
Method number two is to let go of rating yourself.
Now this is in generally a bad thing for us to do,
like rating ourselves and comparing ourselves
to other people.
And I always thought that like, "Oh, I don't really do that.
I'm comfortable in my own skin,"
but then what I've been reading
about this self-acceptance stuff and being more aware of it,
I realised that I actually do it all the time.
Like anytime I'm on my Instagram explore page
and I see these kinds of photos of dudes with six pack abs
part of me thinks, oh, you know,
those abs are really cool.
I really wanna get abs like that.
And if that was the only thing I took away from it,
that wouldn't be too bad,
but there is another subconscious like,
undercurrent when I think that,
which is my current body shape
or my body composition is not good enough,
and to become more good enough, to become more better,
I need to, I don't know, get 12% body fat.
I need to do all these exercises.
It becomes a very like rating-y comparative type thing,
and so I'm trying to eliminate the rating part
while retaining the inspiration part.
Method number three is to practise gratitude.
This is a pretty classic one.
There's so much evidence that just being more grateful
in general is amazing for our happiness.
In fact, there's one study that showed
that gratitude journaling,
i.e. just writing down a few things
you're grateful for each day,
that does as much to increase our happiness
as doubling our salary.
I think I do a pretty good job of this
'cause I have like a sort of daily journaling practise
using the app Day One, which is very good.
And I do always ask myself
what are three things I'm grateful for?
But since reading about the self-acceptance stuff again,
I realised that always the three things I'm grateful for
are always about other people or other things like coffee,
or this desk set up, or this house or Sheen,
or anger. So these, you know, these other people in my life,
for example,
and I realised that I never ever have any gratitude towards
like anything related to myself. Like it's just not a,
a thought that passes my mind at all. And so,
because I like rules and regulations and trying to cultivate
more of the sense of self acceptance,
I've now set a rule for myself
that anytime I do this three things, gratitude, exercise,
at least one of those things has to be something
about me personally.
Like I don't know my health.
or the way I deal with problems,
or even like a failure that I've had in life
that has been helpful for me.
But it's something a little bit more inward-looking
rather than outward-looking.
Method number four is to forgiveness and compassion.
The idea is that as we notice judgements and self rating,
we can try to turn them into forgiveness and compassion.
If we judge ourselves for not doing well at something
or not being good enough at something,
can we forgive ourselves for this
just as we might forgive someone else.
And then ultimately in an ideal world,
we wouldn't even need to forgive ourselves
for having shortcomings or for making mistakes
or not doing something to our standards
because we would recognise that we're all human.
Humans are all imperfect. It's actually totally okay.
We're doing our best. Given what we know,
given what our skills are,
given the environment we were brought up in.
I was talking to Steven Bartlett
in one of our podcasts interviews,
link and video in the description.
And he makes a really good point about this,
about how we're all fundamentally imperfect as human beings.
And we're all just trying our best.
And if we have that lens of looking at the world
and looking at ourselves,
we would beat ourselves up a lot less.
So again, something I'm trying to get better at.
And finally method number five is to separate
from your emotions.
The idea here is that when you're feeling negative emotions,
see them as a separate event, not a part of you.
Remove their power over you by thinking of them
not as commandments that you must follow or believe in,
but rather, as passing objects like a leaf floating
passed you in the wind,
the leaf doesn't control you
and neither do the negative emotions.
That's the theory anyway.
And I think I'm actually pretty good at this.
I've been drinking these stoicism Kool-Aid
for the last like eight years.
Derren Brown's "Happy,"
William Irvine's "Guide to the Good Life."
And Ryan Holiday's
"The Obstacle is the Way," those are really good books
about stoicism. And if you like it, you can even check out
my Skillshare class that I've done with my friend Sam,
which is all about how the lessons from stoicism
changed our lives. Sam is a philosophy teacher,
there'll be a free access link
to that in the video description,
not sponsored, et cetera, et cetera, but like, you know,
people have said that that stoicism Skillshare class
is kind of helpful, but yeah, I think,
I think I do, do a pretty good job of like dissociating
my self-esteem and my self acceptance
from what I'm currently feeling emotion wise.
But then in fairness, I also, I've had a pretty chilled,
privileged life and I haven't really had any major knocks
on my emotions or like major negative things happen to me.
So who knows maybe if, and when that happens,
we'll see if the stoicism training is actually useful
or if I'm just sort of bullshitting myself
and it's all just talk.
Anyway, those are the five methods
that I'm trying to use more of these days
to cultivate more of a sense of self-acceptance.
I'll be honest. This is a pretty new era for me.
I, you know, a few months ago,
I wouldn't have given any of this the time of day.
I don't even know what we're going to title this video
because like, it's not about productivity, but that's fine.
And I'm quite excited because it's like,
this feels like a new area of life, a new area of growth,
where I'm coming across all these concepts,
like self-love and self-acceptance and compassion
and forgiveness and all these things
that really wouldn't have paid any attention to before.
And I'm trying to do things like meditation
and dabbling with yoga.
And, you know,
I'm trying to just become a bit more spiritual,
a bit more in touch with my emotions,
a bit more in touch with myself,
sort of have my ex housemate Sheen to thank for that.
She's turned me on to a lot of these ideas,
but as usual as I learned this stuff myself,
I will of course be sharing what I've learned with you guys
on the channel.
So yeah. Huge thank you for following along journey.
I'm really grateful that you've given the time to be here,
watching to the end of this video.
If you liked this video and you wanna learn
more about this whole like separating from emotions thing,
there is a video over there
which is 10 Quotes From Stoicism That Have Changed My Life
that I think about on a semi daily basis.
So thank you so much for watching.
Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already,
and I'll see you in the next video, bye-bye.