In this episode Betsy asks us to think about the feelings that we felt when we were the favorite version of ourselves. Were you concerned about perception during those times or fully confident and present? Listen in to discover how freeing it can be to accept that you can live everyday as your favorite version and leave your best version to the side.

Transcript:

393 How to be your favorite self

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy P, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.

Hello, fellow Adventurers. Hi everybody. Welcome to the Art of Living Big. I have a. A big topic that I wanna talk to you about, a big concept, and I hope that I do it justice. I hope that this makes all kinds of sense as I talk about it. So before I get into that, I wanna give you a couple updates. If you’ve been here for a long time, maybe you like my updates, I don’t know.

I wanna give you a Dean Martin update. So Dean Martin is my kitty that I rescued from the. Pound I got him from the pound back in beginning of April, so I’ve had him now four months. His second [00:01:00] birthday is this weekend. I ordered a hat and necklace and, oh God, some stuff for cat.

Birthdays from Amazon and we’ll be getting sushi and I’m really looking forward to this little celebration with Dean Martin. He has grown into being such a nice kitty. If you were here back then or you were following me on Instagram, like he was sort of a terror in the beginning. And I even got a little bit worried like, oh my, what have I done?

Always been a dog person, but I thought a cat will be easier. And then he became like this total hellion. But over the last month or so, I mean, every month I feel like he’s gotten more settled, but over the last month, even more so, and now he’s purring. He hasn’t pured y’all. And so it’s like when you’re taking care of an infant, but there’s no feedback and you’re like, I’m doing all this work for what?

And then they smile and you’re like, oh, it matters. Right? That’s what it felt like. [00:02:00] I was like, oh, he does like me. So he’s purring and this is a big deal. So I’m excited about that. Okay, so I wanna get into this whole thought, this whole idea that I have, you know, as we. Move through our lives and we grow and I think we get this heightened self of awareness about who we are, hopefully, right?

Hopefully as we grow, we get a heightened sense of awareness about who we are, and I know for myself over the past 15 years, I think I have been on a path to discover myself. When I look back before that. I was walking through life very unconscious, and that’s not necessarily bad, it’s just where I was.

And so as I have moved through and learned more about myself and been a coach over the last decade, [00:03:00] I’m starting to recognize certain patterns or ways of being that I have, and because I believe that everything is neutral. It’s only the truth that I put upon it that makes it what it is. I’ve started to evaluate how I’m actually thinking about those patterns.

So not just the thing that I do, but also how I think about the thing that I do. And , just like you, I have a little voice in my head. That’s like a little gremlin that will tell me things that are lies. You know, you’re not good enough or why are you doing it like that? Or, oh my God, you’re so cringey.

And I have been thinking a lot about that. There’s this thing going around social media that’s like, you have to be cringey in order to grow, to do something new, to learn something. There is that moment of [00:04:00] cringey. But I also, when I see that meme that’s going around, I also think, well, is it cringey or is it just what we think about it that makes it seem cringey?

But it is in itself totally neutral. And so I started evaluating when I feel that cringiness, what’s the lens that I’m looking through? And so many times that lens would be. How other people would perceive what I’m doing. So me and myself, it didn’t necessarily feel cringey, but it would be when I would evaluate it through a lens of how somebody from the outside may perceive it.

And that’s a big may because I’m totally mindreading, right? I’m totally saying. I think they would think of this, but I have no idea. And the truth is probably some people do think that and some people don’t. [00:05:00] And I know just from the work that I do, that if they do think it’s cringey, it’s something that’s going on inside them and probably less to do with me.

So why do I have this voice in my head? Why do I evaluate myself through this filter that doesn’t actually serve me? A couple years ago I saw a woman on TikTok and she has this little thing. You might know who I’m talking about, and I don’t remember her name ’cause she’s not somebody that I follow, but I would see her come up.

But she would say, have a great day, not just a good day. Do you know who this? It’s a young woman that was like, at Alabama University. So have a great day, not just a good day. And she was very cute, but she would say things like. I wasn’t being my best self or I wanna show up today as my best self.

And I really, I kind of liked that, but I thought about it a lot. And in [00:06:00] this like evaluating things that I do through the lens of other people that I know or don’t know, or that I hypothetically think about, right? That may not even exist. Just what I think people might think. And then, am I being my best self?

I started to recognize there was this correlation between the two, and that me being my best self felt very external. It felt like if I was being my best self, it meant I was showing up as my best. And if I was showing up as my best, then it was less likely that I was being cringey or that I would be perceived in a way that I didn’t wanna be perceived.

Okay, so are you tracking with me so far? Is this making sense? So I’m starting to question the voice in my head that’s telling me things about myself. I’m recognizing that I’m putting parameters that are only made up in my own mind, and it’s coming from this place of wanting to [00:07:00] show up as the best version of me to the world.

Haha. And so over the past. Probably two months, three months, maybe four. ’cause probably since I’ve gotten Dean Martin, I would say I have been thinking about this in a different way. I started to think about what was the favorite version of me. If I look back over my life, I can think about times where I was the favorite version of me.

But when I compared those times with. Was I perceived as being, I’m using air quotes, right, worthy or good enough? I don’t know. So the times where I was being my favorite version of me, I was so in myself, like I was so fully embodying [00:08:00] myself that I wasn’t even using the lens of perception. From some outside entity.

Okay. So there’s a version of myself that’s like my best self, putting my best self forward. And there’s a version of myself that’s my favorite self. My favorite self is the times where I’m not even perceiving how other people would see me. I’m so fully embodied in myself. Those times are also times where I’m most present.

Right. Which makes a lot of sense ’cause you’d be super present. Yourself so you wouldn’t be perceiving outside of you. So my favorite version of myself is the times where I am fully embodied and present. Okay. So now fast forward like a couple like a month maybe after all that, when I started thinking about that.

And I come to you here on the show with like things that [00:09:00] I’ve been thinking about for a long time. So. I hear , a video comes onto my YouTube and you may know this guy Bahar. I don’t follow Bahar. I knew who he was when he came to my. My YouTube video. Lots of times I’ll turn on YouTube at night, like when I’m doing laundry or whatever, and I just have it on, and lots of times I’ll be listening to something positive, like I want something positive.

So I’ll have like Abraham Hicks. Now, if you’re familiar with Abraham Hicks, then it would make sense why Bahar would come into the next video for you, right? So I just had it on and I wasn’t doing something else, so I wasn’t shutting it off. I didn’t skip past it. And so I was listening and a woman was asking Bashar about moments where she felt not good enough, and Bashar said, for what?

Good enough for what? And [00:10:00] she said, well, like, just good enough. And he said, for what? To be yourself. Who else could be better at it? And , I got, I paused, so I’m gonna pause here. To, you’re not good enough to be yourself. Who could be better at it? So even if I’m being perceived as cringey or I’m, whatever the thing is that I’m doing, if I’m fully being myself, then there’s a zero chance that I’m not being good enough.

I’ve eliminated the opportunity to not be good enough. Nobody else could possibly be good as good at being me as I am and nobody else could possibly be as good as being you as you are. And so are we gonna make mistakes? Are we gonna do things [00:11:00] that are air quotes, like cringey? Yeah, that’s me being me.

Which makes me fully embodied and totally good enough because I’m fully experiencing life., I think that there’s this idea, and maybe it’s unconscious, and maybe you’ll listen to this and you’ll be like, I don’t have that, and if you don’t have that, I am so happy for you. Like I love that. Please call me.

I think we all have these moments where we’re like, oh my God, why am I so cringey? Why am I so dumb? Why? Why did I do that? Or I look back on things in my life and I think, like, I, God, I wish I hadn’t done that. Why did I do that? Why was I living that way? Why was I making that choice? What was my decision process?

But the truth, is that I was being fully me, which is I was learning, I was figuring out what was right. I was discerning,, and if I don’t have the bad, I don’t know what feels [00:12:00] good. And so those times in my life then where I feel shameful about or I regret or I just hate, or I wish I hadn’t worn that terrible style in that phase of my life or whatever, big or small, I couldn’t be me right now without those experiences.

And when I started to have these thoughts, it started. To change how I was perceiving myself and really quickly how confident I felt in myself, because I released the need, not totally, i’m still on the journey, but I released the need. There have been instances where I’ve felt it, where I have felt this total alignment to being myself and when I am that it’s my favorite self.

So now I no [00:13:00] longer wanna be my best self because I don’t wanna care about how I’m perceived in terms of somebody else determining if I’m worthy or if I’m good enough or if I am doing things right, because it may be that I’m doing something that I’m learning through. And it may be that I’m making mistakes because that’s how I decide what feels good and what feels bad, and there’s a place for me.

Being my favorite self, that if I harm other people in that process, that it is in my alignment to be fully me. To apologize for those things, to say I wish I had known something different. I wish I had been able to perceive something different and now I know, and so I can make amends and I can move forward and I can.

Forgive myself for whatever perceived failures [00:14:00] I had. I think there’s also a space in this for some things that aren’t perceived failures from the outside, but you may know. I did that, I, bypassed for way too long, or I put myself second or third or fourth, or fifth or 19th for way too long. And now, my favorite version of myself just fully embraces myself and forgives myself for whatever I put up with whatever I wished I hadn’t done, whatever I wished I hadn’t lived in, because right now I am in a place.

That I can be in alignment and I can be my favorite version of myself. So I wanted to share that thought with you because I think that there is, especially in the world of social media, of comparing ourselves and am I worthy? Oh [00:15:00] my God, did I do that good enough? Am I, doing things right?

Is my relationship good enough? Am I pretty enough? Am I doing my work good enough? Am I a good enough marketer? These are the things that come up for me, right? How can I compete against a standard that’s constantly changing and constantly somebody else’s version of maybe their favorite self or their best self?

How could I not be good enough to be myself? ’cause who could be better at it? Nobody else could possibly be as good at being you as you are. So I wanna offer you the thought this week that maybe you lean back and say, what’s my favorite version of myself do today? When something feels constricting, something makes you [00:16:00] upset or something is triggering for you, you say, what is my favorite version of myself?

What is the real, real deep down version of me? How does she handle this? And if you were triggered or upset by something later, you can say,, how does she heal from it? Now. Anytime I’m hysterical. I’m like, I know it must be historical. There’s something deeper in there. And so it may be in the moment I just accept myself for whatever I’m going through, and then later I say, what does the favorite version of me do?

How does she proceed from here? And from there, I can knock off all the comparing. I can always know that I’m being present and doing the best that I can in any moment, and that is, I think, how you live a big life. I hope that this was helpful. I hope that this made sense. [00:17:00] I’ll listen back, be like, I hope this made sense.

It was a lot of different thoughts in my mind, but it’s a real, a concept and an idea I really wanted to share with you. So I love you so much. Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next week. Bye-bye. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger.

Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today. You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless. And your life. It’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.