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STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP

Are you mean to yourself? You aren’t alone. Listen in as I teach you how to stop beating yourself up so you can fall deeply in love with yourself instead.

STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP

Mar 22, 2021 | MINDSET | 0 comments

“Falling in love with yourself has a trickle down effect. When you love yourself deeply, every other relationship in your life changes.”

The relationship you have with yourself is the most important relationship of your life. Yet, often you treat yourself like crap. In fact, you treat yourself in a way that you would NEVER treat anyone else. 

This has got to stop…and you know it.

You see how you’re your own worst critic often and you’re over it. You want to learn to stop beating yourself up once and for all.

If this is you, this week’s episode is for you. 

IN IT, I’M TEACHING…

  • What’s causing you to beat yourself up
  • How to fully become aware of what you’re saying to yourself (because most of our self-talk is in the unconscious mind)
  • The question to ask yourself when you’re beating yourself up to shift your mindset 
  • How to consciously fall in love with yourself instead

…and so much more

Stopping your negative self-talk is one of the most important skills you can ever learn. Make time to listen to this episode; you’re worth it.

Listen via the link at the top of this page.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Apply to coach with me

Continue the conversation in my free online community

Full Transcript

How to Stop Beating Yourself Up

This is the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast with Lindsay Preston Episode 104,
Stop Beating Yourself Up.

[music]

Welcome to the Become An Unstoppable Woman podcast, the show for goal-getting,
fear-facing women for kicking ass by creating change. I’m your host, Lindsay Preston.
I’m a wife, mom of two, and a multi-certified life coach to women all over the world.
I’ve lived through enough in life to know that easier doesn’t always equate to better.
We can’t fear the fire, we must learn to become it. On this show, I’ll teach you how to
do just that. Join me as I challenge you to become even more of the strong, resilient,
and powerful woman you were meant to be. Let’s do this.

[music]

Hi there, Ms Unstoppable, so excited to have you for this episode. Thank you for taking
time to listen to it. On it, I’m going to teach you how to stop beating yourself up.
Beating yourself up is something that’s costing you a lot of happiness in your life and
you likely know this. It’s also costing you the results that you want in your life. You’re
likely feeling stuck often by beating yourself up, but you don’t know how to stop it. You
may not even be fully aware of all the things you’re telling yourself day in and day out
because most of our self-talk lives in our unconscious mind. This episode is for you.

If you know you are your own worst critic, if you know you speak to yourself in a way
that you would never speak to somebody else and if you’re just curious of, “Maybe
there’s more inside of me that I’m saying to myself because I don’t fully have the
results that I want in my life. I’m not fully feeling the way that I want to feel. I know
there’s got to be more to that,” then today’s episode is for you.

In essence, I’m going to teach you how to not only stop beating yourself up, but fall in
love with yourself. Falling in love with yourself has a trickle down effect. When you
love yourself deeply, every other relationship in your life changes from your most
intimate relationship with maybe your marriage or your partner, to parenting, to your
career.

When you love yourself, it’s almost like the red carpets just get rolled out for you in
every pathway of life because you are so deeply in love with you that everywhere you
go, people just can’t help but fall in love with you too. When they don’t love you, you’re
like, “Man, that’s on you. It’s got nothing to do with me,” so you don’t spin in that. You
don’t have that snowball into going in the opposite direction of your dreams. You just
let it be known that that’s their stuff and you just keep rocking in your own amazing
self. I know for a lot of people, they think falling in love with themselves is corny and
silly and snowflakey. I thought I was on that board too, or on that bandwagon too, I
guess.

Now, that I’m on this other side of loving myself most of the time– I’m not perfect.
You’re still always going to have some negative self-talks. If you’re here like, “I’m going
to diminish it all,” just know, I don’t think that’s necessarily feasible, but you can
diminish it a lot to where it’s less than 10% of what you’re hearing every day. When you
do hear it pop up, it feels so foreign, you know how to shift it and get back to talking
really positive to yourself. It doesn’t really serve you to talk negative to yourself at all.
Our brain likes to think it does, which brings me right into the first point I want to cover
of why do we talk to ourselves like this?

Well, this is our inner mean girl voice. If you listen to this show often, you know what
this is. In case you’re new here, this inner mean girl voice is part of our brains. It lives in
the amygdala. In the psychology world, they call it the ego. There are many names for
it. Some people call it the shadow self, the full self, the conditioned self. It goes on and
on and on and on. It’s really the storehouse of condition behavior that you’ve had in
your life. It’s highly emotional in this part of your brain. This is the part of your brain as
you were growing as a child, was just the forefront of making your decisions and taking
in what you interpreted about the world.

You’re building all these brain wires in this amygdala or this inner mean girl space, so
all these negative beliefs are coming in about you and others in the world because,
again, you’re not fully logical yet when you’re a kid. A lot of times, that inner mean girl
really wraps around these beliefs and believes in them so strongly that she thinks of
things in a lot of black and white terms. Meaning like all men are pigs, would be one,
or, when you put yourself out there, you’re going to get hurt, would be another one.
Again, she’s wrapping her power around these and wanting to keep you safe and secure
at the end of the day, but it’s not serving you.

You’ve got to first know what the inner mean girl voice is and know that this is your
negative voice. Anything negative you’re telling yourself, it’s from that inner mean girl.
Really, if we were to strip away the meanness of an inner mean girl, she’s really just
your inner child. She’s that child version of you that had some crappy things happen to
her. She may have had external crappy things happen to her with a parent, at school, or
she may have had things happen where she blamed herself a lot. You’re like, “Oh, I
can’t believe I did that,” and really beating yourself up. I know for me, one example of
me really beating myself up, especially later down the years, is in third grade.

For whatever reason, me and this other girl would come in after recess and tattle on
this girl and say she did things that she didn’t do. At the time, I don’t know why I
decided to go in on this lie and tattle about this girl all the time and my teacher always
believed it, but later down the road, I look back on that, I’m like, “Why did I do that?” I
started to really beat myself up for doing something so hateful to this girl in third
grade for, again, whatever reason. The inner mean girl was mad and beating myself up
for her own behavior almost. It’s crazy silly, but that’s how she works. For a lot of
people, their inner mean girl voice is the voice of a parent, especially if that parent was
harsh.

For me, my inner mean girl voice, for a long time, was my mom. My mom was very
critical. I’m sure her mom was critical and so on and so forth. It was just passed down.
My inner mean girl was just constantly criticizing me and putting me down. It just felt
like my mom was living in my head for so many years. Just be aware of that, that that’s
where it’s coming from. It’s this part of you that you can change. The way that you can
change it is, first, to be aware of it. Awareness is always the first step to change. Then
two, to go in and discover her more and give her a microphone.

I tell my clients all the time she’s whispering in your ear many times because a lot of
her beliefs in the unconscious. We’ve had them for so long since they’ve come from
childhood, so we’re just constantly sitting there day after day feeling the same way,
doing the same things and wondering why we’re not getting different results. It’s
because that inner mean girl has these deep-seated beliefs that she doesn’t really want
to bring to the surface. We’ve got to give her a microphone and say, “Inner mean girl,
what do you got?” My coaching process, what we do is we actually interview their inner
mean girl.

I ask them questions based on neuroscience. It’s happened in this part of their brain. It
doesn’t sound as woo woo and weird as it is. It’s just me asking questions, but it’s crazy
how it works. Two, I have them go through their top 10 worst memories and tell me,
what were the thoughts that you had that you took away from those experiences?
Those are your thoughts of your inner mean girl. We’re bringing that to the light. What’s
crazy is that then they have that list of those beliefs they’ve had. In essence, their inner
mean girl gets interviewed. Then they start seeing it everywhere. They’re like, “Oh my
gosh, Lindsay, I saw those beliefs again.” We call them bullet holes because they’re
painful.

They’re more than just beliefs. “That bullet hole here, that bullet hole there. Oh my
gosh. I see how it’s just repeating everywhere. I hear her now. I hear the difference
between the two because we separated the two voices out.” That’s very, very powerful.
If you’re somebody who hasn’t coached with me, then the way that you can start to do
this is to just, in essence, build a character around your inner mean girl. For a lot of my
clients, I just have them answer this simple question and all of the sudden, they’re like,
“Yes. She’s like Corella,” or, “She’s like this girl named Pam that I went to high school
with.” They just have this character they’re able to pull together really quickly.

For me, my very first inner mean girl voice was a witch. I just knew it right off the bat.
When my coach asked me, she’s like, “What’s she like?” I’m like, “She’s like a witch.
She’s just mean and nasty. She puts me down all the time,” and all of those things. Just
start to give her that microphone and just say, “Inner mean girl, what have you got to
say to me today?” A really great way for you to do this too is go in front of the mirror
and look at yourself. I encourage you to do it when you are naked. Just start to hear all
the thoughts of, “Oh, look at your stomach, oh, look at your breasts. Oh look at that,
look at that.” That’s going to really bring it to life.

Many times, people avoid the things that they know are going to bring out the inner
mean girl voice, be it the mirror, sometimes it’s the bank account, sometimes it’s those
uncomfortable conversations with people that they know they need to have because
that inner mean girl voice can just get so loud. Avoiding your problems is not going to
make it any better. You’ve got to go in and you’ve got to face that stuff. What I’m giving
you here on the show, especially if you coach with me, is going to allow you to face
that stuff and have the tools to overcome it.

Go in there, look in the mirror, face the bank accounts, have the conversation, look at
the things from your past that were so painful and start to hear what the inner mean
girl has to tell you because that’s the stuff that we need to know about so that we can
change it. I’ll give you an example. If I go and stand in front of the mirror, most times
my inner mean girl is like, “Lindsay, your breasts. Oh, they are just so small. Now that
you’ve had kids and you’ve nursed, they are not as perky anymore. God, if you just had
bigger breasts then your stomach would look smaller and you’d be more proportional
with the bottom half of your body.”

That’s her one thing, she loves talking about my breasts over and over and over and
over and over. What you need to do then, as you are hearing that voice, ask yourself
this question. This question is so important, “Is it serving me to think those things
about myself?” Stick with that for a minute. Just take a deep breath because to the
inner mean girl, she thinks she is being very, very helpful. As I said earlier, she thinks
she is protecting you and keeping you safe. What is she really doing? If we go to my
breast example, how is that helping me to sit there and judge my breasts? It’s not.
There’s no purpose to that whatsoever.

To my inner mean girl, the purpose is, I’m going to tell you about all these crappy
things about your breasts because when somebody rejects you then we can go back to,
it was your breasts. Kid you not too, this happened to me. When my ex had his double
life, you better believe one of the first things I did was when I found the other woman
was like, “Does she have big breasts? She does. That’s why he left me.” That was just
like, “Oh, wipe it clean, now I know. It was because of the breasts that was part of it.”
I’m like, “Lindsay, that is so silly.” Maybe it was part of it, who knows? I don’t know. I’m
not going to sit here and beat myself up for something like that over and over and over
again.

If he goes and cheats on me and somebody leaves me because of my breast, that’s their
models. Models meaning their thoughts and their behaviors and it really has nothing to
do with me because this is just who I am. Instead of me sitting here and beating myself
up, I’m going to love myself instead. I’m going to choose consciously that I was given
these breasts for a reason. I don’t know why I was given breasts that were the size they
were. I don’t know, but it’s part of my journey. I’m just going to love in acceptance
because I have this core belief that everything happens for a reason. It’s just one of my
core beliefs, you don’t have to believe that.

I’m like, “I was given these breasts for a reason. I don’t know why, this is why.” Then I
start to change the thoughts and I get to, maybe not quite positive thoughts, but maybe
more neutral thoughts of, “I’m so glad I have breasts. I’m so glad I have two breasts
that fed two children. I’m so glad that I’m a woman and I can be any kind of woman I
want to be. Even a woman with small breasts.” Part of this is society’s program in
thinking we all have to have hourglass figures. We don’t. It’s just part of society’s
program and Lindsay, let that go. You can choose to love yourself however you want.
Then on certain days when I’m feeling real sassy [chuckles] and real positive, I might be
like, “Oh, man, I love my breasts. I love the size that they are. I think they look great.
They are awesome.” I go into all that stuff. You are going to have days where you are
going to beat yourself up more than others, especially if you are not taking enough
self-care and filling that love tank, in essence, of your energy tank, however, you want
to view it, because you are going to be depleted and then that’s going to give that
inner mean girl power to come in. Let’s face it, it takes energy to diminish that inner
mean girl.

Even after you’ve done mindset work like I’ve done for so many years and I know ins
and outs of the inner mean girl voice and I can do all the things to diminish her, when I
am worn out from not doing self-care, she comes in strong. I have to just know that
part of my journey in this life is doing self-care and that’s a non-negotiable for me.
When she starts getting in stronger, I know, I need to up that self-care. I need to go
higher now, I need to make this stronger. Again, you’ve got to consciously start to do
this work, bring her forth and you will be like, “Lindsay, but it’s just so painful. It’s so
painful to hear that voice.” Yes, it is. It is really painful.

I remember how painful it used to be for me. Just know there are options out there for
you to start to diminish this voice. What I’m giving you today is the very first step.
Again, I’m going to go back to you can’t just keep avoiding these problems thinking
they are going to go away, they are not. You’ve got to go in and face this stuff. You feel
like, “Oh, but Lindsay I know I could coach with you, but it’s just the money.” Is the
relationship you have with yourself worth the money? As I said, when you work on
yourself, everything else changes around you. Yes, it’s going to be a scary investment to
invest in something like coaching to start off with.

This is why I guarantee results for my clients because I know how scary it is. I was
there, I invested the last few thousand I had in coaching. I know what it feels like to be
like, “Oh my gosh. Am I going to make an ROI on this?” That’s why I guarantee you
results because, in time, in just a few weeks if not a few months, you are like, “Oh, man,
I’m so glad I did this.” You start making your money back. Just know there are resources
for you out there. One of the best things I ever did for myself was investing in coaching
and the reason why is because I changed my self-talk. I stopped beating myself up.

That not only did it open up all these doors for me to go out there and attract the guy
that was worth attracting. One who didn’t, in essence, treat me like crap. Even if on the
surface he was nice to me, behind the scenes, I had a lot of guys who weren’t. If you’ve
heard my story, you’ve heard I dated a lot of cheaters, a lot of people who lied. Part of
that was because I didn’t think I was that great. I beat myself up all the time. Same with
my career. I was underpaid for a long time. I didn’t think I was that great. Even if on the
surface maybe I tried to act like I was that great and I had my moments of acting like I
was great, I would go up and down often.

It was a rollercoaster ride. Some days I’d really love myself, some days I wouldn’t. Now
I’m at a place where some days I really love myself and some days I’m neutral. [laughs]
Most of the time I really love myself. Every year that I do this work more and more, I go
up on that levels of how much I love myself. The lowest I go is pretty neutral. I don’t go
back into those deep dark hate days where I hated myself. You can tell by the changes I
made in my life because of them. Money comes more abundantly to me, my life is so
much easier, I feel so much better. It all went back to myself.

Think about this, sometimes we meet people and we think they are really awesome, but
then you can tell they don’t think they are that great. It’s unfortunate because you are
like, “Oh man, I really would love to give you some abundance.” I can think of
specifically, somebody that I wanted to be friends with. I just think she is so great. I
could tell in her mindset that she didn’t think she was as great as I viewed her to be my
friend. She didn’t think she was worthy of that and I wasn’t going to sit around and
convince her. I tried, but because she didn’t love herself enough. She beat herself up
too much for that. Then we both lost out on that. Not only her, but I lost out too. I
really wanted to be friends with her.

This is something that is, again, so beyond you. If you are wanting to have deep
relationships, you’re wanting to have a very deeply fulfilling life, if you are wanting to
make a certain amount of money and appear in a certain amount of way, you’ve got to
love yourself in that process. It goes back to that simple process again. Bring forth that
inner mean girl. Something else I give my clients; I tell them to journal. As they
develop the character of their inner mean girl and stuff, they journal from that inner
mean girl. She refers to who you are in the third person. Just to be like, “Lindsay is da,
da, da. Lindsay, da, da, da, la, la.” Just let her go out on paper. Tell all the feelings.

I feel so mad because, I feel so pissed or sad, or whatever, anxious. A lot of times too, if
we are looking at the lens of an inner mean girl is like an inner child, that inner child
just wants to be heard. If I think about my two-year-old son, he has big meltdowns still
obviously. I’m not diminishing him when he is doing that. I’m going in and it’s like, “Tell
me, what’s going on? How do you feel?” “I feel sad.” “Why do you feel sad?” “My car,” or,
“I want this or that.” Then I honor the feeling, I go into that feeling with him, then he
processes it through. Most of us as kids, we didn’t get all that. Now, I’m not a perfect
parent either.

My daughter will tell you, she’s 10, my son’s 2, I haven’t messed up as much with him.
My daughter though, I’ve made mistakes. There are times that I’m like, “Oh, Izzy, go to
your room.” It’s like I’m not in the headspace to hold space for her and her feelings.
Later then, hopefully, I can manage that and have her process some things. Again, that
takes a very evolved parent to be able to do that kind of stuff. I didn’t have any of that
growing up. Most of us didn’t because most of our parents weren’t given mental health
tools. We’re just at this place in our consciousness as human beings to start to look at
mental health more.

You’ve got to go in and hold that space for yourself and be like, for me, little Lindsay,
“What’s going on here? What have you got to say to yourself, or got to say to me? What
do you need to be heard?” Even with some of my clients, I’ll have them go in and even
just visually hug the little version of themselves and give them love. I know it sounds
silly to some of you, but it’s so helpful, believe it or not, and they just love on that beat.
Again, loving yourself is a way you’re going to stop beating yourself up. You’ve got to
quit viewing yourself in these different personas. I know right now I’m telling you,
there’s inner mean girl and then there’s the real you, which we call the authentic self in
my coaching.

We do have to separate them just to be like– like if two kids were in a fight. “Separate.
What’s going on here? What did you do? What did you do?” In time, we bring them back
together and it’s all you. When you’re beating yourself up, it’s like, “Oh, wait a second,
why would I do that to myself, that’s not cool. That’s not going to help me get to my
direction of my dreams.” Some people think, let’s take weight loss, for example, “I want
to lose weight. Well, I’m going to beat myself up all the way to weight loss because I’m
so fat and I’m so ugly and I’m so gross and blah, blah, blah.” Then you know, what
happens? The weight loss feels really heavy and hard.

Maybe it gets you your goal weight if you get there because, again, it’s going to be
really hard beating yourself up that much. You know what you’re going to do when you
are at your ideal weight, you’re going to beat yourself up. The thoughts are still going
to be there. This is the way to change everything, my friends, is to change your self-talk,
it’s so important. I’m touching it so often with my clients, even my more advanced
clients that I have in my Living the Dream ongoing coaching program. Something will
happen and so I’ll say, “Let’s run your models.” If you listen closely to the show, you
know what tool I’m talking about, it’s the self-coaching model.

Circumstance happens and I’m like, “What are your thoughts about the circumstance?”
We pull those. I’m like, “Great.” We bring awareness to that. Then you know what
happens? They have thoughts about their thoughts. Then what happens is, we can’t
even deal with the thoughts about the original circumstance, we have to deal with the
thoughts of them judging themselves for having that thought. I just met with an old,
old client of mine. She is going through something very hard, personally, I won’t get
into details of what that is, just something hard and something that she is needing to
mourn and she’s needing to feel sad about because that’s just what you do when these
kinds of things happen.

As I was helping her just process her feelings, she was beating herself up, in essence,
for some of the thoughts she was having about other people who weren’t quite
understanding how she was feeling. I was like, “Listen, you’re allowed to feel whatever
you need to feel and you’re allowed to have whatever thoughts you want to have, if you
feel like those are serving you, but you going in and beating yourself up for feeling this
way, or thinking this way is not serving you at all. It’s just adding a whole other layer to
the work that you need to do.” She’s like, “Oh, you’re right.”

Again, sometimes we just need somebody to see that in ourselves and to give us
permission to just let that stuff go because it’s just, again, adding another layer of
things that we don’t need to be dealing with. Let’s just walkthrough. I’ll look at my
notes too and I’ll walk you through my notes one more time. How do you stop beating
yourself up? First off, bring awareness to that mean girl. Remember, this is her job, she
thinks she’s helping, but you’ve got to start to listen to what she’s saying. The way you
start to listen is, step two, you do things like stand in front of the mirror, you face the
things that you’ve been avoiding and you just listen to what comes up for you.

You’re not judging it, you’re just listening. Then step three, you’re asking yourself, how
does this serve you to think all those negative thoughts. Really take it in, don’t rush
through these steps, you’re going to want to be like, move on to the next step. Really
listen, as I said, and then really ask yourself, how does it serve you, and really take that
in because if you rush through these steps, it’s not going to work. You’ve got to sit
down and be like, “How does this serve me?” Think of ways in which it does not serve
you to think that way. Think through both steps. We go back to my breast example.

How does it serve me? Well, if somebody leaves me, then I can blame it on my breasts.
I’m like, “Okay, that’s my only reason?” How does it not serve me? Well, it makes me
feel like shit. Makes me not want to connect more to my husband and I go on and go
on and go through all those reasons. Then when that next thought comes up again,
because it will come up again, “Oh, Lindsey, your breasts.” I have some ways to talk
back to it and be like, “Listen, that’s not serving me and letting me grow. No, I love my
breasts. My breasts are great, my breasts serve my babies.” Whatever I need to say to
myself. Then choose those conscious loving thoughts, like what I just said, whatever
you’re going to say back to them.

Another exercise I have my clients do when they’re really working on loving themselves
is to write a love letter to themselves every single day for 21 straight days. Now, it’s
going to sound silly to some of you, but it works. Dear Lindsay, I love you so much. Just
writing those things every single day. You can even hug yourself. This is one I took
from Brooke Castillo, she wakes up every day and hugs herself and she says, “I love you
so much, Brooke.” I started doing it, it’s awesome. Every day I wake up, “Oh, I love you
so much, Lindsay.” I look in the mirror. “I love you so much. I love you so much,”
because you know what? Stuff’s going to come at you all day long, people aren’t going
to always understand you, especially if you’re playing a big game of life like I’m starting
to, I’m putting myself out there more and more and more.

I get some “hate” that’s what you could call it, I guess. Then I love myself so much, I’m
like, “It doesn’t impact me as much anymore.” I start to get very conscious of how I
speak to myself. Again, journaling can help you do this to put your thoughts down on
paper and start to see and bring all that stuff to that conscious mind. This is what you
do and when you do it, the whole world is going to open up for you because you love
yourself so deeply. One of the people that I admired the most as a kid was Lucille Ball.
She said a quote something like this, “Loving yourself is the most important skill you
can have.” I’m butchering it a little bit.

I remember hearing that very briefly from her when I was younger and it made an
impression on me. I was like, “I wonder what that means.” I don’t really know. Now that
I’m on the other side of it, I know exactly what it means. It’s vital if you want to play
this big game of life and to love your life in the process. It all goes back to loving
yourself. You got your nuggets of wisdom for this week. Go out there implement them,
reach out as always if you need me in my free online community,
lindsayepreston.com/community is where you can find me. Always link in the show
notes or email me. You know where to find me there too. All right, my friend. I will see
you next week. Bye.

[music]

Hey there, Miss Unstoppable. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. If you
enjoyed it, share it with a friend. Send them a picture of this episode via text, via email,
share it on social media, I’m sure they would be so appreciative to know these
strategies and tips on how to accomplish your dreams. If you are ready to guarantee
you’re going to accomplish your goals and dreams, then it’s time to start coaching with me.
In my nine-month simple success coaching system, I am going to walk you every single
step of the way to ensure that you get the goals and dreams that you want. The first
step is to apply for a free 60-minute consult call. Just go to LindsayEpreston.com/apply
to get started. As always, my friend, remember, you’re only as unstoppable as you believe you can be, so believe in yourself. You got this.

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Hi! I'm Lindsay

Hi! I’m Lindsay Elizabeth Preston. I’m a certified & trauma-informed life & leadership coach who has spent the last decade helping successful women create lives that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside by using my neuroscience-backed coaching process called, Awakened Woman.


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