- Are you ready to have self-love
and be confident? (laughs) Sorry, I couldn't resist. Sometimes in this position, it just seems like we're car salesman and some of the pitches, hey, you know. And who, who's that guy, JP
Sears, who I think is his name, the comedian, he throws
people like me under the bus and he's just hysterical
and you know, he's right. A lot of times we do sound
like snake oil salesman. So I thought I'd, hopefully,
you have a sense of humor. I decided to poke a little fun of myself. But self-love and confidence
are important things and just like the introduction to this was a little bit different, I want to give you some
information that I think is a little bit different
than you normally get when it comes to how to develop self-love and how to be confident. And the first way I want
to distinguish it is,

you know what most people
say? Your posture. Make sure you know body posture, eye contact. I mean, those are important
things. You need those. You don't want to be
like, you know, who is it, Eeyore? Hello, I'm confident. You know, that's not going
to go over very well. Doesn't quite give the
image that you love yourself or show that you're confident. Yes, you want to visit,
visualize your success. You want to feel your success. That's something I talk about. You want to think positive. You want to do affirmations. You want to be grateful. Gratitude lists are important. Watch yourself talk. You know, challenge your limiting beliefs. Take action right away. All of those are great. They're legitimate and they are part of being
confident and self-love, but let's get a little-- I like to try and break
things down a little deeper.

and let's talk about the two things, self-love and self-confidence. Well, the first thing to recognize is self-love requires two things. The first one is self-esteem, and self-esteem is the belief that no matter what, whether you have a good career, whether you have money, whether you have the trophy husband or wife or the great kids, or, you know, the trappings or the visualization of success, that no matter what, you instinctively and inherently have worth. You, just the fact that you were born, are worthy. You don't have to do or be or accomplish anything. By yourself where you are, even at your lowest, you are of worth. That's self-esteem, that's one requirement of self-love. The second is confidence. Well, and what does confidence entail? Well, confidence entails the belief, it's a belief in yourself that you can achieve the things that you want.

I mean, within reason. I mean, there are many things in
life we can't control. Like, I would love to
be the greatest dunker of the basketball, but
I'm six foot one inches. I have about a two-inch vertical leap. It's just not going to happen. I can train all I want. And, you know, I'm just not going to dunk the ball. I mean, when I was younger, I barely could dunk the ball.
And I was an athlete back then. Some things we don't have control over, but we have confidence that in those areas where we do have control, that
we can achieve what we want. We put our mind to it. And
as long as we stick to it, we know that we'll get it. So that's the difference
between self-esteem and self-confidence. Well, when you put those two together, that's self-love, okay. So it's a combination. If you want self-love,

if you want to know how to be confident, you need to meld both self-esteem
and confidence together. So what's stopping people from that? Well, that's what I like to
call the scales of injustice. And it's been my life experience
all the years I've studied, and all the years I've worked with people, is what's stopping people from one, having confidence in
achieving what they want, and two, loving themselves, or I call it the scales
of injustice, okay. And what I mean by that is all of us have terribly low self-esteem,
that's the injustice. And then to compensate for that, we all are in massive denial. Now, what are we in denial? See, when we're in denial, we don't want to admit
that we feel really poorly about ourselves, that we
can't see our inherent worth, that we don't really believe in ourselves, that we have confidence that
we can achieve what we want.

but we mask over it with drugs, pills, with careers, lots of, you know, we chase all these different
things that present the image. No, I have it, I have self-esteem! We use these band-aids, right. And that's the scales of injustice. Well, what's at the heart here? What's the real problem? Where did we learn that
we had no inherent worth? Well, that's not innate. That is not an innate
characteristic of the human species. There's only one way we learn
that we have low self-esteem and low worth, childhood. The parenting that we all received. Now, this is-- A lot of people think I'm blaming parents. It's not it, it's an explanation. Look, no one teaches
us how to be a parent. We're all perfectly imperfect. Even if we, even if we
went to school all day, every day to learn how to be a parent.

the first thing we do in the first hour, we make 10 mistakes because we're human, and it's just an overwhelming job. I mean, think of it. Someone has to work, take care of other kids, manage themselves, manage their marriage or partnership that they're with, manage technology, the way other people drive, the other way people think, politics, emotion, like, I'm sorry. There's so much going on in life. How could a parent not make mistakes? And at times yell and scream and send the message to us that we don't have worth. That doesn't make, that's not a blaming of the parents, but that's just saying the sky is blue and the sun came up today. That's all it is, it's truth. But see our low self-esteem, this is the proof of the scales of injustice. We can admit that truth. No, no, no, it's not parents, it's not my childhood,

no, don't tell me that, Kenny! Don't make me admit that to myself. I can't admit the truth, and that's what's killing everybody. The single greatest killer on this planet today isn't COVID, it's not guns, it's denial. We don't want to accept that truth that we all have terribly low self-esteem, and we're all in massively high denial, and all of this starts in childhood. The science proves it. What have they said for centuries? Show me the man at seven years old, and I'll show you the man. We've known behavioral science, we become our childhood. And so anything in your adult life that isn't working, you learned it in childhood. That's been proven study after study, the adverse childhood experience. Like... Just Google! I mean if you don't believe me, just Google it, and you'll see page after page of we become our childhood. Like, this isn't, I'm not bringing up something controversial.

What is controversial about what I'm bringing up is that I'm the first person that really calls it out. Everyone skips that and doesn't want to point out that our parents were perfectly imperfect, and that we're all in denial, and that what's keeping us from loving ourselves and being confident is the inability to face this truth. So how do we truly be confident? How do we truly love ourselves? Well, we have to become an expert in confronting our denial and what basically, what's all encompassing our denial, what's in there? A couple of things. First of all, all of our perfect imperfections. This is all the things we don't want anyone to know about. All of our scabs, all of our skeletons. This is that dirty, dark secret in the closet. This is the virus that eats up the Petri dish, and at night, when we lay on the couch and we drink too much wine.

and we take sleeping
pills, and we have affairs, and we steal money, and we
do all the things we do. Those are perfect imperfections that we don't even want
to admit to ourselves, and we definitely don't want
to admit to someone else. Well, do you see what happens? If I go become an expert in
my perfect imperfections, if I can learn to love, forgive, and share with you how messed up I am,
what does that give me? Self-esteem. Do you see that? Self-esteem isn't the ability
to accept our perfection, that you're, you know, all
the things you're good at. Self-esteem is the ability
to accept all the things you're not good at. Remember? What does it require? A belief in your inherent worth, regardless of what you're doing, what you're being, any of it. You, as a human being, have
tremendous inherent worth.

And so the only way to
gain true self-confidence isn't the visualization, thinking
positive, all that stuff. That's window dressing, because nobody wants to
talk about the real issue. The real topic is, are
you willing to accept that in your imperfections
lies your greatness? That's the best part of you. 'Cause do you see what
the recovery process is? Here's what happens. In childhood, because we're all, you know, sent messages that we were
imperfect, what did we learn? Uh oh, this part of me,
mom and dad don't like. I need to get rid of
it. I need to banish it. And so when you sit there
and you shame yourself in your negative self-talk, like everyone's trying to
teach you to, you know, self-love and self-esteem stop all that. They're right. But what is the general feeling? God, I wish I could get rid
of this. I want to cut it off.

It's like you want to exorcise it, take it to a priest and say,
just remove this from me. Well, do you see what that is? That's the piece of you that
was told you don't have worth. So do you see that cutting
it off, getting rid of it, this is your addiction. This is all, you know,
the so-called bad things. This exorcism that you want to get rid of, this is your soul that you're
saying I, it has no worth. The solution is the opposite. It needs to be reintegrated,
it needs to be accepted. All it's lacking is love. Love from you. We can't get it back from our parents. This is our reclamation
project and process. We have to become our own parent and we have to go heal this
pain that was placed into us in childhood that we've
been trying to ignore and abandoned and society especially.

society goes, oh yeah, don't
talk about how bad you are. Don't admit your imperfections. Don't be a tattletale, right? Isn't that what we were taught as kids, don't be a tattletale? Don't you dare cry. What are you doing crying,
what are you upset for? Come on, be strong. That's past is in the past, let it go. Don't deal with it. What do you mean crying about over that? It's already over with let it go, kid. Shame, shame, shame. That's the message we've
been sending for centuries to every child and every
adult that if you look, you know, you talk about any of that. It was funny, I was watching
a documentary the other night about tennis and Andy
Roddick and this guy, oh my gosh, I'm going to
draw a blank on his name. Shoot.

But they were the rising
two American stars after, you know, that we're
going to be the next ones to replace Courier and Sampras
and Connors and McEnroe. And the one guy ended up
having severe anxiety. And they're showing these, you know, they went to this tennis academy,
both of them went his kids and the messaging to
have mental toughness. Don't show that you're weak. Never talk about it, never deal with it. The message, all the training
we've ever been given to have confidence and be
tough and strong mentally, is nothing but shaming, belittling and creating the separation of self that you only have worth if
you put up this false facade, like how I started the video, hey, let's have self-confidence! Like, I've got to act the
part of the car salesman. Like if I act the part I'm confident. No, that's not confidence. Confidence is look at my
scabs, aren't they beautiful?

Yeah. There's no difference between
that and my shiny suit, or my shiny car, or, you know,
the backdrop to my house. Sure, this looks great, but it's no, I mean, that's why I
share my scabs with you. There's no difference between the two. I'm a train wreck too. Sure, I like nice clothes,
this looks pretty, but I'm also really ugly. I have a lot of pain, a lot of hurt. Perfect imperfections. That's the reconciliation
of the scales of injustice. If I'm willing to be open and
transparent about my denial, about my imperfections,
about how awful I can be, not because I'm a bad person, but I have a lot of wounds
and I'm working on them. If I can share that and admit that, that's self-love. Now I can be confident and
come on here and be stupid and silly, and you maybe
you've already tuned me out.

and haven't even watched
this because it didn't fit. Like we have this model and
everything has to fit the model. If it doesn't fit the model, oh, he there's something wrong
with him, I can't watch him. He doesn't have his act together. Well, no, of course I don't. (laughs) No one that does this
as their act together! Do you realize the only, the people that do this kind of work, the reason they do it is
because we're so messed up. That's why we do it. We've been through such hell, but we've also not all of us, but many of us have worked our tail off to try and reconcile it. So it gives us an insight that most, because most people don't
ever want to deal with it and society says, don't deal
with it, they're struggling and so we might know some
things or do some things a little bit, might come
a little bit easier to us.

but it's only because we're so messed up, and we've been working at
it so much longer than you. You know, Michael Jordan, he's what, shot 20 million basketballs. He's got to be a little
bit better than you if all you did was go out
and shoot hoops with your kid on a Sunday afternoon, once a week. That's the difference, that's it. We are just as broken. Now, there are many that take this seat and try and hide that from you. And you get to decide,
maybe you prefer that. I don't know if that's better or worse. It's just different,
but you get to decide, but don't fool yourself. They're caught in this dynamic as well. Now they may choose not share it with you, and maybe that's better,
again, that's up to you, and everyone gets to decide that. I know at least in my life
experience that doesn't work. This dynamic of sharing all of me.

I mean, what do we want in a relationship? What is everyone's dream in a relationship? God, if someone could just accept me. What does that mean? What does it really mean? If they knew how awful I was and they love me anyway. So to me, if you're going to take this role, you better, you damn well better work on your denial and your scabs and share all of your pain and imperfections because how is anyone listening to you ever going to learn how to do it if you can't do it? It needs to be modeled. It wasn't modeled as a child, that's the self-esteem gap. That's what everyone's struggling with. So how do you truly get confident? You have to become an expert in healing the pain. It's two things, healing the pain from the past that created the low self-esteem and the next piece is becoming an expert in how you hide from yourself, how you don't show yourself the truth.

You're trying to protect those, all those so-called bad
things about yourself that you don't want to
admit to yourself or others that you've closeted off, because you have to open
the door to that denial. Because remember, what do you need to do? These are the pieces of
you that weren't loved. And damn it, what is self-esteem? That all of you, every aspect of you, you have inherent worth. This needs to be brought
back in, and the only way that can be done is you
have to become an expert in conquering your denial and seeing and admitting to yourself,
your perfect imperfections. Like that came to me, I don't know, was it five, seven years ago? I wrote about it in my book. I have a little chapter on
it, the day I saw my darkness. And for those of you who
haven't read my book, I was out for a walk and I
was feeling just so great.

about myself, I just
thought I was the cat's meow. I had met with some people that day, and it was like coffee meetings,
just get-to-know-you stuff, not dates, but business stuff. And I was out for this walk, and
I was thinking about the day and just, you know, affirmations, going God, and visualizing, and you know, and really pumping myself up, and really proud of myself, and I said, you know, I asked myself, I'm
always asking myself questions. I'm always confronting my denial. I didn't know that I was about to confront something very poignant, but I just asked myself,
why do you feel so good? And I thought through
the day of, you know, this woman that I'd met,
and within three questions, she was bawling her eyes out and telling me her whole life story, and part of why I was
feeling so good is I'm like, God, look how gifted I am of,
you know, in three questions.

this woman shared her life
story with me, and oh my God, I'm so good at what I do, da da da da da. Just really filled with self-importance. So I was asking
myself, what, you know, what is it you like so much about that? And the first thing that
came to my mind was power. That kind of startled me. And I kind of slowed down
the way I was walking, and I went power, what do you mean power? And I felt, I saw and felt this darkness in me that said I like the power. And what I'm going to explain
will take several minutes to explain, but all of this
happened like that. This whole, what I'm about to share with you, all of this happened in a split second, but it seemed to slow down. And you know, immediately what I saw
right there was, oh my God, I was a predator. I didn't help this woman.

If you seen the movie Predator, the old Schwarzenegger movie, the way that it's an alien that comes down to earth and it cloaks itself. It can become the scenery. And the way it survives is it takes a human being and sucks everything off of them and leaves a skeleton. In that moment, I got a vision of us leaving after, you know, talking and seeing her walk to her car, and she looked, you know-- Now here I am out for the walk, and I saw her, and I'm like, oh my God, she left like a carcass. I had sucked the life out of her. My questions weren't there to help her. They were because I could ask questions in a way that could expose her emotionally. Oh my God, I'm the devil! Oh my God, that's disgusting, that's not helping. That's vicious and evil. And I saw this darkness, and I literally

I was going for the walk, and I buckled. I just bent over, buckled, and just convulsed at the truth of how awful, how treacherous, and evil I was to this woman. And the second I saw how absolutely horrific I can be to somebody, immediately I got flooded with light. Like it was this, it was light. It not just white, but light. And I stood up, and I just started crying, and I just went, and I heard myself say, Oh my God, finally! This is why we have to see how imperfect we are. Once I was able to see the darkness that we all have. See, I was taught to use people because I was used as a child. I didn't know. I could never keep friends. People might like me, but then they drift away from me. I never knew why. In that moment, I finally knew why. I thought I was being nice. I didn't know. I didn't know that there's a way to ask questions.

that is terrifying. That is destructive and evil. That is meant to serve and
feed me, and is about power, and has nothing to do with
helping somebody else. I didn't know. I never knew that about me. And that's why that was
crying, 'cause like, now I can see it. I can do something about it. I was in denial all my life because that's all I've been taught. Don't look at your darkness,
don't admit your imperfections. Don't see it, don't talk about it. Don't deal with it, don't see your pain. That's all we've ever been taught. Right, all this... I get really angry at it now. The messages that people in
this industry especially try and sell you. I call it the Nike
philosophy, come on, be tough! It's garbage, complete garbage. The answer's in the opposite. As soon as I saw how awful I could be,

I was filled with light because what, what did I get? Truth. I saw myself authentically. What is self-esteem? Inherent worth. Every part of me. Like, if I can see and accept that, that's just awful, I can accept all of me. I can forgive myself. Because of the way the world works and people in this position have always taught, don't ever look at that, ignore it! Just be positive. Never deal with the dark stuff. No, no, no, no, no, don't go there. That's all anyone's ever taught. No one's ever taught this. How could I have known? I did the best I could with where I was. But now that I saw it, now I'm free. And so if you want true self-love, if you want true self-esteem, there's only one way to get it. You have to be willing to accept all of you. And that requires you becoming an expert in your darkness.

an expert in your denial. That requires you accepting
and learning how to let in and love those pieces of you
that your parents discarded and said, that's bad, you're a bad child, and then you learn to sequester those. And those are what cause
you to drink and act out and treat yourself poorly. That's your pain. It's a little child in you
that's going, will you love me? It's like, when I work with addicts, they're always afraid
I'm going to get them to quit their addiction. I'm like, no, 'cause I know your addiction is only because deep inside
there's a child in you that wasn't loved. So I'm here to love that
child inside of you. If that child decides it no
longer needs the addiction, the child would decide that, not me. That's why you drink and drug
is because somebody told you who you needed to be. Well, I'm not doing that,
you're fine the way you are.

I like you, and I will love
you just the way you are. That's what an addict needs, that little child to be
validated that they have worth. And so do you. And that's what this process gives you. When you confront your perfect
imperfections, your darkness, your denial, the only outcome is true self-love, true
self-esteem, that's it. From that place, you have
confidence that you can conquer and become and do anything
you put your mind to that's within your
control, that's reasonable. Can you see that now? Can you see how well affirmations
and being grateful and they're helpful, but
they'll never get you there. There's only one way to get there. You have to love all of you, the most broken and perfectly
imperfect aspects of you. Okay, now, if you don't
know how to do that, I have a couple of videos
that are also articles.

I'm going to give you several options. You can go to my online magazine site, www.thegreatnessuniversity.com. If you look under the self-love category, you'll see it's an article with a link to a video. It's called, Three Steps to Love and Accept Yourself. So you can read it while you watch the video. That will give you kind of, you know, basic self-love stuff. You can do that or you can just go to YouTube and watch the video if you don't like the article. There's also, to help you learn how to start seeing your denial, you have to pick up my book, Your Journey to Success, because what you're caught in is the worst day cycle. And many people aren't even, they can't, they they're not aware of their trauma. They're in such high denial about their childhood they can't see it. And so you need to learn how to start healing.

from the worst day cycle and identifying it in your life. And it'll take time. You have to read that, I'm serious. You have to read my book three to five times a year for several years, because your denial is so high. It's going to take a while for your brain to release and go, oh, we're going to deal with this now. And you'll start having memories. Like, you'll start, just like me, you'll start to see, oh, wait a minute. I thought I was kind and loving. Oh no, that's not, that's actually the opposite. It takes us time to learn for our brain to go, oh, so we're going to be real with ourselves now. We're going to love and accept ourselves. Like it's okay, it's safe. You're now here to protect me, this little kid that I had to banish to please my parents.

you're now going to step up and take that role, and so I can share with, you know, this is an internal subconscious conversation that happens to every individual, so I can let go of all these defense mechanisms, all these lies I've told myself. I can drop all that because now I can trust you. You're going to be the parent I never had. You're going to love me and embrace me and bring me back together. That process takes time. So I encourage you to go to Amazon and pick up my book, Your Journey to Success, so you can learn about the worst day cycle. And then the next thing is, go back to the website, www.thegreatnessuniversity.com, and go under, which would it be... I can't, I'm losing track of all the different, I think it's childhood trauma. Just check all the different dropdown menus but with the articles, you're looking for how to heal from your past.

That lays out. It's the video. It's the article. But if you go under free content, that's what I was thinking about, the free content section. There is an actual pamphlet you can download, which gives you the total process to start healing this underlying trauma, which allows you to regather yourself, accept yourself, and so you're kind of conquering the cycle. You're conquering the denial. You're healing the trauma all at once. There are many things going on at play. A lot of things. There are a lot of things in what I teach. I don't tell you about because it just gets to be too much. And also many things in recovery, you just need to live them. It's more powerful when you discover it on your own. And so, you know, many times when I talk about these things, I'm just sending you there and when you take the journey.

then you'll write me. That's when we have the
discussion, because people go, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, yes, yes, 'cause now it's time
to have the discussion. Right now, it wouldn't make sense. And it'd probably go
over most people's head, just 'cause, cause the journey, that's how the journey works. And I had to, just like me discovering how much denial I was
in and how awful I was, I wasn't ready to admit that to myself. It took me a while to get there. Okay, all right, so I
hope this made you laugh. Hope it made you cry. Hope it gave you hope that there is something, a deep intricate process
to gain true self-esteem, true self-love, and true confidence. And I know it can be scary
to challenge all this, but trust me, every person I've ever
worked with and with myself,

this man, when you start challenging this, it's not as scary as you think, it's actually really easy. And it's so just like that moment, you get filled with so much joy when you admit and see your imperfections. You know, you've been medicating and running away from your denial with all of these coping skills because you don't want to experience it, and you think they keep you happy. You know, the trips, the clothes, the affairs, the drugs, the alcohol, all the different things that you use to try and avoid this, and you convince yourself, you use cognitive dissonance that, oh no, this makes me happy! No, no, I'm good. I don't need to go here! Trust me. When you learn how to do this, you'll experience a level of joy way beyond any of these. You can put all of those experiences together, they don't touch one of these, and in part, that's what scares people.

They've never experienced that, and they're scared to death of it. I had someone comment on one
of my posts today about that. That's the responsibility
of actually living in joy. It is a terrifying proposition for all of us, and I can relate to that. I still struggle with it. If you liked this, please like it. If you think someone can
benefit from it, share it. Leave me your comments. Let me know if you think this is helpful to you, and as always, enjoy the journey.

Self Love | How To Be Confident

Self Love | How To Be Confident