Ep #74: Loving the Shit Out of Yourself

You are listening to episode 74 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you start loving the shit out of yourself. Alright, let’s go.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hello, hello my confident coaches. How are you doing out there? So this is kind of a very special episode. Do you remember very special episodes of your favorite TV shows when you were growing up? I’m totally aging myself but of course I am because the very special episode is this is the birthday episode.

This is the annual birthday episode, which I’m pretty sure I just made up. I don’t remember if I actually did a birthday episode last year. I probably did. But I assume I did but I don’t actually know. It’s April, it’s Aries season. Both my husband, the handsome hubby, Trey, and I, have birthdays this week.

His birthday is April 7th, he’s going to be 49 this year, and my birthday is this Saturday, April 10th, and I am going to be 47. Yes, we are two Aries and we are not supposed to work as a married couple and yet we’re celebrating our 18th anniversary next month so somehow two fire signs, stubborn and hotheads are making it work. If that’s possible, my friends, anything is possible.

And also, what I love about this episode, what I’m going to bring to you this week is a great follow up to what we did last week. So last week’s episode was all about the quarterly course-correct, which is kind of an evaluation of what worked and didn’t work the first part of this year.

And now here we are, the first week of a new quarter and what we’re going to talk about today is loving the shit out of yourself. So it’s possible that evaluation kind of – we focused on some things that weren’t working and you might have had more of that than what was working, particularly if you don’t have the result that you want yet.

And I want to offer that there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s not a sign that anything’s going wrong at all. But this episode is going to be all about the love, all about the amazing and the awesome that you are and that I am.

I was thinking about why this is so important. And that’s because listen, I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. You aren’t going to go through the rest of your life without these different parts of your brain. Your Helga brain, your inner cavewoman, the one that tells you to proceed with caution, that tells you all the things that are going to go wrong, the one that will shout at you all the things you aren’t good at and that you can’t do in order to keep you in the cave, she’s not going anywhere.

Stop believing her just because she’s saying it and to believe more about what Gigi is telling you. This is a full-on Gigi episode. This is right here, this is where we are going to let Gigi shine, which is possibly something you’ve never done before, right?

Helga is always going to be focused on what doesn’t work, your shortcomings, what you could be better at, and how often do you stop and purposely focus just on what you are good at, what you’re amazing at, what you love about yourself?

This is a super important part of the Confident Coaches Mastermind. So if you’re new here, this is my free podcast and you can get all my good stuff for free. You can have me in your ear every single week. But if you want me in your brain every single week, you have to enroll in the Confident Coaches Mastermind.

I enroll in a January class, we are enrolling the April class right now, we have a July class, and an October class. So we enroll every three months, once a quarter. Isn’t that convenient? This conversation.

And this is so important because if you want to believe you can do what you’ve never done before, you have to start practicing believing new things about yourself. If you’ve never done that before, if this episode sounds like complete foreign territory, then all the more reason to lean in and see what’s available to you here.

If you want to believe you can do new things, you have to believe new things about yourself and that starts with learning how to love the shit out of you. So this episode right here is kind of an extravagant over-loving of yourself but it’s also a skill that you will learn inside the mastermind because you simply won’t create new things if you can’t believe new things about you.

And this is all about let’s start with what you already know is awesome, what you already believe is true, what you don’t have to argue with yourself, what you don’t have to build like, well, it’s possible I could be. You’re like, no, here’s what I know is awesome about me.

So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to give you some prompts. So right now, if you need to hit pause, go ahead. I want you to grab some pen and paper. If you’re off and on a walk or in the car, listen to the whole thing and come back. But if you can, grab some pen and paper and I want you to jot down these prompts.

I’m going to give them to you and what I want you to do with them is I’m going to give you just kind of a bunch of prompts to be able to find what you do love about yourself, what you do think is amazing about you, what you do think is pretty awesome, and I want you to use them to write a love letter to you.

And then you’re going to actually hear me tell you what I love about me because it’s my birthday week and we are all about celebrating Amy today. And here’s the interesting thing, Amy of five, 10 years ago would have been mortified to bring you this podcast.

An episode all about Amy telling people what is so awesome about her, no one wants to hear that shit. Doesn’t matter if anybody else wants to hear that shit. The thing is I wasn’t willing to own that stuff. I felt weird even talking about myself in that way. I was afraid to love me.

And that is such a sign that is so classic lack of confidence because we’ve just never been told it’s okay to do that. We’ve been told all of our life it’s not about you and we shouldn’t brag, and we really shouldn’t have attention all on us, which is hilarious because apparently as an Aries, I’m supposed to always want attention on me, which was the opposite of how I lived almost all of my life.

And now I’m kind of stepping into my full-on Aries. So some of you, this might be complete foreign territory, but understand that it’s all about learning to appreciate what you do have and what you do bring to the table. And that is a backbone of confidence. And it’s not bragging.

I’m bragging is a thought. I’m sharing with the world what I see in me that is beautiful and awesome and amazing and I am proud of doesn’t mean we think we’re better than other people. And I want to offer you that confidence is the opposite of that.

Bragging and being arrogant and being cocky means I need to be better than others in order to be okay with me. But confidence and owning what I know is beautiful and amazing and awesome about myself is like, guys, listen, here’s how I’m awesome and guess what? You’re awesome too. Let’s go be fucking awesome together.

It’s a huge difference. Confidence versus cocky. Confidence versus arrogance. Confidence and loving yourself versus bragging and being conceited. Those are two entirely different things, being conceited and braggy and cocky and arrogant and overconfidence is actually coming from a lack of confidence.

I need to be on a pedestal and you need to be below me so that I think I have value. That is not what this is. Loving yourself, confidence, owning your brilliance is an invitation to others to do the same and that is what I am inviting you to do today.

So you got your pen and paper. So here’s some prompts. You might come up with some other things. If something else pops into your head as I’m listing this off, jot it down. And then on social media when this comes out, tag me on social media. Tag me with a here’s a prompt I came up with, here’s a question that really helped me. Help other people out. Tag me and I will absolutely share it in my stories.

So I’m just giving you what helped me. You might have another question that’s like, I saw where you were going but as soon as I answered this question, that opened up the floodgates. Tag me on Insta stories and I will absolutely share it. I am @iamamylatta.

So here are some prompts for you in how to love the shit out of yourself. Let’s start with the easy stuff. Let’s start with circumstantial accomplishments. What have you done in your life? Graduate high school? Did you go to college? Have you had kids? Married? Do you know how to crochet a sweater? Do you know how to make a baked Alaska?

Can you fix a carburetor? Can you do something that you can legitimately say I can do this thing and it’s something not maybe everybody can do? Start with what you’ve accomplished. Particularly if this is difficult to really kind of gush on yourself, start with the tangible things of what you have accomplished in this world, these things you have done.

What kind of promotions have you gotten in the past? What kind of jobs have you held that you might put into some esteem of some kind? This is kind of like what do you know you bring to the table.

I want you to think back in ancient times, maybe you don’t think much about being the cobbler or the blacksmith, but the rest of the town is really freaking glad that there’s a cobbler and a blacksmith in the village. So what do you know you bring to the table?

Are you a linguist? Are you somebody who is particularly good at painting? Do you have a particular artistic eye? So what kind of tangible things. Let’s start there. And then let’s talk about like, what are things that your friends and family say they love about you that you would agree with them?

What are some things that people would say, “You know what I really like about you? I really like this about you?” As a matter of fact, if you’re really struggling with this, don’t be afraid to reach out to your absolute closest confidants and just ask them. What would you say my best qualities are? What do you love about me?

And see if you’re like, yeah, okay, yeah, I can agree with that. What is something that maybe someone has said that’s the opposite about you and you’re like, no, I’m actually pretty amazing at that, or no – in other words, they’re telling you something that maybe is negative and you’re like, that’s flat-out not even possible, I’m now with you on that at all.

So maybe something that somebody has said and you’re like, no, exact opposite is true, and that might spur a little bit of what you’re amazing at. What qualities? What virtues, qualities do you really love about yourself? How would you describe yourself to someone else in a favorable light?

They you’d say, “You know what I really like about me? I really like my sense of humor; I really love my timeliness. I really love my integrity. I really love the way I love my family.” What kind of funny or special skills do you have that maybe others don’t? What kind of things do you know that you can do that maybe others don’t and you kind of love that about yourself?

I don’t know what that is for you. I’m getting ready to share with you what that is for me, but I don’t actually know what that is for you. And that’s okay. That’s why I want you to just kind of take these prompts and explore.

Because once you kind of have a little bit of stuff, I want you to commit some time this week to this. I want you to spend some time with these prompts, reach out to a couple people if you need to, really think back on your life and be like, in my x number of years, here are the different things – here’s a great prompt.

What have you overcome? What have you endured that made you stronger? What’s something you’ve overcome that you’re like, that was something I didn’t think I could do and look at me, I did it? What obstacles have you overcome? What situations did you have to work through and come out on the other side and you’re the better for it? That’s a great prompt right there.

So I want you to commit this week to writing out everything you can and then the next step, commit to writing a love letter to yourself. About what you love, about what you’ve done, and about what you do know and what you are proud of.

And I want you to think about this letter like you’re writing it to your daughter or your best friend, or your sister. Write on that level of compassion and love. If you were writing to you as if you were writing to your daughter or your sister or your best friend, how would you write that letter.

Like dear Amy, let’s talk about where we started and how far we’ve come. I’m so proud of us. Here’s all the things I love about us, here’s all the things that we’ve done together, here’s all the things that’s possible for us, here’s all the things we’ve overcome. Here’s these quirky weird things that no one else really gets or understands but we do.

Spend time. It doesn’t have to be a long letter, but spend time putting those words down in first person present tense as if you were talking to your most loved human in the world. And then pull that out when you’re feeling down, when you have weeks after weeks where shit just isn’t working, you have this love letter to yourself to refer to.

And every year, on your birthday, pull it out on your birthday and let’s update it with the past year’s accomplishments. Let’s add to it and update it so it eventually becomes a story of what you love about you.

Listen, your Helga brain is always going to be with you and she will happily focus only on what you suck at and what you can’t do and what you haven’t accomplished. You listen to her enough. You don’t have to listen to her all the time.

And in CCM, you master the skills of learning how to allow her to keep talking to you and you just don’t entertain her bullshit anymore. And this is one of the amazing tools that you can use in order to create that for you. This love letter to yourself, learning how to love the shit out of yourself, making it a regular practice, a touch point for yourself, because Helga isn’t going anywhere.

You just got to learn to spend more time with Gigi and have a love fest with yourself. And you want to know what, have a love fest with yourself. Tie this into something that you – a date with yourself. What would that date with yourself look like?

Pull this letter out and really enjoy it. If it’s lighting candles in the bathtub, if that’s your thing, great. If it’s going out into nature, that’s your thing, if it’s hiking, if it’s camping. I don’t care what your thing is, but what’s your thing that you love doing? Spend some time with yourself in there.

So what I love about me. Because at the end of the day, this is the birthday episode. And I have spent 47 years on this Earth. Guys, I’m getting choked up. When I wrote this, I wasn’t crying but I literally – let’s start at the very beginning. All of a sudden, the tears want to come.

I was born 47 years ago to a single mom. My biological dad was gone before my mom was even four months pregnant and he still to this day isn’t really interesting in knowing who Amy Thames Latta is. And I’ve decided at this point that I’m okay and I love that about me, that I have been willing to spend the time to do the work and look at those painful thoughts, to be okay that there’s a human in the world that’s responsible for bringing me into this world and maybe that was his only responsibility.

Maybe he did his part to ensure that my soul, which was coming to this Earth, come hell or high water, no matter what, he played his role and he played his part. I love that I was able to come to a place and love him and love me even though that is how our relationship started and ended.

I love that I’m willing to go to those vulnerable and uncomfortable places even though I spent most of my life trying to avoid them. I love that I’m funny. I love that I love to laugh. I love my sense of humor. It’s irreverent, I love cussing, I love language, I love my salty tongue. I love watching movies that crack me up, I love quoting movies all of the time, I love movies that are funny, I love movies that are dumb funny, intellectually funny.

I love wit. I love the wittiness that is in me. I really think that there’s just nothing sexier. You will win me over every day of the week with intelligent humor. If you can mix intelligence and humor, if you got wits, oh my gosh, I’m 100% on board.

Because not only do I love to laugh and I love to tell jokes and I love to hear jokes and I love comedy and all of that. I also love to think. I love to understand. I love to think about things. I’m a deep-thinking kind of person. When things confuse me, I want to understand. I want to learn more.

I want to travel the world and experience things that I’ve never experienced before and I love that about myself. I love my desire to learn. I love to listen to people I don’t agree with so that I can listen to understand them but also listen to better understand myself and to solidify why I believe what I believe in.

I’m crazy passionate about justice and injustice in this world. Sometimes to a point where I need to keep it in check. But I love my love for my fellow human beings. I love the passion that I have for causes in this world. I love that I feel so deeply when I see a Black Lives Matter story on TV, when I see one more person of color who is facing injustice and then I want to go do something in my world so that I can make this world a better place. I love that about me. I love that passion that I have for the other humans in this world.

And I love that I love fiercely in general. My family knows this, to the point where they get a little annoyed with me. Like this week, my son got contacts and I – he’s got the most beautiful eyes and I just stared passionately at him for hours. My 12-year-old little boy, just I love this human being.

I love that I love so fiercely. I love my husband so much, even when he drives me absolutely bonkers. I love my children, all three of them. I don’t know if you all know that I have a stepdaughter who’s almost 22. And I have a son who’s almost 15 and I have a son who’s 12. And I believe that they could do whatever they want to do in this world and there’s literally nothing that they could ever do that would ever make me love them less and I love that about me.

I love that my mom taught me to love that way. I love my love for my mom and my sister and that we Marco Polo each other all of the time and we’re on constant text chains all of the time. By the way, I love that I love Marco Polo because it’s really the only way my friends ever stay in contact with me because I hate the phone.

But I love that about me too. I love that I find ways to stay in touch with people that matter to me and I love that they love me in the way that I love them back and that they appreciate and they love me for them. My clients know this. I love how I love my clients. It’s one of the things that they say they love about me, how much I love them.

I cry for you guys. I cry tears of joy. I cry tears of pain when you’re in pain. I love that I’m so empathetic like that. I love my empathy. I love the fact that I can easily get into a feeling with somebody and be there with them and also hold space for them while they’re in that space.

I love when I’m able to say hey, in this moment, I can’t quite hold space, I’m a little too far into it, do you mind if I kind of take a moment for myself too? I love that I’m not afraid to mess up with my clients. I love that I’m not afraid to model vulnerability and authenticity, that I don’t always ask the best questions in the moment, that I sometimes do jump into the pool with you guys, but then I’m able to say, oh you know what, hold on a moment, I’m a little too much in your pool and I need to come back to this.

I love that I don’t always ask the best question in the moment, but I think about you guys so much that I have that vulnerability and that willingness to come back and say you know what, I didn’t coach you the best I could yesterday, I’m going to follow up with you now because now I got it. Now I remember the question, or now I’m not in that emotional space with you.

I love that I’m willing to do that because it shows me and it shows the world that perfection is never the goal. I’m a life-long people pleaser, perfectionist, and procrastinator. And I love that I have challenged all of those stories and that I’m willing to show up in the world today in a way that I was never able to before. I love that about me.

I love that I’m super bendy. That I can still, at the age of 47, I can still put one foot behind my head. I used to be able to put two feet back there. Can’t do that anymore. I love that I’m super bendy and I’m super flexible and I love to dance and I love to cook.

I got to tell you right now guys, I can slice and dice and make some great fries. I am an amazing cook. I am not afraid to experiment in the kitchen at all. I love conjuring up new recipes, I love taking a recipe and making it my own. I love making mistakes in the kitchen, unless we’re talking about baking. I do not love baking and I’m okay with that.

I love to cook, I love to turn on music when I’m cooking, I love to dance while I’m cooking, I love to sing out loud and I love that about me. My kids find it very annoying but I think it makes me amazing, quite frankly, thank you very much.

I love to dance and I love how music can transcend emotion. I love cooking and music and how they both can elicit emotion in me, that sometimes just doing thought work can’t do. I love how cooking and music both can take me back in time to past memories and I love that I allow that for myself and I can be like, this dish here, remember the first time I ate this and what I meant to me.

This song here, I remember the first time I heard this and what this meant to me. I love the way that music can allure my body to move along with it and I love my body, friends. I’m pretty damn sexy when I realize how amazing my body is.

I love her more every damn day. I love the pleasure she provides me, the strength, the curves, and I love that I haven’t always believed that but I was willing to stay with her. I love how I’ve been willing to stay with my body through these years and be always willing to work on that relationship that I have with my body.

I love what I’ve created while I’ve been scared out of my mind. I’ve made over $850,000 in my coaching career and $425,000 just in the last year. I’ve coached hundreds of coaches. All of that while pretty scared, all of that while Helga is over in the corner yelling that we have to be perfect and no one wants to listen to us and if we aren’t perfect, that they’re going to not like us and everybody needs to like us because if everybody doesn’t like us then we might as well just stay in the cave.

I love that I do it anyway. I love that about me. I love that I’ve learned how to do that and I love that I’ve taken my ability to do that and I’ve put it into coaching tools that I now share with you all on this podcast and in the Confident Coaches Mastermind.

I love that by doing things scared, I now do things today that 10 years ago I would have told you, impossible. Never going to happen. That’s not who I am. I loved that I was willing to do the scared, the uncomfortable in order to get here today. And I love that I was willing to invest in myself and get the coaching I needed to help make that happen.

I love that because I did that, not only have I created that coaching business, I love that I’ve created an entirely different life for myself and my family. I love that I believe in what is possible. I believe that I’m capable of so much more than I have ever envisioned and that there’s more out there waiting for me that I haven’t even conceptualized yet and I love that I believe that it’s out there and it exists and it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen.

I love that I believe it so hard for me and that I believe it so hard for you. I love my lust for life. I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves wondering of things that might have been. I love imagining me sitting on top of the world pretty legs hanging free.

I love that I have referenced movie lines and song lyrics throughout this and if you caught any of them, I love you, and if I didn’t, I love that I would happily share those things with you in this world if you wanted to sit down and have a chat.

Friends, this is Amy. And happy birthday to me. This is my love letter to me on my 47th birthday. And I invite you to do the same for you and to pull it out on your next birthday and to celebrate you.

I love loving the shit out of myself because it’s a hell of a lot better than constantly criticizing myself and wishing I was something I wasn’t. And invite you to do the same. You don’t have to wait until you have what you think you want in this world in order to love yourself. You can love yourself first and it starts today.

And on that note my beautiful Latta loves, until next week. Let’s go do epic stuff.

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Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.