You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 164.
Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. And now, your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.
What's up? How are you guys? Hello, my friends.
Whenever I say that, my dogs get so excited. Hey, today, we're talking about love 2.0. We have been talking about love a lot in scholars, and I love talking about love.
So there you go. I think that love is one of the coolest, best, strongest, most powerful things that we do, that we feel, that we create in our lives. And I want to talk to you guys about unconditional love, and I want to talk to you about lovability.
Now, I've already done a podcast on unconditional love, and hopefully you have already listened to that. That is episode number 27. You can access it by going to the lifecoachschool.com/27 if you want to watch that.
I teach a lot about unconditional love as a very selfish thing that we do. And I'd like to revisit it here. I'd like to talk about unconditional love and also lovability.
I think lovability is something that I haven't really talked about a lot on the podcast, and it's so, so, so important. So, the question is, how can we get better at being loved and loving? This is the only class that really matters.
And here's what I want to tell you is that all of us really just want to be loved. This is a great reminder when you're dealing with someone who's like super angry and crazy. This is good when you're dealing with someone who's highly critical, with someone who's very upset.
When you remember that they too really just want to be loved, it changes everything. It changes your perspective on everything. Seems like sometimes people just want to be mean.
It seems like people just want to hurt, but that's always coming from a place of wanting to be loved. And so I think about that when people are like freaking out, people are upset, people are mad. I'm like, oh, they just want to be loved.
Even like angry dogs, they just want to be loved. So this is the only class that really matters. What can I do to feel love?
And what can I do to feel love? What are those two things different? If you can answer these two questions, you have the secret to the universe.
Here's what I know. Love is always an option, and love is always the best option. Now, I have people that argue with me on this because they somehow think that love can open us up to being hurt, that sometimes we need to be mean in order to protect ourselves.
And I'm going to argue that that is never, ever the case. I'm going to argue that love is always an option and always the best option. Love feels great, and withholding love feels terrible.
Love is for you, not the other person. Love always has a good result. What?
Love never hurts, and the lack of love never protects. Unconditional love is a skill. It's a skill set that we all can learn.
So I want you to think about this. If love is always the best option, then we don't want to put conditions on it. So here's my thesis, here's my argument.
My argument is, love is always the best option because love always feels amazing and love always creates a good result. But most of us love conditionally. Most of us only love if the other person does what we want them to do.
Most of us only love if we think that person's worthy of love. Most of us only love if we feel like the person deserves it, that sort of thing. But what if love is always the best option and there's no condition to it and it always feels good?
What if you could make that a skill that you want to get crazy good at? Think about how your life might change if you loved unconditionally, which means you feel love towards the person under all conditions. Think about that for someone else, but most importantly, think about that for yourself.
Unconditional love means you love someone no matter what. You love them when they don't meet your expectations. You love them when they come up short of basic decency.
You love them when they get it completely wrong. When we remember that contrast is part of the human experience, we stop using it as an excuse not to love someone. Did you guys hear that?
Listen to it again. When we remember that contrast, that means everything people do wrong and don't meet our expectation, and they're mean and they're rude and they're crass and they're unkind. When we remember that that is part of the human experience, we stop using it as an excuse not to love someone.
That's what conditional love is. We're using excuses not to love someone. Now remember, when you don't love someone, you are the one that doesn't feel the love.
So clients will say to me all the time, well, I'm not going to love him. I said, what are you going to feel instead? Angry?
Well, that's a good choice. Mad, resentful. Right?
I'm going to feel all these horrible feelings instead, and I'm going to justify them. But you're the one that doesn't feel good. You're the one that doesn't feel the love.
We never say, I don't love you because of myself, right? We never say, I don't love you because there's never a good reason not to love. Think about that, you guys.
There's never a good reason not to love. I will go into a rap battle with anyone who wants to argue with me. The arguments that people make is love makes you vulnerable.
You need to protect yourself. You need to stop loving in order to be protected. I think the opposite is true.
I think the more you love, the more you're going to protect, the stronger you're going to be, the more honest you're going to be. Love is not weak, my friends. Love is strong.
Either is vulnerability. Love is fierce. You can love someone and say no.
And in fact, you are being honest with them when you say no. When you mean no, it means you love them more. Practicing loving other people unconditionally lets us love ourselves unconditionally.
No matter what the problem is, you can always ask what would love do? because love always does the best thing. Love always loves.
This is not some poetic rhetoric either. This is the truth. Love is an emotion that causes an action that creates a result.
And that result will always be good. Now, I can hear my collective students saying, okay, well, let me give you an example. They're always like, worst case scenario.
What if you love someone and they cheat on you? What if you love someone and they hurt you? That result isn't good.
And here's where people get the model confused. And I want you guys to pay really close attention, especially if you're in my scholars and you're an advanced student. This is really important because people switch models.
So if I say to you, I loved this man and he cheated on me and the result was negative for me, here's what I need you to know. The love did not create the negative result. Loving him did not create the negative result.
Your love for him did not cause him to cheat on you. His feelings and his actions, right? His thoughts, feelings, and actions are what caused the cheating.
Your love did not cause that negative result. Your love caused you to love him, and that result for you was loving him, and that's always a good result. Now, when he cheated on you, you had a different thought that wasn't love.
Most likely, it was something like anger or frustration or excruciating pain, and that was caused from a very different thing. Now, you will say, but it wouldn't have hurt if I didn't love him. I could have protected myself from being hurt if I had loved him, and that is never ever ever true.
Loving never causes hurt. The reason we're so hurt is because our expectation of how they would behave was so different than who they really were. Our expectation of being able to count on them to behave a certain way, that's what's so excruciatingly painful, is when people don't behave the way we want them to, and we feel so hopeless and out of control.
That is not love, my friends. Love never hurts and never creates a negative result. I promise you that.
And withholding love does not protect you. It does the exact opposite. Love always does the best thing, because love always loves.
And love is the best thing. Always. I will argue with you to the end of the day on anyone who disagrees.
And I love having this conversation. Thoughts that create love don't come naturally to us. We have to practice them.
The words love and deserve don't ever go together in the same sentence. We all deserve love 100% of the time, no matter what. We deserve to feel it and we deserve to know it.
And most importantly, my friends, don't withhold feeling love towards someone because you think they don't deserve it. I promise you, I promise you that that does not work. You do not punish someone by not loving them.
You only punish yourself. You punish yourself by feeling excruciating pain instead of love. People do not have to do anything to deserve our love because our love is about us, not them.
And I will tell you, and this is what I believe, is that everybody deserves to be loved 100%. And what I mean by that is not only can we love everyone with all of their flaws, but we can do it for our own benefit. because when we love, we are the ones that are benefiting, not the other person.
And yes, we may do many actions that express love, and they may be well received or not, but that does not depend on us. Loving is always, always, always an inside job. And I'm going to tell you this, and I really, really hope you hear me.
If you can't love someone else unconditionally, it will be tragically difficult for you to love yourself unconditionally. because for whatever reason, our most loathing is usually our self loathing. because what we hate in other people is usually something we recognize in ourselves.
And this was something Byron Katie taught me, and I'll never forget it. She says every judgment is really just a projection, just something that you see within yourself and recognize in someone else. And that's true for the negative things that you see in other people and also the positive things.
So as you love yourself more, as you learn unconditional love for yourself, what you will notice is that everybody else can catch a break too. It's easier to love people when you allow them to be human, when you allow them to have flaws. Sometimes, I say this all the time, some people's best they can do is sometimes terrible.
But I do believe that we're often doing the best we can do, even though it's terrible, and we can love people anyway. I went to a Christine Kane event. Christine Kane is one of my friends and colleagues.
She had me speak at her event one time, and I was teaching the model, and a man came up and said to me, I'm so devastated. I hope you can help me. And I said, why are you devastated?
And he said, my wife left me for another man, and all I want to do is love her. And now I can't love her anymore. And I said to him, why can't you love her anymore?
She can't tell you whether you can love her or not. You get to love whoever you want to love with as much love as you have. And you love her, and you're feeling like you can't love her because she loves somebody else?
Sorry, you get to love her till the day you die as much as you want. You get to love, love, love. And true love will mean that if she wants to be with somebody else, genuinely that you can love her in that decision.
That is true love. We think true love is I love you, so you better stay with me. But that's not true love, right?
Love is really wanting people to be who they are and love them anyway. And sometimes, my friends, we love people and they don't love us back. Such a bummer.
But it doesn't mean we have to stop loving them. And you may say to me, well, I keep loving them, that's going to hurt because they don't love me back. No, my friends, love never hurts.
They don't have to love you back. That's what unconditional love is. Loving for the sake of how it feels to love something, to love someone.
That is a gift you give to yourself, and you get to love whoever you want to love. Even when they're hating on you, you get to love them. And in fact, that's something I highly recommend.
Loving people who hate you, loving people who are mean to you. They are the ones who need it the most. It doesn't have to look like you saying, I love you to them, but just feeling that in your heart.
And I'm not talking about some pretend to love and be, you know, this, I will pretend like I love everyone and be kind to everyone. That's not what I'm talking about at all. You don't want to be out of integrity with yourself.
I'm talking about genuinely loving them. Genuinely. Okay, let's switch to lovability.
Now, I want you guys to think about lovability as your ability to love. What? Right?
So a lot of us, the way that I started articulating this was, I was talking to one of my students who was telling me that when she was a child, she was told by her father that she wasn't lovable. And I said to her, that has nothing to do with you, you know, that has to do with him, his ability to love you. If he's saying that you're not lovable, what he's saying is that he doesn't have the ability to love you, because you, my friend, are 100 percent lovable.
Someone not being able to love you is about them and not you. And if there's anything more I can teach you better than that, I don't know what it is. So many of us go around in our lives trying to be more lovable.
We try to increase other people's ability to love us. We try to make it easy for them to love us. We try to increase their ability.
And sometimes we feel like we're very effective at that, and sometimes we can't help someone in their inability to love. Wouldn't it be like great to know when you were a kid? Like, hey, all those abusive people in your life have nothing to do with you.
Their inability to love you has nothing to do with you. Your lovability is absolute. Your lovability is already a given.
You don't need to change one thing to become more lovable. It's impossible. Think about a rose.
How do you make a rose more lovable? Think about that, you guys. What makes a rose lovable?
If somebody loves roses, they will love the rose. We can't change the rose to make it more lovable. It just is.
You being loved or not loved is not about you. It's about the person loving. Your lovability has to do with my capacity to love you, not the other way around.
So if you and I are in a room, how much I love you depends on what? Does it depend on you and how lovable you are? Or does it depend on me and my capacity to love you?
I promise you, my friends, it has to do with me and my ability to love you because you are 100% lovable. If your parents didn't love you, it was because they didn't have the capacity to love you. If you don't love me, that's a reflection of you, not me.
A lot of people will say to me that people love you more than me because you're more lovable. So it's absolutely not true because we are equally lovable. What I will say and what I do believe is that when you have an incredible ability to love, you are easier for other people to love.
So if someone is loving you, like genuinely loving you, it's really hard not to love them back. Let's talk about my puppies because we haven't mentioned them in at least three minutes. It is so hard not to love them because all they do is love.
They're like, we should kiss you, we should say hi to you, we should sit in your lap, we should bark at you to get your attention, we should cuddle with you, we should love you. It's so funny. In our family, we joke around with the dogs, we like yell at them, kiddingly.
We're like, stop it. Stop being so lovable right now. I have to focus on something else.
Stop being so lovable. And really, they're not being any more lovable, right? It's just that they are so loving.
And I want to tell you this. If you want more love in your life, all you have to do is love. Love when it's hard to love.
For your own sake. If you are loved tremendously by someone, it is an indication of the person loving, not you. You are as lovable as that person's ability is to love, and there's nothing you can do to become more or less lovable.
The only thing that can change how much someone loves you is their ability, decision, and capacity to love you. But the same is true the other way. Nobody can become more lovable for you.
You can try and make them more lovable, but they're already 100% lovable. So it's really not a good use of your time. You are as lovable as you will ever be.
You always have been, and you always will be. So you can relax. You can stop trying to be more lovable because you just are lovable.
100%, infinitely lovable, and you always have been. I'll talk to you guys next week. Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self-Coaching Scholars.
It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and we apply it. We take it to the next level and we study it. Join me over at thelifecoachschool.com/join.
Make sure you type in the, T-H-E, lifecoachschool.com/join.
I'd love to have you join me in Self-Coaching Scholars. See you there.
