Everything I Learned This Year...

Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video.

This year was hard and beautiful and incredibly expansive. I think a lot of that had to do with my determination to never waste a crisis. I want to share 10 things that I learned this year that helped me grow, just in case any of this is helpful to anybody out there.

Okay, number one, loving yourself is the solution to literally everything. This is it. The foundation for healing every area of your life. All of our problems stem from one thing only, and that is not wholly loving ourselves. Self-love is the root solution because once you start fully loving yourself, you stop creating limiting self-beliefs, negative self-talk, and self-sabotaging patterns. This isn't just something that I like heard and thought it sounded nice, so I wrote it down. Uh, this is something that I fully put to the test this year and have found it to be like one of the most fundamental truths in my life. And it's so good that I want to take a billboard out on I-90 and tell everyone in the Chicagoland area about it, just like Brian Erlocker can't stop talking about his new hair.

I came to this truth earnestly when I was desperately trying to do something about my liver panel numbers that just kept coming back worse. Because of my therapist and that Phoebe Bridger song, I knew that my liver was associated with resentment. And so I found a few like lectures and daily meditations that were about letting go of resentment and embracing self-love. I started talking to myself in the mirror and telling myself that I loved me and then noticing any resistance that I had to that statement and then like loving the parts of me that had resistance to that statement. After a couple weeks, I was really surprised to find that my heart palpitations just completely went away. My contamination OCD completely softened overnight. I stopped wearing a mask in public, something that felt impossible was just like really easy to do. The depression and anxiety that's plagued me most of my life lightened. A person whom I hadn't been speaking with for months called out of the blue and left a really heartfelt, beautiful message. And that relationship basically repaired itself on its own. My life started looking unrecognizable in the best way. And the next time I got my liver panel done, my numbers came back perfect again. This all took place in a matter of weeks. So, I really believe there's something to this. And if there's something in your life that you want to see improved, a thing you could try is just fully loving and accepting every part of yourself. See what happens.

That brings us to number two, which is stopping criticism is the quickest way to start loving yourself. The number one quickest way to start loving yourself is by releasing the need to criticize yourself. Oh, okay. Come here. Hi, sweetheart. Oh, no, buddy. Okay. Most of us have an inner critic, and it's not even our fault. It's the voices of our early caretakers, siblings, friends, bullies, our belief systems, and even schooling uh that taught us from an early age that there's something inherently wrong with us, something bad or broken, something that needs to be fixed or monitored or controlled. And because we're good, obedient children, we believe them. We take on their voices and we make them our own. So, we start calling ourselves too fat, too ugly, too sensitive, too quiet, too weak, too bad at something, too vain, too whatever. You can probably fill in your own blanks. The truth is, you're not too anything. Those are just stories that were told to you in your most formative years, and you don't have to believe them anymore.

Louise Hay used to often give this example, and I want to read her quote so I don't botch it. She used to say, "If we were to take a three-year-old child and put him in the middle of the room, and you and I were to start yelling at that child, telling him how stupid he was, how he could never do anything right, we would end up with a frightened little child who sits dosly in the corner or who tears up the place. If we instead treat the child with love and encouragement, the potential that comes out of that child will blow your mind. Remember, the person you are scolding is the three-year-old child within you. If you're not comforting the child within you, that is very sad indeed."

When I started to become conscious of all the ways I've been criticizing myself my whole life, I started feeling really sad and guilty about that. And then I realized that even that the sentiment that I hadn't been good to myself my whole life was more self-criticism. This stuff just really sneaks up on you. So I totally changed the way I talk to myself. And I don't think that most people will like this or at least they'll have a lot of resistance to it. Uh, but I'm going to share it anyway. Mhm. Because I think that um if everyone started doing this, the world would heal literally overnight. Um, so what I started doing was calling myself perfect.

>> Yeah, you are.

>> What I do now is I look in the mirror and I tell myself the opposite of what I used to say to myself when I would be critical. I say that I'm a perfect friend. I'm a perfect caretaker for my dogs in my home. I say I'm a perfect writer. I'm a perfect public speaker, etc. When you first start doing this, you immediately get this influx of feedback from your subconscious. A million thoughts about pride and vanity and worthiness just flood your system. And noticing them, making space for those thoughts is the beginning of the end of self-criticism. I like to remind myself that I'm not speaking about perfection as in flawlessness. I'm speaking of perfection as in wholeness. I'm welcoming every single part of me to the table. The parts I used to hide or hate or criticize. Every part is perfect and welcome. And the act of welcoming every part to the table is where your self-love really starts to bloom. And I actually believe that this approach is backed by neuroscience because our brains have this need to make whatever our beliefs are true for us. So when you criticize yourself for being too dumb, for example, your brain has to make that true for you. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know it's counterintuitive, but criticizing yourself actually creates more of the behavior that you don't want. And fully loving and accepting yourself creates all of the behavior that you do want. So, please try this right now. When you go to bed tonight, the first thing when you wake up tomorrow morning, anytime you notice criticism starting to take over, call yourself perfect. Welcome all of you to the table. Allow it all. This is how we heal, baby.

Three, you can't hurt others if you love yourself. This one's so simple, but I think we have to sort of forget it in order to divide the world into good and bad people. But the simple truth is this. Hurt people hurt people. Full stop. If you see someone hurting somebody else, you're looking at a person who is deeply hurt and hasn't yet, this is the important part, learn to love themselves in spite of it. That's it. It's not deeper than that. It's hard to remember this when you're looking at politicians or people who should know better because they're old enough or privileged enough or smart enough. The truth underneath all hurt is a person who has not yet confronted the parts of themselves that they're ashamed of. And the moment that any of us begin to accept ourselves fully with unconditional love is the moment that we stop hurting ourselves and stop hurting others. I really believe this is the truth. And I really want to live in a world where we stop hurting each other. So, I really hope that we all start loving ourselves fully.

Number four, your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. Okay, this one's wild. And the moment that I started to understand this is the moment that my life really like opened up for me. Here it is. Everything in your life right now, and I really do mean everything, is a reflection of your inner world. What you believe about yourself and the world around you creates all of the experiences that you have. Do you often feel disrespected? This is a sign that you don't respect yourself. Do you often feel like nobody likes you? This is a sign that you don't like yourself. Do you often feel shafted? Uh, this is an example that you don't believe you deserve good things. This is so true that if you want to know what your core beliefs are, all you have to do is look at the experiences that you're having every day. This little insight has felt so empowering to me. What used to feel like an ass ton of injustice in my life now just feels like a bunch of misguided beliefs about what I do and don't deserve. A few years ago, I genuinely felt like I was on a bad ride. Like all of these bad experiences kept coming to me on schedule and I felt like it was like this loop that was repeating and I did not know how to break free from it. This is an overshare, but I used to lay down in my hallway and I would just feel completely powerless to stop um like all the negative things that I felt just like kept coming to me. Uh, but now I understand that I wasn't allowing good things to come because I didn't feel like I was worthy of them or deserve them. Okay, that little change in perception has really changed everything and life actually feels really beautiful and perfect to me now. And I really want that for everyone who's really going through it. So if you don't like what's happening in your life right now, a thing you could try is looking at the beliefs you have about yourself, about what you do and don't deserve, about what kind of person you really are, and try shifting them and see what happens.

Okay, this one's really fun. Number five is people who irritate you reveal what you haven't learned to love about yourself yet. This one is the most precious gift and it comes from the last place you'd expect, your enemies. Think of someone you hate or someone you don't like, someone who just like rubs you the wrong way. Got it? Now, do a little detective work. Name the thing that you don't like about them. What about them is so obnoxious? What about them specifically makes you want to put your head in the dishwasher on the pots and pans cycle? Is it their lack of empathy? Their cockiness? Their insecurity? Figure it out because whatever it is that you don't like about that person is the very thing that you have not yet learned to love about yourself. Each one of us contains multitudes. You have within you the capacity to be Mother Teresa or Mussolini. You have within yourself that thing that you hate to see within other people. The truth is every single person that you meet is holding up a mirror to you. You like your friends because they're reflecting back to you the things that you already like about yourself. And you hate your enemies because they're reflecting back to you the shadows that you don't want exposed to the light. And this is the important part. Every single time someone provokes one of these unpleasant feelings in you is an opportunity for you to find out where you're not loving yourself. We've already spent most of this video talking about why it's so important to love yourself. And it turns out that your enemies are the tool to see where in yourself you have other places that you have not yet learned to love. I don't know how else to say that. And I promise you this, as soon as you realize this and start working on loving those parts of yourself, something amazing will happen. A, either the irritation will just go away. Um, it'll be replaced with empathy and understanding and your feelings toward that person will soften. They just won't trigger you anymore. Or B, that guy will unblock you on Instagram after like five years and send you a really nice message about how he really admires your work and he's really rooting for you. I swear this happened like two days after I reckoned with a part of myself that was really annoyed with this guy for like ten years. I don't know. Try it.

Number six, your current reality is made out of your past thoughts. A thing I've really experientially learned over the past few years is that your thoughts shape your reality. I know it's not groundbreaking, um, but it feels experientially groundbreaking for me, especially after I had my first lucid dream this year. I felt like the perfect example of the way that we create what we think about. In the dream, I would make a request and then I would walk into the next room and I would find it materialized. And when I woke up, I thought, "Oh, this is pointing to something true in real life." I think a lot of people have a hard time with this concept because they'll do things like think positive thoughts or say positive affirmations or do visualizations and then they don't immediately see their world shifting. So, I thought that this would be a good place to hone in on the nuance of this idea. Your current reality is made out of your past thoughts, not your current ones. They're on delay the same way we're like looking at stars that burned out thousands of years ago. Louise Hay used to equate this to gardening. Um, she used to talk about when you like plant tomato seeds, you don't um see like the little shoots starting to sprout up and think, "The hell, that's not tomatoes." Uh, you kind of understand that there's a growth process. And it's the same thing with the things that we choose to focus on. I like to think of it like a social media algorithm. What you focus on, you get more of. When you consciously make an effort to focus only on the things that you do want, you get a feed that delivers only what you want to you. You just have to point your attention on what you do want and eventually you just get more of that. That's that's it.

Number seven is heal the part, heal the whole. This one's simple, but I think it's nuanced and important enough to get its own number. I think we like to think of ourselves as separate from the world or separate from the universe. I don't know if everyone does this, but I don't really think of like other people as separate from the universe. I just kind of think of myself as like, like boy meets world, like a person just like walking through this separate thing. But the truth is that I'm just as much a part of the universe as anyone else is anyway because I'm part of the whole. When I heal myself, I'm healing a part of the whole. Another way to put it is when you heal yourself, you're actually healing the world. Sounds really corny, but if you really want to change the world, you can start by doing work to change yourself.

Okay, number eight, mirror work, baby. So much of what I learned this year is thanks to the work of the late Louise Hay. And one thing she touted above everything else is mirror work. And she used to say that she did so because it universally works. Because of my specific background, I was taught to fear looking in the mirror. I was told that it was vain and that looking at myself and loving myself was bad. Actually, in my early 30s, my therapist asked me to do mirror work. She told me to look in the mirror and tell myself that I loved myself and I just couldn't do it. Um, she might as well have asked me to do murder. The stakes felt just as high. It took me a really long time to get to the place where I could finally look in the mirror and say that I love myself. So, I have like a world of empathy for anyone who's just not there yet. If it's hard for you to look in the mirror and express love for yourself, you can like pull it back a little bit. You can say that, "I'm willing to love myself." And if that's too much, you can say, "I'm ready to be willing to love myself." Um, just meet yourself wherever you're at. I think the cool thing about this work is that it's actually like a returning to our most natural state. And so once you start doing it, the progress is actually really fast. Uh, yeah, mirror work, baby.

Okay, dreamwork, baby. Since engaging in dream work, I have no idea how I waited so long to do it. And I don't know why literally all of us aren't doing it all the time. Every single night, the literal best therapist you could ever ask for comes to you with this like beautiful movie written only for you in a language only you would understand. And it's totally free. I have no idea why we're not taking advantage of this literally all the time. Anyway, a couple months ago, I kept having this recurring dream. Um, I would have it multiple times, like it felt like ten, fifteen times a night, every night for weeks. And I would get to like the theta state, that like um that little state between waking and dreaming. And I would remember the dream and I would like repeat it over and over to myself and I would be like sure that I had it down. And then when I would wake up, it would be gone. So I started keeping a dream journal. And oh my god, not only did I start remembering all my dreams, I started realizing that what seemed like a bunch of like random ass unrelated dreams were actually these like beautiful, rich, full of depth movies with like these beautiful cinematic climaxes. They were like playing for me every night and they were revealing to me these corners of my subconscious that um like I hadn't explored before. In a matter of weeks, I really felt like I unearthed like twenty years of therapy. Here's how I did it. I got intentional. I started like reading books about dreaming and like watching YouTube videos about like lucid dreaming. I started talking to my subconscious, to my inner child, to the parts of myself that I felt were like protecting me from um sort of like unearthing whatever's going on in there. And every night before I'd go to bed, I kept repeating the same phrase over and over to myself as I was drifting off to sleep, which is, "Show me what I'm ready to know. Show me what I'm ready to know. Show me what I'm ready to know." Sometimes I still don't remember my dreams, or sometimes I'll only remember just like a little fragment of a dream. But often about every other night now, I have a dream that is so beautiful and poignant and it shows me something um inside of myself that's still hurting or struggling and it shows me beauty, too. I've met my inner child twice and I've been to a really beautiful sacred space with my daughters. For each remembered dream I have, I always take note of what my psyche is trying to show me. Uh, more often than not, it's trying to show me old patterns I have that are still kind of calling the shots in my waking life. And for every old pattern it shows me, I consciously take that opportunity to rewrite those old beliefs. It's so dark again. Can you brighten it up? For example, if a dream is showing me my proclivity towards people-pleasing, then in real life, I might start doing affirmations about how I fully accept myself. I might read books about it. I might find and listen to songs about it because songs is like the quickest way to get information back into my subconscious. Anyway, a beautiful thing has been happening lately in my dreams. Um, they've been showing me that my beliefs are changing. Um, and I'm getting like nightly feedback that I'm making progress. The whole thing feels really powerful and I can't believe nobody's charging me for it.

>> I'll charge you for it.

>> Okay, Daniel.

This last one's huge for me and it's something that I learned from a recurring nightmare that I kept having about being back in school and not being ready for a test. For most of my adult life, I've had this recurring nightmare where I'm about to fail a test. It happens a few different ways. Uh, sometimes I just like can't get to the class. Sometimes I get to the class but I'm not ready for it. And sometimes I forgot that I like signed up for that class and I never attended any of the classes and like now it's midterms and I'm just not ready. For me, the most beautiful thing that I've learned this entire year is that there's no test. There's no grades. There's no judgment. I'm actually done with school and I'm done with the old paradigm. There's no test.

Anyway, here's an ad for Squarespace. I hope you have a good new year.

>> Nothing makes me and Chester happier than building a website with Squarespace. We've been Squarespace customers long before this YouTube channel was even a thing. And before Chesterfield was even born. Now I can build even faster using the new Design Intelligence feature on Squarespace. This gives me a huge head start in adding content and sections to my site in a beautiful way. Trying out different color themes and fonts instantly gives me a preview showing how my site will look. Or I can get started with a wide variety of professionally designed website templates and then make it my own. And when I'm ready to book clients, I can easily create professional proposals, estimates, and contracts to make it all official. I can then invoice my clients and accept payments from a Direct Debit, CLA, Apple Pay, and more. Head to squarespace.com/mangreet for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the code mangostreet at checkout to save 10% on your first purchase of a website or domain. When you use our code, you do help support our channel. So, thank you. We love you.