Should You "Kick a Man when he’s Down?" Or YOURSELF?

Edited Transcription:

So... 

There’s a famous personal development guy—I’m not going to say who he is—and he said, “You should always kick a man when he’s down. He’ll get up faster.”  

But what that doesn’t speak to is, what sort of a person gets up?

When you bully yourself—and we’ll talk about you, here—when you bully yourself into getting up and ignoring your feelings and forcing your way through anyway, what kind of a person do you turn into? 

I think this is pretty important, because we’re all really told that when you’re down, when you’re not doing well, or when you feel stuck, what you really need is a good kick in the ass. Now, sometimes that’s true, a kick in the ass will help. But most of the time, it really isn’t what you need. 

There’s so much "kick yourself harder" going around. I saw an article online that said, “Why you need to work five times harder.” And I had a coach who said that they’d taken on the idea that if you’re working as hard as you possibly can, you need to consider that you’re only really at 40% of what you’re capable of. 

It’s this sort of “Push push push, go go go.” This idea that your emotional experience of what you’re doing doesn’t really matter -- because, after all, “Because once you succeed, then you’ll be happy.”

But...

We all know enough successful people who are miserable, and who make other people miserable, that we know that doesn’t really work.

I’m going to present a different way. 

Here’s what I’d like you to do:

Think about a part of yourself that is down.

A part of yourself that is discouraged.

A part of yourself that maybe seems to get in the way of getting done what you want to get done.

And maybe notice how, yeah, you know what? Sometimes you do feel like kicking that part. It can be annoying.

But what I’m going to suggest here is that instead of kicking that part, that you bring some love to that part.

Very often in healing work we'll ask, “How old might you have been when you first felt that kind of discouragement?” It might be a very young part of you. And just allow yourself to reach out to that part and bring some love. The part of you that says:

• I’ll never be able to do it.
• I can’t do it.
• I try and I try and I keep failing.
• There’s this thing I want to make different in my life.
• I want to have a relationship.
• I want to lose weight.
• I want to do xyz and I can never seem to do it.
• I’m never going to be able to do it.

That’s the discouraged part of you. So let yourself bring some love to the discouraged part of you that says, “I’m never going to be able to do it.” 

I want to be specific on how to do that:

The love you want to bring is the love that says, 

“Wow. You’re doing the best you can and you’re still finding yourself believing that it doesn’t matter what you do, you can never get what your heart truly longs for. And I see you’re having a hard time. I see that discourages you. I see that believing that breaks you, but you don’t feel like you have another option. And I love you even exactly the way you are.” 

You’re not trying to bring advice. You’re not trying to bring like, “Buck up, you can do it.” You’re certainly not trying to kick yourself while you’re down. 

It’s “I see that the best you can do right now is believing that this broken, incomplete life is all that you’re going to be able to have. And I have compassion for you.” 

Because when you bring compassion, when true compassionate love touches the parts of us that are discouraged, that’s when the world changes. 

That’s when we start to see the world with different eyes. 

That’s when we start to see, “Wow, there is a way forward. Or even if I don’t know what it is, I feel like it might be there.” 

The light that comes off of our discouraged parts when we bring love to them is really what takes us to the next level of what’s possible for us in our lives. 

So just practice that for a minute. You may want to practice that for a minute a couple times a day. 

If you’re a guy and you’re interested in finding out more about a deep mercy for yourself that can empower you to move forward, as of this writing there are two spots left in the upcoming Inner King Training. 

You can find out more about that at Innerking.com. 

It's happening March 28-31, 2019. It’s almost full, but there still is a space for you if you want it. 

If you really want to know how deep love and deep blessing like this can transform your life without having to kick yourself when you’re down, without having to work five times harder, without having to say, “I’m exhausted but I’m only at 40%, I’ve got to work more, more more,” then I invite you to join us. Find out more and sign up at innerking.com. 

I hope everybody who’s watching this will have the experience of this kind of love, and I’ll talk to you soon.