The Strong Within Affirmation Podcast
Education:Self-Improvement
387 I’m The Best Friend I Know | January 2018 Monday Week 4
Mindful Mondays-#387 January 22nd The Strong Within Daily Affirmation Podcast
I’m The Best Friend I Know
“Your best friend and worst enemy are both in this room right now. It's not your neighbor right or left - and it's not God or the devil - it's you.”
~Edwin Louis Cole
I was invited to give a talk to a nonprofit group called Upward Bound. Upward Bound’s mission is to, and I quote this from their site… “provide fundamental support to participants in their preparation for college entrance.” Basically, they work to increase high school students college enrollment and graduation rate who come from low-income families in which neither parent holds a college degree.
So during the weekend, these high school students will dedicate themselves to more school. They have people come and teach on many different subjects, and they asked me to be a guest speaker a few times. On this particular talk, I decided to discuss belief systems. I wanted to talk about how the only thing holding us back in our lives is ourselves, as I knew first hand from being my greatest enemy for most of my life—doubting and criticising myself for not being good enough.
As I was doing research for my speaking topic, I came across a song from the 70’s sung by Helen Reddy. It was called Best Friend, and I thought the lyrics were so wonderfully arranged that I wanted to share it with the class. And I want to share them with you now, as we all need to be reminded of this continually:
“Would you take better care of yourself?
Would you be kinder to yourself?
Would you be more forgiving of your human imperfections?
If you realized your best friend was yourself?
Who is always with you everywhere?
Who is on your side when others are unfair?
And tell me, who will never let you down in any situation?
Who will always see you get your share?
And that’s why I’m a best friend to myself.
And I take me out whenever I feel low.
And I make my life as happy as a best friend would
I’m as nice to me as anyone I know!”
Helen actually sang it in a movie called Airport 1975 where she’s dressed as a nun and is singing it to a sick girl waiting for an organ transplant who’s played by Linda Blair. A funny side note, if you’ve ever seen the movie parody Airplane! With Leslie Nielsen…they have a similar scene like Helen’s where a stewardess asks to borrow a nuns guitar on the plane, and as she brings the guitar up to the front to play for the sick girl she bounces the guitar unknowingly off everyone’s head in the aisle seats as they all say “Ow.” The stewardess then sings a beautiful song and accidentally pulls the sick girl's life support tube out as she really gets into the song.
I’ll Include 3 videos in my blog for this specific podcast on my site that has Helen’s song with the lyrics, the scene from Airport 1975, and the scene from Airplane!.
Now I know it song has that 70 corny-ness to it. However, I really love the beauty behind the way things were produced back then, and the meaning in the lyrics are a beautiful reminder about the things we seem to forget so often—that our best friends aren’t other people; your best friend should be yourself.
If you know my story, I spent many years in a dark depression and I thought about suicide quite often from when I was 10 to 25. And the biggest reason I feel that I was in that darkness, was due to me being unkind to myself. I wasn’t my best friend. I was actually my worst enemy. And looking back at it now, it seems so obvious. How can you reach your best if you are constantly looking at why you are a horrible person?
Now mind you, there wasn’t anything wrong with me, except for how I criticized myself constantly in efforts to become better—which only made me feel worse and kept me feeling bad about myself.
Things weren’t able to change for me until I began doing something different, and the first thing was being kinder to myself. It was really about being a better friend to myself.
When people ask what I do as a life coach, I tell them that I help people work on and cultivate the greatest relationship you’ll ever be in—the one with yourself. You see, if you don’t have a good relationship with yourself, everything will falter. While you may be successful in other areas of your life, if you aren’t successful in loving yourself, it will be a hard road ahead in ever finding peace and comfort in what you pursue.
And that’s what happened to me. I thought that if I made enough money, or when I had the right job, or found the perfect mate to be with, or if I obtained the things I pursued…then I’d finally be happy. But those things were only the band-aid covering up the gaping wound. It was the distraction of doing the easier work, looking outside of myself for peace and fulfillment, instead of having to do the harder work in being more accepting and loving towards myself. The harder work of being my best friend.
And I kept struggling until I began cultivating a better relationship with myself. Everything is an effort of balance. When you are constantly out of balance in loving and respecting yourself, the other things that you pursue might keep you distracted for a moment…but, in the end, you’ll always keep coming back to wondering why nothing ever seems to fulfill you.
This statement has gotten me into trouble with many people that I have said it to…especially ex-girlfriends…but I’ve always said that the most important relationship is with yourself, the second is with God (whatever your God is that you believe in), and then it’s with family, or your loved one, or your children….etc.
You see, when you love yourself, you’re able to love others more fully. It really is all just semantics because if I’m loving myself fully, then I’m working to love others fully as well. It all balances itself out in the end. I see it as the conundrum of the chicken or the egg, which came first…and if we take care of ourselves first, if we love ourselves first, if we fill our cup up first…then we have more to give others. Instead of always being on fumes, worn out, struggling, and surviving to take care of everyone else when we are slowly dying inside each day from not taking care of ourselves—from not being our best friend.
Today’s Personal Commitment:
So, who’s your best friend? And if it’s not you, why isn’t it…and how could it start being you? Take a look at the things you do to yourself that you would never do to a best friend.
Maybe this might be an easier exercise if you step out of your shoes for a moment. When you step out of your body, look back at yourself, and view yourself through the eyes of how you would want your best friend to be with you. What would you do differently? What are the first 3 things you would do another way now that you’ve slipped into your best friend suit—now that you’ve changed the way your eyes and your heart sees you?
Write those 3 things down, and then write down a plan how you can begin implementing that into your life. For the next month, at the end of the night:
1) Write in your journal how you did on those goals, 2) what needs improvement, 3) what went well, 4) and any other notes you need to remind yourself on in continuing this pursuit of yours.When you love yourself like a best friend would, you make yourself automatically better. So let’s love ourselves a bit more than we’ve been previously doing….you’ve nothing to lose, except all those negative things that’ve been holding you back.
I’m The Best Friend I Know
Helen Reddy singing “Best Friend” lyrics video
https://youtu.be/uTZpLd8Ts8o
Airport 1975 Helen Reddy nun singing “Best Friend” scene
https://youtu.be/4PPL8Tgt4jM
Airplane! Stewardess song scene
https://youtu.be/5pXFo14Ea28
Thanks for listening. I'm sending great energy your way as we become Strong Within together,
Personal Development Life Coach-
Chris O'Hearn
Contact info- email: chris@strongwithin.com phone:865-219-3247
Music by:
- Zest by basematic (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
- I Have Often Told You Stories (guitar instrumental) by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
Location: Knoxville, Tennessee USA but available worldwide
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