Calm Your Inner Critic & Create Peace w/ Your Mental Health - A Therapists Guide [BONUS EPISODE Presented By BetterHelp]

The Summit of Greatness is back! Buy your tickets today – summitofgreatness.comhttps://lewishowes.com/mindset - Order a copy of my new book The Greatness Mindset today! I got to sit down with BetterHelp therapist, Haesue Jo in a new bonus series I’m doing with BetterHelp. In this series, we talk about The Greatness Mindset and why therapy can help you in your journey toward it. Discover your potential when you visit BetterHelp.com/lewis today to get 10% off your first month. In this episode you will learn,Exploring ways to attain harmony and consistency in your life. Understanding the potential for peace, liberation, and mental clarity through therapy. Recognizing our own role as the underlying factor in all relationships we form and the types of individuals we attract. Emphasizing the continuous nature of healing, alignment, and self-exploration. Acknowledging that healing is a vital step in attracting the right individuals into our lives. For more information go to http://betterhelp.com/lewis Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This episode was sponsored by BetterHelp online therapy. Big thanks to Hsu Jo, licensed therapist and head of clinical operations at BetterHelp. Hsu Jo is not my actual therapist and we are not in a therapist-client relationship. Also, just because you might hear something on the show that sounds similar to what you're experiencing, beware of self-diagnosis. You'll want to find a qualified professional to assess and explore diagnosis if that's important to you. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.

• 0:44Lewis Howes?

  Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:52Lewis Howes?

  Here's another question.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  How do we continue to come from a place of compassion, humility, love, and empathy, even when we find ourselves navigating difficult situations that require us to stand up for ourselves and set firm boundaries?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  It can certainly feel challenging to be a warm and kind and nurturing person to somebody else when we feel like we're kind of all out of sorts in ourselves.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  So if you're really concerned about continuing to show up as this, what you're describing, like really wonderful person, you are working on yourself.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  You know, even when we're navigating difficult situations. So give yourself time and space and put in the energy and invest in yourself to navigate those difficult things before trying to help a bunch of other people.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Advocating for ourselves and setting firm boundaries is not the same as not being compassionate or having humility, love, empathy, all those things. These things can happen in parallel, but I do think it's very important and beneficial to continue to prioritize yourself. And remember that doing that doesn't make you a self-absorbed or selfish person. If anything, like, it means that you're wanting to put in the care to continue showing up as the best version that you can be to anybody else, especially for yourself.

• 2:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and as a recovering people pleaser, this is one of the hardest things because I've always wanted everyone else to like me. And so I've been overly compassionate and overly giving and overly whatever you need and here, I'm here for you. And I didn't create great boundaries for myself. And therefore, I would feel overextended, I would feel frustrated, resentful because of that. And so, again, this is probably one of the hardest things for a lot of people to do is to create these boundaries and know that you might ruffle some feathers and you can be loving and compassionate and kind in your communication with people and people still may be upset. They still may be frustrated and push you and push your

• 3:10Lewis Howes?

  buttons. And you get to be clear. Doesn't mean you have to be mean or hard on people, but you get to be clear to create your energetic boundaries with self. And I think you may lose or frustrate some relationships over time, but I think at the end of the day, you have to live with you. And that's the most important relationship. And if you're resenting and frustrated and exhausted, then you're not going to live a joyful, peaceful life. So it's a dance. It's an art on how to do this. And I think you can do it. It's just takes practice.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, when you're setting boundaries with people, you're modeling something. You're showing them that you respect your own time and you're communicating without saying explicitly that you're hoping that in this relationship, they can be someone that respects your time too, and you will be someone that respects them. And you know, this ruffling of feathers, losing people sometimes in our lives, which can happen when you are prioritizing self. But you know, I would challenge folks to think of it this way. It's like, I would hope that you want to surround yourself with people that want to be around who you are authentically, rather than just constantly trying to be around

• 4:28Speaker 02

  people that only like a version of yourself that you're curating for them.

• 4:32Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. That's great. A few more questions. This one is.

• 4:38Lewis Howes?

  Has to do with parental rejection.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  As many queer folks, experienced, myself included, being rejected or not accepted for who we are, it can create a deep sense of unworthiness or not good enough that can bleed into many areas of your life, like self-care and self-love and repeating patterns of needing to earn love in adult relationships. So my question is, how do you overcome this feeling of not good enough and replace the lack of belonging and acceptance that you didn't feel as a child and maybe still don't feel from your parents? Thanks for your time.

• 5:15Lewis Howes?

  And I know you touched on this a little bit before, but if who you are at your core is not accepted by your parents or your closest family members, how do you learn to overcome that feeling of I'm not good enough? Because everyone in my life has told me I need to change. I need to change, or they don't accept who I am at my core. How do we learn to say, I am good at my core, but there are just certain people that don't accept that?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  I think the answer is going to look a little bit different for each person, depending on like where this core belief of not being good enough came from. And I am afraid that I'm not going to be able to answer it sufficiently for everybody listening to this, even the listener that asked this themselves. So my encouragement really is to get into therapy, especially for something like this.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Because I'm not sure if you're referring to abuse, trauma, or is it something that's a little quieter, but just as damaging, which is childhood emotional neglect? Was it that your emotional needs were not being met or nurtured by the folks that we now know are supposed to be the ones that love unconditionally?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  So, you know, part of this journey of healing for something that's happened to us as children, especially something like parental rejection, is rediscovering and reconnecting with that inner child. We've all heard that phrase.

• 6:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  And learning how we can be the adult and the parent for that child that we didn't have. How can we become this parent to extend the love, the acceptance, um, and the unconditional, you know, everything for the child within us? We can reparent ourselves and that's something that you can learn in your journey in therapy.

• 7:06Lewis Howes?

  This is one of the most important things I learned in therapy. Um, and it, and I went through a process for

• 7:15Lewis Howes?

  every week for six to nine months. It started to be every two weeks, maybe after six months, but it was almost every week for six months. And then it was every other week for, for the next few months, specifically focusing on inner child healing. And I thought this was weird when I started. You're talking to a, you know, a former jock athlete from the Midwest growing up. We didn't, we didn't have these types of conversations where we, we said, okay, go back and have a conversation with the five-year-old you and be the adult in the room and ask your little self what he needed in that moment, what he was struggling with, how he was feeling.

• 7:56Lewis Howes?

  Because we didn't get to say those things to parents at those times. So we never said those things that we actually needed. But now we can go back and create new meaning, healing, and, and congruency from the five-year-old, the nine-year-old, the 12-year-old, whatever it was where you felt neglect, abuse, abandonment, um, or a lack of love. You can go back now as the adult in the room. And have a conversation with that, that young boy or girl inside of you. And start to create peace, create home, create safety if you never felt safe. And a place to talk to someone.

• 8:37Lewis Howes?

  And again, it might sound weird of having this kind of out of body experience with younger self, with current self. But for me, this practice of about six to nine months of specifically, I mean, I had a, I had a screensaver on my phone of my five year old self for almost a year, so that it was a constant reminder to check in with the wounded part of my childhood, the psychological and emotional wounded part of me that I was running away from, that I was masking, that I was overworking to compensate from, that I was people pleasing because I didn't want him to get hurt again from. And if we can, with therapy, and I, and I really believe that this is a thing you, you do with support.

• 9:21Lewis Howes?

  I, I think it's really, really hard to do this on your own. I just don't think it's as wise. We need that environment with a, a trained professional to support us in this process, to create a safe environment, to give us the tools, to give us the research and the science behind why it's so powerful and meaningful, and to allow us to process authentically. And if we just do it on our own.

• 9:47Lewis Howes?

  I don't know, it's, maybe it's possible, but I just think it's going to take a lot longer and it's going to be a lot harder. So again, I really am such a big believer in therapy and specifically with BetterHelp, and I want people to go to betterhelp.com/lewis. You get 10% off your first month. Even if you feel like life is really good, it's still worth going, even trying for a few months to see how can it be better? How can I outgrow certain things, shed the skin of the old? And reinvent myself and in my relationships, in my career, in my health. If something feels like, okay, life is good, but I know I'm missing something. I feel like this is a great opportunity for you to get clear on your meaningful mission.

• 10:31Lewis Howes?

  Where the process with someone who's trained, a trained professional from the comfort of your own home and start taking action steps to getting the results that you want to again, to break free of the different pains, the different, the different stress, the different overwhelm that has maybe kept you at a certain level and kept you safe and made sure that you feel protected, but you know there's something more for you. There's no, there's something more freedom, more peace, more abundance. And so again, I want people to check it out at betterhelp.com/lewis. So you have that support, doing it on your own is just so much harder. So again, if you're looking for a clearer direction in your life, if you're looking for some healing, if you're looking for just more joy and freedom and peace of mind, then

• 11:14Lewis Howes?

  I encourage you to go to betterhelp.com/lewis. Again, you get 10% off the first month when you do that. So you can try it for a month and explore it, check it out. You can find a therapist and you can switch, I believe at any time. So if you're feeling like, ah, maybe this isn't working for me, let me try someone different, you can do that as well over at BetterHelp. They've got again, online support. So if you have any questions, you can ask them questions right on the website, again, betterhelp.com/lewis. I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad free listening experience,

• 11:57Lewis Howes?

  make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple Podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend, leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes. I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com/newsletter. And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.