Love Yourself Enough to Do the Work

Ever had a morning like this? 

You set the alarm the night before with intention & purpose. You were going to get up early and finally work on the thing that matters to you:

• The business you keep saying you're going to build;

• The book you’re going to write;

• The certification you’re going to acquire;

• The exit plan from the job that's draining the life out of you. 

The alarm goes off, and you actually get up. And somewhere between the coffee and your desk, your phone lights up with somebody else's priorities. 

Or the laundry catches your eye. 

Or you open an app for “just a second” and that second turns into a 45-minute rabbit hole.

By the time you look up, the window of time you set aside for the important work is gone. 

“Don’t worry,” you tell yourself, you'll get to it tomorrow. 

But then, later that night, you go to bed with a subtle, familiar ache, a reminder that you’ve once again broken another promise to yourself.

I want to talk about that ache, because I experienced it for years.

We Only Learned Half of What Self-Love Means

Almost everything we're taught about loving ourselves focuses on stopping, and resting, or taking the night off. It promotes protecting your peace of mind, and setting healthy boundaries. Maybe even run a hot bubble bath.

I'm not arguing against any of that. In fact, I’m a raving fan and huge proponent of all of it. I take a warm bubble bath, read a book, and sip a glass of wine 3-5 times a week. It’s good for my heart and my brain. 

But look at what's missing from that vocabulary. We have a hundred ways to describe the love that lets you stop, and almost no language at all for the love that gets you moving. There's no phrase for the person who sits down at their desk on a Wednesday morning to do “the work” when nobody is watching, nobody is asking them to do it, and nobody would notice if they skipped it.

That's the half I want to give back to you. Self-Love doesn’t have to mean stopping. It doesn’t have to be a beckon to Calgon to take you away. 

Loving yourself can also mean keeping your appointments with yourself to work on that calling from deep in your soul. 

You would never stand up a client four days in a row. You would never let a friend sit alone in a restaurant while you doom-scrolled at home.

And yet…

We do that to ourselves every day, for years upon years.

I Was the Worst Offender I've Ever Met

Before any of the work I do now existed, I was broke, desperate, and nearly destitute. But the money situation was only a symptom of a larger issue. 

The actual disease was that I had spent countless years breaking promises to myself.

There was the time period where I said I was going to train for a marathon, and I actually did put it on my calendar, about 13 months away. I certainly talked about it to other people, which still makes me cringe because I never actually started training.

And then, of course, I told people I was a business owner over the years (I started over 26 of them), and I had the “CEO” title, the business cards, and a cool story to tell at parties, but I wasn't really doing any of the things business owners actually have to do behind the scenes when nobody is cheering us on.

It was all talk. 

And I know how that sounds coming out of my mouth here, today, all cleaned up and tidy, but I promise you it felt nothing like that on the inside back then.

There's no escaping yourself. 

You know when you're not keeping promises, especially to yourself. 

You know when you're not doing the things you know you should be doing. 

And all of that eats us alive from the inside out and it destroys our self-confidence.

I did that to myself for years, which is exactly why I had a long line of failures stacked up behind me. And whether I was fully conscious of it or not, I was waiting. 

Waiting for somebody to come save me. 

Waiting for a lottery to declare me a winner, or to receive some long lost inheritance, or be a part of some IPO that was going to launch me into the ethers of success. 

But mostly I was waiting to feel inspired enough to do the work required of me.

That's not how any of this works. 

Confidence, inspiration, and motivation show up during the work or after the work. You have to move first.

What Actually Turned It Around

I didn't invent a system, at least not right away. I was in no condition to invent anything. I picked up somebody else's framework because I couldn't build my own yet, and for me, that structure was The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod.

The S.A.V.E.R.S gave me six things to do before the day got its hands on me:

1. Silence

2. Affirmations

3. Visualization

4. Exercise

5. Reading

6. Scribing (Journaling)

I want to be clear about why that framework made such a difference, because it wasn't about the six activities themselves (Although they also have clear benefits too). 

The biggest difference maker for me was that I woke up each day already knowing what to do. 

It was laid out in front of me, so my brain didn't get a vote and didn't get to overthink it, or try and negotiate with me at five in the morning.

And then I simply sat my ass down on the couch and did them, all six practices, every single day. 

For me, that was the whole miracle. I actually did the thing I said I would do, and then I did it again the next day.

Something started to shift, and it wasn't about productivity, at least not yet. It was that for the first time in a long time, I was keeping promises to myself, and the evidence started stacking up to prove it.

Your Confidence Account

Here's what I've come to believe after years of watching this play out in my own life and in the lives of the people I coach.

Most people are waiting to feel deserving before they act. That doesn’t work because the feeling follows the evidence. You cannot think your way into believing your goals matter. You either accumulate proof that they matter, or you don't.

Every promise you keep to yourself goes into your “confidence account” as a deposit. Every promise you break comes out as a withdrawal. 

And here's the crazy part you have to understand: Your mind doesn't record the excuse. It doesn't log "skipped my marketing today because I had to do laundry and wash dishes." It logs, "I'm the kind of person who says things and doesn't follow through."

Ten years of those small withdrawals is how a smart, capable, hardworking adult ends up believing that dreams are for other people.

That’s not true. Nobody ever sat you down and told you that your goals rank below everyone else's errands. You just voted for it forty times a day in tiny little two-minute increments until the final tally turned into a belief about yourself.

Before You Tell Me You Don't Have the Time

Some of you are reading this while caring for a parent, working doubles, raising kids alone. I honor you for that, and I'm not asking for more hours out of you. I'm also not interested in slapping lipstick on hustle culture and calling it something else.

The measure here is never volume or the “bigness” of your moves. 

It's whether you honored the appointment with yourself and your dreams. Even fifteen minutes kept, doing something you promised yourself you would do, is a deposit into the confidence account. That promise could absolutely be a bubble bath, if that’s what you want. Or it could be that office drop-in, networking meeting, or book-outline brainstorm session. You get to decide. 

Conversely, three hours skipped is a withdrawal, no matter how good the reason was. There will always be reasons to skip the important work, but there is rarely an excuse. 

The Receipts

This is what my Daily Do’s really are.

They look like a productivity system from the outside, as a short list of the activities that grow the business, done every day, in order, without debate. 

But the output has never been the point. The point is that when I close my laptop, I'm holding proof that I'm someone who shows up for my own life, my own goals, my own dreams.

That’s the power of doing this work every day. Do that for ninety days and you will stop needing me or anybody else to tell you that your goals count. You'll have built the evidence and confidence yourself, and it will be yours to keep forever.

Your dream doesn't require anyone's permission or approval. 

It simply requires an appointment, and for you to love yourself enough to keep it.

To learn more and/or start your Daily Do’s routine today, join me on Skool at High Performance Notary and immediately upgrade to VIP. I’ll meet you there. 

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