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Singing-You're so vain. You’re probably think this song is about you. You're so vain.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Parenting Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.
So, you know, I was recently listening to this great song by Carly Simon, You're So Vain. You know, when I was thinking about the words, I was listening to it. So I decided to, I was thinking about the definition of vanity, vain. So I decided to look up the definition because I wasn't 100%. I'm a little fuzzy on for sure what it meant.
And what I found in my Google search was kind of interesting, and I'll tell you what it said when I looked up "vain."
Here's what I found. Vanity, it said, according to Google: excessive pride in or admiration of one's own appearance or achievements, an inflated sense of self-importance, particularly regarding one's appearance, qualities, or accomplishments.
So I thought, that doesn't sound all wrong to me. Sounds like kind of what I'm going for. So I decided, well, it says excessive pride, so I looked up pride because that's kind of a confusing word.
Pride, the definition of pride that I found was: a feeling of deep satisfaction derived from one's own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired. Consciousness of one's own dignity.
Hey, I mean, a feeling of satisfaction from my own achievements and the achievements of the people that are close to me? Sounds right to me. Consciousness of my own dignity sounds right to me.
What about proud? Definition of proud: having or showing a high or excessively high opinion of oneself or one's importance. Wonderful. I mean, that's the goal, right?
Conceited. Well, that didn’t sound right. Conceited was listed as a synonym for proud. So what’s conceited? Definition of conceited: excessively proud of oneself. Proud. So that’s, it’s kind of a circle, but conceited, according to the definition I looked up, as negative as it sounded, as the negative connotation it had to me, the definition just said proud of oneself, right?
And then I thought, well, what even is excessive? You know, excessive according to who? According to who wrote this, who’s also a human being who’s going through the same life processes that you and I are, trying to improve it.
The thing of it is, these words, these words are confusing. You know, they're not clear. Most of them have a negative connotation; they sound like what you and I are going for, the goal.
I mean, am I supposed to have pride or not? Because the definition I read sounded pretty good. And words are, these words and other words, and all words really are all part of how we're socialized, part of what we take in as learning into our brain.
We take in information that becomes part of our belief systems, and we accept it as factual without questioning it. Then, we live our lives based on these beliefs automatically, without even thinking about it.
I'm going to share some more propaganda that, from the web, okay? When I was reading about conceit, it said: people who are born into wealth, live largely pampered lives, or are constantly praised without criticism may develop an exaggerated sense of their own importance and abilities.
Okay, so again, what is an exaggerated sense of my own importance and my own abilities? Because I believe that my importance, and by the way your importance and everybody else's importance, ought to be 100%.100%.
So what do you mean? What’s too much? What’s too important? What’s an exaggerated sense?
You know, I’ve never been born into wealth and largely pampered, so I really can’t comment as having experienced this. But what I do believe this says, if you're constantly praised without criticism, you’re going to develop an exaggerated sense of your own importance. I reject the idea that you must be criticized and knocked down constantly in order to, you know, not get too full of yourself.
What does “too full of yourself” even mean? You ever think about that? These are the kinds of thoughts and beliefs that we have that have just come to us that are just automatic.
I read on: constant positive comments, encouragement, and reinforcement from a person's social circle, whether in real life or online, can contribute to an inflated sense of self.
This is where I decided I'm having a podcast on this. Because I reject this idea that positive comments, encouragement, and reinforcement from our social circle is going to, is going to contribute to an infl... Well, it can create an inflated sense of self, but I'm still getting the idea that that's not the goal. That's not the objective, that something is wrong or negative or that shouldn't be the way that we want things to be.
It said, also on the web, back to reading on the web, conceit can be an innate trait or a learned behavior. Hold on a minute. Conceit, it ain’t, the last I checked, meant you’re born with it.
Okay, so you're going to tell me, Mr. Web, Internet Web, that a little baby, right out of heaven (according to me, according to not just me, but according to what I believe), right out of heaven, a child of God, a newborn little baby, is born with conceit? Ain’t no way.
Individuals may observe and imitate the arrogant behaviors of others. Now, when you say arrogant, that's a whole different word, okay, and that has a whole different meaning.
And these are the kinds of words that I agree with that we should stay away from that make sense to me. Okay.
Arrogance. The web says arrogance can emerge when a person's self-image becomes their entire world, placing them at the center of the universe and devaluing others.
Okay, now, devaluing others, placing yourself higher, thinking you’re better than someone else is something that, of course, we don’t agree with. An unfounded belief in one’s own superiority can lead to a sense of entitlement, special treatment, and a lack of respect for others.
We’re not talking about, I’m not talking about, a lack of respect for others, entitlement, superiority, arrogance, or “I’m better than you” in any way. Those things we reject.
But the idea of vanity, okay, admiring your appearance and your achievements, I think, I’m 100%. I think we ought to be. I think vanity ought to be the goal.
Okay, unless you think it means that you’re better than somebody else, or for some reason you spend way too much time in front of the mirror and it’s, you know, hurting yourself somewhere else.
But see, that is not, you wouldn’t be doing that if you were working on the beliefs about yourself, about improving the beliefs about yourself.
That usually comes from a lack of self-esteem or a low self-image of why people practice this arrogance and so on and so forth.
The notion, okay, the unsaid message to me, and maybe think about this and tell me if it's also true for you. The unsaid message is that if we practice vanity, if we are vain, if we have pride, if we admire ourselves and our achievements, that we are at risk of becoming arrogant and superior and we think we're better than everybody else and so on and so forth. And you know what I say? That's total BS. Not true.
Okay, these words have double meanings, and we only focus on the negative meaning, and we push it away. We're so afraid to accept ourselves because we might become arrogant, or it might be an appearance of arrogance, or we might appear to be superior, that we are constantly diminishing, downplaying, cutting ourselves, you know, down to the point that this is a real crisis, and I'm not even kidding. Okay.
They all have a negative connotation, but why is that? Why is vanity perceived to be a bad thing?
If the definition is to have excessive pride or admiration of one's own appearance and your achievements and inflate your sense of self-importance, if you're not going to inflate it to where you're better than someone somewhere else, I say come with me and let's all go for it. That's what I'm talking about. Okay.
Because the thing of it is, is human beings that are in the same boat that you and I are, write these definitions and they, the people who wrote these definitions and the human family, really, we all have this challenge of believing who we are and the kind of value that we have.
And most of us are gauging ourselves too low, and that's the real thing. Most human beings don't believe they're amazing.
Okay. Because if I even say that, a lot of people will be like, “You think you're arrogant.” If you think that way, you're going to be considered to be, you know, you’re just arrogant. You're too cool for school. Stuck up. Better than thou. Betty better than thou, anybody know her?
And really, talk about confusing arrogance and superiority. And when we condemn other people, condemnation, all of that, okay, comes from a lack of self-importance, not too much self-importance.
We're trying to prove to ourselves that we're enough, that we're okay in the world, that we have value, that we're as good as. We, we all have this need, and we're trying to prove it.
And when we have a really low need and we’re really trying to prove it. And then we look like we're trying to, you know, and then these other things, a lot of times we can, you know, tip the edge to where we're putting other people down. And we're trying to prove that we're better than other people so that we increase our value to where we can be acceptable to ourselves.
So what I'm saying is all these things that we don't want to be are caused from a lack of. Do you see why this is backwards? Am I making sense?
We take this information… Here's why. Here's why these words and other thoughts that we pick up are important, okay, because they become our beliefs. They become our belief systems.
And if you haven't intentionally decided what to think about yourself, you're operating on your default setting. And you know what your default setting is?
Almost all human beings’ default setting is going say, is going to have a lack, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of self-esteem, a lack of self-importance, that we're just not quite good enough. We don't really know if we're quite good enough, okay.
We don't want to talk about it because that's bad, apparently.
But that's what we're automatically given by our socialization, our default brain, our natural brain. And here's what I mean, okay.
Let me just explain how this goes. Okay. We're born, we have an empty brain. Remember this little baby I talked about earlier? Has this little empty brain, and it develops, and it has its own unique DNA, and it's empty.
And from the time we start breathing, you started breathing and I, up until right this moment, this brain has been taking in input. Constant input, 24/7 input, input, input from all five of our senses. Input, okay.
We learn to walk, and our brain, one of the things about our default natural brain is it's very efficient. It likes to conserve energy. It likes to learn quickly. It likes to pick up things that work and do the same things over and over and over.
We learn to walk and then so we don't have to think about it. We just get up and walk somewhere, and we don't have to think about putting one foot in front of the other, right? We just get up and we walk.
We grab a, I grab a drink. I have a little swig of my drink, and most of the time I'm not too worried about spilling it all over me and this and that and the other, right? Because I've done that. I've taken a drink so many times or I've poured a glass of water, as an example.
We do these things automatically, and we do the same things again and again and again. You might drive the same way to work. You might brush your teeth in the same routine. You might have a nighttime like, these routines that we just fall into that we get because they're so efficient. We learn them, they work.
Our brain is geared for survival, efficiency, conserve energy, and these things work great.
So as we observe the world and all this input is coming in, okay, we learn how to survive without thinking. It just happens automatically.
We also, at the same time we’re learning how to survive in the world, we're making meaning, okay. Automatically, all this input comes in and boom, we make meaning out of it.
And repeated thought. So thoughts are phrases or sentences in our mind. So we may hear them or our brain may feed them to our mind.
And these thoughts, thousands a day, we hear and they’re repeated. And repeated thoughts become thoughts that we hear and thoughts that we think, become our beliefs, okay.
Now, you may have heard people say, you know, refer to limiting beliefs. “I have this limiting belief,” or “Your limiting beliefs are what's holding you back.”
Beliefs are, that we have, are either propelling us towards what we want, or they're stopping us from getting there, okay. One or the other. All the beliefs that you have are one way or the other. They're either getting you towards what you want, moving you, helping you, aiding you, allowing you really to get where you want to go, or they’ve stopped you. And they're the reason that you keep hitting the brick wall, that we can't reach our goals, okay, and get the things that we want.
And we keep getting discouraged and depressed, and we sometimes give up hope.
These beliefs determine everything, okay. They are the foundation of actions, the foundation of human behavior, and they equal our results.
Now, our brain in this magical, miraculous process of learning automatically and then doing the same things over and over, is great for survival and basic skills, okay. And it's terrible for belief systems about ourselves.
“I can't do that.” “I'm ugly.” “I'm fat.” “I'll always look like this.” “I'll never earn that much.” “That's not in the cards for me.”
And so on and so on and so on and so on. Okay. Without intentionality, okay, we will not think that we are as good as we actually are. Okay
And let me just say this, okay, if you want to improve the way that you believe about yourself, you are not at risk of becoming arrogant or thinking that you're better than other people because you like yourself or you love yourself or you're trying to have a good relationship with yourself. Okay.
If you read anything like that on the internet, that's nonsense, okay.
The more that you love and like yourself, the more that you can love and like others. And that is the way it works, okay. That is the way it works.
And I know this from experience and from coaching so many people, okay. And by the way, I tried it. Like I said, my own experience, I’ve already tried not liking me! Okay?
And let me just tell you how that went. For a couple of decades and for a long time, okay? And it wasn't very fun. It wasn't very enjoyable. It wasn't very rewarding. And it didn’t help anybody that was around me.
You know, as a matter of fact, not only did it not help them, it hurt other people. You know, I was not able to make my contribution and give and love and participate in life as fully as I could have done.
And so I tried it the other way, you know, and it's an ongoing thing that I'm working on. But let me just tell you something, okay? Right now, I'm at a point that I really don't give a shit what you think about me, okay? Mostly I try not to, and most of the time I get it done. And it's not that I don't value your opinion. Okay.
You can think whatever the hell you want, but here's the thing: if you don't like me, I already tried that, and it was miserable. And I think you might have the same result.
You want to try liking me if you don't. And by the way, more importantly, try liking yourself. Try loving yourself. Because I guarantee you, you're going to have a, it's not just that you're going to have a better result. Your entire world, everything, your life experience, and very importantly, the people that you love are going to have a better experience with you.
How we relate to ourselves, what we believe to be true about ourselves is how we relate to the world around us. That's just the way it is.
What we believe about ourselves equals our results. So don't be afraid of those words.
I've got a new motto, and that's “Vanity is My Goal.” Okay. I'm going to inflate my sense of self-importance. I'm going to celebrate my achievements and even my appearance.
And you know what? If you don't like my appearance, okay, I tried that too. I would highly recommend liking your appearance, okay? No matter what the hell it is, it doesn't even matter. I mean, you got a choice to use it, like it or not. Why the hell wouldn't you?
Regardless of what you think about it or believe about it now, okay? I guarantee you that God already accepts it and He likes it.
So that's just what I'm, that’s according to me. Not just according to me, but that is what I believe, okay?
And this is one of the things that we work on, that we've been working on in Stable Living Coaching is that changing beliefs, okay? And I want to give you the steps right now that we use in Stable Living Coaching to change what you believe. Okay.
Number one is first of all, and this is important and it's easily overlooked, the importance of it. Number one is just to uncover what you believe, okay?
That is, to find out what belief, find out what belief is giving you the result that you're getting. So if you're getting a result that you don't like, find out what belief is behind that, okay? That's step one.
The awareness alone is a significant step because once you see that, once it clicks in your brain, you go, “Oh.” That right there, by itself alone, that beginning, your brain will automatically start subtly changing.
So this is a very important step, is to not to shortcut, but really internalize that, that awareness.
Step two is to determine, decide, make a choice. God gave you the agency that you can choose whatever the hell you want.
What if you could believe, let me ask you this, what if you could believe anything that you wanted to about you? Just saying, anything. Okay? Because you can.
Now, it's not as simple as, it’s not as simple as repeating a thought, but that is part of it. The second step is just to decide to take the time to think about what you would like to believe about you if you could. Okay.
Because like I said, the thing of it is, you can. And a lot of times we’re not even, we’re not, this stuff’s just happening automatically, and people live and die and never think about it.
And that's okay. But hey, you just heard about it. And so I'm telling you, you choosing with your agency to believe what you can, because you can is going to be a, can be life-changing. And not just for you, but like I said, for everyone.
Think about what you would like to believe about you, okay? With no limits.
And then of course, the third one, step three, is to go about developing those beliefs.
That is a process that, like I said, you can't just think a thought. Like if, when I was drinking, I couldn’t just, I was drinking everyday, day in and day out. I was barely sober enough to even have a thought for a couple decades.
And so, but if I just thought to myself, “Well, I would like to believe that I don't drink anymore, that I never drink,” I would, I could say that and I could think it, and my brain goes, “Yeah, you do. You drink every day.”
So that was too big of a stretch for me to accept, right? And so developing new beliefs, sometimes we have to ladder it.
You have to get a thought or a belief that's not quite there yet, but we take steps, and we move our thoughts to, “Sometimes I don't want to drink,” or “I didn’t drink until noon today,” or “I didn’t drink today.”
Or, you know, and then it goes on, and we ladder that up until you can fully believe the thought that you want to believe.
And the steps, so what a belief is, okay, this is important, a belief is a thought that you hold in your mind and you continue to think it, and you continue to prove it to be true, okay?
So as you continue to think your thought, your new belief, and you continue to prove it to be true, and you ladder it up and move towards it. When you fully accept it as 100% true, then that’s when it becomes, that’s when it manifests.
That's kind of how the law of attraction works and all of that.
So step three, the short of it, is to develop the new belief that you want on purpose. Okay.
This work is not something that you want to overlook in your lifetime. Okay. I would encourage you maybe to listen to this again. Even better, go to stablelivingcoaching.com and check us out there.
And check out our free trial. Because your beliefs are the foundation of everything about you, everything.
And this is where change happens. It happens at the foundational, at the base level, down there at the bottom of the building.
This is where miracle happens, and this is also where, where average happens. Okay, where helplessness happens, where addiction happens, where unfulfilled happens. Tt all happens right here.
But remember, this is also where miracles happen.
And so the thing of it is, is you're way too valuable to dismiss this. Your life and your breath and the ones you love are way too valuable to overlook intentionally what you want to believe about you, okay?
Or to not make this a top priority in your lifetime, of what you believe about you.
Hey, thank you for taking your time to be here with me. Again, check us out at stablelivingcoaching.com. I think we still have the free trial going on.
And remember, you cannot fail as long as you Don't Ever Stop Chasin’ It.
