Dare To Be Alone

And today, I wanted to touch on a subject that it’s essential, and it’s about daring to be alone. Now, the problem we have with being alone is humans; let’s be honest, humans are scared of being lonely. And the reason is, well, in my opinion, when you’re alone, You have to spend a lot of time with your own thoughts that can be problematic for some people.

And when you’re alone, you have to address your demons. You have no choice because they keep coming up or reoccurring all the time. And I talk pretty often, whether you’re a client or whether you’re a listener. I often talk about how we speak to ourselves and the need for being optimistic. And, uh, a rule of thumb for me is if you would not speak to someone else in a certain way, please, please don’t talk to yourself that way.

You know, if you’d never say to someone else, geez, you’re dumb. Why are you saying it to yourself? If you would never say to someone, geez, you’re ugly. Geez. You’re fat. Geez. You’re silly. Oh, I can’t believe you’ve done that. 

If you would never talk to anyone else like that, stop talking to yourself that way because it’s not okay. Now the other thing about being alone is you have to learn to love yourself. It might just start off with liking yourself first and then learning to love yourself for many people. Many people out there have, have let themselves down. And because they’ve let themselves down, they feel guilty because they may feel guilty that not only have they let themselves down that they’ve let other people down.

But I want to tell you this one thing, get over it. You did not do it on purpose. On many, many occasions, you did not do it on purpose. You may have decided because the information you had in front of you at that period was the best information that you could have had. And you’ve used that to make a decision, but living in guilt gets you nowhere.

It’s just something that I dunno, we humans, we love to live in guilt. We love it. And then we have felt when we’re alone of not being good enough. People don’t want to be around us because we’re not good enough to be with someone else and not us. Now I read this article recently that said 42% of now this was about women.

So sorry, men, but 42% of women are more afraid of being alone than they are of a cancer diagnosis. Can you imagine people are more scared of being alone? Then actually being diagnosed with cancer, like loneliness, has also been defined as an epidemic. And look, let’s be honest at the moment in these COVID times, it’s easy to see why, because not only do we have, you know, younger people, I suppose, living alone, but we’ve got a lot of elderly people who are also isolated and alone.

Now, I just want to make a little definition here, please. I’m not talking about those sorts of people; I’m talking about, at the moment, daring to be alone after finishing a relationship. And for the simple reason, that being alone and not jumping into something new, straight away. You get to actually address all of the things that will otherwise get covered up.

If you jump straight into a new relationship. So I’m talking about a period when you get to fall back in love with you not fall in love with someone else and hide whatever it is that you’re not going to address. I’m talking about giving yourself the time that you need to heal. Something that I regularly hear is people that say, I’m not going to get remarried.

I’m not going to get into a new relationship. And then next time I talk to them, lo and behold, they tell me how they’ve started something new. Now I am a big believer in love. I believe that everyone deserves to be loved, but I also believe that before we can love someone else, we knew we need to learn to love ourselves.

We need to understand why it is that we feel the way we do and why it is that possibly we should look at things differently. So last week, I talked to you about, um, discovering who you really want to be. And. I’m sure this makes perfect sense to you, but can you imagine ending your relationship and then jumping into something new really, really quickly without understanding what went wrong, what it is that you need, what it is that you want, what it is that you can change. I can tell you the lessons that you could have learned now with pretty much pretty solid.

Proof because the stats support this at the moment, let’s say I’m going to use a figure of, it’s probably around 50% of the first time. Marriages fail 70% of the second time. And 90% of third. Now the 70% quite often is because of precisely this reason that I’m talking about here. Those people haven’t dared to be alone.

They haven’t dared to ask themselves what went wrong. They haven’t dared to address their demons. They’ve probably blamed everyone else and not blamed themselves or not even blamed, but haven’t taken responsibility for the part that they had in their room. Relationship, not working. Okay. But heaven dead to learn to love themselves.

They’ve wanted someone else to love them instead. Does this make sense? They so much want to be loved that they need to get it externally rather than internally, but feelings of not being good enough if you’re not good enough right now. Why, with being with someone else, are you going to be good enough?

Then doesn’t make sense. But so many people just make this mistake, like over and over again. And if you know my story, you would see that I was pretty much forced into two years after my marriage broke up before I could start anything new because I had a risk assessment. Against me, uh, by the AFP. So the Australian federal police simply because I was working in an environment where I needed to be very careful of where I went, who I spoke to, what social media I had. Therefore, I had to do this.

It was forced upon me, but. It’s probably one of the greatest gifts. Like I talked about last week about control sometimes when you just let go. And at the time, you think that everything’s terrible, but you look back, and you go, thank goodness that happened because if that hadn’t have happened, maybe I would have been like the other 70% and just jumped into a new relationship.

May have just wanted to find the love that I’d been trying to fill the void in my, in my gut. Know, maybe that’s what I would’ve done, but I couldn’t do it because of this risk assessment, which meant I had to face my demons. I had to learn what part I took in my relationship breakup. I had to listen to all of the negative thoughts I had to stop the chatter about not being good enough about being my fault, that the guilt.

I had to find peace in that period. I did to face it and fix it but jumping into a new relationship, there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Nothing wrong with it.

But if you don’t look at, in the mirror and if you don’t take responsibility and you don’t address what went wrong, all you’re going to do, you’re just going to copy it all again, next time around, it’s going to make the same mistakes over and over again, and you need to understand what you’re prepared to accept and what you’re not ready to take.

Who your new identity, really is? What boundaries are you going to put in place? What are you going to accept and not accept? We all need to have non-negotiables in our relationship because that’s where self-belief comes from. Because if you’re going to allow someone to treat you in a way that you would not treat someone else, but you make excuses.

That’s not gonna work, but that’s where the strength comes from. That’s why it’s essential to find self-love because when you love yourself, and you say yes to the things that make you happy. When you’re happy, and you’re in a relationship, the other person in it with you, you should also be satisfied because you’re prepared to stand up for what you want.

You’re prepared to communicate. What’s important to you. And then also if they’re in that position, wow. It’s a win-win now, my husband, he, my, my new husband. He had a period of four years by himself. So he’d spent a hell of a lot of time getting to know what it was that he wanted out of life. And then when I came along, and I’ve done that same soul-searching, I knew what I wanted as well.

So now, together, we’re able to communicate that maybe before. I didn’t know that stuff. I didn’t know who it was. I was meant to be, or what I wanted in life. I was just going with the flow. I was just going with what my ex-husband wanted, because like I said, I spoke about, I think it podcast number 118.

I was just. Like a, let’s say, zombie. I was just on automatic pilot. I was just going along, getting up every day, doing what it was that I thought I needed to do to be a good mother, to be a good wife. I believed in him. So, because I believed in him, I thought that we were going in the direction that I wanted.

Now, you know, years later, I realized that until I understood what it was, that was important to me. We were probably always going to be doomed.

Pretty tough thing to say because I spent 22 years with that person. I spent 22 years building a life, having three kids.

To think now that that was doomed right from the start.

Okay. This is not how I choose to look at it. I prefer to think that that was the stepping stone of my happiness, and I had to experience it. And while speaking alone can be really uncomfortable. It can be excruciating because when you think about it, we, someone, sometimes have to feel the silence when you’re in a room.

Don’t we have to fill the silence and do the same thing when we’re by ourselves? There’s, there’s probably not many times where our minds are just empty. We can go to that place when we’re in meditation, or we’ve learned this skill. But the majority of the time, we’ve got millions of thoughts a day going through our head and being alone.

We need to address those thoughts, and you will have heard me say that thoughts create emotions. Our emotions create feelings. And if you’re dealing with those sorts and your, you know, you’re bringing up these negative emotions and feelings, then you can go to a dark place. And I’ve been there. So I know what it’s like, but it then knows this is the pattern of my life.

This is what I tend to do that I need to stop it. I just have to stop it because if I do not address this, if I do not change the way I feel I’m gonna fit ever be in, in this predicament. And it’s such skills that you learn when you’re alone, that when you then move into your next relationship, you know, what your boundaries are, you know, what you really want, you know, who you are.

And when you know who you are, you’re a better partner to the new person you meet. That’s exciting. That’s really, really exciting. And that’s the evolution of you? My darling friend. That’s the evolution of you. That’s where you want to get to. That’s who you want to be. So rushing out and trying to get into a new relationship, just feel the void inside of you by someone externally.

It is not going to fix a problem. You’re going to fix a problem by daring to be alone by daring to address what it is that you want by feeling the void inside of you by yourself. Because when you think the whole, and you are whole, it will be unique when you meet someone new. It will be amazing. And that’s what I want. That’s what I want from you. I do not want to see these awful divorce rates any longer. I want it to change. And if I have to get up and sing from every street sign, just to let people know that you have to love yourself before you start to love someone else, I will do it because you deserve the best you deserve to be happy.

You deserve to love yourself. You are worthy of it. I’ve talked about, um, a book before that. I refer to my clients, but if you are feeling upset at the moment, if you were really struggling with this loneliness, there’s a book out there called. I love myself like my life depends on it. Go and get yourself a copy of it. Listen to it on audible. It is a beautiful book, and it can transform how you feel.

Okay. My darling friends. Thanks for listening. And I’ll talk to you next week. Bye. For now.