A message from my 12 year old self…. Your best friend should always be yourself. This and other messages discovered in a book that I had when I was 12.
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Self image.
Many years ago, my father sitting opposite me at the table and puffing away on a cigarette gave me this advice, kid. He said, and he always spoke. That way, kid. I’m going to tell you something that I hope you’ll always try to remember survival in this world is very hard, but it can be easier if you have a friend and kid your best friend should always be yourself.
Now don’t know an hour and say that’s arrogant and conceited.
Just listen.
Over the years, you will I hope make many friends every now and then you will feel that this one or that one is your very best friend.
Well, good friends are like you and me and then not infallible.
Some will hurt you so much, your heart will almost break some will marry and drift away and we must face it, others will die through sickness or accident and you will feel devastated.
But you don’t rely on your friends to see you through don’t expect any one person to feel he has any responsibility for you, kid.
I hope you have many friends of all shapes and sizes countries and creeds but kid trying always to have yourself as your very best friend.
So when you receive Hard Knocks in life you will like yourself and help yourself and love yourself enough to see you through it.
Now, I think that’s pretty profound I wrote that little verse in a book when I was 12, years old and I don’t know how often I read it or referred back to it.
But when I look at myself all these years on at 50, years old 20 years in business.
The last 14 years going through some of the most devastating time of my life life and I look back at the foundation that all that sat on and if this is what I was reading and treasuring at 12, years old and these messages subconsciously even if not consciously but subconsciously formed a foundation for me to get through the hardest times of my life and also formed a foundation for me to launch my business, which has many of you now.
It talks about the foundation of healthy self image how that is the foundation that everything else sits on and so these messages.
We’re resonating with me.
And where were with me and I believe I had I not had that foundation I would not have got through when I’d been through, perhaps, as well as I did.
And don’t get me wrong.
The well didn’t always look fantastic.
But I did get through and I am on the other side of it and I believe it’s because that I placed value in these things from such a young age.
And I just think this is so true that in my darkest of times that even though my friends could support me and they were there for me and they were and that my family could love me through it and offer their help and they did.
But even though I had all of that when I went to bed at night I was still going to bed with my problems and there was just me there to wake up with them in the morning it was still made that had to get myself out of bed every morning and get up and do the die, nobody else could end up doing that for me.
And that’s an internal resilience that we all need to have and that we all need to call on and so that is what we need to be developing in our children and we need to be exposing them to these messages that help them develop that.
And even if it’s sitting there in a some quiet place and their little brains that subconsciously they have heard them and I have read them, then at some point that can call on them because in the end it is over the last get ourselves through our darkest moments. People can support us. They can applaud us. They can be there to comfort us but we still have to keep getting up through it. So in the end, our best friend will be ourselves and so let us support our young people with these messages and by ensuring that they’re exposed to these positive messages and all that being just the means that they flip through on Facebook and don’t really take the time to read because they’re so busy looking at the the images and comparing themselves and those kind of things.
So, and this is one of the reasons that I’ve I’m doing my building resilience workshops for tweens, teens and their parents is to just give them another another platform and other way to get exposed to some of these positive messages.
And so whether that be through books or quotes or having something up on the back of your toilet door with lots of positive messages on that they’re seeing every day.
Let us expose them to these messages because they really it is their best friends will be themselves and that will be who they will have to call on when life gets tough, and they have to dig deep, you’ve got to go within then or we do go without so if you’re interested in exposing to our young people to some of these messages