One Step To Loving Relationships AND Achieving Music Goals

Since yesterday was Valentine's Day, I want to talk about love. I want to tell you about the most important thing you need in order to have loving relationships that work, and how this is also the key to achieving your goals in your music career.

The best definition of love I ever heard was it's loaning someone your surplus self-esteem. This makes sense because self-esteem is love for yourself. Now, that means you need to have enough self-esteem for yourself first before you can give away any overflow or excess to your partner, kids, family, or friends. Otherwise, you’ll just keep depleting your own well-being.

That means that when someone wants something from you, you'll do it out of obligation rather than love and generosity. You’ll do it begrudgingly.

It means you'll get easily triggered by things they say or do because you aren't taking responsibility for your emotional state and regulating your own emotions, and you expect them to make you feel safe and make up for the shortfall in your self-esteem, so you get into fights.

It means you'll become resentful and insecure because your needs aren't being met, and the relationship becomes a downward spiral of co-dependency and enabling.

If you're a more empathic person, you're good at tuning into other people's needs but you probably do this at the expense of your own needs. The martyr complex of taking care of everyone else before yourself sounds noble and is glamorised in our culture.

You might think it's selfish or self-indulgent to take care of your own needs first. Self-care is not selfish. What do they say in safety demonstrations on aeroplanes? They say put on your own oxygen mask first before you help someone else put theirs on. Why do they say that? Because you're no good to anyone if you've passed out from oxygen deprivation. It’s the same with self-esteem. You’re no good to anyone else if you’ve depleted all your resources.

When you have higher self-esteem, you'll have more resources in your system to support the people you love. My friend Mark says you have to be a reservoir before you can be a canal.

If your well is empty, you can't draw water out for other people to drink. You need to fill your well first. You need to put your own oxygen mask on first. You need to make yourself strong first so that you can give from a place of strength rather than from a place of lack, neediness or insecurity. Otherwise, it's not sustainable and you burn out.

Ultimately, the most important relationship in your life is the one you have with yourself. It's the common denominator in all of your relationships with other people. If your relationship with yourself isn't solid, then your relationships with other people will be compromised.

So you need to be ruthless for your well-being. The way you do that is by systematically building your self-esteem. Self-esteem is a muscle that you can build and train, and I'll tell you how to do that in a moment. But first, I think it’s useful to have a definition of self-esteem to work with.

Dr. Nathaniel Branden was the father of the self-esteem movement. His definition of self-esteem had two parts: having confidence in your ability to cope with the challenges that life throws at you, and a feeling of deserving happiness.

So in order to have high self-esteem, you need to have both of these aspects.

Having confidence in your ability to cope with challenges is trusting your future self. You trust your future self to be able to handle whatever comes up. That allows you to stay calm and tell yourself that you'll figure it out. If you don't trust your future self, you'll worry and have anxiety.

The second part of self-esteem is believing that you deserve to be happy in this lifetime; to have pleasure and joy and success in every area of your life. That's your birthright. Your work is to dismantle any programming you have that gets in the way of that so that you get to the place where you want to enjoy your life and build your skills so you trust your future self to cope.

You might be wondering how this affects your music career. If you don't have high self-esteem, you'll avoid trying new things because you don't trust yourself to be able to cope with the challenges they present. You'll avoid getting out of your comfort zone to do the things that will move your music career forward, whether that's doing Facebook Lives, learning how to market your music, doing audience research, or building an email list. And if you don't feel like you deserve to be happy, you'll be keeping your dreams at arm’s length. You'll be thinking “Who am I to be a professional musician and have a music career?” Because your self-worth is low, you probably won't even put your music out there for people to hear. You won't think it's good enough. And you won't bother to build your skills because you won't feel like you're worth it.

Usually, we have one of these facets of self-esteem more developed than the other. Tune into which part of your self-esteem feels more developed and which feels less developed.

Do you feel more confident in your ability to handle the challenges that life throws at you? Or do you feel more like you deserve success and happiness? Which one is your strength and which one do you need to work on? Coping is about trust, and deserving is about self-worth and value.

You want to work on the underdeveloped muscle.

I'm going to give you a way to build each facet of your self-esteem. I want to acknowledge my coaching mentor Annie Lalla. These are her ideas. She’s a brilliant and wise soul.

Let's start with coping with challenges. The way to build your self-esteem around coping with challenges is to put yourself in situations where you're practising coping with challenges.

Playing safe is inconsistent with developing your self-esteem. You get new levels of self-esteem when you try something that's out of your comfort zone.

The trick is to calibrate the intensity of nervousness or discomfort that you feel on a scale of zero to 10. You don't want to do things that are so far out of your comfort zone that feel like 8, 9, or 10 out of 10 in discomfort because they'll terrify you or immobilise you and make you feel bad when you can't complete them. You want to break off a bite-size chunk of discomfort that's 4 or 5 out of 10, and then take that on regularly.

4 to 5 out of 10, maybe up to 6, is the sweet spot you’re aiming for. 1, 2 or 3 is playing too small. 7, 8, 9, or 10 you'll be traumatised.

4 to 5 out of 10 is great because we have a much greater chance of succeeding. Every time you succeed, you see that you were able to cope with the challenge, that you didn't die. You upgrade your identity and your self-esteem increases. You start to think, “I'm the kind of person who (does this thing). I'm the kind of person who does Facebook Lives. I'm the kind of person who exercises every day.”

If we don't ever do things that are 4 to 5 out of 10 edgy and out of our comfort zone, we don't get to see ourselves succeed and cope with the challenge and then integrate that into our identity.

Now let's look at deserving happiness. The way to build your self-esteem around deserving happiness is to look for moments of microscopic delight. Let me explain what I mean.

It's easy to feel pleasure and high self-esteem if you get a promotion and a raise at work, or win an award, or your album sells a million copies, or gets a million streams on Spotify. But how often do those things happen?

But can you feel high self-esteem when you see the light of the full moon shimmering on the surface of the water, or when a cool breeze blows on you on a hot day? These things are more insignificant, so we don't usually derive self-esteem from them. The more microscopic the delight, the more bang for your buck when generating self-esteem because these are the things that go unnoticed. We totally take them for granted.

The brilliance of this is that it allows to you generate self-esteem from things that already exist in your life rather than defer your self-esteem for who you could be someday, way out in the future. You have to fall in love with this version of yourself before you can build another version on top of it.

If you pay close attention, you'll see that you have so many examples of why you deserve to be happy hiding in plain sight.

It could be the perfume of the frangipani tree as you walk past it. The smell of your shampoo. The first sip of your morning coffee. The smooth feeling of your teeth after you've brushed them. The coolness of your pillow when you turn it over in the middle of the night. The sound of the birds singing outside your window. Opening a brand new book and hearing the spine crack or feeling the texture of the pages. Seeing a painting you have in your house as you walk past it. Notice where you're being a good human being, like when you open a door for someone or you pick up something they drop.

Become an investigator through your daily moments. Constantly be on a reconnaissance mission for moments of delight, beauty, and gratitude about life or yourself or your behaviour that are either happening externally in your environment or internally in your own psyche. The more microscopic, the more everyday, the more simple, the more seemingly insignificant, the more banal, the better.

Notice their pleasure. Write them down. You're generating proof that your life is beautiful, good, and valuable, that it's worth being in, and that you love yourself and your life. This is how you compensate for your default behaviour of focusing on what's bad and wrong in your life.

In our ancient ancestral past, we would vigilantly scan our environment for anything that was wrong because it could kill us. So our minds evolved to be constantly looking for what's wrong. That was a brilliant adaptation that kept us alive. Even though we're no longer in an environment where we're running away from predators, our pattern recognition is still hard at work looking for everything that's wrong. And because our external environment is a lot safer, it's often turned inward to focus on what’s wrong with ourselves. The unintended consequence of this is that it erodes our self-esteem. For every self-criticism you have in your mind, you need to train yourself to scan for what is beautiful, poetic and loving about your environment to generate self-esteem.

Delight and pleasure can't co-exist in the same psyche that shame occupies. They're mutually exclusive. The more you hunt for pleasure, delight and gratitude in your life, the less room there is for shame, guilt and fear and all the things that diminish your self-esteem.

Intentionally generating self-esteem is probably the most important practice that you can take on in your life. When you take this on, it will have a profound effect on all areas of your life. You'll be more intentional about your physical health because you have higher regard for your body. You'll have more fulfilling relationships because you'll have more inner resources to support the people you love. In your music career, you'll stop playing small and start taking more risks because you know you can cope with the challenges. You won't be unconsciously pushing your dream away because you feel like you don't deserve it. And because you feel like you deserve happiness, you'll be willing to invest the time and money in yourself to develop the skills to achieve your goals.

When you systematically upgrade your self-esteem, you also attract a higher-quality romantic partner, because the calibre of partner you attract into your life matches your self-esteem. So if you want to attract a partner with high self-esteem, you have to first become the kind of person that believes they deserve happiness and can cope in order to attract a person like that.

Eventually, you'll want to work on both aspects of your self-esteem, but start with the one that feels like the less developed muscle. That’s going to give you a lot more bang for your buck and more leverage in your life.