Welcome to the Infinitely Precious Podcast produced by Infinitely Precious LLC. Your host is James Henry. Remember, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.

Hello, beloved. It's me, James, and it's a delight to be with you today here on the Infinitely Precious podcast. I'm so thankful that you join me as a companion and that I get to join you on this journey together. As I was looking to prepare what would be best to talk about today, I was thinking about my own life that is often fertile ground for the challenges of living and the struggles of being human because I am. And one of the things I've come to realize recently is my own struggle with the desire for people to perceive in me my own value and worthiness, hoping to cultivate in others a way of perceiving me as wise and spiritual and loving and kind.

And you name it, on the positive side, those are the kinds of things I've kind of hoped for. As I was talking about it with my wife Linda yesterday afternoon, what arose for me as we were sitting together was that phrase that Vivian played by Julia Roberts in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman says about believing the bad stuff. She says something to the effect of it's easier to believe the bad stuff. And I think for many of us who have internalized some negative feelings, it is easier. I think I've talked before in this podcast and in sermons and in other places about how much more quickly our mind latches on to the negative than it does to the positive.

It's like less than a second for us to grasp onto the negative. It's a self protective mechanism that evolved in us. But when it comes to the positive, feeling like there's enough, feeling like we're enough, feeling good, seeing a truth that is in fact positive as opposed to negative, it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen seconds of focus on the good before it feels real to us, before we can internalize it and make it so, believe that it is so, see it, quicker to grasp onto the negative. And that quicker to grasp on the negatives can come to shape how we live our lives and how we perceive ourselves. And because the negative sticks and the positive feeds know, fades away.

The challenge for us is that we cannot get enough positive messages coming inward from outside of us to counter out the negative one negative statement can overwhelm 15 positives, maybe even more. It just changes the nature because we grab onto it and the power of a compliment is not nearly does not seem to be nearly as much as the power of a criticism. Now criticism doesn't have to be negative, but oftentimes it has that connotation. When someone criticizes, calls us and for the places we fall short. Places we probably already know that we do fall short, we can feel that echo and it is amplified within.

And it makes it difficult for us to engage again, to reengage and to feel the positive. And so because of that, what it seems like to me we do is we try our best to manage how others see us. We spend a lot of time to try to cultivate that positive perception of us. So perhaps we're a tad bit less honest about how we feel and try to sugarcoat things. We try to help people to see how competent we are.

We curate our lives in such a way that the best is always true. I mean, how many people out there, at least for a long time, the big deal was that on Instagram and Facebook and in all sorts of other places, people actually photo edit their images so that they look better than from their perspective anyway, that they look better or more according to what the idealized self is meant to look like rather than the way they actually look. An attempt to curate how everyone sees them literally in those pictures. We try to curate how people receive us. So we're careful and guarded sometimes with the things we say and even one little slip up, one flub can become the thing that we obsess about for days because we are sure we have ruined everyone's perception of us and it will take forever.

You know, that it will take forever to recover what it looks like. But the truth of the whole thing, of the whole matter when it boils down to it is we cannot control how other people perceive us. And no matter how good we are and how many affirmations we receive, they're not going to stick as long as we don't begin to see ourselves in a new way. If we can't control how other people see us, and we can't. Because even if we're at our best, we don't know where the other person is and what the criteria running around in their brain is.

We know what they might say their criteria are. We don't know what they are, and so their judgment of us is not even based on a field that we're fully understanding what it is. We're projecting what we think they need to see in us onto them and then trying to produce that which we already think we're supposed to ourselves to meet an expectation that we created that they did not necessarily create for us. So what if I shift the way I ask this question from not how am I seen, but what can I receive about myself as true? What is true from being seen to receiving?

And when I think about receiving, what I think about is the words that I say to you. And let's be honest, I end every podcast this way and the intro ends with the words, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are. But I could say those words a million times and if you don't believe them, they're like empty words. I will tell you that sometimes I say those words to others hoping they will hear them, but secretly within myself hoping I will hear them back. Not from the other person, but that I will believe they're true not only for the other person because I believe that.

I believe that you my companions, those who are listening, those that hear, those that read what I write, you are already infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are. So why is it a struggle to believe the good stuff about myself? Why is it easier to believe the bad stuff? Indeed, you are infinitely precious and so am I. You are unconditionally loved.

You are a gift. And your worth is not measured by anything outside of you. It does not matter how many people give you compliments or how many people criticize you. In the end, the gift that you are is the gift that you are. Already.

Not what you'll become, not what you're stretching to reach to be worthy of, but what you already what you've already become, who you already are. The challenges we've practiced believing the negative is so much easier. And sometimes it's a wonderful self defense. And by one, maybe wonderful in quotation marks. It's a wonderful self defense because if I can think the worst of me before you do, then you can't hurt me.

You can't criticize me worse than I'm already criticizing myself. You can't see me more negatively than I can already see myself. So what can we do differently? What if we could practice believing the good and catching ourselves when we try to speak the bad, particularly about ourselves. How many times have you felt that rise up in you?

Maybe you're not facing this challenge, but have you felt rising up in you at some point a self criticism like I'm stupid, I'm slow, I'm not, I don't fit, I'm not as whatever as that other person is. And immediately there's that comparative, that negative. Instead of seeing myself as a gift, I have already denigrated myself. What would happen if I caught that as was coming up? And I could instead believe the good things about me, about the value of doing this podcast on a regular basis, on a weekly basis.

Because I think that putting positivity into the world matters. If 10 people listen to it, if 10,000 people listen to it, to me if it impacts one person and they walk away having thought about it and maybe seen in themselves some of their own giftedness, their own preciousness, how loved they already are that reshaped their self perception. It would be worth it. It would be worth my doing this. So for a long time now I've been talking about a practice that has become a very much a part of my life.

Recognizing when what's rising in me. If I recognize that negative self statement, I can recognize it coming up, not say it, release it and return. Recognize the inner voice, whatever it's saying, release the need to prove to anyone else the value that is already intrinsically yours. You are already a gift, already precious, already loved. And if you could return simply to what is already true about who you are, the preciousness, the lovedness, and the gift that you are.

It may be easier to believe the bad stuff, but it's not truer. Easier is not the same thing as truer. So watch out for the easy answers. Instead, remember this about yourself. You are infinitely precious.

You are already enough. Practice in your everyday life receiving the good when it comes. Thankful for the sunshine, thankful for the rain, thankful for the compliments that do come your way. And not just thankful in a perfunctory way but thankful because someone is speaking something to you of the positive they have seen in you. And practice receiving that and speaking it to yourself for indeed you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.

Thanks for joining me today. I wish you all the best on this journey of coming to perceive yourself with the same eyes that the divine does. As precious, loved, a gift. Until the next time.