What is your love ability. Here’s a hint, it’s not what you think it is.
You’re listening to the Inner Love Diva podcast episode 39 Lovability.
Hello, all my gorgeous divas! No doubt you are sparkling throughout the world and making it a better place for all of us. I recently had the opportunity to go to a conference and it was so good. Unfortunately, I think I caught a bug, so my throat and my body are not loving life right now. I’m doing what I can to promote extra self-care like drinking my throat-coat tea, taking my zinc, and eating my raw garlic, yes raw, my poor husband. Hope he likes the smell of garlic. Anyway, I’m going to try to get through this.
What is your love ability? After ending a relationship, have you ever heard anyone say, maybe I’m not that lovable. Or maybe you’ve had someone tell you that you’re not very loveable. Most people think either they’re lovable or they’re not. Like it has something to do with them, but guess what? It doesn’t. We think that the way how we look and the way how we act is what creates our lovability. It makes sense that we’d think this way because we live in a world where we put something out on social media and then people like it or they don’t. So it’s easy to connect the false thinking that we must be more liked, the more likes we get.
We think that by behaving a certain way, we’ll be able to control how people think. We can definitely sway people because that’s how trends are born, and there are very strategic marketers out there who are brilliant at playing to your vulnerability making you think that you have to have their product in order to fit in, in order to be more loveable, but if the way we acted could control others thoughts, then everyone would be thinking the exact same thing and I hope you all know by now that that’s impossible.
Now I know there are some people who are easier to love than others, but they are usually the ones who share similar beliefs and ideas with you. It’s easy to love them because we don’t have to manage our thoughts about how they’re acting. We think they are being appropriate based on what our brains have decided is appropriate. So our capacity doesn’t have to be very large to love them. It’s the people who don’t believe the same as we do and who challenges our beliefs that are the ones who really push us to see what our capacity to love really is.
What is your capacity to love? Did you know that we are all 100% lovable? When you disagree with someone, can you still separate their behavior with their worth as a person and still love them as a priceless human being who has their own opinions, or not? Do you get stuck in how you think they should be acting and allow that to cloud your ability for them to still have their opinions and you still love them anyway? When we are talking about love ability, it’s a lot easier to understand it when I say: love, space, ability. Love ability. It changes its entire meaning.
So what is your ability to love? What is your love ability? Do you have limits to how much you will love? If you have expectations for how people should be, then you might have limits and it’s possible you have a cutoff point to how much you will love them. Now you’re still allowed to have expectations, but what do you do when those expectations aren’t met? How do you react towards them? Do you still treat them with the same love you’d treat someone else who meets your “should-be’s”?
The easiest way for you to determine if your capacity to love them is just as high, is to watch how you are separating someone’s behavior from them as a person. Five years ago, I was a big offender and didn’t even know it. I had so many expectations of how I thought people should act and it really limited my ability to love them. My expectations especially caused my relationship with myself and my children to suffer, because I was expecting certain behaviors and certain actions out of us in order to feel good about myself. I thought only if my children did A,B and C, then I could think I was a good mom. It’s like it was proof to myself and everyone else that I was doing everything I should be to produce successful, loving human beings.
I thought I knew exactly what was best for my children and they would suffer if they didn’t do what I was teaching them, and to some extent that was true, just because we have wisdom being older than them, but in other ways, turns out I was wrong. And the biggest problem is that I was the one suffering the most because I was the one feeling bad and I was the one not being able to feel love to its fullest extent. I would still love them, but it was tainted, and I wasn’t able to get past a certain level of love because in the background there was also the feeling of disappointment or hurt. And it was disappointment for them because of what they were doing AND disappointment for me because maybe if they cared more for me, maybe if they loved me more, maybe if I were a better mom, then they’d want to make different choices. This is dirty pain, my friends. Pain coming from me thinking if I controlled the situation, life would be so much better. It’s a pain that keeps us spinning in hurt because we can’t control others, but somehow, we still try and we get stuck thinking over and over “if they did this, then they’d be so much happier.” But really what I was think was, “ if they did this, then I could be happy.”
When we place so many conditions on people, our capacity to love them can become limited. The more limited it is, the less we get to feel love. Think about this. The higher our love ability is, the more we get to feel the love ourselves. I know this can be a hard concept to grasp so hang in there with me. When we love someone, that feeling of love, that good feeling that we have inside, cannot jump out of us and into another person for them to feel it. Now it will cause us to act a certain way which will them cause them to have certain thoughts and those thoughts might create a loving feeling within them, but it is only the thoughts they have that allows them to feel love. When we love other people we get to feel it. And when we’re feeling good, that motivates us to act in a way that will get us more positive results in our lives. When we withhold our love from someone, we aren’t hurting them, we are only hurting ourselves because we are depriving ourselves of that good feeling of love.
It hurts our relationship with them because we show up differently. How we think about someone determines our relationship with them. If we are thinking loving thoughts about them, then we’ll act lovingly towards them. If we are thinking thoughts that are negative, then no matter what, we’re going to show up negatively in one way or another.
When we ask other people to act a certain way, we really aren’t wanting to genuinely love them for who they are. What we’re wanting is an idea of who we’d rather them be so it’s easier for us to love them. If you’re doing this, is that really the relationship you want? A relationship with an idea? Withholding love from others until they behave how we want is like drinking poison and then waiting for them to die. Either people are going to show up as themselves and you’re going to feel negatively, or they’ll act like they think they must to be accepted by you and you end up having an inauthentic relationship with them. Either way, withholding love is only hurting you.
Imagine if you could just love someone for who they were, where they were in that moment. There’s nothing better than being with someone who just loves you for you and isn’t always trying to change you into their idea of a “better version of you”. And the same goes for yourself. Can you have love for yourself for who you are now? It’s OK to also have a desire for a more refined version of you but changing yourself so you can love yourself is putting the wrong fuel in your tank.
What do you want your capacity to be? What level of love do you want to be able to freely feel? What level of love do you want to be able to freely give? These are such good questions to ask ourselves. It helps me to believe that we are all doing the best that we can. We don’t know all the circumstances that has led each person to act the way they do. We don’t know why they are thinking the way they are or if the chemicals in their brain are functioning as it was intended. Now, can we have a limit to who we’ll seek a connection with? Absolutely! Can we have expectations? Absolutely! We just have to like our reasons and be okay with the results we are getting from them.
So do I want to go to lunch with a serial killer or hang out with a rapist? No. But can I develop my ability to look at that person and possibly feel love for them because we know that hurt people, hurt people. And so, they must be really hurting right now. They were born with so much potential, but for whatever reason, it’s still sitting there, waiting to be taken advantage of. And it’s totally within my power to choose to think, they are doing the best they can. It could be true. Even if their best is my worst, it could still be true. And if I choose to think they’re doing the best they can, I can also choose to think that person’s not for me. I can choose to love them and still not want to be around them. So you are choosing to feel good and choosing to keep yourself safe.
Is there someone out there that you’d like to love more? Start by separating who they are from their actions. Their actions are just a reflection of how they are seeing the world. So if they are acting rotten, then they must be feeling really rotten. I can definitely have compassion for someone who is constantly feeling rotten. That would stink to feel that way all the time and they are really missing out of a whole lot of other emotions that could feel better.
Listen, you are 100% lovable. If someone has told you that you’re not lovable, that’s about them. They are telling you that their ability to love you is weak. They may not know that’s what they are saying, but now you know. And that may be their best right now. It’s possible that that person’s not for you and that’s okay. Every day is a new opportunity to work on our ability to love more.
You, my friend, have a brilliant day and always remember,
You are loved!
Bye!
