Hello, how are you doing it? It’s February who is excited. I am really, really excited because I am starting group coaching next week. It is going to be so good. Who is this for? I’ve had a few questions, like, is this for pregnancy after loss? Is this for, you know, all these different things. It is for all lost.

Wherever you are, you belong there. And if you’re worried, like there might be pregnant people, or there might be people who are fresh in their loss and you might get triggered. I don’t want you to worry about that. On day one, we’re going to be learning how to hold space for each other and how to handle our triggers.

So even though we might not be in the exact same spot in our life after loss, we can cheer for each other. What you’re going to get is a perfect mix of a support. And learning coping skills to really up level your life. I’ve got some really cool stuff plan for all of us. This is a really small group.

There’s only eight spots and it goes for eight weeks. It’s $198 for all of that. Eight weeks. When you hit the end of this program, you are going to feel so much lighter, so much better, so much more focused, so much farther ahead. It’s going to be amazing. So please come to winter group coaching, do it. Now you can go in the show notes and there’s a link right there.

I want you to make decisions quickly if you’ve been thinking about coaching with me, but you’re not sure. If you’ve been, if you have any questions, just go ahead and say yes to you, move forward and see what you can. I always say that actually coaching, like you can learn a lot from this podcast. I put a lot into it so that you can learn and like, so your life can be better, but it’s like reading a book about snowboarding and actually getting your butt out there on the mountain.

It’s a totally different thing. When you really get coached and you get to watch people be coached. Go to the link in my show notes, or go to smooth stones, coaching.com forward slash group coaching. Just one word. Well, two words smashed together into one and sign up. I get, wait to meet you. It’s going to be amazing.

All right. Let’s talk about today’s topic, which is love ability. And I, as I was planning out all my topics for February, I thought this is a month of love and relationships are just so important. And so each week we’re going to have something that’s going to help you. And I think this is like, The top, the most important thing, the best skill that we can learn, especially in life after loss, when it can feel a little bit harder because we have a lot of judgments about people and if they’re lovable or not and how they’re showing up.

So let’s talk about what makes someone lovable. A lot of us think, and society tells us that it’s the things. They do, the things they say, how they show up, like if they bring us roses or if they’re really cute and thoughtful, that makes someone lovable. Well, what makes someone unlovable? A lot of times, it’s their bad habits.

They lose their temper. They don’t text us back there. They say things and do things that we don’t like. And so we would say that those people are hard to love, and that is basically what we’ve all been taught, but it doesn’t really serve us. It can make it really hard to go through life because. What we need is for people to act certain ways so that we can love them.

But what I want to tell you, which is the secret to all of it is what makes someone lovable is you choose to love them. You make that choice, that’s it. It’s not about what they do or what they don’t do, how they’re showing up. The way you think about them and the reason this is so amazing. And so freeing is because when it’s about you, you are the one that has so much more control over it and you can build your capacity to love.

So everything I teach you here. It’s something that you can do. You might not want to, you might even not agree with me at first, but I want you to open up your mind and just stick with me here. You can build your capacity to love, and if they love you, or if they love you back, that has to do with their capacity to love.

A lot of times we, it’s easier to love someone who loves us back, but we feel our love. We don’t feel their love for us. They feel their love for us, but we feel our love, which comes from our thoughts about them. So I wanted to give you a really kind of simple example about this love ability. Now I have a couple of girls, 

and they have birthdays. So we have like Christmas then birthday, birthday, and I have one daughter who loves dairy queen cakes every year, dairy queen cake. And we have never, ever lived near a dairy queen. So I’m always like taking a cooler and driving an hour to find a dairy queen cake and bring it back for her.

Now my other daughter, she wants cheesecake pretty much every year. Now is one cake more lovable is dairy queen cake more lovable than cheesecake? Not really. It’s not really about the cake. It’s about them. What do they love? What do they prefer? What do they feel when they see that? If I switched them around and I got the one that likes dairy queen cake, a cheesecake, she would probably be okay, but she would be disappointed.

She wouldn’t love it. She she’d maybe like it, but it has nothing to do with the cake. It has everything to do with the, what she’s thinking. So this is just like how we feel about other humans. But you have to understand your brain. , it is set up to dislike things and to notice problems. This really served us when we’re looking out for dangers, when we’re looking out for things to fix so that we can stay alive and healthy and happy and continue on the human race.

So you have to be on to your brain. You have to know that your brain, even with the people we say we love most, right? Like our partners or kids, our parents, our siblings, our brain is still on the lookout for reasons that there’s a problem. And so we have to make the effort, it takes work to. It really does, but this isn’t a problem, right?

This is just something once you’re aware of it. And once you say, oh yeah, that’s my brain. I’m noticing, noticing problems, but I don’t have to listen to it. I don’t have to believe that it’s a problem. I can still love someone no matter how they’re, they’re showing up or how loud they breathe or how loud they chew or any of those things.

So I want you to think of someone who is challenging for you to love, and it wants you to describe them. What story would you tell about them? And this isn’t the time to edit or to be really nice or, you know, people pleasing, just, if there’s someone in your life that kind of bugs you, what story would you tell about, about them and how would you break that down into, like, if you were going to describe them to someone, if you say.

You know, Sally is what, how would you describe this person? Now? Most of us really do want to be good kind people. I think if you’re here listening to a self-development podcasts and you’ve experienced grief, like, you know that it’s, you know, life is short and you want to be around good people. You want to be a good person.

You want to contribute to the world. So why can’t you love this person? I want you to ask yourself this question. Why don’t I allow myself to love this person? Who’s difficult to.

Let’s look at it and not push it down a lot of times because we want to be good and kind, we will push it down. We will edit it or we’ll be like, we’ll complain a little bit, but then we’ll be like, but I love them. Oh, but it’s, it’s not that big a deal. You know, we’ll push it down, but I want you to pull it out.

This is what we want to do with that work. We always want to pull out the thoughts so we can look at them. And be really honest and curious and not judgmental because you are the one who feels negative emotion. You are the one that is punishing yourself when you don’t love this person. You are the one who has to feel terrible when you were around them or when you think about them or when you talk about.

Michael’s Jody always says it’s like punching yourself in the face, right? When you don’t feel love towards someone, it’s like, you’re punching yourself in the face. And that’s not fun when we love someone, it feels the best. And so that’s what we want. Now what happens is we think this person should be different than you feel terrible.

And then you react. Or like I said, you people please. So you don’t, you act nice around them, but really inside you’re feeling terrible. And then this just keeps going around and around in a cycle because you can’t break out of the cycle. If you’re waiting for this person to change how they behave so that you can love.

They don’t need to act lovable. You need to increase your love ability. Let’s talk about how to genuinely love someone. I want you to think about love. How does it feel? Like close your eyes, take a breath. What does love feel like in your body? Your heart is warm. Your, your whole body can be tingling.

You’re happy or smiling. Like it’s a good feeling. Now when you love, you get to feel the love and not the other person.

So that’s why it’s in your best interest to learn how to love people. 

  I’ve got a challenge for you. Keep thinking about this person that is hard for you to love. There’s something that your brain is going to try to do your you’ll think about them and you’ll be like, okay, I’m going to try to love them. They used to really, really bother me. I’ve been working on this, I’ve come such a long way.

I used to really, really struggle. And now I just feel neutral. Now when I’m around them, like it’s, I don’t feel much of anything. I want you to try loving. I want to push you to the next step, right? Because feeling meh about somebody feeling good and nothing feeling kind of neutral. A lot of times, that’s what we want.

When we have been feeling bad or angry or frustrated, feeling, nothing kind of feels better, but what about loving them? Remember you get to enjoy that, and no matter what they do, if they keep annoying you, I want you to keep bringing it back to. Because every human is lovable. Every human is a hundred percent lovable, including you.

I want you to include yourself in this. You are lovable a hundred percent and worthy in. Amazing.

And I want you to know that a lot of times when, when I teach this concept, people will think. Well, if I love them, if I accept them, if I, if I feel love towards them, then I have to be a doormat or then it means I let them do whatever they want or I let them treat me a certain way. Of course not. I would never tell you that we don’t need to put up with abuse.

We don’t need to put up with behavior. We don’t like or want to allow. Absolutely still need to protect yourself. You don’t even have to keep this person in your life. If there’s someone in your life who just, it’s not okay to have them in your life, you can love them and not have them in your life, but you still get to feel the love, right?

You don’t have to hate someone to kick them out of your life. You don’t have to hate a job to leave it . You don’t need to hate a house to move. You can learn to love these things and also want to change them, but just don’t change them. Don’t change your relationship to try to feel better, 

you can feel better. You can feel love and you can also choose to not have that person in your life. So again, with you being lovable, I just want to add that if someone doesn’t love. It says everything about them and nothing about you, nothing about you. I, I saw a great example of this. I was looking up I dunno, something about in condo and Lin-Manuel Miranda who wrote these songs.

If you don’t know, he wrote Hamilton. He did Mary Poppins too. He is a prolific songwriter and I saw someone commenting. Maybe it was a YouTube that I was watching with my kids and they were like, I just can’t stand Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music. And I thought that is such a funny thing to say, because he has so much music, like so much music.

So to just say this blanket statement of, I can’t stand this certain person’s music. I thought it was just so funny. And the thing is that person is kind of denying themselves enjoyment. They’ve just blocked out an entire, like huge portion of songs in the world. And, and so that person just doesn’t get to enjoy it.

Now. I’m not saying you have to like all kinds of music. I don’t like all kinds of music. But I just think it was a really good example of how. Lin-Manuel Miranda could see that comment. And he could think a lot of things about it, but I’m sure being a creative person, he knows that sometimes people aren’t going to like your stuff and that’s okay.

It says nothing about his music, his skill the amount of effort he’s put into creating these songs. It just says that this other person it’s really too bad. They’re missing out. And they get to have their, their choices and their feelings and opinions. But I think Lin-Manuel, Miranda’s over there.

He’s doing fine. So if this happens in your life, if you have someone into your life who just, you know, doesn’t love you, no matter what you do, that’s okay. That’s about them.

And remember the way they treat you the way they act. It doesn’t make you feel loved. What makes you feel loved is when you think loving thoughts? So my mentor and teacher Brooke Castillo said love feels great and withholding love feels terrible. Love is for you. Not the other person of always has a good reason.

Love never hurts. And the lack of love never protects. I’m going to still love is a skill. It’s a skillset that we all can learn. So I want you to think about this. If love is always the best option, then we don’t want to put conditions on it. And what she means by that is we don’t need to have a checklist of how people need to show up so that we can love them.

We just love. Mother. Theresa said, people who love each other fully and truly are the happiest people in the world. They may have little, they may have nothing, but they are happy people. Everything depends on how we love one another. And I, I love that and I’m sure you know, that she spent her time with people who did have nothing material.

But if they had love, they had everything and the goal isn’t to be happy all the time, but letting yourself feel love in the good and the bad will be a much more fulfilling experience in this life. And I think, you know, touching on that with, if you are like a religious person, a spiritual. Person. I think like we look at Jesus Christ as a great example of love, right?

He loved people, no matter what they were doing. He loved the sinners. He loved the people who were struggling. He loved even the people who persecuted him and eventually killed him. He showed them love and he was a great example. And I’m sure there’s many other good examples of, of people who chose love.

And no matter what, it just, it wasn’t an option. They just loved people where they are and they knew their weaknesses and they still love. So I think that’s a great example of that. And don’t use people’s behavior as a reason, not to love them. This is. That life is 50 50, right? So any experience is going to be half good, half bad, half positive, half negative that’s life on earth.

And so when we have a person, we have to understand that. And it’s not, I mean, don’t question me on the math, but overall half the time they’re going to be grouchy or tired, or they’re going to forget things. They’re going to do things we don’t like. And half the time they’re going to be amazing. This goes for our family members, our friends. This is part of the contrast, right? We wouldn’t really learn anything. We wouldn’t have to work on our love ability if everyone was just perfectly behaved all the time and did everything we wanted. But this is. Where the rubber meets the road, as they say,

when you need to love someone who is behaving in a way that you do not like. And I think it’s funny that I was planning this, this episode this week and I had my whole outline written out and I had everything and I’m going to teach you guys. And then there’s a person in my family that I might happen to be married to who was showing up in a certain way that I.

It did not love. And, and so I was like, ah, here it is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a life coach. If you, you know, are Zen master of all these things, you’re still going to have situations where it’s like, I got to choose, I love this person. I don’t love what they’re doing, but I’m not feeling the love. I’m feeling super frustrated. And so what do I want to do? And it has to be really, really intentional because it’s so much easier to just go to being annoyed. So once you to follow these three steps that are going to help you, when you come up with a challenging person to love or challenging situation, right?

Like we have people we love and sometimes it’s challenged more challenging to love them. So first recognize that love comes from your thoughts about someone not their actual. This is a hundred percent true. And I want you to be curious and try it. Number two, choose love. Even during the 50% of the time that people act in ways we don’t like.

And number three, no, that you feeling loved helps you show up as your favorite self. Now I use the word favorite self cause I saw a friend who was using it instead of like my best self or my highest self would sometimes can feel. Unattainable or overwhelming. What is your favorite self? Your favorite self is patient.

When your kids throwing a tantrum in the grocery store, right? Your favorite self is calm when other people are getting frustrated. Your favorite self is when you show up the way you like the most. And for most of us, like I said, we want to be good people. We want to be kind people. And so when we have love driving our actions,

if you look at the self coaching model, it’s circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, results. So when that, when there’s love in that feeling line, it’s going to create how we act and those actions are going to create our result. And it is really, really this simple. I just want to touch on it, being careful with how you use the model in this case.

Because something that I see a lot in the loss community is people will say I loved my baby. And when it died, it made it more painful. That is not. Okay. Like, I’m pretty open to everything and, and I’m not going to tell you how to think, but when you say, because I loved my baby, when it died, it hurt worse.

That’s not true. The love to not hurt you. The love felt great. Those blissful weeks, whatever you had, the time you’re able to just love that baby. That was great. And then the baby died and now you feel like you have to be in pain. Or you have to withhold love from the people around you or future babies because love creates pain and withholding love will protect us, but that is not true.

Your thought that love more love equals more pain is a thought error. 

Another thing that we think is that we can’t fully and completely love our babies because they died. It’s also not true. In fact, I often argue that our babies who aren’t with us are incredibly easy to love. They don’t write on the walls or talk back to us. They don’t corrupt up and find beliefs totally opposite to what we taught them.

They’re easy to. But they died. And in our higher brain, we would never ever blame them for that. But somewhere we do have this thought that we can’t love them a hundred percent because they aren’t here physically with us. And I just want you to notice that and question that, see how. It’s showing up in your life and in your grief and in your parenting after loss, right?

Because we do still have that relationship. But in this case, that relationship is in our head. Now all of our relationships are in our head, but it doesn’t seem like it. But this is a great way to notice that you loving your baby comes a hundred percent from you. And how you think about them.

Notice where you’re holding yourself back from fully loving. I know in pregnancy, after losses is a huge thing where we hold ourselves back from fully loving to try to protect ourselves. And if you’re in that space, you got to be really, really gentle with yourself, but it also wants you to push yourself.

You can just let yourself love that baby. You can let yourself love the people around you, and yes, you might lose them. But I would choose my favorite self would choose to love people fully while they’re here in front of me. And if something happens, you deal with it. Then we have to practice. This is, does not come naturally.

Okay, let’s wrap this up. I hope you have loved this episode, but I want to talk about February the month of love. How lovable is it to you? Some people have a terrible relationship with Valentine’s day. And if that’s you, I especially want you to practice this simply with February 14th. What story are you telling about it?

What story do you have about the people in your life and how they show up? What about the stores and the cards and the candy and the roses and the crafty moms who do a sweetheart cafe and the influencers who have a picture perfect reel of it all. And that friend who hates it and has to share every year, how lame they think Valentine’s day is what would be different if you just loved it.

It doesn’t mean you have to participate. It just means you enjoy the day you get to feel love. I don’t think there’s ever a downside to loving and celebrating love, no matter how cheesy it is. It reminds me of an old song. You’ll have to search for it since I can’t put it on my podcasts, but it’s called lovers of loving love by the acrobats.

And it’s so funny and cute. Uh, but I did find it on Instagram. So if you’re not following. Go to Amy dot spoos stones, coaching. Follow me on Instagram. I’m going to make a real with this song. So you guys get to hear it. I refuse to dance on camera, but I will think of something to make a real about love and increasing your lovability.

And this is my challenge. As you finish up this podcast and get out there. No, that your ability to love is a hundred percent up to you. You have complete control over it, and that is the best news. That’s the best part about ThoughtWorks and learning to manage your mind is you realize I have so much more control than I thought I did.

Trust me. I have people in my life that people might say are hard to love and just choosing to love them and choosing to believe they’re doing their best. We’re all just doing our best. And just love all the humans it’s going to make your life is so much better, and it’s going to make your life after loss so much better.

Cause I think there’s a lot of judgment around how people show up for you in your grief, but you got to give yourself the gift of love. You gotta love those people in their imperfect humanness. It’s going to feel so much better. It’s going to be a lot more fun. I know you can do it. So good luck and I will see you next time.