Love is Not Enough & It Certainly Costs Some Things

Are you someone who goes beyond just using the phrase "I love you" to communicate commitment to those you love and lead? Or do you practice mirroring your actions based on how you want your love to inspire and impact the lives of others? 

This episode starts the conversation about what love is, how we tend to use it, and how we can be encouraged to go beyond it by making daily commitments to showing those we love and lead just how much we adore and unconditionally support them. When we understand that love costs a lot more than we think, including deficits to our energy, time, and money, we can begin to unravel the cyclical process of loving ourselves so we can be the best version of ourselves for everyone else. 

While this is just the start of the conversation, we believe changing the way we see love and how we share it can be an opportunity for us to find our vision and elevate exceptional people everywhere, including ourselves.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Hello. And welcome here is a podcast just for you where every day I'm teaching you something new about how to be the best version of yourself. So you can be an inspiring visionary for everyone else. I'm showing up to guide you. There's some things that you may have often overlooked such as how to strengthen your mindset. Without having to read a book in a world where everyone's focus is on what everyone else is up to. I'm hoping I can help you slow life down so you can focus on what you can do. The world needs more people to believe in what they see and to have visions beyond diagnoses with a focus on possibility. So I'm asking that as you listen in, please open up your mind and together, let's see all the ways we can make better. What we find. This is a podcast about diversity, equity and inclusion. And it's also about my experiences with exclusion. And it is my hope that in each episode, you're able to connect with me. And when we leave the conversation, I hope you are forever committed to the cause. See me not ASD. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to episode eight of Simi, not ASD the podcast. I'm your host Devika car. This week. We're talking about love. Love is not enough. And it certainly does cost some things. This episode was inspired by Jennifer Lopez's song. Love don't cost a thing, and the truth is love. Actually costs a lot of things. It doesn't maybe cost money, but we're going to get into all the things that it costs and what it actually is and how there's an opportunity for us to love better by showing people differently. So the monologue question for you this week is how do you show your love, take it assessment of where you already are in your life and how you already show people that you love them. And what is the price that you pay for sharing your love with others? Our segment goal is to inspire you to go beyond just loving others and encourage you to mirror your love and your actions based on how you want your love to impact the lives of those that you love and lead. So in the basic form, love is defined as deep affection, a feeling of deep affection, and it really is nothing more than that. I think that we tend to attach meaning to it based on how we feel when we receive it, but essentially the dictionary definition doesn't really go much beyond that. In last, we're talking about romantic love. And in this episode, we're not, we're talking about non romantic love. When we say that we love someone, we feel deep affection for them. We feel deep admiration. When we say that we love someone, it really is just how connected we feel with them, but how we show our deep affection and our deep admiration is much different than just simply saying,

Speaker 2: 3:25

I love you.

Speaker 1: 3:29

It is not uncommon for people to use the phrase I love you. And to then think that it is enough to communicate commitment, adoration, unconditional support, et cetera. And really it's not the phrase itself that communicates all of those things. It's the actions and the outward expressions of the statement that really communicate those things. And so love is effective when it is supported by action. And so it is not enough for me to just say that I love my children. It is a, not enough for me to adjust, you know, um, say I love them and expect them to understand what that means just by words alone. And I think from the beginning of your time, in a relationship with someone you're building trust, you're building, understanding, you're building friendship. And over time, as you begin to understand and to trust and to become friends, you start to really feel what love is when it comes to that particular person. And this applies to anyone in your life. Anyone that you think that you love, this is how it starts. It's not just the feeling, right? So it feels good to say it though, right? I mean, if you love someone, you enjoy telling them, you want them to know and you want them to trust it. You want them to believe in it. And so you share the phrase. I love you. Uh, we say it all the time to our kids, to our spouses, to our partners, to our friends, to the people that we meet, even for a short time, uh, to former lovers, to former friends, these are all people that we have likely shared some adoration, some admiration for and deep affection for. And one way in which we've likely expressed it is to say,

Speaker 2: 5:26

I love you. So, but if we don't

Speaker 1: 5:30

Show people how we love them, then how do they really associate us saying that

Speaker 2: 5:37

I love you with a feeling

Speaker 1: 5:40

Of commitment or feeling of admiration, really? Where does that connection happen

Speaker 2: 5:48

And hearing

Speaker 1: 5:50

And seeing, I love you will have no positive impact if you don't attach actions to it that communicate so love is merely the segue to deciding and committing, to building the kind of emotional intelligence necessary in order to handle life circumstances with someone to handle the experiences that we have with one another, to over the course of a relationship, develop that kind of trust and understanding, and to make that kind of impact in those lives. And to really share with someone,

Speaker 2: 6:35

The feelings that arise

Speaker 1: 6:40

And transpire through love, love is practicing and emotional balance. Love is practicing the emotional balance required for you to be able to handle the things that come along the way, right? So you have to be committed to constantly evolving as transformations happen in a relationship as transformations occur in time and in space and the dynamics of relationships. Because like I said, whether we're talking about romantic ones or non-romantic ones, everything changes, people, evolve experiences change us, time changes space between us and the closeness that we share changes. These are inevitable facets of life. And so love is truly the commitment to evolving when those things happen to being prepared for how you will evolve. When those things happen to simply being committed to the process of evolution in who you are and how you show you love people as time and space and relationship dynamics change in order to advance on a journey with someone to advance in your relationship. As you journey together through life, you have to be committed to the ways in which you are sure will share your love and your expression of love with other people. So those you love and lead are the same people whose lives you want to inspire and impact and influence positively. And that also includes yourself. You, you want to love and lead others and love and lead yourself in such a way that you are inspired by the memory of how you felt, how you made others feel right. So we w we want to act in such a way that conjures up positive emotions and positive memories. And so when people are reflecting on how we were loved or how we loved them, those are the

Speaker 2: 8:56

Things that come up. So what does it cost?

Speaker 1: 8:59

What does it cost us to love effectively? The things that come to my mind are sacrifice and investments. We sacrifice our, our own desires. We sacrifice the things that we already have. We sacrifice pursuing the things that we want so that other people that we love and lead can receive the benefit of our investments. So our time, our money and our energy,

Speaker 2: 9:35

We invest

Speaker 1: 9:37

Our time into those that we love and lead. We give our time so that they can grow so that they can learn so that they can

Speaker 2: 9:49

Release

Speaker 1: 9:50

The thoughts and feelings that are, are troubling them so that they can release the thoughts and feelings that are making them feel good.

Speaker 2: 10:02

Wow.

Speaker 1: 10:02

We invest our money in other people that we love and lead by sharing resources. We invest our money, for example, by attending conferences and reading books and buying inspirational things that are going to enhance our knowledge and our wisdom and our capabilities and skills so that we can then share and give and invest in those people to grow and become more knowledgeable and to become wiser.

Speaker 2: 10:38

We invest money,

Speaker 1: 10:42

Time and energy in order to do all of these things.

Speaker 2: 10:46

And yet,

Speaker 1: 10:48

How often do we consider investing similarly and sacrificing similarly for the way that we love ourselves.

Speaker 2: 11:00

It's almost as if, for example, I,

Speaker 1: 11:04

I sacrifice my time for my children. Let's say I have like most people, 24 hours in a day to accomplish something and to achieve different things. And I set aside three hours dedicated to my children. I don't focus on the things that I need or want. I don't focus on the things that I desire other than loving and leading them and making sure that they feel and are shown what kind of love and leadership I am dedicated to giving them. And so now I have 21 hours left in my day, and yet they've received an additional three hours. So perhaps some could argue that now they have 27 hours in their day where they can receive and, and share in love and leadership with those that they love and lead themselves, including themselves. Reality will tell you that we each have the same number of hours in every day. But when you think about the amount of time that people are taking away from themselves to invest in other people, then perhaps the perspective could change that we really do receive more time and more energy and more resources than a strict 24 hour day can give us. And that's because of the people that we are loved by, and the people that lead us and seek to watch us grow and who are committed and dedicated to seeing us achieve and be more successful in life. So you can take away from yours, your, your money, your time, and your energy to expand someone. Else's time to expand someone else's energy, to expand someone else's, um, ability to obtain more money. Think about all the times that you loved a friend, and they came to you with a discussion of their problems, their challenges, and you left the conversation, feeling depleted with your own energy. You felt like you gave to them so much positivity and so much insight and so much, um, thoughtfulness and mindfulness that you left feeling like you had nothing left to share. And so you demonstrated your love and leadership with that friend, by giving to them all that they needed to be more energized. And now you're left to figure out how to re-energize yourself. How will you love yourself in such a way that you can re-energize, you can provide or share your resources so that others may grow. And when you're finished, how do you replenish the resources that you gave away,

Speaker 2: 13:58

Growing

Speaker 1: 13:58

Your skills, your knowledge, your wisdom, so that you may help others find focus and to approach challenges that are bothering them, or things that have just shown up in their lives. Things are unfamiliar with, and you provide them greater clarity and direction, but then when you leave that interaction, when you, when you step back or you complete your, your task of sharing your time, energy, or money, or sacrificing what you needed, or what you desired, or what you wanted, where do you go, and what do you do to reinvest in yourself? How do you approach the challenge of now being

Speaker 2: 14:42

Depleted so

Speaker 1: 14:43

That you can give more to those that you love and lead it's this cycle, right? Where we want to love other people deeply. And we want to be able to show them how we love them deeply in such a way that they have a positive memory attached to the way in which we love to them. And yet it often leaves us feeling like we haven't loved on ourselves enough. And so love costs all these things, sacrifice money, time, energy, and yet it also costs us feeling less like we spent time loving ourselves. So how do we fix it? What is the solution to this cycle? Which could easily keep us from being our best selves, which could keep us from loving and leading the people that we love and lead as effectively as we desire to make impact. How do we ensure that we love ourselves enough and show ourselves love enough that we are able to expend our time, our energy, our money, and make sacrifices willingly and happily, and then be able to come back full circle and repeat again and again and again, because when we have a purpose, when we have a desire and a calling to love and lead one particular group of people, one person, many people in many diverse areas and groups, and all of the many roles that we play, if I want to love and lead my family and my children, if I want to love and lead my husband, I want to love and lead my friends if I want to love and lead my past relationships for the rest of my life, because each area has meant so much to me. And I'm deeply connected to those experiences. How can I do that? And still love and lead myself in such a way that I am the best version of me as a visionary so that I'm elevating in every single one of those roles. And when you really think of the expanded conversation, like that's really deep and that's really challenging. And this week I have struggled with a dear friend of mine. We have discussed on numerous occasions, how empty we feel sometimes an empty, not as in, we don't love the people that we love or that we don't want to keep going to leave those that we wish to, to elevate, but we feel empty because where is the energy coming from? Where's the time coming from for us to do all of these things and to be all of these things for everyone else. And a lot of the process throughout the year in finding your vision with us at Simi, not ASD is a discussion and an expansion of what it means to grow so that you are able to comfortably say that you are always replenishing yourself so that you can be the best version of others or for others, but it's a process and it's a practice and it's a commitment to the practice of it. So I can't tell you right now that I have all the answers, but I can tell you that by the end of this year, by the end of the 52 weeks, that I have committed to giving you all the resources that I believe you need to find your visions, that you can elevate other exceptional people around the world. If you remain committed with me to going on this journey and, and staying on this journey, I promise by 2021, we're going to start off the year. Just we've already practiced enough that we're going to be able to share what we've learned so that other people can learn it and other people can practice it. And everyone else can be inspired by what we're doing to see the world differently. So my call to action is for you to identify three ways in which you are committed to going beyond just loving someone, think of someone that you love and that you lead, that you want to be a positive memory for when they think of you, you want them to feel a neuroma or all the ways in which you loved them and ways that they could easily identify by sharing into thoughts. Think of three ways that you are committed to showing people that you love them differently. Going beyond just saying, I love you and demonstrating what your love means, what are the choices that you can make? And the actions that you can take that would result in you being a positive memory or an inspiring memory for those that you love and leave. Yeah. Creative connection this week is a quote by Bernay Brown. Daring greatly connection is why we're here. We are hard wired to connect with others. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. And without it, there is suffering. Now I'm certain that I have probably talked about Bernay Brown already. This quote, even if I've used it before, it's still appropriate here. And it's because connection is what will make you loving someone and the way in which you act come together in the mantra this week. I want you to really consider how you love, who you love and how you hope that you loving them will make them feel when they think of you. Love is feeling deep affection, but how I love is the connection that gives purpose and meaning to the life I live. And the love I give may. I love unconditionally, may I lead effectively? And may I be a positive or inspiring memory in the lives of others? Thank you for tuning in this week until next time.

Speaker 3: 22:05

[inaudible],

Speaker 1: 22:06

You've just listened to see me not ASD the podcast with your hosts to Bekah. Thank you for joining. Please connect with us beyond this week's episode so we can continue the conversation. We hope that you'll have time to visit our website. See me not asd.com, where you'll discover show notes, bonus content, be able to sign up for access to our other resources and submit any questions, comments, or topic ideas. But if you're currently multitasking while watching or listening to this podcast, and you're not able to get to the website right now, we simply ask that you remember us on Instagram. See me not ASC. We have some bonus content that we've bookmarked for you, easy access, and you'll be able to get started. We believe we are the number one source for inspiring visionary supporters around the world so that they can elevate the exceptional people in the world as well in the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion. So as you meet individuals, see them for the exceptional people that they are and do your best to elevate that.