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My Journey of Self-Acceptance

2021-09-12 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 6:58 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Evidence-based framing, His own numbers, He changed his mind

Just after reaching 2 million subscribers and moving to London, Ali admits he has a poor relationship with self-acceptance and shares five methods he is trying: relaxed awareness (meditation), letting go of rating himself, gratitude that includes himself, forgiveness and compassion, and separating from his emotions through Stoicism.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Life is great after 2 million subscribers and the move to London, but Ali lacks self-acceptance

  • ★★ Ali's YouTube channel has just reached 2 million subscribers. — 00:00:03
  • ★★ Ali's team has doubled in size. — 00:00:06
  • ★★ Ali has just moved to a new place in London. — 00:00:08 · London
  • ★★★ Although his life is going well, Ali has been reading a lot about self-acceptance and realises he does not have a good relationship with it. — 00:00:12

  • ★★ Ali gives the definition he has read: true self-acceptance means embracing who we are without qualifications, conditions or exceptions, accepting the less desirable, negative parts of ourselves as well as the good. — 00:00:20

    “true self-acceptance is about embracing who we are without any qualifications, conditions, or exceptions”

  • ★★★ Robert Holden (quoted): Robert Holden writes that no amount of self-improvement can make up for a lack of self-acceptance. — 00:00:38

    “no amount of self-improvement can make up for any lack of self-acceptance”

00:00:48 — Method one: practise relaxed awareness, a form of meditation

  • ★★★ Ali's first method for self-acceptance, relaxed awareness: close your eyes for a minute and softly notice your thoughts, feelings and body, negative ones included, without pushing them away or trying to make them positive. — 00:01:08
  • ★★ Ali has been dabbling with the Headspace app and Sam Harris's Waking Up app; he has no proper meditation practice yet, but it is a habit he really wants to build. — 00:01:30
  • ★★ On the few occasions Ali meditates or sits in silence for about 10 minutes noticing his own thoughts, he finds it genuinely helpful and the rest of his day feels a bit better. — 00:01:40

00:01:54 — Method two: let go of rating yourself

  • ★★★ Ali's second method for self-acceptance is to let go of rating yourself and comparing yourself with other people. — 00:01:54
  • ★★ Seeing photos of men with six-pack abs on his Instagram Explore page, Ali finds that besides wanting such abs he has an undercurrent feeling that his own body is not good enough. — 00:02:12 · Instagram
  • ★★ When he compares himself with others, Ali is trying to drop the self-rating while keeping the inspiration. — 00:02:36

00:02:42 — Method three: practise gratitude, including for yourself

  • ★★ Ali's third method for self-acceptance is to practise gratitude: there is so much evidence, he says, that being more grateful is amazing for our happiness. — 00:02:42
  • ★★ Ali cites a study showing that gratitude journaling, writing down a few things you are grateful for each day, increases happiness as much as doubling your salary. — 00:02:50
  • ★★ Ali keeps a daily journaling practice in the app Day One, which he calls very good, and always asks himself what three things he is grateful for. — 00:02:58 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali realised that the three things he is grateful for are always other people or things, such as coffee, his desk setup, his house, Sheen or Angus, and never anything about himself. — 00:03:10 · Sheen, Angus
  • ★★★ Ali's new rule for his three-things gratitude exercise: at least one of the three must be about himself, such as his health, the way he deals with problems or a failure that has helped him. — 00:03:30

00:03:50 — Method four: understand forgiveness and compassion

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth method for self-acceptance: turn self-judgement into forgiveness and compassion, forgiving yourself as you would someone else, and ideally recognise that all humans are imperfect, so shortcomings are okay. — 00:03:52
  • ★★ Steven Bartlett (quoted): Steven Bartlett, in a podcast interview with Ali, makes the point that we are all fundamentally imperfect human beings just trying our best, and that seeing ourselves this way we would beat ourselves up a lot less. — 00:04:25

00:04:38 — Method five: separate from your emotions, and Ali's years of Stoicism

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth method for self-acceptance: separate from your emotions, seeing negative emotions as passing objects, like a leaf floating past in the wind, rather than as part of you or commandments to follow. — 00:04:40
  • ★★ Ali says he has followed Stoicism for about the last eight years. — 00:05:00 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali recommends three really good books about Stoicism: Derren Brown's Happy, William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life and Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way. — 00:05:05 · Derren Brown, Ryan Holiday, stoicism
  • ★★ Ali thinks he does a pretty good job of keeping his self-esteem and self-acceptance apart from whatever emotions he is feeling. — 00:05:25
  • ★★ Having had a privileged life without major emotional knocks, Ali says that only when something bad happens will he see whether his Stoicism training is useful or just talk. (hedged) — 00:05:32 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali is using five methods to cultivate self-acceptance: relaxed awareness, letting go of rating himself, gratitude, forgiveness and compassion, and separating from his emotions. — 00:05:46

00:05:50 — A new area of growth: self-love, meditation and yoga, thanks to Sheen

  • ★★★ Self-acceptance is a new era for Ali: a few months earlier he would not have given it the time of day; the subject is not productivity, and he is excited by it as a new area of growth. — 00:05:52
  • ★★ Ali is trying meditation and dabbling with yoga, trying to become a bit more spiritual and more in touch with his emotions and himself. — 00:06:15
  • ★★ Ali credits his former housemate Sheen with turning him on to many of these ideas about self-acceptance and spirituality. — 00:06:25 · Sheen
  • ★★ Ali promises to share on his channel what he learns about self-acceptance and these ideas as he learns it. — 00:06:30

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: self-acceptance

Also: People: Angus · Derren Brown · Robert Holden · Ryan Holiday · Sam Harris · Sheen · Steven Bartlett · William Irvine

Works: A Guide to the Good Life · Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine · The Obstacle Is the Way

Organizations: Instagram

Concepts: meditation · stoicism

Places: London

Products: Day One · Headspace · Waking Up

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