Namaste. Today I want to welcome you to the third section, Third part. Yes, not section, third part. Third part of our four part series on the L.O.V.E. method. L, O, V, E. Love is an acronym. And over the last couple of months we’ve have learned to let go and let God, the L to embrace change. And also we’ve dealt with the O which is open your heart to receive. Why so many high achieving women, heart centered women are wired to give but struggle to receive. And today we’re going to be shifting now our focus to the V in love, which stands for value your uniqueness. And as we look toward our final installment next month, today though is going to be about claiming the identity you need to design your life your way. So why is it important to value your uniqueness and why do we have trouble doing so?
And you might also be wondering what is valuing your uniqueness. Your uniqueness. If I could speak today, have to do with designing your life your way. Well, it all stems from what I believe is worthiness. When we aren’t valuing what’s unique about us, it’s typically because we may not be finding ourselves to be worthy in some respect.
Worthiness and Childhood Peer Pressure
It also stems from, I think, I think this starts, you know, way, way back in childhood. A lot of times where, you know, when you’re in school there’s all this peer pressure, you know, to fit in with each other. And so you may not necessarily be willing to like they say. When I wrote about, in my book, I said to let your freak flag fly. Pause before I said that.
Because even though you might be unique in a certain respect, if you want to fit in with the certain clique in your school, maybe you start to hide that light a bit. And that can start you on this pattern of hiding your light as you get older and, and again, you know, you get into maybe your 20s and your 30s and, and there’s still a sort of subtle peer pressure that’s going on. And maybe sometimes not so subtle as a matter of fact, because let’s say you get married and now maybe you’ve got well meaning in laws who are like, when are you going to start having a baby? And I’m directing this to you women out there, but you know, maybe the men get this too, you know, when are you going to start a family, son? But I know, I know I had that, you know, and, and then, and not only the, you know, when are you gonna, when are you guys gonna start a family now that you’re married?
But then, oh, it would be so nice if you had a girl. Because, you know, our other grandchild kids are all boys, so it’d be nice if you had a girl. Like, okay, well, I don’t have any control over that. Sorry.
Social Media, FOMO, and Keeping Up With the Joneses
So, yeah, there’s, you know, this, this Keeping up with the Joneses and then. And then there’s also with the rise of social media or the last 20 years, I guess now, holy moly. Probably. Yeah. Or 15, maybe 15 years or so that people are putting their best foot forward, say on social media.
And so then it creates this fear of missing out FOMO when you see maybe someone posting something and that you feel like you’re not keeping up with them. And I know this is something that I felt a lot and. And I want to. I’m going to share a couple things today from my book, Live Love Engage how to stop doubting yourself and start being yourself.
A Confession from Writing My Book
One. One thing I want to tell you first is that, you know, when I, when I was writing this book originally, I was writing it in a journal. I don’t think I have it. No, I don’t have it here. But it was in like a, you know, a little composition notebook type of journal.
And then when I went to start copying that into my computer so that I could make edits and things, I realized that the section on value your uniqueness contained the least amount of content. And I thought, oh, isn’t that interesting? What does that say about Gloria Grace, that she’s not valuing her own uniqueness enough to write about it?
Yeah. So one of the things I did as. As I was writing this book, I was journaling a lot of times. And.
And one of the things that I, I was sort of journaling about was, you know, why are we so afraid to be ourselves? Why. Why are we afraid to own our value and tell people about it? And so I was actually normally a journal, handwritten style, you know, the pen, pen and paper. But this time I was typing it up on my computer.
Why We’re Afraid to Own Our Value
And so this is what I said. I said, we’re afraid of judgment. Someone probably judged us or rejected us. And so our brain keeps replaying that memory over and over, like a broken record or a tape on a loop. Or maybe it’s a virus on your computer that has corrupted your hard drive.
How do we fix that hard drive in our head? Call on God, the ultimate PC repair person. Just need to reboot. When in doubt, reboot. Erase those old tapes and feed new data into your memory banks.
And then keep feeding it every day like a plant. You give sunshine and Water to help it grow. Your mind and spirit and soul need that attention. Always tell yourself I love you. Keep reminding yourself that you are worthy.
The All-Caps Message From My Higher Self
And the other thing that was interesting about this is when I was, when I was typing that in, is that I didn’t realize at first that I had the all caps on my computer keyboard. And so 95% of this was typed in all caps, until I realized, oh, and I hit. And I hit the. Hit the key on my computer keyboard so that I could put it back into lower, you know, upper and lowercase. So it was like, to me, it was.
I felt like it was God, source, whatever you call it. My higher self was shouting at me to pay attention. And that was why there was no accident that the caps lock was on when I was typing that. So, yeah, if you ever buy my book, you’ll see that I, I have it here in all caps. I re.
I’ve reproduced it that way because I wanted you to see it. So. Yeah. So I want to share with you a little bit now also about what, what is the cost of not valuing your uniqueness? And, and then I’ll.
The Real Cost of Not Valuing Your Worth
Then we’ll get into a little bit later about really how this does affect how you can go about designing your life. So not valuing your worth can show up in a lot of different ways. And I want to just share one story with you of how it showed up in me when I had first started my business doing copywriting, and I was fortunate. And then I was hired by a woman who owned a. Owned a digital marketing company, and she specialized in working with home builders.
And so she hired me to write blog articles for the different home builders because, you know, SEO was, Was big at the time and, you know, and it was a good way to be able to demonstrate their, their authority. So I was writing book books. No, I was writing blog articles about different aspects of home ownership and, and things that people should be aware of when they’re buying a new house. And. And then also sometimes it would be about the communities that the home builder was serving and things like that.
So, so I, this was a great job because I was then writing articles every month, so it was nice steady income, so it was great. And, and she kept. The owner of the company kept, you know. You know, at first she just gave me a few, you know, like one. One home builder to work with, and then she saw that I was doing good work, and then she’d give me another one to work, work on.
And so I was doing, I think at one point I, I had, I was writing maybe, I think maybe 12 or 16 articles a month for, you know, like three or four different home builders.
And so I did this for several years. And at one point I attended a webinar where they talked about, you know, it was a webinar for entrepreneurs, for solopreneurs. And they talked about pricing your services and the importance of raising your rates.
That, that it’s a good idea to, you know, to raise your rates once in a while because you’ve got, you know, you have bills to pay, expenses go up and, and was such an awakening for me because when this lovely woman hired me, you know, this was. She was one of my first clients. So I didn’t charge her very much to do this work. It was, you know, a certain, certain X amount of dollars per article. And so I didn’t charge her a lot because I wanted the experience, number one.
And, and, and I was just starting out. Yeah, I mean, that’s it. I was just starting out and I didn’t want to price myself out of the job. So, you know, I thought, did some research and thought I, you know, told her what I thought would be a good price and she accepted it. But after probably, I think it was about four years, she was still getting a really good deal for me because I never raised my rates.
Four Years of Underpricing My Own Work
And I had forgotten that if I was an employee of a company instead of just working as a freelancer, that my employer would give me, you know, an annual review and, and then based on how I did that year, they would give me a raise. And when I worked for a television station for years, that’s exactly what happened. I would get a, I would get a annual review and then, and then an increase in my salary.
So I could. I forgot that as a solopreneur, I’m the one who has to determine my rates and I’m the one who has to institute an increase, a rate increase. And so I finally, I was nervous about it, but I finally got up the nerve and asked and said, hey, I’m going to be raising my rates this next year. It’s going to be X percentage. I forget what I did.
Percentage or dollars amount more, you know, just wanted to let you know that. And they were like, okay, sure.
Like, oh my gosh, I could have done this like two years sooner and probably been. And even done it like every year, just increased it a little bit. And most likely they would have gladly paid it because I was delivering good work. But I wasn’t valuing my own services enough. And Valuing myself enough to ask for that raise until I finally had finally heard, at some point, you know, got heard this lesson and was like, oh, okay, yeah, see?
And. And I will say I.
It’s an excuse, I guess, is that, you know, I don’t have a business degree, even though I did study it briefly in college before I changed my major to mass communications. It just never occurred to me, frankly. It just. It really didn’t. It.
Even though, you know, there were probably other bills that I was paying in my personal life that. For other services where they were probably raising my rates every year. I mean, shoot, we pay utility bills go up every year. Just about. Lesson learned.
What Valuing Your Uniqueness Has to Do With Designing Your Second Act
Okay. So that was one thing I wanted to. I wanted to share with you. And I have. I have another one that’s in my book too.
But I think I’m gonna. I’m gonna encourage you to get the book to read about it because I also share a story about something for my sister in there as well. So. What does valuing your uniqueness have to do with designing your life your way? Oh, goodness.
Well, it’s about the fact that you are. You have. Well, you are. You are worthy, number one. And you have unique talents, abilities, gifts, as my old coach, Marty Ward used to say.
She called them tags. So you have your own unique talents, abilities and gifts. And especially if in this time of life, if you are considering a pivot and you’re. Maybe you are an entrepreneur, but you’re not feeling as fulfilled in this business anymore and you want to do something different, or maybe you are a professional and you’ve been working at a company for a long time and either of your control, or maybe not of your control, maybe you’ve been let go and you’re needing and wanting to figure out what else to do for your second act.
It starts with figuring out, or let’s. Let’s say you can figure out what you want to do, but part of what you want to do ideally should be tied into, connected to what are the things that you excel at, what are the things that you love to do? What are the things that you find easy to do? And then, of course, especially if you are looking at creating a business about that that involves that, hopefully, then those. Some of those talent, abilities and gifts are things that other people will pay money for.
And one of the problems that comes with not valuing yourself often is that we sometimes take for granted the things that we are good at and. And we don’t place enough value on them.
That. That’s. That was my case, I mean, for sure, for when I wasn’t raising my rates is that I just, you know, I took for granted. Yeah, I. I like the job. I was doing a good job at it.
I enjoyed writing. And I didn’t think about the fact that I could be charging more for what I was doing. I know it sounds. It sounds so ridiculous looking back at it. And I would say the, the other reason, though, is that I wasn’t.
This was my first business that I ever launched, so I didn’t. I didn’t realize it, that I could do that, you know. What are you gonna say? I didn’t realize it. So I just want to let you know one quick thing here before I go on, because I am gonna.
Download the L.O.V.E. Method Companion Guide
I’m gonna share some ideas with you on.
How to.
What I wanted to let you know is that I’ve put together a companion guide to the Love Method that gives you a little breakdown. I should say it was little. A simple breakdown. Simple breakdown of everything we’ve covered so far. So it, it goes through and.
And mentions what each of the pillars stands for and, and how that.
Yeah, it gives you a little bit of background about it. So I’m going to have the link to that in the show notes. And actually, I might even just put that up right now, right here as a little. For those of you who are watching the. Watching this podcast, whether you’re watching a new reality TV on the app on Roku or Amazon TV, or if you are watching on YouTube, then you can go to gloriarand.com self love and you’ll be able to download that.
So it’s, It’s. It’s a nice little cheat sheet basically, for using the Love Method to design your second act.
So let me talk a little bit about.
Valuing Every Experience — The Good and the Bad
Well, I want to talk about. I’m trying to think here. What do I want to. What. Which direction do I want to go to here?
Because.
Valuing. Valuing your new unit. Okay. Valuing what’s unique about you. There we go.
Valuing what’s unique about you and, and how this ties into designing your life, your way. As I mentioned, it’s.
I think it’s. It’s one of the key pillars of, of all of this. I mean, it’s. It’s important to let go of your limiting beliefs, certainly, and to let go of this idea that you’re not worthy and to then open your heart to receive wisdom and guidance and help, concrete help maybe in making a change in your life or doing something different. Designing your second act.
And when you do this, to then appreciate who you are and. Oh, I know what I wanted to say. Yes, thank you. Thank you, my higher self, because we’re talking about talents, abilities and gifts. But, but it’s more than that even.
It’s. It’s valuing all of your experiences that you’ve had up until this point, valuing the good and the bad. You know, the, the, the. The heartaches and the joys and the triumphs and, and appreciating all of that, because all of those things are what makes you. You.
You’re listening to this podcast today. You have survived this long, and all of those wonderful and not so wonderful adventures, events, experiences.
You can tap into that to help you decide. What do I want my life to look like now? Because there may be things that you say, you know what? I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to be that way anymore.
Or that was great. But there was something when I was younger that I wanted to do, and I decided not to do it at the time because I wanted to go in this direction. But now maybe I can revisit that path. So as an example, let’s. And I’m going to even just.
From the Stage to Behind the Camera — Revisiting an Old Dream
This is sort of me as well, is that when I was a kid, I saw myself on the stage. I’ve loved Judy Garland. She was. I just. I loved watching her old movies on tv.
I loved her voice, hearing her sing. I also loved Gene Kelly. I. I loved watching him dance and, and especially the movies where they were together. Hey, that was. That was really great.
And so when I was a kid, among other things, that I wanted to be an astronaut for a while, but. But I did. I would envision myself on the stage singing and maybe dancing, but certainly doing some sort of performing. Now, that wasn’t what I wound up doing with my life, though, because I wound up, you know, going to college. I first majored in business and then changed to mass communications, television production.
And at that point, I wanted to be behind the camera. I did not want to be in front of the camera performing. Nope. I wanted to be behind the scenes. I wanted to write or, or just.
Or handle the. My first job in television was actually doing graphic work. And I liked being behind the scenes. I didn’t want to be on camera, even though when I was younger, again, I liked to perform. I loved singing, I loved dancing.
I took ballet and tap and jazz and. And really enjoyed doing all of that. But I don’t know, somewhere along the way, you know, I don’t know, life happened. You know, my brother died when I was a teenager, and then, you know, my parents split up and, you know, there’s all kinds of crazy reasons, but at the same time, I also had a lot of great stuff going on. I moved to Florida.
- I joined a church choir. So I got to sing with the church choir. I made a bunch of new friends. I eventually, you know, after I graduated from college, I got job at the local public television station and worked for the nightly Business report. And life was good.
And then I got married, and then I had two kids who were amazing, and so I had a really great life. And then of course, the kids get older and they start getting on with their lives, going to. Off to college and then starting their own lives. And I missed singing. I. I had stopped singing in the choir for a while, and because I stopped going to the church because I wasn’t finding my fulfillment in Catholic Church or even the Episcopal Church I went to for a while, it just wasn’t serving me anymore.
How Light Language Brought the Gift of Song Back
And then this wonderful gift came back in my life, the gift of song, but in a different way, and was the gift of light language. And.
It brought me back to life again, even though I wasn’t really not living. But. But it. It’s been this fabulous way of. Now in my second act in my next chapter, is that I’m really leaning into doing, sharing light language with people.
So this is a good segue because I want to share some light language with you right now. Because one of the benefits that I have gotten from light language, not only giving me the ability to sing again, because some of what I share does come across as a song, but it’s also helped me to release some of the blocks that I’ve had around worthiness and, you know, limiting beliefs and. And it has helped me to really value my own uniqueness. And that’s what I wanted to share with you today. So if you’re somewhere where you’re comfortable and you can listen, listen to this without being disturbed, I would encourage you to do that, especially somewhere where you can close your eyes for a little bit.
And what I’m going to share with you right now, I’m going to invite you to set an intention that what comes through whatever message I’m going to share is going to be something that will perhaps.
A Live Light Language Transmission
Allow you to release whatever is keeping, possibly maybe keeping you from valuing your own uniqueness and maybe give you some clarity about your next chapter and, and what you want to do in midlife now.
So I invite you to. As I said, if it’s safe, close your eyes and don’t worry about trying to understand what I either say or sing or both. Just let it wash over you. And because it’s really for your heart, it’s for your heart and your soul. It’s not for your brain to understand.
So don’t worry about that. I’m just going to take a drink of water first and then I’m going to share some with you.
[Audio transmission only]
How was that for you? Let me know. I would love to know. Please share it with me. You know, you can, if you go to my website and listen to the podcast, you can respond there with a comment and I would love to hear from you.
Or you can, you know, simply reach out to me on social media. You know, you can do that as well. I’m on, you know, LinkedIn. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can comment there. I would love to know what you, what you thought of that.
Practical Tools for Valuing Your Uniqueness
And what I want to encourage you to do right now is to.
Make Your List — and Push Past the Obvious
Value your uniqueness. And if you don’t know how to do that, I’m going to give you a couple tips right now on how to do that. So I mentioned this briefly early on. What I would highly recommend you do, especially if you want to be able to maybe come up with some new ideas for what you want your second act to be, is to make a list of what you’re good at, what you like to do, and what comes easy for you.
So, and I challenge you to make this list as long as possible. You know, don’t just do like five things. Really push yourself. Try to come up with 10 or 15 or 20 things, even, even silly things. You know, like I like watching tv.
I did like watching TV as a kid and still do. And oh, look at that, I’m actually on TV now. Huh? You know, so you never know. So do that.
Ask the People Who Know You Best
And I want you to go one step further, though, because as I mentioned before, often we take for granted the things that we’re good at because they come second nature to us. So I want you, if you are in business right now, to ask your clients if you’re, if you’re an entrepreneur or if you are a professional. If you’re working for an organization, ask your co workers, ask your boss if you’ve got a good relationship with your boss. Ask your close friends, ask them to come up with a list of things that you’re. They believe that you’re good at.
Because the answers may just surprise you, because again, it may, you may see that they’ve mentioned something that maybe you didn’t even have on there on your, your own list or it was something that you, you feel is just super easy for yourself, but they think is like, you know, they’re amazed at it. And, and in fact, that’s what I want you to, I want to clarify this, this request. Ask all of these people to not only tell you what they believe you’re good at, but maybe mention if it’s this in particular, if there’s something that they see that you’re good at that they’re not good at themselves.
Yeah, yeah, if that’s a biggie, ask them what if there’s, if there is something, say I, you know, if you can help me out, I really would invite you. I want to hear what you think I’m good at. And if there’s something that you think I’m good at that you’re not good at, please definitely highlight that because that, that could be the seed of a future business that you might want to get into. Because if it’s something that you do already that is easy, but they value it, they don’t find it’s easy to do, then here you go, solution found. So I encourage you to do that.
Save Your Testimonials for the Doubtful Days
The other thing is, if you are in business already, I hope that you have a list of testimonials somewhere. Maybe they’re on your website already, but if not, they should be. But also if you have them saved in a, in a digital file somewhere or physical file somewhere, because there are days when doubts will still come for you. Even if you are the most confident person in the world, once in a while there’s going to be something that’s going to possibly create that little niggling doubt. And then when that happens, pull out those testimonials and read them and say, oh yeah, that’s right, I did do that.
Oh yeah, they really like that. I was good at that. Save those things.
The Power of Journaling
And the other thing I would recommend to do, and I’ve talked about this on the podcast numerous times, the benefits of doing is to get into a habit of journaling. Whether you’re doing morning pages or you’re just, or just doing a regular straight out journal your thoughts and feelings either in the morning or before you go to bed at night. But get into the habit of really connecting with yourself, getting to know yourself.
It’s a wonderful way to be able to then come to appreciate how amazing you are. I know I’ve said this on the show before, but it’s just.
It’s my one way of staying connected with my mom because I always hear her saying in my head, you know, God doesn’t make junk. And you are not junk. You are amazing. You are. You are light and love and everything beautiful and.
And I don’t care if you’ve made mistakes in your life. I’ve made tons of mistakes in my life. We’re not perfect, and yet we are divine. And we’re going to talk more about that next month when we finish up the love method. So you definitely are going to want to come back for that one.
Embracing Your Divinity — Coming Next Month
The E is embrace your divinity, and I want you to embrace that. And I don’t care what religion you are or if you’re an atheist, whatever, I still encourage you to come back and listen to that.
Listener Shoutouts and Closing Resources
So, yeah. Okay. I think that’s going to do it for today. So one thing I did want to do right now is I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you to Tracy Hoth and Linda.
I’m gonna. I know. Please forgive me if I’m butchering your last name. Babalik or Babalik, I don’t know. But anyway, they both posted some wonderful reviews for the podcast on Apple, and I so appreciate that you ladies did that for me, and I really appreciate your kind comments.
So thank you. Thank you for that. And. And again, if you are ready to stop settling and start building your life from a place of love, to stop stop doubting yourself and start being yourself, I encourage you to check out the show notes where I’m going to have that link to grab your love roadmap. So I encourage you to do that because it really is.
It’s a. It’s a. It’s a great tool that will bring all of this stuff fresh in your mind. And of course, pick up a copy of my book, too. Put that in there as well.
You can. You can find it wherever you buy books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or my website. And, yeah, so I think that’s gonna do it for this week. So until next time, I encourage you to go out and live boldly. Live boldly.
Yeah. Let me say it with. I need to say it more boldly. Live boldly and on purpose.
