THE LIFE COACH SCHOOL – Episode 164
Let’s keep with the topic of love. Bryant listened to this podcast from The Life Coach School before me. I heard recently in a church sermon that maybe a good judge of the strength of a marriage is how willing the husband is to be influenced by his wife. I don’t think that’s doctrine. But it is something to be curious about. And when Bry started listening to Brooke Castillo, and wanted to talk about what he learned, I just smiled. I love our marriage. I love that man.
I choose to love that man. I have the ability to love that man. Today Brooke is talking about our loveablitiy, our ability to feel love.
“What if you could make that a skill that you got crazy good at? Think about how your life might change if you loved unconditionally, which means you feel love towards a person under all conditions.”
When I feel love for another person, that feeling is a gift to me, not for that person I am loving. They are not able to feel my love because it is my feeling created from my thoughts. If I love somebody, I get to feel that love. They don’t feel the love – they feel their own emotions. So maybe I can make it easier for that person to think thoughts that lead them to feel love. But when I love – when I act on that emotion – it is from me and for me. And when I can love unconditionally, that means I get to feel that feeling, in any circumstance.
How would that ability change my life, change my relationship with others, and change my relationship with myself?
Okay, my friends. Get this, on loving others unconditionally:
“When we remember that contrast is part of the human experience we stop using it as an excuse not to love someone.”
When we realize that contrast is just a part of the human experience, just part of the 50/50 – everything people do that we think is wrong or unkind or crass or disloyal, or whatever – then we stop using it as an excuse not to love someone. Nothing has gone wrong. There is nothing to forgive. This is just part of the human experience.
“People do not have to do anything to deserve our love because our love is about us not them.”
Now it’s important to remember, it goes the other way, as well.
“So many of us go around in our lives trying to be more lovable. We try to increase other people’s ability to love us. We try to make it easy for them to love us. We try to increase their ability…
(But) your lovability is absolute. Your lovability is already a given. You don’t need to change one thing to become more lovable. It’s impossible…
You are as lovable as that person’s ability is to love, and there’s nothing you can do to become more or less lovable.”
With the kids being quarantined due to this horrific Coronavirus, we have jumped into homeschool again, with both feet. I homeschooled the children that first year we lived in England, mostly because we wanted to travel. And I loved it. And I gave everything to it. And I didn’t know if I could do that again – it was so intense. But when the schools were cancelled last week, I really felt excited to go at it again. I feel like I have so much I want to teach the children, that I haven’t had the chance to – school gets in the way, right?
Well, the first thing I have really wanted to take the time to teach them was the model. And I have. But not in depth. So, every day, get this, the kids sit with me for 30 minutes and we discuss the model and we run through the model and I test them on the model and they ask questions, challenging the model.
This is how today went, from my journal entry:
Yes! Today we discussed the feeling of LOVE. And how you can’t give it away. YOU feel the feeling – it’s for YOU. And we thought of examples of choosing to feel that feeling for OUR OWN sake.
And then we closed with the example Christ gave us.
- CIRCUMSTANCE: Christ was whipped, spit upon, mocked, and nailed to a cross.
- THOUGHT: “They know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
- FEELING: Love
- ACTION: Fulfillment of His purpose.
- RESULT: The Atonement of Jesus Christ enable us to receive grace, and to return to the Lord again someday.
The children totally got it! And they loved it! And the Spirit was so strong.
Let me close with two more thoughts from Brooke:
“Love is always an option, and love is always the best option. Love feels great and withholding love feels terrible…
There’s never a good reason not to love.”
Never. It will never serve you or me well to not love.
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