– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

(soft piano music)

If I could go back in time,

these are the five things

I would tell my younger self about self-love.

Hi my love. Welcome back to Lavendaire. My name's Aileen.

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Today, I'd love to share the five things

that I would tell my younger self about self love.

These are all things

that I desperately wish I knew back then.

It would've made life so much easier.

I would've been so much happier as a person,

but life happens the way it happens for a reason.

And I learned these lessons throughout this journey

of adulthood and coming into my own self and my own skin.

And so I'll share these lessons

for you guys in case you are younger.

You're probably like my younger self

and I hope that this helps you.

The first thing I tell my younger self is to understand

what love is and learn how to love yourself.

It sounds simple, but it really is super deep

because what is love in the first place?

I think when I was young, I didn't know what love was.

I thought love was just romantic love.

I thought it was what I saw in movies.

And I didn't understand that I could give that love

to myself rather than live my life seeking

that love outside of myself.

Because growing up as a child, I think a lot of kids,

depending on your situation,

you have times where you don't feel fully loved,

fully seen, fully appreciated,

and you have this inner need for that love.

And the way you seek it is

through validation from other people.

Maybe you want other people to like you,

the friends at school to like you.

You want so badly for your crush to like you back.

Even beyond the childhood

and high school experiences,

I just didn't know that it was possible to love

and accept myself fully, even with all my flaws

and everything that was not perfect within me.

So to me, self-love is the choice

in choosing yourself always.

Meaning you have your own back, you take care of yourself,

you care about yourself, you want the best for yourself.

Love is something that can be hard to define,

but I define unconditional love as you are so lovable

and so worthy and you deserve to be cared for.

I would recommend you ask yourself and you do

some reflecting on what unconditional love really means.

What does it mean to love someone unconditionally?

Meaning no matter what they do,

who they are, what they become, whatever happens,

they are loved, you love them.

They are lovable, they are valuable, they are worthy.

So the closest thing is if you can think

of the closest person in your life,

maybe it's your best friend, maybe it's your family member,

like whatever you do, even if you make mistakes,

yeah, they might point that out,

but they still love you at the end of the day.

There is that support, there is that caring.

And so you can turn that love, support and caring

and compassion back to yourself.

You can learn to see yourself as worthy no matter what.

Even if you're not perfect, even if you make mistakes.

You can learn to accept, embrace,

and take care of yourself

through all of it to support yourself

and to be your own best friend through all of this journey

of ups and downs in life.

And so I guess that's scratching the surface

of what I mean by learn how to love yourself,

but it's a lifelong journey to learn to see yourself

with those beautiful eyes of love rather than being

so critical and so negative when you look at yourself.

When I was younger, I also felt like love was something

that had to be earned.

Like you had to be a certain way

or achieve certain things to get the approval

or the love from others that you craved so much.

And that's something that I wish I knew

it didn't have to be that way.

I didn't have to do anything, achieve anything

or be anything other than

who I was right now to be loved.

Whether it's be loved by the people

around me or to be loved by myself.

And so that is the lifelong journey of learning

to love yourself, learning to commit to self love.

No matter what happens, you choose yourself,

you are there for yourself.

You are that person holding your hand,

making sure that you are well protected

and well cared for the entire journey.

The second point builds on the first one.

It is to shift how you view and value yourself.

So like I said, when I was younger

I kind of grew up valuing myself

and seeing myself through my achievements,

through my, how well I was received by others,

whether it's whether people liked me

or whether I seemed successful.

Whether I just was kind of, I don't know, this image of

who I should be played out in real life.

And what I wish I knew sooner was to learn

to recognize and see my own self-worth.

Like I didn't have to be anything different.

I didn't have to try.

I didn't have to like achieve something.

I didn't have to get to a certain destination

in order to be worthy and in order to be loved.

This is so common

because a lot of us are taught that we are worth

what we achieve or we are worth, like how productive we are.

I think it takes a lot of reflecting

and healing to learn to understand where exactly

that came from in our past and to start to unravel it.

So that's your own journey and I wish you the best,

but I just wish that I knew

or wish that someone told me that I was already so valuable,

that I was already so worthy

just by me being a living person.

Like you being a living human being is already so valuable.

You are a miracle.

The chances of you being here is so slim

and you have a unique personality.

You have unique strengths and gifts.

You have a unique point of view in life.

You have perspective, you have knowledge and experience.

You have all these beautiful intangible things about you

that already make you so beautiful and so worthy.

There's no one else in the world exactly like you.

And that's what makes you so special.

And you don't need to be anything else

or try to be different

or achieve anything in order to feel worthy.

You can already look within at everything you have already.

These are things that cannot be taken away from you,

like your life experience, your past, your memories.

Like you can't take that away from someone.

It happened, right. It's in them.

You can't take away someone's personality like it's in them.

So to see those things, those beautiful intangible things

as what makes you so worthy, so valuable, so special

and so beautiful, I honestly wish I knew that.

Because the more you know that

the more you see and embrace your inner worth,

the more confidence you will be,

the more bright you will shine as a person.

Number three, I would tell myself,

you deserve to express yourself openly and honestly.

You're allowed to take up space.

This is a huge one for me personally,

because I grew up as a very shy type of person

and I really struggled with talking, expressing myself,

telling people how I honestly felt,

telling people like my real thoughts and emotions.

For some reason, maybe I felt it was unsafe

to share or whatever.

I kept so much to myself.

I felt so many feelings.

I had so many thoughts that I just kept to myself.

I didn't share it with the people in my life,

and I kind of isolated myself that way.

And for some reason

I was just that very like closed, introverted type

where I didn't feel like

I could take up much space in a room.

I just automatically in a room just

like wanna like make myself smaller.

I don't wanna speak up,

I don't wanna raise my hand even though

there's something on my mind that I do wanna say.

And I just wish I knew that

you are allowed to take up space.

It's okay to speak up and express yourself.

It's okay to be honest.

It's okay to express your needs.

All of that is self-love.

Because self-love is honoring your needs.

Self-love is honoring yourself.

Self-love is also honoring your boundaries,

knowing how to set boundaries,

knowing how to stand up for yourself, speak up for yourself.

All of those are such important lessons

that I wish I knew when I was younger,

but I just didn't.

Nobody taught me, nobody kind of led the way.

And these were things that I had to learn in my adult life.

How to speak up for myself, take up space.

It's okay to just be honest, be confrontational.

Oh my God, I'm like the one

of the least confrontational people.

I just hate confronting people,

even if I have something on my mind, it's really tough.

But it's something that I learned and practiced

and got better and better as I grew older.

But it's something that is so, so important.

I wish I knew it sooner

because the younger you learn this lesson,

the easier life will be.

Easier meaning you live your life honoring yourself

and your needs and you're not sacrificing yourself

for anybody else's needs.

And also you're not feeling so small,

'cause when you feel so small and you wanna shrink down,

you're not being your full self,

you're not being your confident, brightest self

and you don't feel good.

It doesn't feel good to be small.

It feels good to be free.

To allow yourself to be open and free.

And so in order to do that, you have to be brave.

You have to be brave,

speak up, express yourself, and take up space.

Number four, I would tell myself to release perfectionism

and learn to embrace your mistakes and failures.

I grew up being very afraid of mistakes and failures.

I felt like they made me a bad person,

not like a lesser than, a less worthy person.

And that was just the wrong mindset.

And because of that, it makes me afraid to take risks.

It makes me afraid to fail.

It makes me afraid to like put myself out there

because of that fear.

And I just wish that I knew that you are

so worthy regardless of what happens, regardless

of the outcome, regardless

of whether you make mistakes or fail.

And in fact, when you do make mistakes and fail,

it is an opportunity for learning and growth.

And through those experiences,

you become a stronger, better person.

You just level up, you evolve in a very positive way.

So you don't have to see mistakes, failures as negative.

You don't have to strive for perfection

to always look put together or whatever.

You really can embrace that failures

and mistakes are a part of life and they make you better.

They help you grow, they help you learn,

and they're nothing be afraid of.

So the bottom line is you are still so lovable

and still so worthy throughout everything,

regardless of your mistakes and failures.

Like who cares?

It's a part of life.

And in fact, I love you more for trying.

I am so proud of you for trying

and I'm so proud of you for making the mistake.

I'm so proud of you for failing and learning from it.

I think that is just the mindset that I wish I had

because I would be so much more bold if I had that mindset.

Like it's almost like you cannot fail

because even failures are life experience

that give you something, it gives you knowledge,

gives you perspective, just it helps you grow and level up.

And so yeah, there's really nothing to be afraid of.

No matter what happens, you are worthy and you are lovable.

Like how powerful is that?

The fifth thing I would say is to change

that inner voice in your head.

I wish I knew sooner how to understand that

that inner voice in my head is not me.

It's just my brain thinking a million thoughts a day.

And I also wish I knew that it was possible

to choose which thoughts to believe in.

It was possible to change that inner voice in my head,

that self-talk.

And this is something I learned later in life in my 20s

that I could literally change my thoughts

and that my thoughts shaped my reality.

If I constantly thought negative thoughts,

if I was constantly criticizing myself, being negative

about myself, I would feel worse about myself.

And the negativity in my mind would like,

I would see more of that in my reality,

because your brain really is like

a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you focus on one thing,

you're gonna see more of that thing in your reality.

So it's like a biased perspective.

So if you're constantly negative,

you're gonna see the negativity

in your life and the negativity in the world,

and you're gonna focus on that

and that just makes you feel worse.

But if you can choose positive thoughts

and to choose to believe those positive thoughts,

even if it's difficult

to believe them fully in the beginning,

you just with repetition and with practice,

it truly is possible, it truly can change.

Like the more you speak good words to yourself,

words of love, care, and compassion,

the more you truly see yourself as, oh, I am worthy.

I am worth compassion. I am worth loving myself.

I should take care of myself a little more.

I should be kinder to myself.

I can be gentler to myself.

And so all it is, is the choosing the thought.

It really begins in the mind, and I wish I knew that sooner.

How to change the self-talk from negative, critical

to positive, loving and supportive.

If you can truly just be the compassionate, best friend

to yourself in your head, then everything's okay.

You have a bad day, it's okay. Just pick yourself back up.

Like you don't have to throw the whole day away.

Take a break, pick yourself back up like in a couple hours.

Like take a nap if you're tired.

Take a break if you're tired.

It's okay to rest. It's okay to slow down.

It's okay to give yourself whatever you need right now.

And so if you really start to shift that mindset,

shift that self-talk, it changes your life completely.

All right, my loves.

Out of those five lessons that I shared today,

which one resonated with you the most?

Like which one is the one that your younger self needed

to hear desperately?

And also, if you have anything else

that you would tell your younger self about self-love,

let us know down below in the comments.

I'm sure everyone would like

to read each other's lessons and tips.

What you would tell your younger self,

what you wish you knew back then, because hindsight is 2020.

You know, we live and we learn and we wish we knew better,

but it's okay, it all happened the way it was meant

to happen so that we can become more wise with age.

If you wanna deepen your self-love journey,

I have a whole playlist on self-love and self-worth.

I'll link them here and down below so you can watch more.

We also have our Artist of Life workbook

that I recommend you check out.

It's basically a workbook

to help you plan your most successful and intentional year.

But there is a whole section on self-love, self-discovery,

like figuring out what you love about yourself,

what your values are, what success means to you.

It really goes deep

and it gives you a great framework

for how to build this new relationship,

build a stronger relationship with yourself

that is rooted in self-love.

So you can check it out at shop.lavendaire.com

Links are down below.

Thanks so much for watching this one.

Sending you so much love and I'll see you in the next one.

Bye.

(upbeat music)

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
love /lʌv/ A1	noun - a strong feeling of affection verb - to have a strong feeling of affection for
self /sɛlf/ B1	noun - a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others
worth /wɜːrθ/ B1	noun - the value or usefulness of something or someone
embrace /ɪmˈbreɪs/ B2	verb - to accept or support willingly and enthusiastically
express /ɪkˈsprɛs/ B2	verb - to convey a thought or feeling in words or by gestures and conduct
learn /lɜːrn/ A1	verb - to gain or acquire knowledge or skill in something
release /rɪˈliːs/ B2	verb - to set free or allow to escape
mistake /mɪˈsteɪk/ B1	noun - an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong
failure /ˈfeɪljər/ B2	noun - lack of success in doing or achieving something
worth /ˈwɜːrði/ B2	adjective - good enough to be valued or important
unconditional /ˌʌnkənˈdɪʃənl/ C1	adjective - not subject to any conditions
valuable /ˈvæljuəbl/ B1	adjective - worth a great deal of money or highly prized
compassion /kəmˈpæʃən/ C1	noun - sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others
space /speɪs/ B1	noun - a continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied
support /səˈpɔːrt/ B1	verb - to give encouragement or approval to noun - the action of supporting something or someone
care /kɛr/ A2	noun - the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something verb - to feel concern or interest; to attach importance to something
confidence /ˈkɒnfɪdəns/ B2	noun - the feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something
perfect /ˈpɜːrfɪkt/ A2	adjective - having all the required or desirable elements, qualities, or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be
voice /vɔɪs/ B1	noun - the sound produced in a person's larynx and uttered through the mouth