Hey, my loves. Welcome back to Lavendaire. It's Aileen. Today, I'm gonna share some journal prompts for self discovery and healing. These are gonna be pulled from the new tbh deck that we have on our Lavendaire Shop. If you haven't heard about it, the tbh deck is a deck of 120 prompts for honest conversation and deeper connection. Basically, prompts to help you guide your journaling sessions or go deeper with your conversations with the people in your life. If you don't like small talk, this is something that is really cool to try with the people in your life to spark some deeper conversation and just to know people on a deeper level. Or if you'd like, you can bring this on a first date and it makes for a pretty fun activity. If you're ready, bust out your notebooks or open up a Word document, so that you're ready to journal. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna share the prompt and then I'm going to share my answers for the prompt. You can choose to listen. Maybe it'll help you with your answer to the prompt, or you can just skip to the prompts yourself. Here's the first prompt: “How would you live your life if you stopped caring about what others thought of you?” I love this prompt because it reveals your truest inner desires. Maybe you're not living aligned to the ideal person you want to be. Maybe there's more of you that you don't share with the people in your life, for whatever reason. Maybe there's something that you've always wanted to do, but you're scared to because you're afraid of judgment or criticism. You're afraid of looking weird. Ask yourself: "How would you live your life if you stopped caring about what other people thought of you? What if nobody knew who you were? Who would you allow yourself to be? Who is the true you that is asking to come out?" Personally, a big theme in my life after graduation was learning to live not caring about what other people thought, so I feel like a lot of what I'm doing now is the result of that. Me taking a creative path.

Me doing something risky, doing YouTube. But now if I ask myself this question again at this point of life, I am aware of parts of me that still care about what others think of me. And I think if I lived not caring about that, I would just be more of my weird, goofy self. The self that I am when I'm with just me and Togi. Me singing throughout the day, speaking in British accent throughout the day just for no reason and not having to explain yourself. Me being my authentic self outside. Because I do tend to filter my personality depending on who I'm with. The next prompt is: "What types of experiences make you feel loved? And how do you show yourself that kind of love?" This is a prompt to help you reflect on your love language and what experiences or things that other people do or say to you make you feel loved. And then to turn that question on its head and ask, “Do I do that for myself?” Or “How can I start doing that for myself?” This journal prompt was kind of a game changer for me because when I journaled to this, I realized like, “Okay, I understand that this is what makes me feel loved.” I love getting compliments. My love language is words of affirmation first. And I think acts of service next. Jotting down the times in my life or the things that happen that make me feel loved. And then realizing like, "Hey, I can do this for myself, right? Why can't I do more of this for myself?” Giving your love language back to yourself means giving yourself compliments, cooking yourself a nice dinner, taking yourself out on a date, buying yourself a nice gift, something that you've always wanted someone to buy for you. Instead of waiting for someone else to give you the love that you crave, you can already give yourself that kind of love in the way that you want it. I hope that this was a game changer and an eye opener for your self love practices, because you deserve to receive the love that you crave in the way that you crave it. Moving on to the next prompt: “What do you feel life has been trying to teach you lately? What are the signs that make you think this way?” Life is always teaching us lessons and I truly believe that there's a lesson to be learned from every experience and every phase that you're going through.

Sometimes we are either stubborn or a little ignorant at the lesson, and we don't recognize it when life is constantly trying to teach us the same lesson over and over again, and we're not learning it. What is something that life has been trying to teach you lately? And why do you think that way? A big lesson that life has been teaching me for the past couple years is to learn to let go of my need for external validation, and also to reevaluate my internal validation. What I mean by external validation is needing people's approval, needing to look successful on the outside, needing to prove your worth to people on the outside, especially as an influencer, when your success and career is tied to external validation, either the numbers or how people perceive you. It's really hard, but it's necessary to untie yourself from that to truly find worth, regardless of what happens on the outside. You can look like a failure and everything can be crumbling down on the outside, and to be able to still feel worthy and whole. That is a big lesson that I have been learning. And then, the second part is reassessing your internal validation. I had to assess what motivates me, what makes me strive to do things in life? And I recognized a lot of trauma that made me want to achieve for reasons that were unhealthy. I realized that I had a tendency to push myself, to push myself really hard beyond my limits because I had this internal part of me that didn't feel good enough. My internal validation and my internal sense of motivation really came crumbling down   once I started healing everything inside and outside. And now, I am really rebuilding my internal sense of motivation  and what drives me in life. It's not about ambition or achievement.

It really is about following my joy and following my light and not needing to constantly be showing up or achieving. Allowing myself to just find joy in doing nothing, and find joy in parts of life that are not about achieving and success.   The last prompt I'll share today is this: "Think back to a time when you were in a period of struggle. What would you say to your past self?" I love this prompt because life can feel really challenging with its ups and downs.   And we often forget that we've overcome many struggles in life.   Think back at a time in life when you were seriously struggling. Maybe you hit rock bottom. Maybe you were depressed. Just think of the most challenging thing that you've had to go through,   that you've made it through. What would you say to that past self that was in the middle of going through that thing? And hopefully in that message that you give to your past self,   you have a message for your current self because life doesn't get easier with time. There's always challenges coming our way, obstacles, and it's inevitable, right? You can't run away from it. Maybe the things that you have to say to your past self could inspire your current self. The most difficult time in my life was likely around 20 to 21 years old when I was a senior in college. Life was so heavy and I couldn't be regular anymore. I couldn't be a normal functioning person. I couldn't go to class. I couldn't do homework. I couldn't show up. Even if friends wanted to hang out, I was so flaky. I would just stand people up, flake on friends, and flake on group projects and presentations, and flake on interviews. And I was just a mess. That was the most depressed in my life that I feel like I ever was. What I would say to the girl who was going through that is "This is not the end. This is the beginning." And when I say beginning, I don't mean the beginning of a terrible life. I literally mean the beginning of your beautiful life. And it's beautiful because you had to break down in a way to shed what wasn't you to start to explore and discover who you really are.

Because up until that point, I was living a facade. I was just on autopilot. I was doing what other people told me to do, what I thought I "should" do, what society deemed as good. And it all came crumbling down in those years, and I had to figure it out for myself and rediscover/recreate myself in those years. It was not easy, but I felt like it was so empowering to go through that. To have gotten so low and to have slowly picked up the pieces from that state. And when you watch a movie, it's exciting because there are highs and lows. There's a challenge, there's a rock bottom. And then it's exciting to see someone come out of that and what happens because of that. And life is the same way. Life is not meant to be perfect forever. It's not meant to be always okay. If it was, it would be boring. It wouldn't be an exciting roller coaster ride, but instead it would be just... plain. And in a way, yes, peace is great. I want inner peace. But I think what's fun about life and what's beautiful is we get to ride those ups and downs and we get to experience the lows, and so we can appreciate the highs. In shorts, I would just let her know to keep going. “Know that this is the beginning of your beautiful story. Believe in yourself. You have more power and you are more capable   than you have ever imagined. Have fun because this journey is fun." All right. I hope you enjoy journaling to these prompts today from the tbh deck. If you'd like to do more of these journaling sessions, or if you'd like to hear me share more about my life, because I feel like it's really fun to share through these conversation or journaling prompts, let me know down below. Comment down below with your favorite prompt, because I'm curious what type of prompt is your favorite. And if you are so bold to share, feel free to share your answers to any of the prompts that I share today.

All right. Sending you so much love. And again, you can find this on my shop: shop.lavendaire.com I leave all the links below. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.