Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.
Guy: This week welcome to the show Eloise King. Journalist, author and creator of The Self-Love Project Eloise King has been considered a leader in the wellness industry for many years. She majored in psychology at The University of Sydney and went on to get one of five cadetships on offer at media conglomerate News limited. Since then, just some of her accomplishments have included:
Writing for body+soul, a liftout in Australia’s #1 selling newspaper… and contributing to many more of the countries most popular health & wellness publications
Working with industry heavy weights Deepak Chopra, the late Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, Neil Donald Walsch, Dr Joe Dispenza and others. Founding Director of The Souluversity (formerly Soul Sessions), an educational institution offering research-based programs that support people to live more authentic, happy and meaningful lives.
Attracting 13,000+ people to the Wellness Business Owners World Summit (WBOWS) 2013 . Author of The Self-Love Project Guidebook & 6-Week Online Program Developer… which is the focus of our podcast today.
The Self-Love Project Guidebook uses a captivating cocktail of humour + heart + world-best research from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, The University of Sydney, TED Talks, The Greater Good Science Centre, The New York Times, Forbes Magazine and a plethora of institutions dedicated to physical, psychological and emotional-spiritual wellness at work and in life.
Use Snapchat? Follow me at: GuyL180 or Click Here.
Audio Version
Questions we ask in this episode:
What is Self-Love?
Why is Self-Love so hard for so many people?
What is the danger of not mastering self-love for your life at some point?
What is the relationship between self-love and food specifically?
Why Self-Love as the focus of a project? Why not simply meditation project… or exercise project… or diet project alone?
You’ve interviewed one of my heroes; Wayne Dyer. Can you share the story of how that came about
Get More Of Eloise King
https://www.theselfloveproject.com/
https://www.soulsessions.co/
If you enjoyed this, then you’ll enjoy these interviews with:
Darya Rose: How I Gave Up Chronic Dieting & Changed My Relationship With Food
Yasmina Ykelenstam: Beyond Food Allergies & Sensitivities; Understanding Histamine Intolerance
Sarah Wilson: My Trick to Quitting Sugar
180 – Fuelled By Nature
Full range of products HERE.
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Full Transcript
Guy
Hey everyone, this is Guy Lawrence of course from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another fantastic of the health sessions where we are connecting with leading global health and wellness experts to share of course the best and latest science and thinking and empowering people to turn their health and lives around. We have a fantastic episode again for you this week with our lovely special guest Eloise King.
[00:00:30] Now Eloise King is, I would say first and foremost an entrepreneur. She’s been a great inspiration in my life. She’s a founder of the Soul Sessions and much more recently The Self-Love Project. She’s interviewed some of the heavyweights like Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, all these in-person, Anita Moorjani, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Neale Donald Walsch just to name a few. It’s quite incredible what she’s already achieved in her life.
[00:01:00] We sit down to talk today about self-love and what it means and how we can apply it in our lives and why we should even consider it in the first place. It’s fantastic, so myself and Stu, yes, just a couple of lads on a podcast talking about self-love. We have gone there today and personally I loved every minute of it. I think it’s actually a real vital component that we can all look at. That’s of course all the fellas included.
[00:01:30] When you listen to this podcast it goes way, way, way deeper than that and Eloise has actually been spending the last year scouring the world and correlating all the best information from the leading minds and what science is saying as well and being able to bring it all together and create The Self-Love Project and then how we can start to apply that in our daily lives on a daily basis and actually start to find more meaning in our life.
[00:02:00] I think it’s such an important message. I loved every minute of this podcast and I have no doubt you’re going to enjoy it too guys. I reckon let’s just go over to the show. I’m not going to ask for a review on iTunes this week, but hey, if you do subscribe and give us a five star, leave a review, that would be mightily appreciated of course. All right guys, let’s go over to Eloise King. Enjoy. Hey, this is Guy Lawrence. I’m joined with Stuart Cook. Good morning Stu.
Stu
Hello mate, how are you?
Guy
I’m excellent, thank you. Our lovely guest today is Eloise King. Eloise, welcome to the show.
Eloise
Thanks Guy. Hi guys, it’s so good to be here.
Guy
Super to have you.
Stu
Good morning.
Guy
[00:02:30] It’s been a long time coming. Now, Elo, before we get into it, I ask everyone on the show the same question, which is if you were to be stopped by a complete stranger on the street and they asked you what you did for a living, what would you say?
Eloise
[00:03:00] It’s an interesting questions. I’ve got sort of a clinical response to that which is I run an online education organization which kind of tells its stripe. Depending on who it is and how deep we go into it, then I can start sort of talking about the self-love piece or the whole, the bigger picture I guess which sadly not everybody wants to hear about it, so when people get into it they tend to really get into it.
Guy
[00:03:30] Yeah, for sure. Look, well we’re certainly keen to get into the bigger picture and take us back a little bit on your own journey. I just wanted to mention as well for the listeners out there because not many people know this, I know we’ve discussed this a little bit before Elo, but when we were starting 180, so we’ve been doing 180 seven years now, myself and Stu. In them early years, and I’m sure anyone can relate to this who is a business owner, it’s bloody really tough and you have to draw on a lot of self-reserve and push through and you’re trying to make changes.
I stumbled across your Soul Sessions videos that you were doing. which I’m sure you’re going to get people to talk about in a sec. I just used to watch them all the time and just got so much inspiration from that. It was fantastic. I even wrote down, “I’m going to speak at the Soul Sessions one day,” as one of my goals.
Eloise
I know, I love your story so much. It’s so good.
Guy
Then many, many years later through different random things we met. Then I reached out to you and then you invited me to actually come and speak at one of your groups you had on. It’s sort of come full circle. It’s just brilliant. It’s brilliant to have you come back on the podcast today. Can you take us back to those days of how all that started because it’s pretty impressive who you’ve interviewed, what you’ve done and what you sort of created online over the years.
Eloise
Yeah sure. Yeah, thanks Guy. I love that story. Where it all began I guess was that if we go way back I studied Psychology at the University of Sidney and then I graduated and had always wanted to be either a psychologist or a journalist. Those were kind of my two childhood teenage goals I guess.
[00:05:00] When I finished studying my degree I actually got offered a cadetship at News Limited which were pretty hard to come by. I think there were five available and offered and sort of thousands if not tens of thousands of people putting their hand out to get one of them. I made a decision to choose that route at the time and got in and started writing daily news pieces and getting into the newsroom, which is where obviously I learned a lot
[00:06:00] I very naturally moved, during the time I was there, I was there 13 years, I had had a baby at some point which very much can change your priorities I guess in a lot of ways. We’re obviously going to be talking about love and self-love quite a bit in today’s podcast, but really I had never experienced love like I did once I gave birth to my son. That kind of quite naturally just changed my priorities. I sort of started moving back to I guess the wellness phase, the kind of I guess what my original interests were which was health and wellness and emotional psychological well being.
[00:06:30] I transferred from a news focus to a more features focus and I started working with the Sunday Telegraph and I was doing a little bit of news, but a lot of feature writing for Body and Soul. I redesigned their kids’ section and was doing section editing spots in there as well. I worked there for 13 years as I said. At some point I started to actually feel like I wanted more. I wanted a bit of a change and I wanted more.
[00:07:00] When I say more, what I mean is that I was interviewing the most high profile people in the country, sometime sin the world, whether it was going to press conferences with the prime minister, whether it was talking to Oprah’s [inaudible 00:07:03] as she came through, whether it was superstar celebrities, whoever it was. I was doing all of that. I’d interview and then I’d head back to my desk and I’d write up a story. We’d press send. It would go through the processes in the newspaper and however many million people would read it.
[00:07:30] That was kind of cool that all these millions of people were reading it, but I wasn’t actually getting direct contact with these people. I really started craving community and I started craving a deeper level of engagement with the people that I was connecting with through my work, which is when I started Soul Sessions.
[00:08:00] 2010 I got myself a little café that used to close at 4:00 and I had a really good relationship with the barista because he would make my coffee everyday and everybody loves their barista because we’re all addicted to coffee, or many of us are. Anyway, we had a great relationship and he said, “Come in. We’ll do it from 6 till 10PM.” That’s where I ran my first ever Soul Session in 2010. It was a sellout. We had 33 people, so huge event.
[00:08:30] Those events were really about getting the same sorts of people that I would interview in a live situation with a community of people. Everybody would eat a meal and drink a glass of wine. We would have these incredible guests come in. Sometimes I’d do keynotes and sometimes I would interview them on stage in a live setting.
[00:09:00] It just really grew from there. Then over the years we went from 30 people in a café in the back streets of Surry Hills to having our own studio on the border of Surry Hills and Red Fern that was kind of tailor made with everything that we needed to broadcast and video and do all those things. Two events that, I think our biggest event was 350 people. Yeah, it was an amazing time.
Guy
You was your first guest, Elo?
Eloise
[00:09:30] Do you know what? The first, this is really funny, the first Soul Session we did was called Sex, Love and Relationships. I sort of figured it was a topic that most of us have an interest in and most of us I’d say all of us, so I wanted to pick something that would have widespread appeal. One of the first guests I was interviewing at the time was, he was the head social psychologist for eHarmony and he was in the country basically promoting eHarmony in its first few years of release in Australia.
[00:10:00] He was a super smart guy and obviously he had done amazing work with eHarmony, so I have three guests. I had him, I had the sexologist from Body and Soul actually fly down from Queensland and I had a more spiritual approach, a woman who had a bit more of a spiritual approach to relationships as well. That was the first one.
Guy
Wow.
Eloise
[00:10:30] Sort of all grew from there. I guess yeah, I don’t know if you want to talk about some of the interviews I did off-stage as well as the in-house.
Guy
Yeah. Just give people an idea of some of the people that you had coming through on the Soul Sessions. Then obviously it evolved from that onwards.
Eloise
[00:11:00] It did, yeah. Really it was those. What happened was we’d have these events, right, that people would walk away, they’d be like, ‘That was the most amazing night, incredible information. I’ve just had all these aha moments. I feel really pumped and juiced and inspired to go and make some change,” or whatever. Then they’d be like, “Well, now what? How do I keep going from here?”
[00:11:30] What I realized at the time was that people, we were providing a really strong hit of inspiration and experience, but we weren’t actually supporting people to literally make the change on a day to day practical level. Change is really hard for people, we all know that. That’s why the science of change is so interesting, which I’m sure we’ll get into later. That was what really kind of inspired me to start running programs and that’s how we got to being an online education institution I guess.
[00:12:00] In the meantime I was, to come back to your question, I was interviewing people like my first really big interview for Soul Sessions, like I’m talking global profile, was Deepak Chopra. Just a little guy. Deepak’s a guy who has been around the block 1,000 times. He doesn’t even need to get out of bed in the morning if he doesn’t want to. He’s worth a squillion dollars. He’s written a squillion books. He’s …
Guy
That’s why he’s on Oprah, yeah.
Eloise
[00:12:30] [inaudible 00:12:19] Oprah who’s one of my personal heroes obviously. Well not obviously, but she is. Yeah, so he was my first big one. I remember going, “Oh.” Even though I’d had really high profile interviews through the newspaper this was different because it was my brand, it was my organization. It just felt different.
[00:13:00] Anyway, he’d come into the country. He’d said, I don’t know what he said but literally they said two interviews only. That’s all I’m doing. I managed to get one of them and the very popular Sarah Wilson got the other one. For those that, I mean I’m sure a lot of your listeners know who Sarah Wilson is, but so yeah. It was 8:00 in the morning. I remember the night before just being so nervous, had all my questions prepared and I had the film crew arriving. We had the whole thing sort of really set up.
[00:14:00] Then I got in there and it was just hilarious. He was sitting there on Twitter. We started. Deepak, he was deep in social media. Hardly even stopped when I got in there. Then we started a conversation and we were talking about Miranda Kerr and he had been on the plane with Orlando Bloom. We just sort of kicked it off from there. It ended up being an amazing interview and it’s now been watched by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. I still get loads of feedback about it actually which is really exciting. Yeah, he was the first big one.
Guy
That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant.
Stu
Fantastic.
Guy
I do wonder because when we, myself and Stu, do interviews we’ve got Skype as a bit of a barrier in terms of actually going and sitting down with someone one-on-one, with somebody that’s … Because people are just people at the end of the day, that’s what I believe, but when sometimes you can’t help but give them this star profile and you think, oh my God.
Eloise
Oh, totally. Totally. It is very different because I’ve now done a lot of Skype interviews as well, but when we do something like this we’re all in our really comfy home or office environments. We know we’re where we have everything that we need and want sort of around us. We feel very at home, but when you’re going to floor 30 of a top hotel in the city and you’ve got a bag, it is a different experience.
[00:15:30] You’re shaking hands and giving hugs and looking deep into somebody’s eyes. It is a bit of a different experience, but actually I’m glad we’re talking about this because it was really Deepak’s interview which was in 2012, so five years ago now nearly. That interview planted the seed for really what has taken five years to develop and cultivate and generate in terms of my own development and creation, which is now The Self-Love Project.
[00:16:00] In that interview, in the last 30 seconds he talks about, I said to him, “For people who are stuck, for people who feel like there’s a barrier and they just can’t break through it to find greater happiness of ease or success or whatever it is that they’re looking for, what would be your number one piece of advice?” He looked at me and he said, “Turn every story in your life into a love story.” He said, “Even the terrorists are looking for love. Even the addicts are looking for love. It doesn’t matter what’s happened or what the actual story is, what the content of the story is, there is a place of love in there somewhere and that’s what you’ve got to find.”
[00:16:30] I was like, “Does that mean you go back and you recreate all your memories?” He said, “No, it’s not that at all. It’s just you find the love in every story in your life.” I thought, that’s good. I knew it was powerful. It just took a little time. It just took a little while to sort of actualize.
Guy
Sink in.
Eloise
Get a practical …
Stu
[00:17:00] I needed to do a little bit of thinking to get that one around in my head I think. You mentioned self-love and I’m very much aware that you’re project is focused on self-love. Guy’s been raving about it and it seems to be creating quite a lot of buzz. Now, I don’t really know what self-love is. To me I’m thinking oh, self-love, I don’t have time to love myself. I’m too busy. I’ve got kids and family and business. What on earth is this all about?
Eloise
Stu, Stu, Stu, Stu.
Stu
Tell me. Tell me.
Eloise
Stu.
Stu
Tell me what self-love is.
Eloise
[00:18:00] You are going to do our next Self-Love Project, I can feel it. What is self-love? That’s a really big question and it’s a really important question. Self-love is the ability to hold yourself compassionately, to be with yourself in the most loving way, to talk to yourself the way your most trusted best friend does. The reason I guess it’s important to talk about that is that we kind of all have this profile or this way of being in the world where we put out our sharpest or wittiest or most intelligent or strongest, whatever it is, best foot forward.
[00:18:30] That’s an important part of ourselves to be able to cultivate obviously, to be able to be out there in the world and doing productive things. Then there’s this other experience of ourself that we have which is when the light goes off at night or when the sound kind of turns down in our life and all we have left at that moment is our own voice and our own relationship with ourself, the experience, the stuff that goes around in our head.
[00:19:00] For a lot of people, which I think can quite a comforting piece of information, if the listener or whoever is experiencing this right now, but for a lot of people, and I’d almost go and say the majority, more people than not, that voice is quite critical. That voice that you’re left with when all the sound turns down in your life is kind of just naturally goes toward finding the thing that you can beat yourself up about or finding the thing where you haven’t achieved success. Telling yourself you failed in that department, expecting yourself to be a better lover, mother, brother, whatever.
[00:19:30] This kind of experience of not quite measuring up to where you want to be and then as a result kind of getting into this self-flagellating sort of habit. It’s not helpful. There’s a lot of reasons why that is the case for a lot of people, but it’s not helpful eventually.
[00:20:00] Yeah, so the self-love piece, there’s an element of self-care and that is kind of the stuff that you guys talk about so brilliantly all the time like eating well and exercising often and all that sort of stuff. We are physical, mental, emotional, spiritual beings. There’s no way of actually denying that. We’re so integrated in all those parts of our souls, so if we don’t have the ability or the tools and the strategies to emotionally nourish ourselves or to spiritually nourish ourselves outside of just the physical or mental aspects, then we can get into trouble,
[00:21:00] Or we can … You know what? We can get into trouble, but more important to that is, I was in a publisher’s office two days ago and we were talking about some incredibly successful people. I won’t name names because I don’t think it’s fair on these people, but the experience for you Guy, you, Stu, me, Eloise, if any of us, if we were thinking about these people or looking from the outside in at their success we’d be like, “Oh my gosh, they’ve done amazing things.” You know?
Stu
Yeah.
Eloise
[00:21:30] How successful and amazing are these people? The stories I was hearing, I get to have these conversations a lot because of the nature of what I’m doing right now with Self-Love, but the stories I was hearing was just high levels of anxiety, high levels of stress, high levels of just discontent I guess within them. The reason that’s important to talk about is that once you can cultivate and you really nail this self-love piece, what’s the most important thing?
[00:22:00] Is it that you tick all those boxes or is it that you get to be in your life and feel amazing in it everyday and get to have a loving experience and level of life and vitality and engagement rather than stress and anxiety and fear and all that sort of stuff than is driving a lot of people these days and really affecting their quality of life?
Stu
[00:22:30] Yeah, no, I get it. Do you think, is timing, like right now for me, I perceive this time in our society right now as being very insular and very almost self-focused in a way that we’re so connected now to the internet and social media that we very rarely have time to sit down and unplug and disengage, disconnect. Yet when you’re out on the streets you’ve got people with selfie sticks. I’m on my own having a great time. I’ve got 1,000 friends on Facebook.
[00:23:00] I’m sitting down eating my lunch and I’m on social media, but I wonder in a time that we have never been so well connected, that perhaps we’re so disconnected now that we actually need to set all that aside and like you said, start to actually think about this self-love angle, direction.
Eloise
[00:23:30] Yeah. It’s a big problem, Stu, a really big one. When we think of addicts, we think about … I’m reading this amazing book at the moment called A Million Little Pieces by a guy called James Frey who was a hardcore addict, addicted to ICE and heroin and crack and all the heavy drugs. It’s his story about coming out of going to rehab and then coming out. It’s called A Million Little Pieces because he ends up putting himself back together because he goes from feeling like he’s in a million little pieces to having to become whole.
[00:24:30] When we think about it, we think about guys like him or women like him. It’s not gender-specific. However, the exact same brain chemistry is released when you get a hit of cocaine that, the exact same brain chemistry kind of comes into play when we get a hit on social media, when we get a new like or when we open up something and see that we’ve hit 300 likes or we see a new piece of information or a new email pops in that has information that kind of gives us a lift. It’s something new and all the rest of it.
[00:25:00] Addiction now has to be like social media and technology really has to be taken seriously as a potentially addictive mechanism or substance like in our lives. While you’re right, we’re more connected than ever before, I think a lot of people are feeling much more disconnected because the kind of yeah, the pull and the habits that we can get into can be really destructive. Not only destructive to our own brain because we start to just need little snippets of information and then we can’t focus for longer periods of time and then we can’t get into the depth of life and experience, but also because there’s this promise that these connections on social media or out in the world, more and more connections will give us more and more joy. It’s not the truth at all.
Guy
They’re like empty calories, yeah.
Eloise
Yeah. Fantastic. I was about to swear there. That’s an amazing analogy. That’s an amazing analogy. It is, it’s empty calories and the research shows so convincingly that you know what? To really be super happy we actually only need, we only need two, three, four very close relationships. That’s all we need.
[00:26:30] That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy community and enjoy people and enjoy what the world has to offer, but the most important thing is that the closest people in your life, you trust them, you have an open dialog with them, you feel self-expressed, you feel like they can be self-expressed with you. It’s really not about, rate of happiness is not about going further and further out there. It’s about making the simple things and the stuff closest to you in your world the most impactful, the most loving, the most enjoyable.
Guy
You mentioned the world cultivating earlier. I love that. Cultivating self-love, self-worth, that means you have to take ownness on yourself and actually start to take action and want to create the changes. I think though there are so many people out there that are, and this is just me using external things to try and fill a void that may be within, but how would you bring awareness to that person?
[00:27:00] Do they have to become aware to themselves? What have you seen from your own eyes and somebody listening to this today that might not even have thought about oh, maybe I actually start to look at myself, my self-worth and from that point. What would be the first step to trying to bring that awareness into someone’s life in the first place?
Eloise:
[00:28:00] Yeah, so think it’s definitely about slowing down to actually think about what your experience of life is. This step alone can be very hard for people because we don’t like, like as human beings, as whole human beings, we experience joy and excitement and all these kind of uplifting emotions, but by our very nature we also have an equal amount of not so great emotions, whether it’s anger or guilt or stress or whatever is going on there.
Because they’re not as fun or enjoyable to actually connect with, we spend so much of our life, another driver for social media actually, looking for something to not have to connect with those parts of ourselves, you know?
Stu
Yeah.
Eloise
[00:28:30] We’re really good at I’m just going to have a drink to feel better instead of actually feeling what I’m feeling. I’m just going to have a piece of chocolate cake instead of feeling what I’m feeling. I’m just going to go and have sex because that will just take my mind off everything or I’m just going to go and see how many hits on social media I’ve got.
[00:29:00] It’s all the same thing. It’s all the same thing. The first step is to slow down. This is to actually start observing what are the thoughts that are going on in your head, what are the feelings that you’re having in your body? This is why in The Self-Love Project we pitch it very much as you become the chief scientist in your life for six weeks.
[00:29:30] The reason that’s important is that a scientist is an objective observer. A scientist, a scientist can come to something and go, “That’s depression. That’s elation. That’s anxiety and that is love,” or whatever. They do it objectively with an equal amount of acceptance for all of those different states. That’s why we sort of say, “Slow down. Become the chief scientist so you can start observing, observing the good and understanding that, but also allow yourself to observe the not so good.”
[00:30:00] Because it’s only in connecting with that that you get the experience of becoming whole rather than fragmenting yourself further into a million little pieces, whether it’s through social media or drugs or whatever or the glass of wine at the end of the day, you get to love yourself whole. The first step is definitely slowing down and starting to just be okay with some of these negative experiences coming up I guess.
Guy
Got it.
Stu
[00:30:30] Brilliant. Brilliant. Clearly this has been a big process for you in the development of the project itself. How much of a personal journey was that for you? Did you hit any aha moments and think my word, I need to change X, Y and Zed because the scientist in me has just discovered that I’m doing all of these crazy things?
Eloise
Stu, my whole life has been preparation for this project quite literally. If I talk about that it’s really easy to sit here and go, “I was sport captain. I was first violinist at school. I was in the first [inaudible 00:30:54]. I got 95% in my HSE. I graduated from here. I got a cadetship.” You know what I mean?
Stu
Yeah.
Eloise:
I’ve done a lot of really amazing things that I can talk about and be very proud of, but equally I did have quite a fragmented experience with myself because I was talking to Guy about this recently. One of my earliest memories, I was five-years-old so I was at kindy and I was in a extracurricular class, a gym class after school.
[00:31:30] I was standing in line waiting to do the horse vault and the gym instructor came over to me and I cannot remember how it came up, but I just remember her saying, “You know what Eloise? You’re going to be so fine in life because you’re going grow up to be such a beautiful woman.”
[00:32:00] Now, what she said was not as interesting to me as what my five-year-old mind did with that information because immediately I went oh, so really ugly little girls must grow up to be really beautiful women. When I look back at that I go, that’s the programming. A five-year-old doesn’t have any ability to monitor themselves or step outside themselves and change their thinking and all the rest of it.
[00:32:30]
[00:33:00] For whatever reason it started quite early for me, this kind of not so loving experience of self. Then in my teens I had an eating disorder for about 10 years which is a long time to have an eating disorder and it’s also a very formative period of a person’s life. During my … Eating disorders are often very closely linked to self-loathing which is just so interesting. The self-loathing often comes from, well, not so much the self-loathing, but an eating disorder will often develop for people when they cannot, they don’t understand and they can’t process and they can’t be with their full gamut of feelings and experiences.
[00:33:30] This is all really interesting for me now as a nearly 40-year-old looking back and doing the work that I’m doing which is really about helping people integrate themselves to be a self-loving whole rather than just their highlight reel. Yeah, so that was really obviously big. All of these experiences, and there’s more, all these experiences helped me get a little bit closer to more information and really I guess inspired me to do the work that I do these days.
[00:34:30] The next thing was in my early twenties I had an anxiety disorder which obviously having an eating disorder doesn’t do great things for your biochemistry, so that was really just a spinoff of the way I was treating my body. Yeah, so it’s like I said, I can do the highlights. We can all do the highlights reel and there’s lots of great stuff to talk about, but I guess one of my biggest messages or my reason for being in front of work now is the highlight reels in my world don’t really matter very much if you personally, or if I personally, am not loving the experience of my life. Do you know what I mean?
[00:35:00] It doesn’t matter if I make a million dollars if I wake up and I hate myself every day or every day is just full of stress. Amazing to make a million dollars or build a really successful company or whatever the achievement is, but if your personal experience of your life is not full of vitality and juice and engaging experience and conversation, then kind of what’s the point. Do you know what I mean?
Guy
Yeah.
Stu
I do. Absolutely.
Guy
Yeah, it’s important. yeah, yeah. It’s massive, massive. I’ve been following you onto this journey and I know you then developed The Self-Love Project. I thought that now would be a good time, can you explain how it’s mapped out and what people can expect from it?
Eloise
Yeah, sure. I think I was listening to one of your guy’s interviews actually a little while ago. Bruce Lipton, which was a fantastic episode. He summed it up so brilliantly. In there he was talking about zero to seven we’re all sponges. This chemistry that’s available in our brain literally opens us up to just soaking the messages of the world around us.
[00:36:00] The social cues, the norms, the rules and it’s why you can learn three languages before the age of seven, but if you try and do that at the age of 30 you’re going to really, really struggle. Because so much of our programming happens zero to seven, when we get older and we get more conscious awareness and we want to start changing that, the
[00:37:00] The only way he says in that interview to change your programming as an adult is to develop habits. It’s literally just do it today, do it tomorrow, do it the next day, do it the day after that until the habit is formed and you have reprogrammed or rewired the subconscious area of your brain to be able to support you to do things differently. Whether that’s thinking or eating or moving or whatever it is, the same thing applies to all of those things.
[00:37:30] The Self-Love Project, to answer your question, basically is a six week program that invites you to become the true scientist of your life as I said before, to get an objective perspective of yourself, but it’s about habit formation. For six weeks the goal is to create these research-based positive daily habits over a six week period that we know support a more loving experience of self because the research, I’ve been to Yale, Princeton, Harvard, the Greater Good Science Center, TED Talks, I went everywhere to get the best information that exists at the moment on the planet.
[00:38:00] Yeah, so that’s the way it’s set up is not just to be another read or another experience of information, but to keep people accountable to setting up these daily habits and then over time they get the experiences of chief scientists to go, “Yeah, that worked for me,” or, “No, that didn’t work for me.” It’s all about the practical application and daily coming back to rather than just learning the new piece of research or the new piece of information.
Guy
Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah, I know you’ve brought in the community approach, right? Because you use software now where everyone can see each other and login.
Eloise
Yeah.
Guy
Actually introduce themselves to each other and have a bit of a chat.
Eloise
[00:39:00] It’s actually amazing the level of intimacy you get. It’s all online so people, we have people from New York, Texas, Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth, wherever. They all come in and literally everybody is in their lounge rooms or in their bedrooms or wherever they choose to login from. We’re looking at each other and we’re talking and I deliver information and people kind of interact around that, share whatever’s going on for them. It’s all in real time and it’s really amazing.
Guy
Very cool. Very cool.
Stu
[00:39:30] That’s excellent. It’s very exciting. If I want a little snippet of that, tell me, if I wanted to bring some more self-love into my life, just a teaser of what to expect. Would I be meditating for 10 minutes a day? Is that an integral part of it? Or is it about experiencing some other pleasure in life? Give me a little teaser, a little snippet.
Eloise
Do you know what? I just happen to have this thing here which your listeners won’t know what I’m holding up, but anyone that’s watching it will. We’ve got this thing called the Self-Love Halo. It’s a visual representation of the entire six week process and the daily habits we’re wanting to cultivate. People stick this on their fridge or the back of their bathroom door, wherever they want to put it.
[00:40:30] Really we do the food. We provide all the food science or principles because that’s important. We’re cultivating a habit of mindful eating basically. It’s a different way to be with your food and a different way to whether it’s through the preparing of food, the eating of food, the communing around food. It’s a mindful eating practice that we’re cultivating on The Self-Love Project.
[00:41:00] There’s a mindfulness pillar which is a combination of meditation 10 minutes a day, three minutes a day if you’re really busy. This is actually for a really busy person, this project. It’s minimal effort for maximum output basically or maximum result. There’s a meditation practice. There’s also some journaling advice. Again, you can go do the full journal experience or you can literally just write three things in the morning, but the point is you have to do something every day even if it only takes 10 seconds because you’re affirming the habitual, the practice, the actualization of the information.
[00:41:30] There’s that. Then there’s the movement. Everybody’s got to move every day. That doesn’t mean you have to climb Mount Everest or do a three hour session in the gym. You do what feels good and you move from a space of not it’s time to thrash myself. It’s more like when I move I feel energized and oxygenated and I feel more vital in my own skin and I get to do with my body what it’s designed to do. It’s about changing again the
[00:42:30] Then the biggest one and the one that most people really love playing with is the happiness pillar. I struggled a little bit to call this happiness because rather than happiness, like pure, unadulterated happiness is not the goal. The goal is emotional wellness. You can be emotionally well and connecting with your less positive emotions because that is emotional wellness, to be okay, to accept all of you and all of [inaudible 00:42:36].
[00:43:00] There’s eight factors in the happiness, the Self-Love Halo, the happiness pillar. We essentially invite people to activate three of those factors every day. Interestingly part of happiness and well being is about new experiences. It’s not about doing exactly the same thing every day. It’s about activating the best bits for yourself every day.
Guy
Beautiful.
Stu
That’s interesting. Interesting as well that you’re mentioning these different pillars that make up the wheel or the cog because I’m reading a great book at the moment that dissects habits of world class performers. Most of what you’ve spoken about right now is exactly what these guys have found to be the most rewarding …
Eloise
Wow.
Stu
… in terms of whether spiritual, emotional, financial, whatever. Those are the tools that they implement every single day. It is like you said, there’s journaling, food, nutrition, movement and happiness. How does that connection …
Eloise
Can I just say, Stu, sorry, that doesn’t surprise me at all because nothing hasn’t been tested and retested, tested and retested that is in The Self-Love Project. Do you know what I mean?
Stu
Yeah.
Eloise
It’s not just me going, “I think you should do this and that and this.” This is the best research in the world pulled together in a framework that people can activate.
Stu
Brilliant. I know I loved it. Cutting edge, hard science, new science, new technology. This is the best of the best. Love it.
Eloise
That’s it, yeah. Sorry.
Stu
[00:44:30] Food. The relationship between food and self-love, because I know that a lot of our listeners are going to be very into their nutrition and mindful about how important a role that does play in their overall health and well being. Why is it so important to self-love, getting your food right?
Eloise
It is really important for self-love, so I’m so sorry, Allen, I’m in the middle of an interview. I’m so sorry guys. We might need that editor. Just leave it out there and I’ll … Thank you. Sorry. Sorry guys.
Stu
That’s good.
Eloise
Do you want to ask the question again.
Stu
You’ve got to love Allen. Send him love.
Eloise
I could sort of see him out of the corner of my eye. I’m was like, “Oh God, is he coming in? Is he going to ruin this?” Then he opened the door. I even spoke to him beforehand and said you cannot come back with these things. Anyway. Do you want to ask the question again? Sorry Stu.
Stu
Yeah, so the link between food specifically in self-love, why is what you put in your mouth so important to self-love?
Eloise:
For a couple of reasons, if not more. Firstly we have a, many of us have a very emotional relationship with food. Food, you can’t get away from it. If you become an ICE junkie and you hit rock bottom and it’s time to clean things up you can survive very well without ICE, right? You just walk away from it, you get it out of your life, but you can’t do that with food. Food is another one of those things that we do get a lift, we do get a hitch when we have sugar or when we have alcohol or when we have whatever kind of fits.
[00:47:00] A lot of us develop a quite an emotional experience or relationship with food, which is why the mindful eating practice becomes so important as a piece of, as an approach to everything. When we talk about mindful eating it’s about again slowing down, it’s about checking in, becoming the observer, why am I eating right now. When you do eat making sure that you’re loving the experience so you’re connecting with the texture and the colors and the smells and you keep your food in the cavity of your mouth for longer because that’s where you taste, that’s where you get the most joy from your food, when it’s actually on your tongue or in the cavity of your mouth.
[00:47:30] There’s the mindful eating practice and just kind of separating what your body actually needs versus emotionally what hole you’re trying to fill with the food choice at the time. The other thing that I’d really like to talk about actually is Stu or Guy, we could actually all potentially, I’m sure we don’t, but we could all potentially have exactly the same food needs and diet everyday. All of this comes down a Paleo breakfast and then a 180 smoothie for lunch and then a coffee in the afternoon maybe and then a fish and grain veg dinner.
[00:48:30] Let’s say we all ate that, but each of us could be having a different experience of that at the time. One person might be eating like that because they really dislike the way a part of their body or their body is at the moment so they’re forcing themselves to eat really rigidly to a prescriptive let’s say Paleo diet. Rather than whereas another person could be really going, “I know this is what nourishes my cells. I know this gives me maximum cognitive ability. I know that I’m loving what I’m choosing to put in my body at the moment because this is so good for me.” Do you know what I mean?
Stu
Yeah.
Eloise
Things can look exactly the same from the outside, but the energy that you bring to food can make a huge difference around your experience of life and self. We eat all the time, right? It’s the one thing …
Guy
There’s no getting away from it, yeah.
Eloise
[00:49:00] No getting away from it. It’s the one thing we come back to all the time. It’s also why this mindful eating practice is so powerful because if you just anchor this experience of mindfulness with your food alone, then actually it ripples out into all the areas of your life as well because you’re affirming it two, three, four, five times a day depending how often you eat your food.
Guy
Excellent. Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
Stu
[00:49:30] I like it. I like it and I guess it gives you a perfect fuel source as well. If you’re a sugar muncher and you’re just habitually eating junk and snacky foods, then your energy levels and your mind is going to be all over the place anyways. It’s going to be quite hard for you to ground yourself if you haven’t got the stability from solid nutrition.
Eloise
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Guy
Now guys, I’m aware we’ve only got just over five minutes left. I’ve got some questions for you Elo. There’s one burying question that you’re going to have to give me the short answer instead of the long answer, all right?
Eloise
Can’t promise.
Guy
That was you actually met and interviewed one of my biggest heroes ever in Wayne Dyer. The question I’ve got for you is he as cool in the flesh, meeting him as he’s perceived to be in his audio books and his books that he’s written?
Eloise
[00:50:30] Do you know what? He was one of the most enjoyable interviews of my life because he was so exactly what he talks about. He was so loving, so lovely to be with, so accommodating, so just a beautiful energy and a beautiful man to be around. He was not in a big rush, which there’s probably a story as to why he wasn’t in a big rush, but it was just yes, I guess. Yes. He was amazing. I think the question that you wanted to ask though, correct me if I’m wrong.
Guy
Go on.
Eloise
Is how the interview came about.
Guy
It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us the short … Yeah, go for it. Give us the short version.
Eloise
The short version is Wayne was coming to town for the launch of his book. He lives in Hawaii or he lived in Hawaii. Bless him, he passed away recently, but was coming to town. I knew he was coming to town and I wanted to interview him, so I called up one of my contacts and I was like, “Okay.” The first thing he said to me was, “”Eloise, ask me anything except to get an interview with Wayne Dyer.” He’s like, “He’s coming with his daughter. He has two and a half, three days in the city. He’s not doing any media. He’s not doing any interviews. It’s not the reason he’s here. He’s coming to launch his book at the event that we have planned and then that’s it. Then he’s kind of, he’s underground.”
[00:52:00] I was like, hmm. Okay, but I obviously didn’t really like that answer very much. I went to the launch of his book. I accepted it of course. What could I do? I went to the launch of his book and there was like 5,000 people in the audience. I happened to be about five rows back in the audience. He’s on stage and the book happens to be called Wishes Fulfilled. He talks about fulfilling wishes and he has a five step plan for basically manifesting or getting the thing it is that you most want.
[00:52:30] As he starts talking he goes, “So I’m going to do this with you right now.” I thought okay, okay, here’s my chance to actually use his five steps of manifestation to manifest an interview with him, knowing full well that I’d been told there is no way this is going to happen. I do it. I won’t go into all the steps because that will take much longer than we’ve got, but I do it and then I let go and I go home. It’s 10PM at night and I arrive home.
[00:53:00] I wake up the next day. I am sent to one of the city hotels to interview Anita Moorjani actually who is, I know she’s a lot of people’s favorite as well. As I’m walking towards the hotel I bump into my contact who introduces me to Wayne Dyer’s PA. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” I’m like, “I really wanted to interview Wayne while he was here.” She was like, “LEt’s go meet him.” I was like, “Okay.”
[00:53:30] We go upstairs and I give him this massive hug and he goes, “What? Well let’s interview then. I’ll meet you at this place tomorrow at 3:00.” I was like, “Okay, it’s done.”
Stu
It worked.
Eloise
Yeah. It worked. Then after, I didn’t tell him until we had done the full interview and we’d finished up and we were walking back to his hotel room and I said, “I’ve got a story for you.” I said, “I was told no. I came to your book launch, I did your process and here we are.” He just giggled. He just had a little chuckle.
Stu
Beautiful.
Guy
That interview is on YouTube? Your website, Elo if people want to go watch it?
Eloise
Yeah, it is. It’s on YouTube or SoulSessions.co. That’s the other place.
Guy
So people know the backstory. Amazing. I love it. I love it. I can ask you one question, Elo and then we’ll wrap it up. What are your nonnegotiables for the best version of yourself?
Eloise
To do The Self-Love Project every day. I think that’s the obvious one, isn’t it? I guess the thing is there is no one thing you can do. There’s no one thing. Sleep is really important obviously. Sleep makes a massive difference, but so is eating well, so is looking after your mind, so is moving, so is staying positive. All those things help. That’s what I call the practice of self-love is just the combination of all of these things. That would be my nonnegotiable.
Guy
Beautiful. Beautiful. I know The Self-Love Project is coming up soon so if anyone wants to participate and get amongst it, where would they go and what are the dates, Eloise?
Eloise
[00:55:30] Thanks Guy. It’s TheSelfLoveProject.com. TheSelfLoveProject.com. They will be running regularly every month or two online, so it doesn’t matter where you are in the world you can sign up. I’d actually love to offer, you know I’m really passionate about people connecting with this information because it makes such a massive difference. We’ve had HR directors, bankers. We’ve had moms, we’ve had addicts, we’ve had teenagers, we’ve had all different types of people come through it and they all have the same result at the end of the day.
[00:56:00] Because I’m so passionate I’d really love to offer your people a bit of a discount as well, so if they use the promo code 180, just 1-8-0, the numbers, then they’ll get a $200 discount on any Self-Love Project that they want to come into. Yeah, I hope that I cam meet some of your listeners because we have a really great time. It makes a huge difference.
Guy
That’s very kind of you, Elo. Really appreciate it.
Stu
Fantastic.
Guy
[00:56:30] Yeah, I hope you get to meet some of our listeners too. I want to meet some of our listeners as well.
Stu
They don’t want to meet you, Guy. That’s what I’m thinking.
Eloise
I know Stu’s coming on the next one so maybe you should sign on for the next one too.
Guy
Yeah, absolutely.
Stu
That’s right. I’m coming. I’m paying full price. I’m coming.
Eloise
You’re coming.
Stu
Sounds great.
Eloise
I coming to get you.
Stu
Yup, you don’t know where I live.
Eloise
Actually, don’t I.
Guy
Beautiful. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on today, Eloise. Thank so much for your honesty and it was just tremendous coming on this show and sharing all this information. Loved every minute of it.
Eloise
It’s my pleasure. I love what you guys do as well. I’m a big fan of the podcast and so it’s this funny thing of coming full circle in your journey Guy, and I feel like it’s a bit of a coming full circle for me too. It’s really nice.
Guy
No, it’s brilliant. Thank you so much guys.
Stu
Thanks Eloise.
Eloise
Okay.
Guy
Bye bye.
Eloise
Yeah, see you online.
Stu
Bye bye.
The post Eloise King: The Science Of Self-Love; How It Transformed The Relationship With Myself appeared first on 180 Nutrition.