Aloud: Normalizing Taboo Topics

Hi, guys. Good morning. It's Shannon from allowed. It is a beautiful Friday morning here in St. Paul, Minnesota. I am here to do something weird with you today. It's gonna make you feel funny, and that's okay. So we exist aloud exists to help people stop pretending like everything's okay when it's not, because we're all human beings that go through hard things, and we just don't talk about it. So how do you stop pretending? Right. What's that first step? To start to feeling like you're enough, that you don't have to pretend to be good and just know you're good.

So I'm gonna do something that involves beautiful Taylor Swift, because, a, I'm a fan, b, she's in the news. You know, if you're a football fan, you're aware, Travis, Kelsey, all of that. So we're gonna do something today that is the first step to letting you know you don't have to pretend to be good, because you actually are good. And so you're going to sing yourself a love song. I know that sounds really strange. This is an exercise that I have done myself when I don't feel like I'm good enough in the roles that I take on in the world, particularly as a mother, I have a lot of mom guilt around not doing a good enough job.

And so one of the exercises that I did was, I love love songs. Okay? So I'm gonna say that I've always been a romantic my entire life. I grew up in the nineties, and I listened to all the, you know, all the boy bands. But I always thought of love songs, obviously, to be about someone I loved or wanted to love or thought was cute or whatever it was. So when my therapist and I talked about loving myself, one of the first things I thought about was love songs. So what I'm gonna say to you today is, what if you.

When you are thinking about yourself in a role in your life where you don't feel good enough, you feel like an imposter, you don't talk about it. You're suffering inside with this pain. What if you sang yourself a love song? Okay, think about. For me, I'm thinking about Taylor Swift's love story song. I don't know if I'm gonna sing. I might try, but there's a scene where it's like, Romeo, take me somewhere in be alone. I'm messing it up. Find a love song with lyrics that you love and sing them to yourself.

Think about the passion. Right? Think about the words in the love songs that you use for someone else who's worthy, someone else who you think is beautiful and magical and oh my God, I remember the day. What if you did it to yourself? I will not sing. I'm not gonna do that to you. But find one love song, find the words. I don't care what genre it is. Sing em to yourself. Don't sing them, write them down, whatever it is, but direct them to yourself today and notice how you feel. And maybe that's your first step in not having to pretend you are good because you know you are good.

So that's what I have for you today on this beautiful Friday morning. I love all of you. Love yourselves. You are amazing. We'll see you soon. Take care of yourself and you're an amazing person. Have a great weekend and we will see you soon. Thank you Nikki. Thank you. Health my friend. Have a great day.