Empowering Yourself for a Life You Love with Arliss Dudley-Cash

Self-love is not merely a luxury but a necessity for our well-being. It involves acknowledging our worth, embracing our strengths, and forgiving our flaws. By practicing self-compassion and self-care, we create a solid foundation for personal growth and resilience. In a world filled with obstacles and challenges, how can we carve out time for self-love amidst our busy lives? In this episode, I have an interesting conversation with Arliss Dudley-Cash, a highly esteemed business consultant and self-love coach. Join us today as we delve into Arliss's remarkable personal journey and explore the profound significance of cultivating self-love, not only within the realm of business but also as individuals. With a background in neuroscience, Arliss founded Soullutions to guide clients toward personal growth, utilizing self-love and self-acceptance as catalysts for success. --- Listen to the podcast here: Empowering Yourself for a Life You Love with Arliss Dudley-Cash Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you selling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a situation that you may find yourself in or may already be in and that’s a situation that you have already kind of made some progress or started taking some action toward your goals, you figured out what you want to do, but now you need to take account for a couple of things. First of all, how you maintain that balance, how you maintain that balance of taking care of yourself while you’re, say, potentially working a full-time job but also trying to promote a business or taking on two or three pursuits, trying a whole bunch of things, it can be stressful, it can be a lot, and also how you’re controlling your mindset because nothing’s going to really work that well if you don’t have a positive mindset and there’s plenty of people talking quite a bit about how the information you consume into your brain and the messages you tell yourself, what you believe about yourself eventually becomes the results of whatever pursuit you’re trying to take on. And this is where my guest today, Arliss Dudley-Cash, and her business, Soullutions, comes into play. --- Arliss, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here today. It’s such an honor. Well, thank you so much for joining. And, first of all, I want to ask you, Soullutions, just give us a little overview of what the whole thing is all about. You know, I had a dream and this is the business name that came to me and, really, it’s the marrying of the business pursuits that we’re all looking at, and it could be in business but it could be in life, those solutions that we’re looking to achieve or those goals that we’re looking to achieve, and really bringing a soulful approach to that, tapping into our humanness and what we need for the caring and feeding of us as humans on this planet as we go through the process of accomplishing our goals. So, do you think that the business world tends to ignore the human soul, the human needs and focus only on things such as output, things such as numbers and metrics? Absolutely. I think that that is a huge part of our societal structure and a huge part of the way that business is structured. And other professions as well. This is not just in business, it just is in business as well. Yeah. And I think that it’s kind of a short-sighted approach to having success in business because the research shows that the more that we look more holistically at what we need as humans to be successful, the more successful we are. Yeah, that makes sense, and you showing the research, is this all recent research or would someone 20 years ago have had any reason to be aware of this idea that if we take care of our human needs, our business is also going to be better? So, 20 years ago, there was some research out there. Most of the research that is discussed now is very recent, like in the last five to ten years, but if you are looking for later research, I highly recommend Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn’s research. She did biochemical research and she won the Nobel Prize in biochemistry and she showed that our cells are listening to us, so what we say in our heads about ourselves or our businesses or about our world, and they actually have a response to what they hear. If they hear something negative, it can impact our telomeres and if it hears something positive, it can positively impact our telomeres. Now, that doesn’t have a specific relation to business but it does talk about our resiliency as humans to live long and healthy lives, which is what we need to be doing in order to function in our business. So when you talk about living a long and healthy life but also a productive life, and so could you be saying some things to your cells, like, “I am a productive person,” “I am competent at doing X, Y, Z tasks. I am a person that people are gonna like when I try to put myself out there,” will that have an impact as well? Absolutely. So the more that we positively speak to ourselves about our efforts or our belief in ourselves or our business, the more likely that we are going to see that in our reality.Share on X And one of the reasons why is because we have a pathway in our brain, it’s called the frontal striatal pathway, and it has shown that the more positively we are to ourselves, we can actually strengthen that pathway. We can make it stronger, actually thicker and more active, and that’s one of the pathways that we use to link to the part of our brain that is important for decision making. So, if we make that pathway stronger by being kind to ourselves in the process of doing business, we are more likely to make better decisions in our business. And does this include the talk we get from people around us because there’s the self-talk and then there’s also the environment, such as what content we’re consuming, whether we’re reading online or reading newspapers or what people we’re around, which one’s a bigger impact on our cells are receiving information, whether it’s positive or negative? The environment that we’re in and what we’re consuming dictates what we normalize, and so when we are around people that speak negatively about themselves or others, if we consume media that is negative or traumatic in some way to us, if we are in situations that are not supportive, we normalize that and then that influences our internal environment, because what we’ve normalized in our consumption, we then make part of our internal environment. So it is my belief that we come into this world kind to ourselves and then we normalize this negative interaction that we see, it could be from the adults in our lives or from media or things like that, and that impacts whether we’re kind or not to ourselves inside our own minds. Now, here’s a random observation that I sometimes make and I admit to having absolutely no statistical basis behind it so forgive me if I’m just way out of left field but, sometimes, I feel like when I interact with people, like little kids, age four, five, six, even seven and eight, they tend to be kind to themselves and kind to each other until the childish “I didn’t get what I want” crying thing comes about, but, usually, the default reaction is that, but then teenagers tend to be quite critical of themselves, critical of each other, there’s always this anxiety about who’s popular, who’s not. What kind of leads to some of that? That feels to me like somewhat where the origin of this like “I’m not being kind of myself” may come from in a lot of people’s lives. Yeah, and this is just going to be from my observation too, I don’t necessarily have a study to cite, although one kind of comes to mind, but I do see that younger children are kinder to themselves and kinder to others so they’re much more likely to be supportive and they’re very resilient. So, if something negative happens in their world, they bounce back from it, just like if you see a kid running down a hallway and they fall down, a lot of times, they’ll pop right back up and keep running. Whereas if I was running down a hallway and fell down, I would not pop up that fast. So, they’re definitely more resilient and it doesn’t occur to them to make it a problem for themselves because they’re in pursuit of whatever they’re in pursuit of. I think then, as we age and get into our teenage years, we’re exposed to more of the societal norms, which leads to pressure to meet those societal norms, whether they’re realistic or not. And I think that in that age, we don’t have the ability to really evaluate if something is realistic or not, we just see it as what it is and then we hold ourselves up against that. And, typically, societal norms are actually not very achievable by most people, if any people, and so that creates that negative environment. What we do know is that the more that we normalize something and the more that we believe something is true of us, it alters our perception of reality to be that.Share on X So, the biggest impactful study that I’ve read, it was a study done with patients who were suffering from anorexia, extreme anorexia, and, obviously, they were very small individuals at that point because of their disease process but they had told themselves that they were huge and big and fat and all these things for so long that they would literally walk up to doors and turn sideways for fear that they wouldn’t fit through the door. Even though they obviously physically could fit through the door, they had altered their perception of reality so much and that had become their reality is that they were too big to fit through the door. If people in those circumstances can do it in that extreme form, obviously, we’re doing that sort of thing all the time in small ways and so we just have to be really conscious of it. 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