Wondering how to love yourself more? In this interview, wellness and confidence coach Lisa Van Ahn shares advice for self love and self-protection.

Lisa is the founder of I AM Initiative, helping young women harness their superpowers by teaching how to love yourself, how to trust yourself, and how to use those qualities to create positive change in the world. Lisa is also a former professional kickboxer who competed on an international level as part of the US National Kickboxing team. She offers workshops, retreats, private coaching and fitness bootcamps where she teaches self-confidence, self-love, and self-protection to empower women of all ages.

MALLORY WHITFIELD:

Hi, Lisa. Thanks for joining me. So, you founded the I AM Initiative as a way to teach young girls how to love themselves. Can you share more about what that program is and how you got started with that?

LISA VAN AHN:

Absolutely. The curriculum that I created follows a protocol of Think -> Feel -> Act. So, there are three separate guidelines or rules to self-protection and that's what I teach. I always like to say that I teach self-protection over self-defense because self-protection is something that you use every day and self-defense is something you need at a moment, at a time where you're being attacked, and you have to defend yourself.

If you practice self-protection on a daily basis, you're going to show up in the world and represent yourself in a powerful, connected way. That is actually going to, it's going to keep you safe from situations where you need to use self-defense. The protection pieces follow think feel act because what you think is what you, what you bring about.

So, we begin with first love yourself, FLY. It's an acronym, and it's the first rule of self-protection. What you think about you bring about and so if you don't know your value and your worth in the world, you're not going to be able to protect yourself. We often in the program talk about, we're hardest on ourselves and we can beat ourselves up and when we're doing that to ourselves, there's really not anything that we can protect from outside influences. We just believe what comes in.

If someone's telling us that we're unworthy or someone's telling us that we're unlovable, that we're stupid, that we're never going to amount to anything we just believe all of that information that comes in and that becomes real for us. So, your first best protection is loving yourself and knowing the truth about who you are and your value, then what you call into your life is information that supports that. If someone's telling you something different then you can turn it away, you can say, no, I'm actually not. I don't choose to believe that.

So, we move from thought to feeling, and the second rule of self-protection, which is to face your fears, run away from danger. In that space, I teach that there are two kinds of fear. There's fear that helps you grow and there's danger. Being able to trust your gut and your intuition is the most important piece to be able to identify what kind of fear you're facing in the moment. So, if you have the feelings of fear, come up shaking hands, sweaty poems, knocking, knees, butterflies in your stomach, you feel this fear. You need to ask yourself in that moment, is this going to help me grow, or is this danger? When you can trust your gut and your intuition immediately you'll be able to answer that question.

It's one of two things. It's either going to help me grow and I'm going to face it or it's danger, and I'm going to get out of Dodge. So, we move from thought, to feeling, to action, right? We're working down the line from your head to your heart to your feet, which is your action, and the third rule of self-protection, which is to be a positive change. So, you take your thoughts, and you take your feelings, which hopefully support your action. If I believe I'm strong and I feel strong, then I will take strong action. If I believe I am love and I feel loved, then I will take loving action. So, it works this way and that's why it's called the I Am Initiative. We work with the two most powerful words in the English language: “I am.” What you put behind them is who you become.

We start with I am strong. I feel strong and then I act strong. I'm confident. I feel confident. I act confident and we work on aligning that. Sometimes you might know you're confident, I'm confident. In a moment you won't feel confident and that's okay. We talk about how it's not always going to align. You won't always take confident action. You won't always feel confident. You might not be thinking that you're confident but when you have that awareness and know that when you align those things, you have the most power, then you can move that direction and that's essentially the program. That's what I teach.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you talked about like the first love yourself as the first step and you mentioned how sometimes there's this like negative talk, whether it's coming from internally within us, or maybe we have family members who are either verbally abusive or otherwise or other people in our lives that maybe don't love themselves. So, they're passing that around. I mean because you think about this idea of loving yourself and everybody's like, oh yes, you should love yourself. It's easier said than done sometimes. 

Some of us are blessed to have supportive family members, but some of us might not be. So, if somebody is in your program and is dealing with less than supportive people in their lives, are there additional steps that you would encourage them to take or, I think it's easier for people in certain situations to kind of step into this kind of work. But if they're really struggling with that negativity around them, how do they deal with it?

Absolutely. That was just such a quick overview of what it is but with each piece we dive into how do I implement this? How do I practice this in my life? One of my favorite things to teach my students is practice makes you better. So, remember that practice makes you better and that's the biggest thing. You have to be willing to practice and practice on a daily basis in order to get better at it. You know, I come from a really traumatic background. My childhood was extremely traumatic. I went through a lot of stuff that I wouldn't ever wish on anyone and I understand it happens to a lot of young women in the world.

I took basically my feelings of complete unworthiness. I believed that I didn't matter. I didn't want to live on this planet. I didn't want to be alive. I didn't think that I had any significance. I took that and transformed it into this space where I love myself so that when I teach it as well, I know that it's possible for every young lady. It's more difficult when you don't have a supportive home system. What you need to do is ideally remove yourself. The first thing is to remove yourself from people that are not supporting and loving and lifting you up. Now, that's not always possible, especially when you're a young person that still lives at home. Then what I recommend is that you get someone outside of your family that can guide you, support you, mentor you, teach you, work with you.

So, you want to find someone that will support you and support your dreams, and sometimes the family system isn't, isn't dysfunctional in an abusive way where you need to be removed from the home. Sometimes it's simply negativity. It's simply I want to be an artist and my parents continue to tell me that that's ridiculous and that I'll never make any money being an artist and I'll never amount to a successful human being if I choose to be an artist. This is my dream, and this is what I believe in and want. So, I say that's what matters and then find someone that supports that. So, oftentimes it isn't necessarily someone telling you that you're a waste of space or that you don't matter. They're simply doing what they believe is best for you but what is most important is that you realize that you know what's best for you and it is the truth. We are the best judge for ourselves always and I think what happens when we're growing up, as we hear, we were inundated with so many messages and so many core beliefs that come from outside of ourselves, and then there isn't an opportunity to actually revisit those beliefs and see if they work for us as we become adults.  

So, then we need to be protected as children and be taken care of but then as an adult, it's fair to revisit a belief. Do I need to look both ways before I cross the street? You could try not doing it, get hit by a car, and realize, oh no, that belief really actually works. But there are some things... I grew up with this belief from within my family, that you have to work really hard for your money and you have to do stuff that you don't like doing in order to pay your bills. I believed that for a long time and then I realized while I was in college, that what I was going to school for, I didn't want to do, and I really wanted to be a professional athlete. I really wanted to be a professional kickboxer which seemed ridiculous. 

How can you make any money doing that? But I made that choice, and I moved that direction and that's how I made my living. I've made my life teaching kickboxing and fighting professionally for a number of years and was very successful and loved it. I wouldn't be in this position if I had decided to follow that original belief or thought. So, you have to choose for yourself and be able to self-generate your beliefs and your love. When I say self-generate you have to be able to find it from within. We seek acceptance and support and love from outside of ourselves so often and it is important to have people that support you and love you. But if you can't self-generate your love then you're going to be in trouble because at some point when someone disappoints you or they leave there's a disconnect, then your well dries up. 

So, you have to be able to find love from within. The practice of that is finding your skills and repeating to yourself I'm confident, I'm smart. I'm athletic. Use those, look in the mirror, say it to yourself, watch your thoughts and your feelings, and when something negative comes up or you have self-defeating talk transfer it, switch it. I think mirror practices like looking at yourself in the mirror are really important. They feel very silly, but to look at yourself and say, I love myself, to meditate, to spend time sitting down and being quiet and listening to your thoughts and then letting the ones that don't support you go and see when you can move into more positive thinking. It's a wheel that works whether you're on a negative track or a positive track. So, if you're on a negative track to switch over to the positive track you have to practice, and it takes more than one day. They're like, I've tried to love myself but it's not working and then I would say how long have you been practicing? Because I'm good at it now, but I've been practicing for 22 years and I still struggle sometimes.

Yeah. Well, and you mentioned your own childhood growing up was rough and you mentioned that you eventually became a professional kickboxer and I know I've heard you talk where you had a couple of mentors that guided you into that path of kickboxing and how important mentors and finding positive influences are. Can you share a little bit more about your own sort of journey from that rough childhood growing up into going into kickboxing and how that shaped your own experience of learning how to love yourself?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the turning point for me was finding kickboxing. I was going to school for interpreting, I didn't love what I was doing in college. I had gone through as I said, a number of years of very, really traumatic experiences and it led me to being 19 years old in an abusive relationship. So, I was seeing a much older man who was violent and abusive. There was a particular day where he had pulled me into his car and drove out into the suburbs and he pushed me out of it. He just pushed me out and drove away. It was right outside a kickboxing studio. So, I essentially landed on the curb outside of a kickboxing studio.

I sat down and cried for a few minutes and I made a choice. In that moment I was just like, I stood up, I saw it. I said I'm going to go in. I'm going to sign up or I'm going to take a class. I want to try this, and I went in and they were starting a class and I took, I took my first class. I had spent so many years not feeling strong that when I was punching and kicking during that class, even though I was crying through most of it, I felt strong during that class. So, it was like I was taking strong action and it felt different and it felt positive and so I wanted to keep going back and keep doing that. 

When I was leaving the class, there were two women that owned the studio. They were sisters and they stopped me. They could tell that something was wrong because of the tears and the crying, and just the general coming in and signing up and being flustered from getting pushed out of the car. They just said you did a great job and you're strong and comeback. They just simply asked me to come back and I did. So, for me, when I talk about practice makes you better, I was living a life that I hated. I hated myself. I didn't believe that anything good could really happen to me. I mean, these were all the things that I actually believed to be true. Then I started going to kickboxing and I would go every day. 

Sometimes that would be the only part of my day that felt good, but it always felt good. I would feel strong and literally some days I would be like, I'm so strong and then I would leave, and I would go home, and I'd be getting screamed at or just being in this abusive relationship. The rest of everything would be I'd go right back to where I was. So, it was the kickboxing and then the sisters that own the studio kept supporting me and kept mentoring me and kept encouraging me. Yeah, I wasn't really in a space where I could love myself and they really did carry that in the beginning for me. But as they carried it, they really helped me see that they couldn't love me if I wasn't... That love lived inside of me and what they could see, just that I couldn't see it didn't mean that it wasn't there.

So, then I started to see it for myself. But it took me a couple of years before I actually was able to file a restraining order and get out. So, I was kickboxing for a couple of years before I could actually even bring myself to get out of that relationship which is just a demonstration of it isn't a  flip the switch. If you've been hard on yourself or beating yourself up or devaluing yourself for years, it's not simply read a book, do a program, turn it around, say, I love myself and everything's better. You're going to need to practice and you're going to need to practice every day for a while. That's what I did and that's where it shifted.

So, then I became strong enough, I was in college to actually say this isn't what I want. I really love kickboxing. So, I dropped out, I had three weeks left of my internship in college. My parents were so upset. They were like you have three weeks left, just finish it. II was like, it's not what I want to do. I'm not going to spend any more time doing anything that I don't want to do. I've spent most of my life doing things that I don't want to do and feeling things that I don't want to feel and now that I know that I can choose I'm going to choose something else. So, I dropped out and I started teaching kickboxing full-time and then I started fighting, and then I was on a different track.

So, I got myself onto this really great track of being an athlete and doing what I loved. I moved to Las Vegas. I boxed professionally, I fought on the US kickboxing team internationally. So, I had these really amazing opportunities for a number of years to fight. Then when I retired, I created this program because I realized the transition, the shift from hating my life to loving my life. It happened in that moment of change where I stood up and I went in and took the class, but then I had to practice that moment over and over and over and over until it became a pattern and habit and a natural part of my life.

Yeah. Yeah. You talked about emerging out of this abusive relationship and finding that strength. I know another project you've been involved with is working towards ending sex trafficking. I've seen you do a lot of work around that. So, what is the connection between that and self-love? How can practicing self-love help people from getting in these abusive relationships or potentially harmful situations?

Yeah. Well, the thing that happens now, and especially when we talk about trafficking, if we're talking about a younger generation, that's being groomed into trafficking and that's what's happening. The grooming is really insidious. It's not a grab and go, and people imagine some young girl playing in her front yard and a van pulling up and grabbing her and pulling into it. This is not what happens. Trafficking is a meticulous, strategic process of pulling in young people, not just girls, young people who identify in any way. There are young people who do not know their value and their worth and are seeking that love from outside. So, the process is generally like trust. There's a trust game that happens in trafficking where there's someone that's brought in. They're brought in, there is someone that is typically a peer or close to being a peer and will encourage and support and gain trust.

The way that they do that is you're great at this. You're good at this. You're great. If I don't believe in myself and I don't believe I'm good at anything and I have one person that's out there, that's telling me, look, you're great at this. You're awesome. This is great and then just kind of keeps that keeps the river flowing of affirmation. I am going to feel good and I'm going to move in that direction of feeling good because we all want to move in a direction of feeling good. It's how we get into relationships in the beginning first. You move in a direction of feeling good with a person and then people break up because it doesn't feel good anymore. It's like, I don't feel good anymore.

Oftentimes though, if someone doesn't have a good foundation of self-love and value and worth for who they are in the world something will move in a direction and then when it becomes violent or abusive their answer to that is well that's just what I deserve. They'll look for where they made their mistakes or where they went wrong, rather than looking at there's something internally wrong with this other person. I know who I am. I love myself. I take care of myself. So, I don't put myself in situations where it just feels off and trafficking isn't the issue or the only problem we also deal with. From the ages of seven to nine girls are most likely to be abused or assaulted. It happens most often with someone that is in their system. So, a coach, family member, a friend of the family, a provider of some sort in the system.

If a young person doesn't know their value and worth they are susceptible to listening to the positive feedback that then moves in a direction that starts to feel off or doesn't feel okay but now they're in that river that is like, okay, well this feels good. Then when it doesn't feel good, they're not on a track to get out. So, the first letter itself, the FLY, the first rule of self-protection is the most important because if I love myself then I take care of myself and when something feels off, I just peace out. I do that as an adult now. There might be a situation where this doesn't feel good to me and so I'll just say no. That practice, even that's one of the things that we do in the program is just practice makes you better. If you practice saying no if something doesn't feel right, you just practice saying no. The more you practice, the better you get, and then you're just in a position where you just say no and it's not an issue, and it's not a problem.

Yeah, totally. So, starting to wrap up. What's one resource that was helpful for you in your life that you would recommend to somebody else to check out? It could be a book or a person or a movie, or kind of anything.

Well, I would say movement specifically to me is an incredible resource because getting into your body and being present in your body, there's nothing more valuable than that. For me, that's when I say that shift, actually punching and kicking, getting into the kickboxing, and punching and kicking was such a powerful shift for me to feel, to be present in my body. So, the one thing I would recommend is to find if there's something that interests you like dance or yoga or kayaking or something that you've looked at, that you've been ooh, I'd like to try that, try it. Do it, go and try it.

A more recent resource, which to me I didn't read until last year. A friend gave it to me, and the book is just brilliant is called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. When I read it, it felt so aligned for me. The practice he gives. His name is Ravi Kamal, I think is the name of the author. But he gives these practical applications, which are creating a mental loop, a mirror practice, a meditation practice, a question practice that is all to help you drop into loving yourself. It's all about what I teach practice makes you better. He's like, this is the stuff you've got to do every day. That book, I read it so fast and I recommend it to everyone. I feel like it's essential reading

So good. I haven't even heard of that book, so I'll definitely have to check it out. So, finally, if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self a piece of advice, what would you tell her?

Wow. I mean, I would want to be her mentor. I'd just want to say you're worthy. You're valuable, you matter.  Yeah. I mean, I think that to me, you're loved, you're worthy, you matter. They're really important things and I would just tell her that. It's what I tell the young people that I work with now too. Sometimes you'll get into a group of young people and can see that there's someone in that crowd, that I really detect with that particularly struggling. That's really having a hard time. I do, I single that person out at the end afterward, and just walk up and ask if it's okay for me to give them a hug because of consent. Then just say you're brilliant and you matter, and you're worthy and I'm so grateful that I had this opportunity to be in your presence for the last hour. Here's my phone number if you need anything. Here's my email call me. I'd love to support you. So, that's probably what I would have done to my 20-year-old self, yeah.

Yeah. Well, speaking of where to get in touch with you. So, if people want to learn more about your work or the I AM Initiative, how can they find you online?

The easiest place is just to go to LisaVanAhn.com. I have a few different things that I do. The I AM Initiative is a website too. So, you can go to iaminitiative.com. You can also find it through my name, lisavanahn.com.

You can also connect with Lisa on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Cool. Thank you so much, Lisa.

Thank you. It was so great. I'm so glad you reached out to me. This was fun.