Self Love Guru Vex King Discusses His Latest Book Closer To Love

Lindsay Judge   |   22-03-2023

Self-love guru and author of best-selling books “Good Vibes Good Life” and “Healing is the New High” Vex King is spreading his love around the world.

 

The author, social media content creator and mind coach has amassed over 1.2 million followers on Instagram with his self-love-inspired platform, sharing his quotes and thoughts on creating a better mindset and life for yourself. Vex arrived on social media platforms as a fairly unknown influencer a few years ago, sharing his thoughts and beliefs in a way that he hoped would inspire others to feel more confident and happier in themselves and their lives.

 

After quitting his corporate job, Vex found his voice on social media, sharing daily inspiring quotes that would help others. In 2018 Vex released his first book “Good Vibes Good Life”, sharing his own stories and experiences of trauma as a child and explaining how he has channelled that trauma into something positive. It was immediately a best seller and his mindset became infectious amongst his community around the world. The follow-up book “Healing is the New High” was released in 2021, while the third instalment “Closer To Love”, which discusses Vex’s relationship with his wife Kaushal, came out in February 2023.

 

Last month, Vex King was in Dubai to promote his new book as part of the Emirates Festival of Literature. We caught up with him ahead of his talk at the event to find out more about his latest book and the story behind his beliefs and vision.

 

 

Welcome to Dubai tell us how you feel to be here and what you will be talking about and sharing at the Emirates Festival of Literature.

Yesterday my wife and I did a session about our journal, which focuses on the idea that ‘the greatest self-help book ever written, is the one written by you.’ Then today I’m talking about my new book “Closer to Love” and that’s a book that de-mystifies a lot of what we hear about love and relationships. A lot of us believe that when we find the one, all of our problems in life will be solved, but actually, it’s about becoming the one, and then becoming a magnet to people who resonate with your energy. The key message I want to leave behind is for people to be able to recognise the power they have within themselves to create a life that they love, through the power of love.

 

How do you feel now that people are recognising what you’re saying and resonating with it?

It feels like everything I did was worth it. I gave up my corporate job, my businesses and my role as a music producer, I gave up my old life to create a new one that would serve people and help others and you never really know how it’s going to pan out. Now that my messages are reaching people and there is a transformative element that people are relaying back to me, it feels like everything I gave up was worth giving up, and that I followed my intuition and the signs for a reason.

 

How did you find that motivation to make big changes in your life or get over the fear to give things up?

I think part of it is to do with my upbringing because I grew up with very little. I always say to myself that maybe one day I will make a certain decision and lose it all, but I pretty much had nothing when I was younger, so I don’t really have that fear within myself. At the same time, I have this self-belief that if my intuition is telling me one thing, then I should trust it and stick to it. Some people might say that is blind faith, but I think it is the only way to be in life because fear is assuming the worst and faith is assuming the best, both ask you to trust in the unseen, so which one empowers you and which one limits you? I would always choose faith.

 

This idea of self-love is easy to talk about but much more difficult to do – what advice would you give to those on how to feel comfortable and happy with themselves?

By definition for me, self-love is a balance between accepting yourself as you are and knowing that you deserve better, then working towards it. In a sense, it is an acceptance of the past that you can’t change and an acceptance of the things that you can change to improve yourself. I have an acronym that I use because a lot of the time, the concept of self-love seems out of reach. To make it work for you, you need to remember that self-love is not about neglecting other people, it’s just about remembering yourself in every single thing you do. The acronym that I use is C.R.A.A.P.

 

C is Care: How do you take care of your mind, body and spirit? How do you take care of other people? Because that can also evoke a feeling of self-love within yourself.

 

R is Relationships: This is about managing your relationships, balancing those relationships and making sure that you’re not over-extending yourself in those relationships.

 

A is Ambition: We’ve always got goals that we aspire to or tasks that we have to do every day and it’s about staying on top of those things and following through on the things that mean a lot to you and also the things that are helping you survive and seeing you through the day.

 

A is Appreciation: This is about showing gratitude for what you have in your life and for the people that you have around you.

 

P is purpose: There are lots of concepts or models about how you find your purpose but it’s really just about finding meaning in the small moments. It’s about living life with some kind of meaningful action.

 

Once you repeat these points over and over again I think the repetition becomes a habit and these things start to become natural to you.

 

Closer to Love

 

Your desire to help others came from your own trauma and struggles which you speak very honestly about – what was the turning point in your life where you decided to channel that energy into others and how did you get there?

I had two turning points. The first was in my teenage years when I picked up my first self-help book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. That really inspired me to think positively.

Then my second turning point was in my early twenties when I was at University. During this time I was at my ultimate low and everything felt like it was going wrong at the same time. I’d just gone through a heartbreak, I was behind at university, my grandfather had passed away, and everything that you can imagine was going wrong for me. I felt like I was losing my will to live and no matter what I did, I couldn’t think positively at that moment. As much as I know that positive thinking will help me get to where I want to be, I couldn’t do it. So I went into this dark place, and after having to overcome that and find a glimmer of hope, I said to myself that there needs to be a more organic way of doing this because the way I was using positivity where I’m suppressing my deeply rooted feelings and trauma, just for the sake of being a positive person, isn’t quite working. So I went on this self-love journey and then I decided to share some of these messages online.

 

I created several different social media accounts, none of which were under my name. At one point I had 50 different accounts on all different social media platforms. This was around 2013 when it was still the early days of Instagram. I had one page called “Good Vibes Only” which was all about spreading positivity and promoting higher states of vibration. What I noticed was that there was a lot of negativity accumulating online within that particular period, and I wanted to make sure that the internet didn’t continue to be such a negative place. So I was spreading all these messages and then I realised that sometimes I would share a quote about gratitude for example, but people wouldn’t understand the significance of it. For example, there was one page called “Wealthy Words” on Instagram, and it was followed by loads of celebrities, no one knew it was me posting. I would write things like “too blessed to be stressed,” which is a cool and quirky saying, but people weren’t really grasping the deeper meaning of why gratitude is so important for happiness. So I would write a caption and elaborate on it and I started to get feedback from people on how my words had touched them. By that time my wife had become incredibly popular on YouTube in her own business and she said to me “you’ve got all this wisdom and ideas to share with the world, but no one knows it’s you sharing them – why don’t you go online as Vex King and share as yourself?” At first, I wasn’t keen, I felt I looked too young and that no one would take me seriously. But I started posting quotes and messages to see if they resonated with people and that’s how it started. I got rid of all the other pages and focused on just the Vex King page hoping that what I was posting might make someone’s day better or alleviate some of the things they were going through in their lives. And from there my following just grew.

 

 

Tell us about your relationship with your wife Kaushal and the new book “Closer To Love” which you have based on your experience in this relationship.

We met when we were very young. It was after that dark period when I was working on myself. I was heartbroken at the time so wasn’t really open to finding someone else, and Kaushal had gone through her own heartbreak and was in a similar situation. When we met we naturally gravitated towards each other and we realised there was this instant connection, it felt like we had known each other for a lifetime. So we entered a relationship but I would say at this point it was a very immature love. When you meet someone there are all these feelings of excitement and fireworks, infatuation, lust, there are loads of things happening and when I look back at that time it was a very young love, where we were looking for the other person to reciprocate that love, whereas now, the love comes from a deeper place where you love the other person regardless of what you say, what you do, who you are, what you look like, how you age, it’s just this idea that ‘I accept you in your entirety and I don’t expect anything in return, and even if we weren’t together, I would continue to love you’.

 

What do you fear?

That’s a really deep question and I love it! I think what I fear the most is not being true to who I am in what I do. When you get to a certain stage or reach a certain level of success, you have people around who want to influence you to go in a certain direction. People will tell you what or who you should be, how you should be building your brand or making more money, and for me, it’s about staying true to my roots and values and staying aligned with who I am and not trying to people please. Because by doing that, I would be teaching people that the only way you are accepted in society, is by being something that you’re not.

 

What is a message that you would tell your younger self?

There are two things. The first is to trust your intuition. A lot of people will tell you that this particular thing is your calling, and this is your path, but the only person walking your path is you, so you know yourself the best.

The second thing that I would tell myself because I went through so much pain and misery and trauma, is that it will get better. Just trust that every single thing that you’re going through is going to mould you into a better person. That might not change that person back then, but it might alleviate some of those heavy feelings that I experienced as a child

 

What is the motto that you live your life by?

It is what is essentially the foundation of all my work which is “love yourself.” When you love yourself and you fill up your own cup, you are able to pour it into other cups. It all starts from within. And secondly, just be present in the world without the need for anything in return because that creates the need for a lot of conditional relationships and I don’t think I would be here, being able to offer so much advice and love to others if I hadn’t attended to my own wounds.

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