Love Myself!
We all know the age-old sayings: You can’t truly love another until you love yourself. or my other favorite, You receive the type of love you think you deserve.
While this may be very true, tackling these hurdles of self-love blindly is what leaves us feeling defeated. Statements like this can often feel daunting leaving us with questions such as: How do you go about loving yourself? Where do you even begin?
Part of the problem with these blanket statements is they lead us to think we should have an easy time saying, “I love myself, I am beautiful” and *snap* we are fixed, we believe it. But it’s not that simple. Learning to love yourself takes time, it takes practice. It also can take support. Don’t think that because this is a journey toward love for oneself means you can’t ask for help along the way.
Sometimes the best thing to do when we feel overwhelmed is to get support from a close friend or a therapist. By seeking support from people we trust, we can learn to see new insights and receive the type of assistance we may need toward growing our self-love.
One of the most important things to remember is having patience. We are our own worst critic and with that comes the issue of us expecting perfection, expecting that we can change overnight. Being a Human Being is difficult and there are challenges, the first step of self-love is being patient with yourself through this process. Giving yourself the space and time you need to heal and grow.
When we take the time for ourselves and remind ourselves why we are worthy of the things we want, we can begin to shift how we think. It is important to start slow, setting micro-goals that are more easily accomplished.
Start by creating mini moments of self-care. It’s easy to run around taking care of our friends, family, and obligations before we even begin to think about doing something for ourselves. Now is the time to take care of you.
Start with something small daily. Make sure it’s a goal that you can easily achieve and start making a habit. Maybe it’s reading a few pages in your favorite book, closing your eyes and listening to music, taking a bath, cooking your favorite meal for dinner, going for a walk, grabbing a coffee at your favorite cafe.
It’s important to realize that doing things for yourself every day doesn’t mean it has to be something grandeur. The last thing you need to stress over doing something restorative for yourself.
Once you get in the groove of remembering to do at least 1 thing a day for yourself, you can begin to try doing something a bit more significant. Maybe going out to a nice dinner, sleeping in, adventuring into a new part of town, going to a concert or even buying that new outfit you’ve been wanting.
Another way to stimulate self-love is by changing the way we think and behave. While this area is more difficult to tackle, with patience and compassion for ourselves it is obtainable.
Start by changing the conversations you have with yourself from negative to positive. For example: Say you were supposed to pick your son up from daycare and you were caught up at work, leading you to be extremely late. The whole drive over you beat yourself up thinking “I’m so stupid! How could I forget to go pick him up? I’m his Mom!” Statements like this are very detrimental, over time they will wear us down and diminish our confidence and self-love. Stop focusing on the mistake, change the conversation by focusing on the bigger picture and the reality that you are human.
Instead of tearing yourself down, take a deep breath and say to yourself, “I am only one person and I am doing my very best. Sometimes things happen and that’s ok. Tomorrow is a new day and I’m excited to see what that day holds.”
Simple changes in our inner dialogue will start to shift how we treat ourselves.
Some other ways we can begin to shift our thinking include:
-Being mindful.
-Living Intentionally.
-Acting on what you need rather than what you want.
-Setting boundaries.
-Forgiving yourself.
-Being gentle.
-Stopping comparison and judgment.
When we start implementing this way of thinking into our life, we begin to shift the way we treat ourselves. We start to trust our intuition and feel empowered to make the decisions we want. Then as our confidence grows so does our ability to love ourselves on a deeper level.
