Learning to love myself
I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday! (for those that celebrate it)
So this past year has been a crazy year for me. My next post (12/14/15) will be more of a reflection on that but this week I wanted to just focus on how I've been learning to love myself.
Learning to love myself.
What does that mean? It's not like I think about hurting myself or ending my life, so why would I say I didn't love myself?
Well like they say, love is unconditional. It doesn't tell you that you're stupid, crazy, weird, not pretty enough, going to fail, be a disappointment, that people don't like you, a bad person... And the funny thing too is that I told myself that I wasn't being negative. It was my motivation because I could always work on myself.
I still believe that I can always work on being a better person. But now I've learned I can do that through loving and understanding myself rather than criticizing and trying to fix all my flaws.
If you love yourself, you take better care of yourself. You don't let other people treat you badly (or they treat you better because they can just tell you won't put up with that sh*t). You trust and believe in yourself.
I posted this article last week on my Facebook page that explains it really well: "It's easy to get confused about this. It's easy to let self-imposed expectations and guilt trick us into believing self love is selfish. It isn't. It is our innermost need. When we accept ourselves fully and feel gratitude and appreciation for ourselves, we can give to others of our time, our energy, and our love more richly."
Society tends to make us think we're full of ourselves if we express any sort of self love. But self love actually makes me see how much people have helped me in my successes because I don't have that insecurity of needing to prove to myself that "I'm awesome because I did it all by myself."
The article does a really great job of listing the kind of things I've been working on so I don't need to talk about them. But I did want to talk about the changes that I've noticed in my life.
1. More fulfilling relationships- Because the more I love myself, the less I need other people to. Which sounds counter-intuitive but it's more fulfilling because I no longer "need" something from the relationship. It just makes me happy to be a part of their lives and I appreciate them for wanting to be a part of mine.
2. I stopped comparing myself to others- Because when we feel secure with ourselves, we don't feel like we need to prove anything to anyone and I'm not worrying about what others are doing because I'm too busy with living my own life.
3. I'm not worried about what other people think- we can still care about people but not care too much about what they think. And if I do something wrong or make a mistake (or someone thinks I did, I don't have to agree...), it's really not a big deal, I know it's OK and I don't have to (1) get defensive about it and (2) beat myself up over it.
So this past year has been a crazy year for me. My next post (12/14/15) will be more of a reflection on that but this week I wanted to just focus on how I've been learning to love myself.
Learning to love myself.
What does that mean? It's not like I think about hurting myself or ending my life, so why would I say I didn't love myself?
Well like they say, love is unconditional. It doesn't tell you that you're stupid, crazy, weird, not pretty enough, going to fail, be a disappointment, that people don't like you, a bad person... And the funny thing too is that I told myself that I wasn't being negative. It was my motivation because I could always work on myself.
I still believe that I can always work on being a better person. But now I've learned I can do that through loving and understanding myself rather than criticizing and trying to fix all my flaws.
If you love yourself, you take better care of yourself. You don't let other people treat you badly (or they treat you better because they can just tell you won't put up with that sh*t). You trust and believe in yourself.
I posted this article last week on my Facebook page that explains it really well: "It's easy to get confused about this. It's easy to let self-imposed expectations and guilt trick us into believing self love is selfish. It isn't. It is our innermost need. When we accept ourselves fully and feel gratitude and appreciation for ourselves, we can give to others of our time, our energy, and our love more richly."
Society tends to make us think we're full of ourselves if we express any sort of self love. But self love actually makes me see how much people have helped me in my successes because I don't have that insecurity of needing to prove to myself that "I'm awesome because I did it all by myself."
The article does a really great job of listing the kind of things I've been working on so I don't need to talk about them. But I did want to talk about the changes that I've noticed in my life.
1. More fulfilling relationships- Because the more I love myself, the less I need other people to. Which sounds counter-intuitive but it's more fulfilling because I no longer "need" something from the relationship. It just makes me happy to be a part of their lives and I appreciate them for wanting to be a part of mine.
2. I stopped comparing myself to others- Because when we feel secure with ourselves, we don't feel like we need to prove anything to anyone and I'm not worrying about what others are doing because I'm too busy with living my own life.
3. I'm not worried about what other people think- we can still care about people but not care too much about what they think. And if I do something wrong or make a mistake (or someone thinks I did, I don't have to agree...), it's really not a big deal, I know it's OK and I don't have to (1) get defensive about it and (2) beat myself up over it.
4. I appreciate my flaws- They make me unique. I'm learning to even appreciate the anxiety and verbal abuse that goes on in my head. Because I can understand why other people have irrational thoughts and negative self-image.
5. I appreciate the journey more than reaching the destination- I'm doing the things I want to do because it makes me happy to do them, whether I "succeed" or "fail".
Of course it's always a work in progress. But I've noticed that these things have become a more natural way of thinking for me rather than what I tell myself "how I should be thinking." And they're just side effects of truly loving yourself.
5. I appreciate the journey more than reaching the destination- I'm doing the things I want to do because it makes me happy to do them, whether I "succeed" or "fail".
Of course it's always a work in progress. But I've noticed that these things have become a more natural way of thinking for me rather than what I tell myself "how I should be thinking." And they're just side effects of truly loving yourself.
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