When you think about love, family, relationships, and whatever else you hold dear to your heart, love, in essence, is truly the foundation of who we are. Love is an emotion that all of us crave and want to experience. No matter how callous or short-hearted someone may seem, at some point, everyone desires love. Out of love flows our strongest yet basic emotions—joy, trust, anger, hurt, and so on.
At the core of humanity's being lies love. While traversing through life, love will be one of the most prevalent feelings we experience and crave. Because of this, we need to learn how to love ourselves. Learning to love ourselves is a prerequisite to living a holistic and successful life.
While going through the different stages of life, it can be easy for us to be our own biggest critic. From these criticisms can stem erroneous and false self-comparison, self-judgment, and self-scrutiny. When dealing with negative criticism, it can be easy to focus on everything that is "wrong" with us and desecrate our greatness. With those things in mind, it can be hard for us to exercise self-love.
If you need a little more self-love in your life, then here are a few things that you can do to love yourself a little better.
1. Talking to Yourself
We all do it, have done it, or are going to do it; talking to yourself is a lot more common than we may think. Sometimes, we may talk to ourselves when we make a mistake. Other times, it may be us talking ourselves out of a situation. Talking to ourselves can be bountifully beneficial or direly detrimental—bountifully beneficial if done positively, direly detrimental if done negatively. Studies show that optimistic self-talk enhances general performance and well-being. Whether we want to believe it or not, positive self-talk almost always makes us feel better about ourselves. One method of doing this can be accomplished by writing thoughts/affirmations in a journal.
Journaling is one way for us to organize our thoughts on paper, close the open loops in our minds and have a deeper conversation with ourselves—holding ourselves accountable for personal and professional growth. Through journaling, we can become more mindful of our wants, needs, goals, and accomplishments. Using journaling to lovingly and healthily assess and affirm ourselves allows us to establish encouragement in the present and have it to look back to for the future.
2. Forgiving Yourself
Sometimes, we can be our greatest critic. Some of us criticize ourselves so much that we have accepted the lie of something being wrong with us because of past mistakes, failures, and moments that may not have gone in the positive direction that we wanted it to go in. Sometimes, self-love is impeded because we fail in acquiescing to holistically forgiving ourselves. Forgiving ourselves begins and ends internally—acknowledging that there is an issue and moving in a direction that will imbue you to move toward a resolution.
Because much of self-forgiveness is internal, when we come to grips with ourselves, it is important to be gentle with ourselves as we go through self-forgiveness. Here are some steps to help you in forgiving yourself to love yourself:
1. Acknowledge what it is that you need to forgive yourself for. 2. Forgive yourself.
3. Think of ways that you can change your actions.
4. Change your actions and walk in forgiveness.
While these steps are easier said than done, they are doable!
3. Honoring Yourself
We all can agree that we live in a self-gratifying society. Everyone desires praise and approval to some degree in their life. But what happens when you are not honored by society—family, friends, associates, professors, and so on. While it can be disheartening to not be acknowledged in a way that suits you, learning to honor yourself will invoke a sense of tranquility that no one can take from you.
Honoring yourself looks like this:
- Trusting yourself
- Not speaking badly about yourself
- Practicing self-gratitude
- Embracing yourself
- Appreciating who you are
Be yourself—do whatever feels loving, nourishing, and honors who you are!
Self-love is something that we learn to do. The only way to experience it and its invigorating power are to practice it. While external relationships aid in allowing us to feel love, without self-love, external relationships always end up being unfulfilling. Whether you want to believe it or not, internal self-love is the precursor to long-lasting, healthy external relationships that help us to flourish. While it can be challenging to engage in, self-love is one of the greatest loves we will ever experience in our lives.