10 ways to start loving yourself the way you deserve to be loved
Updated: Jun 28, 2022
Self-love means loving and truly honouring everything that makes us be who we are! It is appreciating all that we have been given, our gifts, our talents, our ideas, our feelings - everything that makes us uniquely us.
Loving yourself means, respecting your body! It is the most clever and loving mechanism there for you, it works in your favour! Thank it and use it wisely! Give back to it, so it can function for you at its best. What are doing to it? What are you feeding it?
How much are you listening to your body? We tend to get ignorant to the signals our body is constantly telling us. It is literally communicating with us all the time.
How much are you taking care of your thoughts? Thoughts affect your emotions and if they are let loose, your emotions will let loose and do whatever they want, and usually, when this happens it is not good. It can cause anxiety, anger, doubt, guilt, all kinds of negative emotions. And what do emotions do? They lead us to behave in certain ways, 'reacting' to things instead of confidently acting proactively on things with love and care and kindness.
Accept Yourself
Flaws, race, color, all. This is you, these are the cards you have been dealt. Put things in proper perspective. You might not be able to do everything, but you can do something. You might not be as profound, tall, handsome or beautiful as you wish, but you are you. And what you are does not define your value. Can you state that the homeless person in downtown has more value than a politician?
What you can do is to accept all and everything as they are, with full blunt honesty.
Be grateful
Find the beauty in the ugly. Be grateful for the breath you can inhale into your lungs. Being grateful does not make things great overnight or change the situation you are in right now, but you can change your perspective if you cannot change the situation.
Celebrate yourself
Acknowledge your efforts. Catch yourself doing something good. Ponder on it, savor the moment, entrench it in your memory. Alter your self image. It might be that you are afraid of speaking your truth and saying how you feel, so you keep it to yourself and suppress the emotion, which will result in pressure felt from within that might try to find its outlet in other ways. So your emotions come and go unpredictably and in numerous negative ways and you might doubt your decisions and procrastinate, because of it.
Watch your self-talk
What are you thinking, saying to or about yourself? Is it negative? If so, change it! Rephrase your self-narrative. Make it positive, constructive and character-building. How are you responding to your own thoughts? Are you directing them to the negative or positive side? What is the quality of them? Is your thought process generally negative? We chose our thoughts - becoming aware of them will help to strengthen our ability to take control of them and steer to the positive side.
If you notice that a lot of anxiety is coming from your thoughts, it probably means that they are doing their own thing. And thoughts tend to pull towards the negative if we don't watch them.
Forgive
Forgive yourself, forgive others. Declutter and enjoy freedom that forgiveness brings. You cannot undo the past, but can redefine your future.
Stop comparing yourself with others
Rather compete with yourself. Strive to get better.
Prepare for your finest hour
Determine to be the best version of yourself. Invest in yourself. Like the Scouts say, “Be prepared”! Success come when opportunity meets preparation -Zig Ziglar.
Get inspired
It has been said that ‘’if you don’t get someone to inspire you, you will expire’’- Archbishop Benson Idahosa. We all can do with a little nudge here or there, someone or something to light some fire in us. Positioning ourselves for regular inspiration ensures our continuous relevance and impact.
Unleash your greatness
Take a step of faith. Follow your dreams. Realise that pain is your friend. The body (the physical side of us) tries to run away from pain. However, pain is a very vital part of living and a very vital part of loving yourself. If, for example, we let our fears overcome us and control us, we would not face certain situations that would be important for our growth, personal growth or business growth, whichever challenge it might be. On the other side of pain or uncomfort is the reward.
It is the same as going to work out in the gym or whatever sports you do, the satisfaction comes after working out hard and going against tiredness or feelings of weakness and doing it anyway. When you have an exam or when you have to perform, fear always hits just before.
But how good will you feel if you didn't go on stage, didn't perform, didn't push a bit harder to see results because of fear? Even the pain of separation or doing the right thing feels uncomfortable but there is this knowing that it will be good for us if we go through it. Don't be scared of pain. It's inevitable, suffering is a choice.
We can learn so much simply by observing.