If you don’t love yourself, who will?
If you don’t love yourself, who will?
Self-love is an essential element for living a positively present life, and self-respect is a vital aspect of self-love. The more you respect yourself, the more you are able to love yourself.
You have to learn to love yourself first, instead of loving the idea of other people loving you. Because the greatest struggle in life is the struggle to accept, embrace and love ourselves, with all of our imperfections.
We have to learn to be our own best friends, because sometimes we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies. We love the idea of others loving us, and we forget to love ourselves.
To be 100% honest about who we are, how we feel and what we need. To stop discrediting ourselves for everything we aren’t, and start giving ourselves credit for everything we are. And to be aware that not everyone we love will agree with us every step of the way, and to be OK with it. In 2017, you may have let all these happen but it is time to put an end to it. Let 2018 be the year of SELF LOVE.
To help you along the way, here are 8 things you must do to get the ball rolling
-
Stop Nit-picking! – Firstly, the endless barrage of self-criticisms and nit-picking must end. Learn to change the dialogue in your head! Keep things in perspective – you're only human, one who makes mistakes once in a while, and you are good enough!
-
Take a break from relationships – If you are in a happy, committed relationship, this is definitely not for you. If you don’t love yourself enough, you will keep looking for someone to fill a void only you can fill. Take time out to discover yourself again. Fall in love with you just because you deserve it and can love yourself better than anyone can love you.
-
Exercise! – Yes, this might be one herculean task if it is something you are not used to doing already. Research has found that exercise boosts the mind and this might be all you need to start appreciating yourself more.
-
Read a good book – Besides helping form a better you from reading, through reading, you expose yourself to new things, new information, new ways to solve a problem, and new ways to achieve one thing. Your communication skill is also improved through reading. As you communicate through reading, you understand more, and thus you can communicate better with people. Also, reading exposes you to a world of imagination, showing you nothing is impossible in this world.
-
Rid yourself of toxic relationships – You can’t love yourself more if you keep hanging around a friend that constantly puts you down. Friends should lift you and build you up not the other way around. You're on a journey, and there's no room for toxins where you're headed.
-
Take a vacation! – Take time away from work and your usual surroundings and explore the world around you! You cannot come and kill yourself now can you? A study in the US has shown that people who took a vacation once every six years or less were almost eight times more likely to develop heart disease, have a heart attack, or die of a coronary-related cause than those who took at least two vacations a year. These statistics are not to scare you but to persuade you that time off is important to your health in the long run.
-
Make new friends – If you bury yourself indoors all the time, the likelihood of meeting new people is very slim. Make more efforts at networking. Go out alone and mingle with others. You never can tell where these new connections might lead to. You just might meet that friend that will give you a contract worth 30 Billion after all.
-
Answer to no one! – Be the boss of you because when it comes down to it, this is your life, and you should do what you damn well please with it. You can make your dreams happen; you can become everything you've ever wanted. It all starts with a little self-love.
The bottom line is: People will come and go. Events will come and go. Days will turn into weeks and into months but a true love for yourself will always remain with you, if you nurture it.
Article by Titi Dokubo