Being able to love yourself unconditionally is the gateway to success, happiness and fulfillment in life.
A healthy relationship with yourself ensures that you understand yourself, accept yourself, take care of yourself, trust your abilities and have faith in everything you do. You can’t expect results when you don’t love yourself and don’t believe in your abilities.
Your relationship with yourself tops all the relationships in your life and you need to practice self love to nurture this relationship and make it stronger. With self-love, you will always be able to support yourself and get through the toughest phases in your life because you will always have yourself, no matter what.
With self love, you also free yourself from any kind of dependence or approval seeking behavior as you feel complete from within. You start living an authentic life in alignment with your true nature instead of putting on a fake persona only to seek approval and validation from others.
So you see, self love is absolutely crucial to your health and well being.
The following are 8 simple ways you can boost self love.
1. Believe that you are worthy of love
Before moving ahead on the journey towards self-love, you need to clearly accept and acknowledge the fact that you indeed are worthy of receiving unconditional love. You need to look past your insecurities and focus on accepting love.
Remember that you are not less than anybody else and you have the potential to achieve all of your dreams.
Focus on how far you have come in your life and how you have gotten past your problems until now. Respect yourself and your journey. You need yourself to give that love and affection that you would expect from others. Because you are worth celebrating and you do deserve love.
2. Allow yourself to make mistakes
In order to keep growing and bettering yourself, you need to keep trying new things and expanding your horizons.
Invariably, mistakes do happen when you try something new. And, when things don’t turn out the way you expected and you end up making a mistake, it makes you think you are not good enough and you don’t deserve to be trying new things. It makes you doubt your abilities.
This is precisely where you need to support yourself with self-love instead of treating yourself harshly or punishing yourself for making mistakes.
Mistakes happen, but that is also how you learn. Don’t think that if you messed up one particular opportunity, you are doomed. There are plenty of opportunities out there. You will be able to see them and eventually seize them, only if you have confidence in yourself.
If you aren’t confident about yourself, you will be passing those opportunities over and not be able to grow. So be thankful for the mistakes you make, for they teach you to deal with more opportunities in the future. They prepare you for something even better and bigger.
3. Embrace your weaknesses while working on them
When you focus on only your weaknesses and flaws, it is very easy to get carried away and become too critical of yourself. This hinders you from truly accepting and loving yourself.
Part of the journey to self-love is accepting your weaknesses. When you do that, you start moving on the path of turning them into your strengths and working towards becoming your ideal self.
Understandably, you would want to get rid of all your weaknesses and flaws as soon as possible.
But when you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin, you can never achieve this goal. Constantly undermining yourself is a major obstacle to loving yourself.
4. Deal with criticisms positively
There are a lot of situations in your life when you get criticized by other people, both personally and professionally. Understandably, it feels bad to be judged and be put under scrutiny.
However, take your criticisms in a rational way and focus on how you can overcome your shortcomings. Understand what you did wrong and work on correcting it instead of bashing yourself or taking criticisms personally.
A criticism is a comment on the things you are not good at or the areas you are lacking in. So put more focus on the things you are good at while working on improving things you aren’t good at.
People will not always agree with you or even like you, and that’s fine. What is important that you love yourself, constantly work on bettering yourself, spend more time with people who encourage you and ignore people who bring you down.
5. Believe in yourself and don’t settle for people who don’t respect you and make you feel unworthy
When you are not able to love yourself, you will look outside for love and appreciation. And when you do that, it is very likely that you will settle for something less than what you deserve.
You will find yourself in relationships where you feel unworthy and unloved. You will end up belittling yourself and your self-worth.
When you don’t love yourself and aren’t confident about yourself, you will let manipulative people use you because you wouldn’t know how to stand up for yourself.
Also Read: 11 Feel Good Quotes That Will Fill You With Positivity.
6. Do not worry about what other people think of you
It doesn’t even matter what anyone thinks about you or tells you as long as you love yourself unconditionally and strive to become better – One step at a time.
So let go of thoughts about what other people think of you. Do not give attention to these thoughts. Be conscious of them as and when they arise and when they do, shift your attention to other empowering thoughts. Become self validated by realizing that you do not need to live up to anyone’s expectations and that you do not need to prove anything to anybody. You are enough as you are. Complete and beautiful as you are.
This will free your energy up which you can then use to focus on yourself. To become more self aware.
7. Become more self aware
Understanding yourself is at the very core of self love cause you cannot love yourself if you do not understand yourself.
Spend time getting to know yourself beyond the labels. You might have accumulated a lot of limited and negative beliefs while growing up which block you from accessing your true nature. Become conscious of these beliefs and let them go. Ask yourself, who you truly are, what you truly want from life? Find out what your true strengths and weaknesses are. Focus your energy on your strengths and try your best to overcome your weaknesses.
Simple practices like mindfulness, yoga and meditation can be immensely helpful in the process of self awareness. Maintaining a self reflection journal is another great way to know the deeper most subtle aspects of yourself.
Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more liberated you become.
8. Stop the blame game
Judging and blaming others or yourself is not going to help. As long as you keep blaming yourself or the external, you remain in the victim mode. And being a victim is self defeating.
Accept complete responsibility for everything in your life, minus the blame. Know that the power to change you life lies within your own hands and not on someone else. Accepting responsibility is a part of self love.
9. Realize that you are enough as you are
Realize deeply that you are enough as you are and that you don’t need to prove anything to anybody to feel worthy. You do not need to live up to anyone’s expectations.
This is an extremely important realization as it will help you refocus your energy and attention from outside to within. It will liberate you from living an unauthentic life to please others to living an authentic life true to your deepest desires.
It is only when you shed this fake persona that you can get in touch with your true nature and that’s where self love begins.
It is vital that you always stay true to yourself and understand what really makes you happy. You are deserving of love, don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
Also Read: 18 Deep Self Love Quotes That Will Change Your Life.
