How to love yourself (in the best possible way)

Self-love is a revolution. If there is anything that can change your life drastically, it is self-love. 

But the problem is that when it comes to ourselves, we are not the same kind, encouraging and supportive friends that we are to the ones whom we love. 

It’s funny how we tend to ignore ourselves and never think that loving ourselves in this journey of life is even essential until life hits us and we have no idea how to deal with it. 

In such times, if you knew how to love yourself, the blow wouldn’t be that big, because you would know to pick yourself up and come back stronger.

So today I want to remind you that you are in a relationship with yourself first and foremost and this is THE most important relationship that you must nurture. 

You need your own love more than anything in this world and only then can you also love others and love this planet better. 

So let us know how you can love yourself better. 

I hope it inspires you to start loving yourself and seeing yourself in another light. 

How to love yourself better

1. Accept the past 

For most of us, the biggest obstacle to loving ourselves is our past. 

But the past is past and it is gone. 

No matter what has happened to you in the past, it has no power over you except your own thoughts. 

To truly love yourself, allow yourself to start each day with a clean slate and don’t allow the past to control your present actions. 

Sincerely accept what happened in the past as something that had to happen in order to learn some lessons. 

Forgive those who hurt you and allow yourself to heal. 

If it is you yourself that you are angry at, then give yourself self-forgiveness. 

You deserve to forgive yourself. That is the only way out. 

Only when you forgive yourself and others can you free yourself from the shackles of the past and begin to work on changing your life. 

2. Embrace the present 

This present moment is all you got and each moment you are filled with choices. 

The choices may be as small as choosing to scroll your phone till late at night or choosing to sleep early, choosing healthy food or choosing junk food, choosing to forgive yourself or choosing to keep being stuck over what happened in the past. 

Each moment in the present is filled with choices and how you choose to embrace the present is what determines if you love yourself or not. 

To learn to love yourself, you need to be mindful of the choices you’re making today. 

For the rest of the things that you have no choice over, that happen in life, accept them as part of life too and 

If it is under your control, change it. And if it is not, then there is no use complaining about it. 

Accept things as they are and give up the idea of how things should be. 

Move with the flow of life instead of resisting and lamenting. 

How you choose to make the most out of the present moment is how you choose to love yourself. 

• P.S How to practice mindfulness
• How to make your life interesting

3. Be willing to do the work 

There is a lot of inner work required to do if you want to truly love yourself. 

The reason why we’re so bad at loving ourselves is because we hate to do the work. 

In fact, we think there is no inner work to do. We think all the work should be done by others and not us.

We tend to think

•  “They have to change first” 
  
  
• “If only this hadn’t happened”
  
• “Nothing can fix this”
  
• “Nothing can change them”
  
• “They are the ones making my life miserable”
  
  
• “Till this goes on, I can’t do anything about my life”
  
  
• And we keep on delaying working on ourselves. 

To truly love yourself, you have to be willing to do the work NOW. 

Notice all the stories your mind creates to resist inner work and the urge to blame the outer situations and other people.

Waiting for the perfect moment and waiting for others to be perfect is foolish. 

No moment is a perfect moment unless you decide to say, “This is the moment. Enough is enough”

What others do to you is their business, but what you do to yourself is your business and nobody else can take care of your business. 

You have to do it for yourself. 

Also, we need to learn to see that it’s not always the other person who is at fault. We tend to ignore a large part of our mistakes and negative intentions. 

To truly love yourself means to see your negative side and shortcomings as well, but to not do this with self-criticism and judgement, but to give it enough love and compassion and be willing to change it.

• P.S Mindset shifts to make to change your life
• 50 ideas to change your life
• Lucky Girl Syndrome affirmations

4. Trust the future

Trust that the future can be incredible no matter what your past looked like. 

You need not have been born into a rich family to change your future. 

What you are now, where you are now, what you have now is enough to create a beautiful future. 

To love yourself is to believe you are worthy to live a beautiful life and be determined to create it. 

The future is made up of Nows. How you spend and live your now is what will make your future. 

If you want to know what your future will look like, take a close look at your present actions, habits, mindset, lifestyle and how you choose to live each day. 

They are what is slowly making your future. 

Trust that the future can be anything you want. 

Set big intentions and do the everyday work required to get you there. 

If you are sincere and truly decide, what is not possible? 

Everyday choices might seem very small, but it is what make up great changes for our future.

My life was very different 5 years ago, but so much changed because of the tiny choices I kept making every day. 

But everything depends on your decision. You have to decide first how you want your future to look like. 

5 years from now? 10 years from now? 

I have my eyes set on 2030 and I have set goals I would like to see myself having, doing and being by 2030.

It is what makes the present exciting and worth living and fighting for.

P.S. If you are ready to give a try at working on yourself and changing your life, I have recently created a Special challenge/Guide for you to Change your Life in 7 days.

I think you’ll love it if you give it a try for 7 days and see what’s possible for you.

5. Speak kindly to yourself 

The words that we speak help us form bonds of friendship and love. 

Even a small kind word from a person we love can boost our spirit and help us see the light when we’re down. 

But words can also cut us deeper than knives. 

They can hurt us more than bullets and we must have all experienced it in our lives. 

It is words that can spread peace and even hatred across nations creating the deadliest war.

So it is known that words have power.

But when we speak with ourselves, we are so careless with the words that we use. 

We say negative and unkind things to ourselves and things we would never speak out loud to anyone we love. 

To practice self-love, one most important habits to be mindful of is to be aware of how we speak and what things we are saying to ourselves. 

Speak kindly to yourself.

Speak highly of yourself to yourself.

The words you keep repeating to yourself become your self-identity. 

If you keep saying, “I am so miserable.”; “I am so lazy”; “My health is always in a bad state” and “Nothing good can happen to me” then this, in turn, becomes how you identify yourself and also how your reality will start to look like.

Your reality is never different from the words you keep speaking to yourself and to those around you.

It will always match your words.

So love yourself enough to change your negative self-talk. 

Choose to speak words that you would want to be and have. 

Choose the reality you want to attract and speak words that align with this new reality you want to create. 

6. Know your worth 

If you want to love yourself, you need to stop wrestling with yourself and start giving it love instead. 

How you see yourself becomes the eyes of how others see you. 

Don’t let anybody else decide what you’re worthy of or what you’re capable of. 

You get to decide that for yourself. 

In my life, many of my family members thought that I would amount to nothing and that I would not be able to do anything worthwhile. 

They would always compare me with my other cousins and never in their mind did they think I could become something. 

But I never let this bring me down. Instead, I worked hard in my studies and in my personal growth so much that they became a motivational force for me to prove that they were wrong. 

No one can truly bring you down except your thoughts. 

Raise your bar and your standards. If your bar is set too low, you will always be settling for less. 

And you’re not here to settle for less. Never. 

Don’t let anybody put you in a position of pity and you should never do that to yourself. 

Know your worth more than anything. 

Inside you, there is a 5-year-old child who needs love, attention, encouragement and support. 

Even if you’ve neglected her/him all this while, you can still build a good relationship with her. It’s not too late. 

And to build a good relationship with your inner child, you need to give it love and do things that are good for them, even if he/she may not like it. 

You have to teach your inner child that she is worthy, she is capable, she is strong and that she must know her worth. 

• P.S How to overcome low self esteem
• How to become a more positive person

7. Cultivate determination 

To love yourself truly, the most important quality to develop is determination. 

Here I’d like to mention one of Yung Publo’s quotes:

One of the most important qualities to develop in life is having a strong determination. At some point, you just have to put your foot down and say, “I am going to move in this new direction and no person or situation is going to stop me”. Great transformations always have a beginning. 

To talk about my own life, the change I brought in my life also started with a determination I finally made to myself. I even remember the date. 

It was 13th February 2013. 

It was then that decided that I would work on improving myself and change my life. 

It required work and lots of ups and downs and the process is going still. We need to keep on determining and re-determining if we want to love ourselves fiercely and change our lives. 

It is possible, even if you have seen yourself as a lazy, weak person till now. 

Trust me, you have all the determination in the world to move mountains, cross oceans or walk a thousand miles if you only decide.  

8. Don’t treat your mind as a dustbin

To start loving yourself, the most important condition is to start loving your mind. 

To love your mind, here are two things you need to do:

First is, to speak with it kindly and give it love and understanding instead of always being at odds with it. Our mind tries to trick us all the time, so you must be careful not to believe everything it says. 

If it tries to tell you something that is causing you hurt, give those negative thoughts a hug and let it pass on. Don’t judge those negative thoughts. 

When you judge your thoughts, you create more suffering than necessary. 

The second condition to love your mind is to treat your mind as sacred and not treat it as a dustbin where you throw anything and everything. 

This means that you should be careful about what you’re reading, watching or listening to. 

What you feed your mind with becomes your thought process. 

If you treat it like a dustbin, it is dirt and negativity that will get cooked. 

But if you feed it with love, wisdom, compassion, and knowledge, then it is love, wisdom, courage and knowledge that will come out of you and you won’t have to force being positive or happy. 

You might feel that you cannot control your thoughts, but yes you can, with what you feed your mind. 

Treat it as sacred, as a temple if you truly love yourself.  

This Love will bring about transformation 

9. Build good habits

Love is a verb and self-love is all about action too. 

It rests in everyday habits that we do and it starts with cultivating good habits. 

In life, as we grow up we need to keep on letting go of negative habits and make our life lighter and happier, but what we end up doing is we keep on adding up the negative habits instead of good ones. 

We start sleeping late, eating foods that are not good for our bodies, taking up complaining habits, attaching to relationships that are not good for us, and hoarding things that are not needed and it makes our lives more and more complicated. 

If you want to love yourself, you need to give up negative habits one by one. 

List out all the negative habits that you have consciously or unconsciously picked up and work on removing one at first. 

Then slowly remove the other. 

When you remove a bad habit, you automatically replace it with a good one. 

• Here are 10 toxic habits to quit and 
• 10 Daily Habits That Changed My Life 

10. Have dreams to pursue

To love yourself means to go about expressing your fullest potential. 

You are born here to be you and nobody else, to be the truest you possible. And this is a lifetime work. 

That is why loving ourselves is an endless journey. 

So many of us in life are suffering from boredom, anxiety and depression and I truly believe that the root cause of all of it is because we’re not fully realising our potential and who we are truly meant to be. 

When we are far away from our true selves, then all the problems occur. 

If you truly loved yourself, how would you be? What dreams would you dream about and work on creating? 

Sit with this question for a while. 

You can also go look in the mirror and see yourself in the eyes and ask yourself this question. 

To love yourself means to daydream about the possibilities of life, to live each day as being in love with the person you are and with the person you are going to be. 

So this is how you can love yourself better. Start loving yourself better from today. 

The only person who can change your life is you. 

What happens when you love yourself? 

When you truly love yourself, something inside you shifts. You’re no more unkind to yourself and you know how to pick yourself back up. 

You let go of self-criticism and learn to see the lessons from each experience. 

You start to wonder how could you even live for so long without loving your inner child all these years. 

No one can really hurt you because that permission rests with you. 

You no longer allow people to take advantage of your heart, and yet you become more open to giving and receiving love. 

You smile more, take more risks and seek to express yourself in wonderful ways. 

You are no longer a victim of your past and you learn to embrace the gift of the present moment and seek to do more of the things that are truly good for your self-growth and healing. 

You are the most powerful tool in your life and you must love yourself enough to use You wisely. 

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