Email: Feel useless, hopeless, broken. (China)
“Loving yourself starts with liking yourself, which starts with respecting yourself, which starts with thinking of yourself in positive ways.”
A charming expression – all of us get selves into a big mess. Sometimes, unknowingly.
The only way out is to learn to love self. Honestly believe most important relationship we will ever have, is one with ourselves. Quality of relationship we have with ourselves, determines the real quality of all other precious bonds.
A few ways I learned to trust myself again:
1. Recognising I’ve done my best, given my level of awareness at that time
Focus our honest mind-power, inner strength to the present moment. Mind’s #1 role is our survival, it protects us from stubborn, self-sabotaging behaviours. With self-awareness we’re able to forgive selves, stop beating self up, stop negative thought processes with positive affirmations. Don’t try to make changes overnight, we get overwhelmed, give up.
2. Setting small and achievable goals
Once we realise we’ve done our best in the past, given our level of awareness at that time, we remove any sense of failure, regret, guilt, just accept valuable learnings. Everything changes when we just change the way we think. We shed old, familiar patterns. Small, simple, straight-forward steps bring tangible results. We revive some faith, hope, patience, compassion to trust self again. Then we can trust others.
3. Self-motivation and self-acceptance
A huge contributing factor in forming a better relationship with self is accepting both our dark and light aspects. Encourage self to overcome any fears. Acknowledge small successes. Take small steps to do stuff we’re proud of, pursue passions.
“Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions and as a result, they get better answers.”
Loving self is the hardest thing to do!