Let’s face it, no one is going to love and appreciate you more than you learn to love yourself. With that being said, until you are 100% into yourself, nobody else will ever be. In this case, you’ll need to do whatever it takes to boost your self-love and self-confidence and love the person you see in the mirror. Why loving yourself is so important? Just think about it. If you are not okay with who you really are, how on Earth are you planning to connect with people around?
Self-love makes a combination of such elements like self-acceptance, self-awareness, and respect for your own self. Believe it or not, many people happen to find that they actually are the hardest ones to learn to love in their lives. And we definitely know all sorts of things we have done in our lifetime, either good or bad, so it certainly makes sense that we will be judging ourselves even more critically than anyone else will. So, is it that hard to start loving yourself? In fact, not really. But you surely need to understand that loving yourself first is of enormous importance. Here are some useful information and several tips to help you learn to love yourself, and most importantly, become more confident with that kind of person you are.
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Before figuring out how to start loving yourself, the definition of self-love must be established. True love for yourself lies in an unconditional appreciation, respect, and acceptance of oneself. You ask what unconditional means? It is pretty simple though: No matter who you are, you should always love your reflection in the mirror with the same strength.
The primary component of liking yourself might seem to induce recognizing your own strengths and good qualities. And in reality, loving somebody else —and actually being loved in return - can help you finally realize and appreciate your good qualities as those are always reflected in your beloved person. Thus, instead of self-love being a must for loving another, it might rather be a result. Yet another element of self-love is taking care of your own self and many people may doubt that if you do not manage to take care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of those who mean a lot to you. It is as clear as that: Having little concern for yourself stems from a quite low self-worth. You can even imagine such an individual might need to take care of somebody else to feel their self-worth, which again may imply that for some of us, loving others can be helped to love themselves.
Loving yourself and being a narcissist or just a selfish personality are absolutely different concepts. Love is entirely about giving and receiving, so if you can give enough love, care, and sympathy to your own personality, most likely you can give it to those people around you.
You must have once heard the old truth telling that we can’t love others if we can’t love ourselves first of all. Love can flourish only when we give it to others, still, it always begins with “me.” That’s why we should finally realize we are the ones totally responsible for our own lives, decisions, and actions and that we simply have no right to act neglectfully with ourselves. Nevertheless, most of us have never thought about why it is that essential to love ourselves even though all of us can agree with the statement above. And the following reasons given below demonstrate that learning how to start loving yourself is truly vital.
1. When you love yourself, you accept the person you are
Naturally, you know perfectly well all of your positive and negative qualities and you must be comfortable accepting those. It does not actually mean you have to be satisfied with every single trait of yours. And while in the process of learning to love yourself, you should not stop improving the person you are. Accepting yourself grants a huge boost of confidence. Once you start accepting who you really are, you will feel no urgent need to imitate others or compare yourself to someone else. And, no doubt, that one is one of the most powerful and inspiring feelings ever.
2. It provides you confidence and self-approval
We all tend to idolize confident and charismatic personalities. This one is among our inner subconscious desires and no one can escape that. Compassion is important as well, but when you need to talk to somebody, you often address a reliable self-confident person. Those who can love themselves first usually get better jobs, career promotion and make even more friends and admirers.
3. You’ll be able to avoid self-reproach
Self-reproach, constant sense of sorrow and shame are probably the worst things you can experience. Loving and appreciating yourself might mean being a lot less anxious and concerned, less inclined to depression, stresses and self-torture. Just imagine a person who’s always dissatisfied with his weight, even though he may be quite an attractive individual. This person used to stick to all sorts of diets and eventually lost so much weight that he was forced to go see the doctor. Although this particular example is a made-up one, the situation is a terrible yet pretty common one that displays a serious lack of love for your own self.
4. If you love yourself, you can look more attractive
Trust it, this one is that simple. You should focus on your stronger points instead of constantly bothering about the weaknesses and some minor imperfections. Every person has certain imperfections, yet most people have learned to ignore them. For instance, some people are short and they cannot change it. Still, they are generally completely comfortable with the way they were created.
5. When you love yourself, you have better chances to live a better family life…
Not loving yourself won’t take you too far in life. And if a person loves himself/herself, he or she knows what they deserve. In that sense we’d like to mention a happy family’s example. Many couples still maintain very tender and warm relations, even though some of them have been together for more than 20 years. When you love your own self you can never be poorly treated by others. And it plays an utterly important role in a healthy family life.
6. …and have happier kids
All kids with no exception always copy their parents, their manners, actions, views and basically everything. In this way, it comes as no surprise that the ability to love is a crucial thing your kids need to adopt. However, it will be just impossible if the parents simply can’t display that ability. That’s why if you love yourself first, you can set a healthy example for your children.
7. The world revolves around those who love themselves
When people fall in love, everything around becomes brighter and more appealing. And falling in love with your self is no different. It can enable you to embrace a more positive look at ordinary things, people surrounding you and life in general. Thus you are absolutely free to choose whether you will learn how to start loving yourself in this mad world or not. Self-love improves both physical and psychological state. So, be sure to give it a try and watch yourself attracting more nice people and events into your life.
So how do you start loving yourself? We know at first it can seem pretty complicated to believe and you don’t really want to listen to those people following you and constantly telling how unique and wonderful you actually are. But it is even harder when you are not surrounded by those telling you how loved and appreciated you are. Most of us have been at that spot in one way or another, and you may agree that is an incredibly dark period to walk through. Be ready to say “hello” to a new sunny day though, as we are about to give you some extremely helpful tips on how to start loving yourself more with each day!
1. Deal with all the negative influences
First step in learning to love yourself, is getting rid of those ones who don’t value you. Love is an action, not a feeling. In this case, any person claiming they love you, however does not make enough time for your needs, does not make you feel happy, or even treats you like you are some unimportant thing — they don’t deserve a place in your life. Those parasites are feeding off your confidence and happiness. Just learn to let go of those. You are a wonderful, and unique personality, so don’t be wasting your precious time on people who don’t respect your right to be that awesome!
2. Take more time to do stuff YOU like to do
If your co-workers call you up on a day off and they have decided to go to the cinema, you really don’t have to join them. So, if you’re better staying inside and reading your favorite book for the fifth time, go do that! Just because those around you do particular things, it doesn’t mean you need to do these things too. Of course, you should ask yourself if it is something you genuinely want to do. And if not, proceed to politely decline and just do your thing.
3. Stay active!
Active doesn’t actually suppose you working out for three grueling hours at the gym. It may be going out for a nice walk around your town, jogging in a local park or doing a bit of a home workout while watching your favorite movie or a TV show in the morning.
Not only does it lead to positive results physically, but emotionally as well. A human body is known to release endorphins in large amounts when you are active, so you will be feeling way more energized and ready to tackle the nastiest situations that can otherwise seem frustrating as hell.
4. Compliment your own reflection
We don’t care about this one sounding pretty silly. It really works! Just take some time to look at yourself in the mirror before leaving for work, university, whatever, and say aloud that you look just gorgeous today. It can even be something as silly as, “I love the way my hair’s done today” or “I’m about to blind the whole world with my pearly white smile!
5. Let your intuition guide you
Everything comes from within. With that said, look for the signs and pay some extra attention to your gut senses. You might be hearing two inner voices talking over each other when you need to make a serious decision. The quieter voice is your higher self and the louder one being your ego. So, make sure you always follow the quieter voice.
We do believe that learning to love yourself is actually very different – in particular, from practical and ethical points of view - from learning to love your own self to loving those people being around. For many people, the perfect situation is when they can have both equally, but we really don’t see any solid reason you can love yourself before loving others and more exactly, why loving yourself first can help you love others.