IT IS TIME TO LOVE YOURSELF. DAMMIT.
I’ve spent the month looking at the pillar of wellness encompassing relationships, looking specifically at the relationship you have with your loved one: your spouse or partner. It’s time to turn the focus to the most important relationship of your life, and often the most neglected… your relationship with yourself.
There is no other relationship that affects your wellness more than the relationship you have with yourself. If you don’t like yourself, you’re less likely to feed yourself food that nourishes and brings joy to your body. If you don’t value yourself, you’re less likely to carve out time to do the things that bring you joy. If you don’t think you’re worthy, you won’t make time for the healing sleep that you so need. If you put everyone else’s needs in front of your own, you won’t make time to move your body and exercise.
Why not like yourself? Why not learn to value yourself? Finish the month with a commitment to nourish the one relationship that affects all others. Your relationship with YOU.
Learn To Love Yourself
How or where to start? I like to start with an open mind. A willingness to look at where growth is possible. Dropping our ego to look at where we can learn to love ourselves a bit more. Like all relationships, there is always room for growth. Whether you’ve been working with a life coach for years or whether this is the first you’ve heard of the importance of your inner-relationship, there is room to grow. I promise you that the work you do to grow will exponentially affect your life for the better. The more you love yourself, the better care you’ll take of yourself, the better you’ll feel, the more confident you’ll be. The more you know about yourself, your patterns, your triggers, and the way you show up in this world, the better you’ll be able to craft a life you love. Knowledge truly is power.
Take that open mind and choose one of 2 places to start. Choose either one or both and get started to being kinder to yourself today:
Your inner voice:
What do you tell yourself? What is that voice saying in your head? Is it mostly nice or, more commonly, unbelievably cruel?
We have 60 to 80 thousand thought a day. Thoughts are just sentences in our head. They are not necessarily true. Things we tell ourselves. Where do these sentences come from? Mostly our past. Our thoughts can be the voices of our parents, our teachers, our siblings, our friends, or our colleagues. It’s important to acknowledge two things: (1) Thoughts are not necessarily true and (2) we get to choose which thoughts to focus on. The thoughts we focus on create the way we feel. The way we feel drives the actions we take in our lives. The actions we take produce the results we see. As we foster a close relationship with ourself, it’s important to become very aware of that voice in our head. What is it telling us? What is it saying? How do we feel when we think those thoughts?
96% of what we do during the day is unconscious. Think of this step like you shining a flashlight inside your head. You want to become conscious to what you’re routinely telling yourself. It that thought true? How do you feel when you think that thought? How would you act if you didn’t think that thought? It’s time to call yourself out on your BS. Would you talk to someone else the way you talk to yourself? Who’s voices are in your head? I had a therapist tell me once that I was allowing my ex to rent space in my head without paying rent and to kick him out. How about you? Who are you allowing to rent space in your head? Who are you allowing to drive your day? Are you allowing your critical mother to occupy a lot of your mental space? Or are you still allowing that deranged ex-boyfriend to drag you down into self-doubt and loathing?
Choose differently. How? You’re already doing it. Yay! By becoming aware of what thoughts you’re thinking, you’re becoming the observer of your brain. As soon as you can lift yourself out of your head to view it instead of reacting to the thoughts in your head, you grow and gain power. To amplify that learning you can use one of my favorite tools: journaling or brain dumping. Dump the contents of your brain out onto paper. Make yourself aware of what you’re thinking. What thoughts are driving your feelings? Where do those thoughts come from? Choose to confront your inner critic. To speak up to it. To stand up for yourself and your goodness. The moment my clients turn from beating themselves up to being a kind observer of their lives, change flows in and their life opens up.
Brain Food:
Another way to strengthen your relationship with yourself is to look at what you are feeding your brain? What are you watching on TV? Listening to on the radio? Reading on social media? Whose voices are you letting in your ear? Friends, co-workers, family members, significant others? What we let into our world directly impacts our health and the health of the relationship we have with ourself. If we talk to a critical parent every week on the phone, it will be hard for us to re-wire our brain. If we can never do anything the ‘right way’ for our spouse or boss, that will impact our wellness. You are an adult and you are in charge of the influences that come into your life on a consistent basis. Pay attention.
[tweetshare tweet=”“You can not hang out with negative people and live a positive life” @JoelOsteen ” username=”SusieBarolo”]When you start to pay attention to the thoughts you’re thinking, what you’re telling yourself about yourself, and what is influencing around you, growth will occur. You may need to create some boundaries in your personal relationships. You may need to stick up for yourself with yourself and with others. Become more interested in your opinion of yourself than others’ opinions of you. What do you think about your actions? What do you want to do? Surround yourself with support and positive brain food.
Action Steps Forward
I leave you with this powerful quote from Andrea Owen’s new book, How to Stop Feeling Like Shit (and the book I recommend in this week’s newsletter (click here to subscribe if you’re somehow still missing out on my newsletter).
[tweetshare tweet=”“We live in a culture that profits from women not feeling good enough, beautiful enough, thin enough, everything enough.” @andrea_owen” username=”SusieBarolo”]It’s time to change this, warriors. For you, for your children, for your community, and for this wonderful world. You are enough. You have always been enough. You will always be enough. You will screw up. You will fall down. This is normal. Speaking negatively to ourselves holds us back, keeps us “playing small”, and restricts us from being who we’re meant to be in this world. Start today. Become the kind observer of your life. Start questioning the mean things you say to yourself. Start treating yourself as you would your best friend. It’s time, warriors. Time to fall in love with yourself. With your brilliance. With your Shiny-ness. With Wonderful You. Let’s go.
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