.png)
Ok, ladies, let’s be really honest for a second. Many of us are not great at loving ourselves. We balk at ideas and recommendations regarding self-love with a breathy laugh and an eye roll and we dismiss all compliments as if they weren’t true.
Raise your hand if you know what I’m talking about. 🙋♀️
Why do we do that? Why can’t we accept positive truths about ourselves?
Well, in my experience, I have spoken with many women who just don’t know how to love themselves. They’ve never been taught and, in many cases, they’ve been taught that it isn’t right to love yourself because it is cocky or prideful. (That was my experience.)
I was taught to stay humble and reject all compliments so I can avoid becoming prideful.
Let me tell you, that took a long time to correct and overcome. I had to learn all over again how to see myself as having beauty, strength and pleasing qualities. I had to trust that people might just be telling me the truth when they say nice things about me.
Ever had this experience?
Well, I have learned a few things along the way through my process of overcoming these beLIEfs and I feel that it is only right to share them with you in case you have some similar beliefs that need to be challenged and shifted.
You deserve love and are worthy of love….especially from yourself. So ladies, let’s have some real talk about steps you can take to learn to fall in love with yourself.
Truly See Yourself
First, it is important to truly see yourself. I am not talking about only looking at yourself physically (although I do love and recommend doing mirror work to help with this). I am talking about taking an inventory of all the things that make you amazing and unique, especially things you don’t think about on a regular basis. For instance, consider things like:
I am compassionate.
I care about people.
I like to hold the door for people just to brighten their day.
I know how to crochet & enjoy making blankets for newborns to keep them warm.
I love art and poetry.
I am a good listener and friend.
I love and am kind to animals.
I enjoy using my abilities to help others.
I am resilient.
I have overcome many struggles and grown from my challenges.
These are just examples, but hopefully you get the idea. Sometimes it is hard for us to offer even a few positive words about ourselves. In those situations, I recommend first making a list of all the things you love about your best friend or your favorite family member (or anyone else you really care about). Sometimes it helps to get the positive energy flowing by sharing loving, positive words about someone else to really get the ball rolling and then begin making the list about yourself.
We have way too many false, limiting beliefs about ourselves that keep us living and believing small. We focus on our flaws and faults instead of focusing on our inner light, good hearts and strong character. If you can only think of negative things (or the majority of your thoughts about yourself are negative), there is an imbalance that needs to be corrected. Begin by looking at your inner light…the part of you that cares about others. It’s all a part of you and it all deserves to be loved and seen by you.
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” - Aristotle
Know Yourself
After you have made your list of positive qualities, go back through that list and ask yourself questions like:
“Why am I like that?”
“Where did I learn that?”
“Who taught me that?”
“Why do I like this quality about myself?”
“Who has demonstrated this quality for me and how did it make me feel when they demonstrated it for me?”
“How does it make me feel when I demonstrate this quality myself?”
You may just find that you are like a tapestry made up of the thoughts, beliefs, character qualities and behaviors of some other wonderful people who have made a positive difference in your life. You may also find that the things you like about yourself are things you’ve liked in others and decided to adopt as your own beliefs and behaviors. Spoiler alert….you might just find a lot more things you love about yourself than you first realized. 😉 It's also possible that you can find things that no longer fit.
We all get to choose what type of person we want to be. Many times we become the person we are because of what we have observed from others - whether we gain clarity on the type of person we want to be or the type of person we do not want to be. We can all become people we are proud of by shifting and healing the traits we don’t want to have and growing and strengthening the ones we do want to have.
In that way, we have tremendous power and control over who we become. It all begins with expanding our awareness of the positive influence others have had on our lives, feeling gratitude for those things, then making the choices about what influence we want to have on the lives of others.
Appreciate Yourself
As you begin to see and know yourself through these exercises, take time to just sit with the awareness of the positive impact others have had on you and the positive impact you may have had on others. Sit with it, close your eyes, and take a deep breath. Release a sigh of satisfaction and, dare I say it, pride in yourself. Soak in this moment of appreciation for each of your positive qualities and let your pride reach all the way up to your face to be expressed in a smile of gratitude for the amazing and wonderful person that you are.
Appreciate yourself for exactly who you are right now and let that include all of your qualities, even the “so called” negative ones. We don’t have to turn a blind eye to our less than pleasing qualities. We all have them. There is not a single person in existence who only has positive qualities.
It is my personal opinion that our light (our good, pleasing, positive and helpful qualities) are in us for a reason just as much as our dark (our negative, less-than-pleasing and challenging) qualities. They all serve a purpose and are a part of our soul’s growth in this lifetime - to learn to fully love and accept ourselves as we are, while still working to grow, heal and improve. Appreciate who you are, who you are becoming and each step of the journey you are taking to get there.
“You are the journey and you are the destination. You are totally worth the trip.” - Christy Edwards
Validate Yourself
This is a big one. Too often, we look for our validation outside of ourselves. We seek it out from family members, friends, bosses, co-workers, and anyone else who will tell us we have any sort of value and worth. We look for people to tell us that what we have experienced was real and to sympathize with us in order for us to believe our experiences were as real, valid and powerful as we thought they were.
Stop. Seriously. Let’s shift this.
If you rely on others to make you believe in your value and worth, you will always be searching for it and will never be fulfilled because no one will ever be happy with you 100% of the time. If you were relying on someone to validate you and they get upset with you, you run the risk of losing your self-esteem, growing in self-doubt, and adopting self-sabotage behaviors to keep yourself living small so that you can stay “safe” in a comfort zone that was designed for you by someone else.
There are two alternative healing modalities that I have personally used to help me transform my self-love and learn to validate myself:
The Emotion Code
The first one is The Emotion Code. Using this modality, I learned to address tension, emotional pain, frustrations and even physical discomfort at the root. The stressful circumstances we face can have a long-lasting effect on our mental, physical, emotional and energetic bodies if we don’t find and release the negative emotional energies that can get trapped there.
Getting to the root helps us to validate that those life experiences were real and they did impact us negatively. The body remembers long after the mind forgets. Well, in my opinion, our mind doesn’t really forget. It just conveniently removes the painful experience from view and hides it in our subconscious mind so that we don’t have to look at it anymore. However, it’s still there affecting our feelings, thoughts, choices and habits. The Emotion Code finds it, releases it and helps to restore balance.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
EFT (or "tapping") has been an amazing tool that I have used to process and validate my negative emotions, life experiences, and emotional pain. It is really what taught me to fully love and accept myself even with my negative parts mixed in with my good parts. It helped me to learn to have more grace and compassion with myself and others. I highly recommend it.
The truth is that you are enough. You are acceptable. You are lovable.
However, you don’t need other people to tell you that in order for it to be true. It’s already true. The work lies in choosing to believe it whether other people agree with you or not. Your value and worth are not dependent on someone else’s ability or inability to show you love or validate your feelings.
Challenge Yourself
We’ve covered how you start this process by seeing, knowing, appreciating and validating yourself. This is just the necessary groundwork that sets you up for greater success in the next step, which is to challenge yourself.
When we challenge ourselves, we learn new skills, experience personal growth and develop a newfound confidence that we didn’t have before. If you have been following along with the steps laid out for you in this blog post, I’m sure you can imagine that gaining new knowledge, skills and confidence is the perfect opportunity to go back and add new data to your inventory of qualities that you can see, know, appreciate and validate about yourself.
Don’t stop. Don’t get stuck or become (or stay) stagnant. Keep growing, learning and adding to your list of things to appreciate about yourself. How can you do this? Here’s just a few ideas:
Take an online course on websites like Udemy, Teachable or some other course platform to learn a new skill.
Hire a coach to help you set and achieve your goals. 👋😉
Read books from personal development experts like Brendon Burchard.
Take up a new hobby and follow people online who teach you how to do it well.
Take a look at your life and determine where you have self-sabotage habits that are holding you back. Break those habits by getting to the energetic and emotional root of them and releasing the trapped emotions that are fueling those habits.
Challenging yourself to grow, learn and improve is a super fast way to build knowledge, awareness and confidence. Become a student of personal development. Find a spiritual practice or two (like meditation, journaling, rituals, prayer, etc.) that makes you feel supported and connected to something bigger than yourself. These two things working together create growth and depth that can strengthen the foundation of your life and help you be able to design an aligned life that you will love living.
Celebrate Yourself
Last, but definitely not least, celebrate yourself! I find this especially helpful when you are surrounded with a group of like-minded women who are also on a path of growth, self-healing, and personal/spiritual development or when you have an accountability partner who is walking the journey with you like a good friend, mentor or coach. Share your wins and be proud of all that you are and all that you are becoming. If you don’t have a group, follow me on Instagram and share your wins with me in my DMs.
The Power of These 6 Steps
These six empowering steps have the power to help you see yourself more clearly and in a positive light (something that is a challenge for many women). It also has the power to help you become more than you ever thought you could be and to fully love yourself at every stage of the journey.
It is all within your reach, but you have to be willing do the work. We must all take our own personal responsibility in our journey to falling in love with ourselves and learning how to really care for ourselves. It’s an amazing journey and you’re worth it!
Have you tried any of these steps? How did it go for you? I’d love to hear all about how you have learned to fall in love with yourself. Head on over to my Instagram page or Facebook page and share your experience with me. As always, I’m cheering you on!
Christy Edwards is an Intuitive Life Coach and a Certified Emotion Code Practitioner. She is a wife, mom and snuggle buddy to her goofy pup, Royal. As a self-proclaimed "Sparkle Specialist," she loves inspiring other women to bravely tackle their mindset, self-sabotage and inner obstacles so they can unleash their sparkle and magic into this world that desperately needs it.
Commenti