The complete guide to finally ‘Love Yourself'
For everyone who has tried 'self-love' and failed miserably
I have known for a while now that self-love is one of the keys to escaping the constant battle we’re fighting against our own insecurities and doubts. Year after year people have told us to ‘just love yourself’ and to ‘accept yourself’. Statements that we have translated into post-its stuck to the mirror saying: ‘you’re perfect just the way you are’. And year after year we still struggle with the same doubts and insecurities as we did before.
I remember the first time hearing the statement of ‘love yourself’ wrapped up in the simple but powerful message: ‘Treat yourself like someone you loved’. As someone who has been trying to just accept herself or even – god forbid – love herself, but has failed time and time again, the treating of yourself as if you were one of your loved ones seemed like a game changer.
But somehow the game has not changed.
And I bet that things have not really changed for you either.
Short summary for quick readers
- Saying "just love yourself" doesn't do anything if it's not accompanied by actions that help you love yourself. And self-love does not come from external things; you need to do mental work too.
- You don't just magically love the people you consider friends; that relationship grew into love. It is something that becomes.
- Self-love is about forgiving yourself, compassion, empathy and all the other things you give the people that you love. Stop demanding the perfection of yourself that you'd never expect from a friend.
- Self-love is a 'fake it till you make it'-situation. It is giving yourself love until you love yourself. And there are steps to take.
- First you need awareness: what happens when you punish yourself for not being 'perfect'. Where do you shame yourself? Becoming aware can be done through meditation.
- After you're aware, it's time to respond with compassion. No shame or guilt, just acceptance. Mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow.
- Self-love is a skill that requires practice. Spend time with yourself and do the things mentioned. Go out on dates with yourself and be compassionate with your thoughts.
- You can practice loving yourself every day, at every moment. It doesn't matter what you do: you can always find a moment to become aware and practice compassion. There's always a moment to give yourself some love.
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Don’t just #Loveyourself ‘lavish prince’-style
We book the massages, have spa days, take ourselves out shopping and #selflove the crap out of life, while ‘Love yourself’ become the words that lose their meaning when you repeat them too many times. It is not surprising that ‘treat yourself like someone you loved’ becomes an empty proclamation as well.
Why?
Because a statement by itself does not actually do anything. You need actions for words to become physical. If ‘love yourself’ was an order we could just blindly follow, it would have been easy. Unfortunately self-love is not something that you can watch a YouTube-tutorial about and we don’t know how to do something we have never done before unless someone explains or shows us how to do it.
They tell us to accept ourselves like it is something to tick off a to-do list. They even make it into ‘easy to try’ self-love challenges. We have been told the same thing in different ways and we felt moved by it each and every time, but we were never given a rundown of what we are actually supposed to do to end up loving ourselves.
And so the words remain sounds carried by air until they disappear in the sea of noise.
When Googling ‘How to love yourself’, the first things that come up are lists with activities that you could do by yourself. But self-love doesn’t come from facials, buying yourself a present or going out for a walk.
Now don’t get me wrong: those things are very important to do. Having quality time with yourself is great for learning to enjoy your own company. But reading a book by yourself is not magically going to make you love yourself unless you do the mental work that is needed for self-love.
Self-love: falling for yourself
When I heard the words ‘Treat yourself like someone you loved’ in this video, I assumed it meant that you’d have to love yourself in the same way you love your family, your partner, your friends.
I focused on the word ‘love’ without realizing that love is not something that just happens.
I never thought about the creation of love, the way it comes into existence.
‘Just love yourself’ sounds like a switch that you can flip. Like one day you would just wake up and decide to love yourself like you love so many other people in your life.
As if you just loved those people from the moment you met them.
As if love hadn’t been something that became.
Self-love is not about a conscious choice. Loving yourself is not something you can just decide to do. There is so much that comes into play when you actively learn to accept and love yourself. And with that to accept all the things that actually make you want to be someone else.
Self-love grows when you nurture it. And surprisingly enough, self-love needs love to grow.
Actual feelings of love.
I get it, ‘love yourself’. How then?
Treating yourself like someone you love means that you actually treat yourself with love. A treatment similar to the one you reserve for your loved ones: love, compassion, empathy, forgiveness and all the beautiful things that make you into the amazing human being you are.
It means that when you do something that you weren’t supposed to, or if you forget to do something that you should have, you forgive yourself. You don’t worry about it day and night while you punish yourself with your thoughts of ‘How could I be so stupid?’. You show compassion and empathy and you understand that sometimes things don’t work out. If you want to read more about judgment and how to keep from judging yourself, you can get into that right here.
Treating yourself like someone you love means that you hold yourself up to the same standards that you hold your loved ones up to. Instead of the standard of perfection that you usually save for yourself.
We’re so used to having to fit into a picture perfect. Having the perfect job, house, family, body, life, relationships, etc. Everything we do is supposed to be flawless even though we don’t expect our loved ones to fit this spotless image. When they screw up we know that life is full of hurdles and issues to overcome. We know that not everything is in their control and we know that nobody can have their shit together at all times. We show so much compassion for our dear friends because life is hard. So they deserve it.
You need to show yourself the same love
But when it comes to ourselves we jump on the blame-train all week for forgetting to call a friend or because we did not send out the birthday card.
Someone once told me that all love is conditional. I don’t believe that to be true. I think we as humans made love conditional, but love – real love – is not supposed to be conditional at all.
Especially love for ourselves.
We just need to learn to love ALL of us instead of trying to discipline away the parts we don’t like. Because loving yourself shouldn’t depend on who you are and whether you like the person looking back at you in the mirror.
Let’s learn how to ‘love yourself’
The advice is quite simple actually. You give yourself love until you actually start to love yourself.
It is kind of a ‘fake it till you make it’ type of situation.
And giving yourself love is not meant to be in the form of presents or an extra dessert at dinner (although that does sound awesome. So maybe also do that). This is about the mental work you need to do while also spending quality time with yourself. It is what makes something simple as ‘going out for a walk’ into an actual self-love activity.
Our first ingredient is awareness.
1. Awareness is always key
In order to change things we have to be aware of the thing that needs changing. You cannot alter something that you cannot see. So you need to become aware of what happens mentally when you talk to yourself without compassion, kindness, empathy and all that good stuff.
You need to figure out what happens when you punish yourself for not being perfect.
For me this occurs in the form of shaming. I would call myself dumb and stupid and I give myself a mental slap on the wrist. After that I torture myself with thoughts of what I should have done differently. Or ‘better’ as I would phrase it in my mind.
Naturally, me shaming myself has never amounted to much #selflove in the past. And still I do it. On autopilot.
As if shaming and guilting ever made someone completely change their ways.
As if shame and guilt is a solid foundation for love.
But apparently my mind thinks it is, because otherwise I would have already stopped doing it. The thing is:
Your mind thinks you need to be perfect in order to be worthy of love.
People will only like you if you do everything right, if you are always kind to them and if you never say no. You have learned that love is conditional and you need to meet these unrealistic conditions that you have made up yourself. And now it is time to unlearn it. A great way to become more aware, is by following this simple meditation technique. After reaching some level of awareness, it is time to change the tune.
The second ingredient is compassion.
2. ‘Self-love’ means compassion
After becoming aware of the way we react to our own ‘mistakes’, that is when we can actually do something to change it. Of course you can not stop the initial reaction, your subconscious is completely programmed to carry all of that out automatically. But you can condition a new response into that automatic program.
A response of gentleness, acceptance and compassion.
Don’t punish yourself for punishing yourself. That is not compassion. You let the initial response happen since you won’t be able to change it right away: it is supposed to fade over time. After the automatic response, you say gentle things to yourself.
What ‘Love Yourself’ actually looks like
I tell myself that it is OK that it – “it” being whatever ‘mistake’ I made – happened. No shame, no guilt. If it is something I did to someone, I help myself figure out a way to make it better. If it is something that I did to myself then I just stick with the gentleness and tell myself I’ll do it differently next time. We make mistakes so we can learn the right way to approach a certain issue, and next time we’ll solve it.
This was an opportunity to learn, I am not a failure and I am not dumb or stupid.
Condition this response into the automatic response of shame and punishment that is already in place. Without judgment. You don’t have to tell yourself that you should ‘let go of the shame already!’ It will leave whenever the time is right.
Maybe it is hard for you to talk to yourself in this way.
Maybe you feel so low and useless, you can’t even muster the energy to feign some compassion towards yourself. Then imagine yourself talking to someone you love.
Do you have a friend that you love dearly and with whom you are always very gentle? A partner, your dog, your parents? Just imagine your inner critic as that person and talk to them in the exact same way. Your mental world is now your friend who just got fired and feels completely incompetent about it. Soothe yourself the way you would this friend and you will reap the benefits.
Which brings us to the last ingredient of this self-love pie: practice.
3. Self-love is a skill
I know, not very exciting. But every skill develops with practice and practicing love will eventually grow a beautiful garden within yourself called ‘self-love’. It might take 10.000 hours, or it might take more. Maybe even less. Fact of the matter is that practice makes progress and so practice we do.
The exciting thing about this ingredient: this is where you can actually do all the self-love challenges you’ve been reading about on Instagram. Because practice comes from spending a lot of time with yourself.
All the moments you spend by yourself are usually filled with thought. When I go out for a walk I think about the past, the future, the present – all is represented. All of these thoughts are usually related to yourself: something you did or did not do, the question whether you’d be able to do something that is coming up or thoughts about how you look, walk, talk in the present moment. We spend so much time thinking about ourselves and all the while we don’t even notice that we judge ourselves constantly.
We‘re our own harshest critic
Imagine you are going out for a self-love activity like ‘take yourself out for dinner’. You sit alone at the table and a person walks up to you to take your order. They’ll ask you whether you are waiting for someone or if your party is complete. Shamefully you reply that no one else is coming. When the person walks away, you think about how they must think you’re pathetic and have no friends. You get worried about how you look, discreetly checking yourself in the reflection of your phone screen.
You start thinking about how you are lonely and that this was a stupid thing to do and how you will never be able to do anything by yourself. Your mind goes from past to future to present.
That is the moment you need to throw in the first ingredient: awareness.
You are the only person vocally judging and talking yourself down.
As soon as you become aware of how mean you are being to yourself right now, you can sprinkle some compassion in the mix: ‘Look at how brave you are by going out by yourself, you can do anything, even hard things.’
You might not feel better right away. Practicing a new skill usually means that you suck at first. But you know what?
That is totally fine.
Because practice makes progress and progress means that at some point you’ll get better.
Right up to the point where practice makes so much progress that self-love is something you will never have to think about again. Because you are self-love.
On to #selflove-ing the shit out of yourself!
At the end of this blog post I am hoping that you had another ‘aha’-moment concerning self-love (maybe so life-changing that you’ll consider sharing this blog with friends?) but I also hope that it was not just this moment of revelation that made this post different from others you have read.
What I really hope is that you have actually realized what it is you need to do to finally get into the select group of VIP’s who know how to love themselves.
Truth be told, just by focusing on self-love and taking yourself out to dinner and a movie every week, you might have also gotten to a point where you actually enjoy your own company. You might even end up loving yourself after years of trying. But honestly, who has the time? Life is happening right now and there are a million other things you could be doing that self-love and self-acceptance can help you achieve. So why waste years looking for self-love when there’s a clear cut recipe you can try?
Why not try something that you can practice every day without having to take yourself out and spend a bunch of cash. This path to self-love is one you can tread on while you walk to the grocery store. Or while you are in the shower. This easy to apply exercise can fit in with your daily gym routine, it can be something you do while folding laundry.
Bottomline: you can practice self-love everywhere and every moment of the day.
Self-love is an always welcome guest at the party that celebrates you 24/7 and eventually you’ll notice that she’ll just walk in without you having to drag her through the door.
So… Just love yourself!
