How To Learn To Love Yourself

meditationmental healthHolistic wellnessself love

Aug 26

Written By The Self Care Space

Off the top of your head, name the three people that you love most in the world.

Can you think of them?

You might be able to see where we’re going with this.

Did your own name make it onto the list? Probably not, right? Most of us don’t consider ourselves as someone we “love”.

But we should. YOU should!

The reality is that you are the most important person in your life. There is no one who you will spend as much time with, no one who will be there with you through every single one of your ups and downs. Yet at best, most of us just seem to tolerate who we are.

So how do we learn to love ourselves more? Realistically, we won’t be able to tell you exactly what the process will look like. There is no “one size fits all” approach to self-love. The challenge for each of us lies in embarking on our own journey and carving out our own personal path.

All that we can do here is give you some helpful tips and tricks to support you along the way. Maybe some of them will resonate with you and maybe some won’t, that’s okay too. This process is all about learning to reconnect with your own inner voice and letting it guide you back to a place of self-love.

So without any further ado, let’s jump right into it. Here are six things that can help you on your journey.

1. Identify how you feel about yourself at your core

One of the greatest things we can do to learn to love ourselves is to stop believing the voice in our head that tries to talk us into hating ourselves. Diving into those dark parts of our mind is intense work. It requires us to look into those parts of ourselves that most people try to avoid and then figure out what exactly our core beliefs about ourselves are.

Most insecurities we have can be traced back to a few core beliefs that start with “I am …”. Some common ones can include “I am not pretty enough”, “I am not thin enough”, “I am unlovable”, “I am a failure”. If you try to start watching your thoughts the next time you feel insecure or self-conscious, you’ll likely stumble across some sort of language you use to condemn yourself. Both journaling and meditation can be great tools to help you identify these kinds of thoughts and beliefs.

If you take each thought and ask yourself “Why do I feel this way?” and follow that process all the way down, you’ll eventually reach the core beliefs that influence almost everything you feel about yourself. We even have a whole month of programming dedicated to improving your self-talk in our membership, that’s how important it is!

2. Realize that your core beliefs aren’t an objective reality

Once we’ve managed to identify the core negative beliefs you hold about yourself, the next logical step is of course to learn how to realize that they aren’t true so that we can remove them from how we see ourselves and move on.

You can think of core beliefs as putting on a pair of colored glasses - they distort everything that we see and perceive. If your core belief is “I am unlovable” then you’ll move through life only seeing evidence that that specific core belief is true. Everywhere you turn, you’ll find proof that nobody loves you.

But what most of us don’t realize is that our perception of ourselves and our reality is often just as distorted by our core beliefs as our view of reality would be through a pair of colored glasses. Taking those glasses off isn’t easy or fun but with a lot of self-reflection it is possible and it can help us see ourselves and our reality in a completely new light.

3. Start building a trusting relationship with yourself

Trust is another crucial element in our journey to self-love. If we think about it, trust plays such a huge role when it comes to our relationships with other people. Why would it be any different with yourself? Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

So if you want to improve the relationship you have with yourself, start by keeping one little promise to yourself every day. This doesn’t have to be crazy, especially if you’re just starting out on your new self-love journey. You want to make it easy enough that you can keep your promise to yourself every day without ever breaking it.

Over time, you’ll be able to increase the difficulty of the kinds of promises you make to yourself. You’ll notice that your ability to keep these promises will get better and better. And you’ll slowly start to realize that you are someone that can be trusted to do difficult things. So when you encounter any difficult situations or emotions, you’ll be able to handle them confidently, knowing that you can handle anything that life throws at you.

4. Learn the art of proper self-care

When we say self-care, we don’t mean taking more bubble baths and doing more face masks (although both of those can be amazing!) but actually learning to attune to your body’s physical, emotional and mental needs and to meet them in ways that work best for you. It’s so much easier to love yourself when you feel good all around!

What this looks like in practice will be completely unique to you and your needs. You might consider adding nutrition changes, movement, meditation, breathwork, journaling, any type of therapy, counseling or coaching. Maybe you need to make changes in your relationships, cut out some friendships you’ve outgrown or go out and make new ones.

The list of things we can or should do for our own self-care is as diverse as we are (and we offer plenty of guidance in our membership as well of course). The important thing however, is that you invest some time into learning how to read your unmet needs so you can make those necessary changes and start filling up your own tank.

5. Learn how to keep others from dragging you down

All of the points we’ve touched on so far have been focused on improving your internal image of yourself. But of course, external images - that is to say how others see and perceive us - can also greatly influence how much we are able to love ourselves.

Most of us are conditioned to value the opinion of others much higher than our own opinions. However, if we truly want to love ourselves, we’ll need to learn how to drown out any negative voices and only focus on what matters most - our relationship with ourselves.

On top of that, people who don’t love themselves will often get upset when you start on your own journey towards self-love. They will see their own pain reflected back to them and will try to drag you back down to your old self so that their own ego won’t feel challenged.

Learning to become aware of when your image of yourself is being influenced by others´ opinions and negative energies and consequently learning to create a shield around you so you don’t let those things affect how you feel about yourself, can be an incredible step towards improving your self-image.

6. Take a breath and don’t beat yourself up about it.

And finally, we’ll end on a really important note. Try to take a breath and don’t beat yourself up about the process. Learning how to love yourself should never turn into yet another thing that you beat yourself up about if you don’t master it perfectly.

Self-love should always be about progress, not perfection. Every insecurity, every judgement, every negative emotion that arises is an opportunity to practice self-acceptance and self-love. If you can truly view every challenge as an opportunity for growth, you’ll have mastered the most important foundational step that you need in order to love yourself unconditionally.

If you’re interested in doing this kind of work, there are many therapists and coaches out there who understand and are trained in helping their clients on their journey to self-love.

Additionally, we provide lots of resources for you to dive into this work in a safe, supportive way in The Self Care Space. We have everything from self-guided prompts and programs to guided meditations and healing visualizations to help you improve your relationship with yourself. We also have amazing advisory board members who specialize in this area and will be there to answer your questions in the private community or at our members-only live events. Whichever route you choose, we just want you to know we are proud of you for showing up for yourself in the first place!