Over the past weeks we have in depth discussed a lot of factors of self-love, all of them leading you up to this moment. Yes, the time has come to start practicing self-love yourself. I cannot stress enough that self-love is of incredible importance in your journey to change your life. Like we have seen, self-love is something that needs to be worked on, it needs to be cultivated and nurtured. It’s not something that just appears along the way when working on yourself which is why you need to start your self-love journey. I of course won’t send you off without some great tips on how to start your own self-love journey.
Step 1 – Admit You Have A Self-Love Problem
Before a problem can be rectified it needs to be addressed and named properly. You need to get crystal clear about what the issue at hand here is. You have a self-love problem. There is an issue in the relationship you have with yourself. I want you to sit and think about these questions:
- Do you love yourself?
- Do you have self-love? At all?
- What do you think and feel when thinking about learning to love yourself?
- Do you like yourself?
- What do you think of yourself?
All these questions are important to answer before you can start your self-love journey. You need to know where you are beginning before you can lay the first brick on your new journey.
Another thing that needs to happen is for you to admit that it is indeed a problem especially when you are a three for three on answering the first three questions with ‘’No’’. You need to accept that there is something not going right and you need yourself to help yourself. This can be quite emotional so make sure that you do it on a day where you can really sit with yourself and let yourself be. It is not nothing to admit that you don’t love yourself or not even have self-love at all. It can be even harder when you have problems with the other parts of the selves as well such as self-esteem and self-worth.
Step 2 – Start Looking At Your Insecurities
When you start looking at your insecurities you can cheat your way towards finding the root of your problems with self-love. It is important to focus on insecurities that have to do solely with you and your opinions, thoughts and feelings. For example you can have a belief that you are ugly not pretty or that there is nothing good about you in general thus nothing to love.
These belief systems could be holding you back from forming a healthy relationship with yourself in terms of being willing to engage in self-love practices and loving yourself. They might even be helping you develop or sustain a few toxic self-love practices.
Recommended: Toxic Self-Love Practices You Need To Stop Immediately
When you look at your insecurities you also get a good view of aspects that need your love. That need your attention and care during your self-love journey.
Step 3 – Identify Your Negative Self-Talk
You simply cannot be learning to love yourself while on the other hand talking to yourself negatively. This can be occasionally or consistently, it doesn’t matter as both are harmful. Obviously consistently is more harmful but that is also relative to a lot of other questions that would need answering to accurately be able to make that judgement.
When starting to identify your negative self-talk it is important to pick up on what it is exactly about. Categorize the talks by main subject. This again gives you pointers of what you need to work on when on the road of your self-love journey. Also pay attention to whether there is any overlap with your list of insecurities. When there is, it can be a clear indication that it is something that might be cutting really deep in you. Perhaps that item is one that needs to be highest on the list of where to start implementing changes.
More on this in: Starter Steps To Creating A Life Story You Love
Step 4 – Decide Which One Is Hurting You The Most
This was briefly touched on in step 3. You need to allow yourself to see which one is hurting you the most. This can be a particular negative self-talk, an insecurity, or a combination of the two. When I say allow yourself to see I mean that you have to be honest with yourself. Something I have said over a dozen times on the blog when changing your life you have to be honest with yourself. When embarking on a self-love journey you definitely have to be honest, without any if’s or but’s.
You need to allow the pain, shock, frustration you feel to happen when going through your negative self-talk list and your insecurities list. A behavior that could indicate you towards the one you are suffering from the most is you not wanting to address it at all. Pushing it to the side and dealing with it later on, ‘’when the timing is right’’ or something equivalent.
Once you have decided which one hurts the most it is the easiest to tackle it in the middle of your self-love journey. Why? You’ll be in the perfect spot to be able to pick yourself up with honest self-love when things get rough as you’ve already built some, and at the same time be in the perfect spot to start wanting more self-love thus having the drive to push through.
Recommended: Unexplainable Drive; Needed To Accomplish The Dream
Step 5 – What Is Self-Love To You
Here is where you lay your first stone that will form the path of your self-love journey. The absolute first step in starting to love yourself is figuring out what your own definition of self-love is. This has to include:
- Thought patterns
- Belief systems
- Practices
- Habits
And all of them have to be centered solely around you. This is not about working on aspects that directly affect other people. No, your self-love process is about you working on all the ways you are depriving, stealing and sabotaging your relationship with yourself. Or differently put it’s about learning about, forgiving the mistakes in, changing and improving the loving relationship you have with yourself. This holds true even when you have absolutely no relationship with yourself, or one that is somewhere on the spectrum of bad to harmful.
When you define self-love for yourself you know what it is you are working towards. The definition of self-love takes out the vagueness behind simply saying that you love yourself and have self-love for yourself. Next to that it also gives you a frame to see what needs bettering when you compare it with your negative self-love.
Step 6 – Start Your Self-love Journey With Like Not With Love
Your end goal here is to unconditionally love yourself and also have unconditional self-love however to go from not having either to suddenly having it in abundance takes a lot. It is not easy to grow love for someone or something that you did not have a good relationship with recently. Those things take time and patience. All this is true for building a loving relationship with yourself too. It’s why it is a good idea to not start your self-love journey saying love but saying like.
Growing to have some kind of positive feeling about yourself is way more manageable than trying to immediately love everything about you. Therefore instead of finding things you love about you, start with finding things you like about you.
What do you like about being you?
What are things you do that you like that you do for yourself?
In what ways are you kind to yourself?
Get yourself comfortable saying you like yourself, even if it is not everything. Even when it is not your whole being or something that seems miniscule on the grand scheme. Liking aspects of yourself is better than not liking anything at all. It’s perfectly okay to be oddly specific about this. It might even be really good to be specific about it as then you know exactly what you love about you and what you still need to work on loving.
Step 7 – Dare To Make The Like Unchangeable
It is easy to whisper to yourself that you like yourself or like an aspect of yourself, but that is not enough. You need to dare to say it out loud where you can hear your voice clearly utter the words:
‘’I like me’’
or
‘’I like … about me’’
fill in the blank with an aspect of yourself that you like. When you say it out loud you can’t take it back. When it’s all in your head, you can way easier pretend it never happened or doesn’t exist. Once said out loud you erase that option. You don’t even have to say it in front of other people, it’s okay to start by yourself where no one can hear you and say it. It might even be better as you can let yourself be after having said it. You can and should let the words just exist and then after a short while repeat them.
It’s an incredibly powerful thing to hear yourself say something good about yourself when you haven’t done so in a long time. This means that you might not believe them even though you have no problem thinking them and believing them when thought. Hearing something is completely different from thinking something so the hesitation and disbelief are normal. It is because of the chance of you not immediately believing yourself that you need to repeat the words until you do.
We’ve reached the last self-love starter step. With these 7 easy steps you can start your own self-love journey and come a long way. All that rests me to do is to wish you well on your journey and tell you that I believe in you, always. And tell you that I made you a self-love workbook to really help you get going that you can get below for the total of free!
Self-love is a long process, but starting with manageable steps is already a sign of self-love.
Love,
DCPR.
PS. Want to know more about self-love? Find out below;
1. What is Self-love; Unpacking The Popular Concept
2. Easy Self-Love Treats To Treat Yourself With
3. Self-love vs. Self-care; Key Differences You Need To Know
4. Toxic Self-Love Practices You Need To Stop Immediately
5. Learning To Love Yourself: Can Self-Love Be Taught?
6. How To Start Your Own Self-Love Journey
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