Fall In Love With Yourself

If there is one important lesson I can ever teach you it’s to fall in love with yourself.

When you love yourself deeply, you get an understanding of your worth that you previously are oblivious to. You also start to pay attention to yourself in a gentler way, instead of what I call the “strict parent.” This leads to increased passions, desires, goal setting, and overall just living your life more deliberately and fully.

One quick way to know if you’re in touch with knowing and loving yourself is how you feel when you spend time alone with your thoughts. If you’re comfortable and enjoy this time alone, that’s a queue that you are on track to loving yourself.

The next queue is the Mental Chatter you have with yourself. Is it judgmental or kind? If you’re very harsh with yourself (like a strict parent), you likely have work to do with loving yourself more deeply and intentionally (this is where I coach a lot of perfectionists who tend to be very hard on themselves).

Not to mention there are enormous benefits of loving yourself, such as you exude confidence and joy, and you’re likely to show up and love others.

I like to teach that if you get this right—if you learn how to unconditionally love yourself—then all the rest of your life falls into play. You improve your life and also the lives of others.

Fall In Love With Yourself

While falling in love with yourself is truly a lifelong romance (in the famous words of Oscar Wilde), the tips below are a very practical way for you to get started.

Tip 1: Notice how you talk to yourself

The first tip is to pay attention to your Mental Chatter—the voice in your head when you’re talking to yourself.

What do you say? Notice in your normal day to day life what conversations you have with yourself in that brain of yours.

Are you usually speaking from your Inner Critic or your Inner Coach? Your Inner Critic is the strict parent who doesn’t listen, thinks you should be doing better, and also wishes you were something or someone else. Your Inner Coach encourages you when you’re down, loves you even when you get it wrong, and approaches you really gently when things are hard.

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Tip 2: Get to know yourself

The second tip is to get to know yourself.

What do you like?
What do you really, really, really want?
What do you want the next 10 years to look like?
What do you want to stop doing?
What do you want to start doing?
What do you want to continue doing?

Most of us (speaking for myself and so many of the women I coach) really don’t know ourselves. We look outside ourselves to decide what we like—a little Instagram scroll, reality TV, or an influencer tells us what we should like and not like.

Get to know the real you by creating some space for thinking and journaling where you answer the questions above and really find out what you want for your life. This may look like practicing solitude (quieting your outer world and the inner world) and focusing on what you really like, who you are, what desires you have, and so on.

For some of you who haven’t really spent time getting to know yourself this may really push you out of your comfort zone in a really amazing way.

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Tip 3: Fill your own love tank

Tip three is to fill your own love tank.

In fact, I talked about this in the podcast episode: Your Self Love Tank. The idea is that instead of thinking love comes from outside of you, you give yourself the love you want.

If it’s words you’re after, give yourself words. If it’s acts of service, do acts. Then if you want gifts, buy gifts for yourself.

It’s never about the actual action—it’s always about how you feel. When you give yourself the love you desire, and then you make it mean something like “I’m so loved” you will feel loved.

At first this can seem weird, almost like you’re dating yourself, but overtime it can be an incredible way to love yourself and “fill your own cup.”

Tip 4: Repeat a mantra in the mirror

Tip four is to repeat a mantra every day when you look in the mirror while you’re getting ready.

Most of us get ready in a hurry, and when we do look in the mirror, our self talk goes something like this: “oh what is that? How did that get there? I need to cover that up in order to look better.”

It’s mean at worst and neutral at best.

But what if you intentionally decided to repeat a mantra you believed in every day when you’re getting ready?

This can be truly transformational in how you think about yourself.

Here are example mantras:

  • I just love your face.
  • Hey you! I love you.
  • You’re beautiful.
  • You are so much stronger than you think.
  • You were made for this.

Basically, you want your mantra to be something you genuinely believe about yourself and want to be your default thinking. In addition, it should enhance your relationship you have with yourself by deepening your own self intimacy.

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Tip 5: Love all photos of yourself.

The final tip is to love every single photo you see of yourself. I mean every one.

In such a digital world, photos can be a daily occurrence, and the temptation to only like photos when you “look your best” is always there. This tip flips it on its head.

You decide intentionally to love all photos of yourself no matter what. Instead of thinking you need to look perfect in every photo, you’ll develop healthy habits of changing how you see yourself. You’ll also start to have loving yourself in photos be the default. And from there you’ll actually enjoy photos more and not need to see the photo immediately after it’s taken to approve of it or not.

I love all the photos I take no matter what. The good, the bad, and well, the ugly. That’s life. In photos and in reality. It’s not always perfect—nor should it be. I can love me anyway.

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A Final Note!

The more you fall in love with yourself, the more you raise your standards.

For example, if you truly deeply love yourself, you won’t overwork and feel internally off balance because to do so would be a boundary violation against yourself. Speaking from experience as someone who used to do this—self love was not involved! Now, when I work, it’s planned in advance, and balanced with my personal life so that I can do work and life successfully.

Ultimately, self love is a life long journey and a skill that you can get really good at by practicing the tips above to get started!