Five Incredible Ways to Nurture Self-Love & Maximize Your Impact in the World

Love is “The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.” We form meaningful relationships of all kinds to support one another’s growth. At the same time, we need to love ourselves and support our own growth. When we work on our own self-love, we inevitably become more whole and authentic individuals. We are able to fuel our own changemaking and leadership journeys. In this article, I present five ways that can help us to cultivate self-love: (1) choosing a courageous and assertive posture, (2) having self-acceptance, (3) having self-compassion, (4) challenging our beliefs and assumptions, (5) and choosing love over fear each and every time.

Choosing a Courageous and Assertive Posture

Self-love starts with choosing a courageous and assertive posture. This is easier said than done. Many of us don't think we will be understood. Thus, we stay within the boundaries of personal discourse.?

In a middle school home economics class, my teacher Mrs. Bruns talked to us about assertive communication. She explained that, if a person was washing dishes and you were taking a shower and washing the dishes created a situation where there was no hot water for me, it's okay to tell them that you feel cold and disregarded.?

I left the classroom empowered. I had never been encouraged to give voice to my feelings. That evening, I explained assertiveness and what I learned at school that day to my mom because I wanted to know her thoughts. My mother was triggered because she felt her power and authority was undermined by what I had just said. She was quick to interrupt me and to express disagreement, telling me that the school was teaching me to talk back and rebel against my parents. She threatened to transfer me to a Christian School where they spanked kids. Looking back, I realized my Christian mother held onto a mental model where a good child must fear their parents. If the Bible instructed children to fear their parents and God, there was no room for deviation.

Assertiveness isn't just speaking up—unapologetically and with confidence. There is a sense of comfort in being ourselves in a way that we break down barriers and reduce the social distance between ourselves and others, by sharing with others more about who we are and inviting others to do the same. We own our feelings, our values, and our beliefs. We communicate them clearly to others. We do not allow anyone to diminish them in any way. That day I had that conversation with my mom, I chose not to identify with her disempowering beliefs.

Having Self-Acceptance?

Often, in our life journey, we will most likely feel as if we are not where we would like to be in life. The tension between where we are and where we want to be is unlikely to go away. However, our inability to accept where we currently are can demotivate and disempower us. When we look back at our past filled with regret and disappointment, our hearts are filled with fear. However, when we accept that our life is the way that it is at the very moment and will not remain that way forever, we open the space for our self-love to accelerate us through our journeys. When we finally have self-acceptance, we then realize that the present is the present and the future is not the present, and we will write the endings to our stories.

Having Self-Compassion

Jared Warren defines self-compassion as “treating yourself with the kindness and concern that you would give to a good friend in need. When you are in a tough situation, and you’ve fallen short of your own expectations, it’s responding from a place of kindness instead of that of harsh criticism.”

Self-compassion is also recognizing that all humans suffer and that no individual should need to suffer alone. The mind likes to assume that everyone is okay except for me. We live in a world where things happen that go against our expectations. No, I'm not meeting my savings goals. I've lost a loved one. The list goes on. When we recognize that suffering is ordinary, then we can minimize the impact that suffering has on us. Self compassion is making the choice to be mindful rather than over-identify.?

According to Kristen Neff, “Mindfulness is a non-judgmental, receptive mind state in which one observes thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to suppress or deny them. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.? At the same time, mindfulness requires that we not be “over-identified” with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negative reactivity.” When we are mindful, we say to ourselves, “It is what it is,” and we move on. ?

Challenging Our Beliefs & Assumptions That We Are Not Enough

Salzberg writes: “To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or inherently better in order to be worthy of love. When we contort ourselves, doggedly trying to find some way to become okay, our capacity to love shrinks, and our attempts to improve ourselves fill the space that could be filled with love. Maybe we don’t need to correct some terrible deficiency. Maybe what we really need is to change our relationship to what is, to see who we are with the strength of a generous spirit and a wise heart. St. Augustine said, ‘If you are looking for something that is everywhere, you don’t need to travel to get there; you need love.’”

There are many roles that I have held in organization that I know that I can excel at. There are some that I know that I cannot. It is easy for me to construct a narrative about incompetence using the experiences that I have not excelled at while disregarding those experiences when I've done extraordinarily well. When I am finally able to challenge my beliefs and assumptions, I can rewrite my personal narrative to one that is more inspiring and empowering.

Choosing Love Over Fear Each and Every Time

Fear and love are not emotions that happen to us. We create those feelings for ourselves. Therefore, we can either empower or sabotage ourselves. Often, our creativity is the result of habitual choices that we make. If we are accustomed to generating fear from our upbringing, then we can also train ourselves to generate a unique version of love that reflects who we truly are. According to Averill and Knowles, emotional creativity is the ability to express original, appropriate, and authentic combinations of emotions. Rather than using anger, fear, despair, can we choose a more loving combination of emotions, such as gratitude combined with hope, commitment, and courage? We become authentic people refusing to follow the fearful emotional script that was handed to us when we were young. Art is no longer a creation to express our emotions. We are the art and the artist. Our emotions are the tools we use to create ourselves.

I hope this article provided some insights on how you can cultivate and nurture self-love to further fuel your personal aspirations, whatever they might be.?