The Three Steps to Loving Yourself

Life is dreadfully short and full of such amazing wonder. It’s important to celebrate yourself. Yes, even you. Because once you can celebrate and appreciate yourself - even love yourself - your perspective will shift to a far more optimistic and joyful state - and that’s a state that you can build from.

I’m all for holding yourself to a high standard and really swinging for the fences, but even if all you can find to love in yourself right now is that, like all humans, you have a ton of potential, spend some time celebrating that.

If all you ever do is demoralize yourself you’ll never make any real changes in your life. If all you focus on is that you’re not who you want to be in life, and you’re not where you want to be, you'll never get out of your rut because spending that much time in the “darkness” leaves no time to develop the excitement that you’re going to need to make change.

You've got to begin the process of falling in love with yourself.

That doesn't mean accepting any behavior and it doesn't mean not pushing yourself. But it does mean finding things to love about who you are right now so that you'll have the strength and energy to begin the long process of becoming your ideal you.

To make this really concrete, here are 3 steps to get you started:

1. Repeat to yourself that humans are designed to learn and grow.

Literally designed to do it. So, since you're human, if you're willing to focus and push yourself, you will grow. And that's awesome. And you’re awesome simply by being human. You don’t need to have made a single right choice in your life up to this point. You have the raw material, now it’s just a matter of shaping it. Love yourself for that. Be aggressively stoked on yourself for that.

2. Earn credibility with yourself.

If you really want to win over your negative self-talk start doing things that build momentum in your life and make you feel good about yourself. Might I suggest starting with #1 above? Now, since #1 is only a primer meant to get you started, you need to follow that up by actually doing things that make you believe in yourself.

The only way to do that is to tell yourself that you’re going to do something and then stick with it. It can be the smallest of things, but do one thing every day that if you do it, you know you'll be proud of yourself. Start small. This is one of the most important things you can do in life. Believing in yourself with make ALL of the difference. But you will only believe in yourself if you earn it. But if you start small, you’ll be surprised how addictive it is to keep your promises to yourself. It will make you feel like a new person.

3. Practice gratitude.

It sounds stupid, and you’ve heard this a million times, but it is INSANELY powerful. I’m telling you, if you haven’t already committed to this, commit right now. It’s not enough to do this once. You need to do this EVERY DAY. You get more of what you focus on. If you focus on things that you're grateful for suddenly you'll start seeing things to be grateful for everywhere. Take the time to acknowledge them all. Again, start small - a smile, the wind, your health, etc.

Do those three things and you'll be off to a very good start of really learning to love and appreciate yourself. Once you’re beginning to believe in you and be proud of you, you’ll be in a far more optimistic space. You’ll just feel better. Your head will be clearer, and you will have trained yourself to obsessively think about positive things instead of negative things. That one shift will change your entire life because it will make the act of changing in a positive direction possible.