Learn to love yourself
It is probably one of the hardest things we have to learn, to accept ourselves as we are and to go even further, to love ourselves. We all struggle with this, as we are very often only focussed on our weaknesses and problems.
In a world of people around us presenting themselves in the perfect light in front of their millions of followers and every weakness we show being laid out as a disadvantage on our path to success, it is not easy for learning to love ourselves. We live in a world of perfectionists in which it seems hard to keep up with others and this very often makes us feel weak and overwhelmed with our own expectations. Never before in the history, did people hold such high expectations towards themselves and their own life. The pressure can be overwhelming.
However, besides all of this, it is still essential that we learn to live with our weaknesses. It is important that we get up in the morning and can look ourselves in the eyes in the mirror and accept us as we are, with all our strengths, weaknesses and weirdnesses. So how do we get there?
The first stage to loving ourselves is to really deeply know ourselves. This requires some active work of reflection and becoming self aware. Only when we know of ourselves, our characteristics as well as our desires and dreams, can we identify what we like about us and what we don’t. The knowledge about ourselves is the base for accepting ourselves and eventually loving ourselves.
Once we know ourselves, we will have things we like about us and things we don’t like about us. It is wise to focus more on things we like rather than the other way round, and to keep building on our strengths in life rather than trying to cover up our weaknesses. However, besides our best efforts we will still have things we absolutely don’t like about ourselves. Examples include problems to forgive, being moody or coming across arrogant. So how do we deal with those?
There is only one answer, we have to accept them. We have to learn to live with them and bury the image of perfection the world is trying to impose on us every day. Nobody is perfect that is true as much today as it was before. We all have issues, weaknesses, anxieties - every single one of us. And we need to show more of this. At the moment, all of us try to show only our best self to other, to desperately keep the impression of perfectionism about ourselves alive to others around us. This will not lead us to the path of happiness, resulting from loving ourselves.
The way to love ourselves therefore, is to be self critical and self reflective, but to accept that we have characteristics and events in our lives that we are not proud of and don’t like about ourselves. It is time to show those to others, as it will make us more authentic. It is ok to sometimes not be ok, be moody and have a bad day or even a bad time we go through. We can show it and not hide behind a curtain of perfection.
There are three stages for learning to love ourselves, self - awareness and reflection, the burning of the illusion of perfectionisms and lastly self acceptance of our strengths but also of our weaknesses. All these combined will lead us to be able to get up every day , look in the mirror and be happy with what we see. It will make us be in balance with ourselves. This will eventually make us be authentic, self-fulfilled and happy. The good news is besides the world desperately around us trying to live perfectionism and sell it to us as the best way of being, we can work actively agains it by following the above steps, leading to learning to love ourselves.
