How to Love Yourself
How to Love Yourself - Episode 109
Everyone deserves to feel like they are worthy and that they are enough. You are amazing, and you can live your life to the max! Although many times we stop ourselves from truly loving ourselves for who we are. We look back on our mistakes and foibles and tell ourselves that we are not worthy, that we have to prove ourselves first. I’m here to tell you that’s a bunch of crap! Stop believing it! And in this episode of the Jonesin’ for Show I share how you can let go of the past and truly love you for you!
How do you love yourself? At the UnleashU Now Men’s Retreat I went to I heard one of the men telling his story of how he couldn’t go in front of a mirror and say “I love you” to himself. After that I was thinking how I could definitely do that for myself, but then I realized that would just be my ego talking. Truly, I don’t think I could have looked in a mirror at myself and said I loved myself. Can you honestly say that about yourself? That night when I heard him speak, I was dealing with a lot of emotions, and I don’t feel I could have said it and meant it. The next day however, I think I could have. Now the majority of days I can say it, but there are days when I struggle, and I don’t love myself. Know that if you are struggling, whether you can’t do it at all or you can some days but not others, it’s normal. It is tricky to get to a place where you can love yourself all of the time. I have three things that can help you to love yourself. It takes time, and you may need to put some work into it, but I promise you, it is worth it.
The first thing to do is to forgive yourself for the mistakes you have made and you will make. You could write yourself a letter, pray about it, meditate on it. Find what works for you and do it. Sometimes I need to forgive myself multiple times for the mistakes that I’ve made, because sometimes the thing that I forgave myself for comes back so I need to forgive myself again. Normally it’s easier to forgive myself the second time, but it isn’t always. You need to truly let your mistakes go if you don’t want them haunting you and weight you down.
The second thing you can do to help love yourself is to process your emotions. What feelings do you have? Is it frustration? Guilt? Shame? Sadness? Sit with those emotions and process them, figure out why you are feeling them. It’s only when you work your way through your emotions that you can let them go. There’s a term called toxic positivity where everything is positive. That isn’t real life and I don’t want to promote toxic positivity at all! It isn’t true, bad things happen, not everything is positive. Of course, I want you to try to find the positives in those bad times, but I don’t want you ignore the negative emotions you may feel. There are times when you can’t deal with them. I get it, so gently put them in the background and when you’re in a good place you can try to process them so that you can let them go. I went for a run this morning, the weather was great, and I was thinking about some of my negative emotions again. On my run as I was diving into these emotions, I allowed my inner critic to start bullying me for having some of my feelings. Don’t let that happen to you. You don’t need that inner critic beating you up, you are way to awesome to allow it to keep knocking you down. We are all human, we get to have these emotions, they are natural. When it’s the right time, embrace them, and work through them.
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The final tip I have it is to let the situations that you are beating yourself up over go. I do this exercise at my forgiveness meditations. Visualize the situation like a scientist. Start dissecting it. Find what you can learn from in the situation, take that away, discover the lesson. Then let that situation go. You don’t need that weight. Learn and grow from the situation, and let it go.
You are too amazing to go on not loving yourself! Even on days when you are struggling, try your best to love yourself. You are worth it.
I would love to hear what you think about How to Love Yourself. Send me a message on social media @Jonesinfor or send me an email at spencer@spencermjones.com.
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