How do you learn to love yourself?

Many of us find it very difficult to love ourselves. One often-overlooked process of this is to practice proper self-care.

We usually think about love in terms of falling in love with a partner, but we should consider learning to love ourselves before we offer out our love for someone else. That doesn’t mean it’s not important to love others, but how can we effectively fall in love with someone else if we are not able to love ourselves first. An appropriate phrase that comes to mind here is: “you can’t pour from an empty cup”.

With this in mind, take a look at these 5 tips to help you to love yourself and become the real you in the process.

1. Get in touch with the real you

A lot of our self-image actually comes from our perception of what others think of us. This often leads to people forming negative opinions of themselves as we tend to remember the negatives over the positive.

This type of thinking usually manifests itself during childhood when we allow our peers and others around us to form negative beliefs about ourselves. This could be represented as a memory of a childhood bully, or perhaps adults in our lives tell us that a specific behavior or habit is bad.

In order for you to start and love yourself properly, it is important to realize that what other people think or thought about us in the past does not determine our self-worth today.

2.  Learn about and practice reflective soul work

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Reflective soul work is a simple technique to becoming more positive about yourself.

All it requires is for you to look in the mirror and repeat positive opinions or affirmations about yourself. The repeating of specific phrases is important as this helps mimic a learned behavior and enables you to build positive reflections of yourself.

This technique will help you to believe in yourself more than ever, which in turn will build your self-esteem and make you a more confident person. Whatsmore, doing this is easy: all you need to do is stand in front of mirror. Try it now!

3. Accept that you are not perfect

No one is perfect, and we sometimes forget that. Once you are able to learn this you will no longer feel the need to always put yourself down.. After all, we only criticize ourselves because that what others do to us.   

This is something all humans do and we are not averse from doing it to others either. We should instead learn to accept our flaws and learn from them. Next time you feel like you want to criticize others or yourself say to yourself “I will not criticize myself or those around me”. Instead, say to yourself “I will love and accept my flaws”. Positive reflection is important and helps you to become a better person.  

4. Spend more time with yourself

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This means that you should set more time aside to spend time with just yourself. Think about taking yourself out somewhere on a date. Go to a restaurant alone, watch a movie by yourself. If you can’t learn to enjoy spending time with yourself how else can other people enjoy spending time with you?

This will allow you to learn more about what you like and don’t like. This extra insight will make you a more confident person around others and someone who is able to assert what they want from time to time.

5. Allow yourself to make mistakes and don’t forget to learn from them

We will all make mistakes in our lives so it is important to take these moments as learning opportunities. Rather than be too hard on yourself or constantly beat yourself up, take these moments and turn them into future successes.

Follow these steps and you’ll get closer to loving yourself, which will help your own relationships grow for the better.