Unless you are somehow immune to all of the temptations and insecurity, sometimes in your life you must have faced with negative emotions and self-criticism. I myself have been done that road more often than I’m comfortable to admit. I was putting my self-down with my insecurity. Not loving myself as I should, caused all of these problems. And the lack of love was caused by absence of self-confidence, self-value, self-belief and self-acceptance. The first significant step towards being a confident person is to set our mind to it and say out loud: “Today is the day I will start to love myself. Today is the day I’ll accept myself”.
Do we “parent” ourselves?
After giving this topic a lot of question, reading about the topic, I realized that we tend to be our own parents when criticizing unwanted behaviors and certain flaws. It’s in a way resembling to the painful critics we sometimes received from our mothers and fathers, that we could translate into more drastic forms of how a child perceives some of them: “You are not smart enough. You are not good enough. You are selfish. You are not attractive”, etc. When we grow up we take over those patterns and use them to “beat ourselves up” with negative thoughts. So, the first step towards self-acceptance is to outgrow the need to be “parented”.
To love ourselves we should know and accept ourselves
This step actually helped me the most. Stand in front of the mirror and observe. Find what you consider a fault and what an advantage. Say to yourself: “Hey I’m the only one in the world with these kind of eyes.” If there is something you dislike, don’t hate it. If you want to change it, don’t perceive that change as a fixing, rather observe it as a promotion. It is clear that sometimes, despite our self-acceptance there is something we still don’t like, as long as that is not causing us not to love ourselves, it’s ok. I can explain that on a personal example. I do feel unconditional love and acceptance of my being and my physical appearance, but I’ve always had a problem with a bump on my nose. I didn’t expect that an intervention may help me to love myself, but the opposite, I had to fall in love with myself first, and then with all the peace of my heart I decided to undergo an injectable rhinoplasty, and I’m happy with the results.
You’re the star of your own red carpet
You should stop defining beauty with Hollywood stars and magazine covers. The one person you must perceive as a definition of what beautiful is you. Of course we all stand accused for comparing ourselves with celebrities, I’ve sat on that bench for the accused more than one time. But hey, we all stray from the right path now and then. As long as we remember that self-acceptance is our choice, and that love we provide to ourselves should be unconditional, everything will be ok.
