To love yourself is to experience freedom – freedom from doubt, self-hate, and oppression created by you. To love yourself is no longer holding yourself back from what you deserve. To love yourself is to grow and enjoy your life.

Self-love is essential if you want to live a happy life. Self-love is a choice, a commitment to yourself that you will love yourself, despite all the social and biological obstacles in your path. It is not found in a place, person, or item.

Can You Love Others If You Don’t Love Yourself?

We hear this a lot, But that isn’t true. You can love others even if you don’t love yourself. To say otherwise would be false. You can experience and express love even if you do not love yourself.

What you can’t do is expect that person to fill the void in your life that isn’t filled with your love for yourself. You can’t find that love in anyone or anything.

Self-love is chosen, developed, practiced, and defied. It isn’t always painless, but you can never find it in the arms of another person.

What Do You Require to Love Yourself?

Decide to Do It. Self-love is a choice; it isn’t handed to you.

You achieve self-love by deciding that you want it. After a lifetime of hating yourself for not being enough, you have to choose to let go of this toxic mindset. Choose to say no to all the internal self-hate and choose to tell yourself the truth that you are not perfect, and that is okay.

To start this, allow yourself to love yourself. You are worthy of love, even if you tell yourself you’re not. Take a moment to tell yourself this and allow yourself to open up to self-love. This is the first step in accepting that you can love yourself.

 Fulfill Self Acceptance

You are who you are, and there is nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to be something else to have worth or to be good enough. Who you are right now is enough.

People may not like you, and that is okay because the point of self-love is that it doesn’t matter what other people think of you. What only matters is what you think of yourself. That starts with accepting that you are who you are and having the faith of self-acceptance.

 Know That Self-Love Is an Ongoing Journey

As we go through life, we grow, change, learn, and become entirely new different people. We are all different people from who we were 10 years ago, which means self-love isn’t just learning to love yourself once. It is about falling and being in love with yourself as you change and grow. You don’t achieve self-love; you travel with it as you discover who you are.

 Let Go of the Idea Of Being Perfect

No human will ever be perfect. Don’t let that stop you from loving yourself. It is easy to hate yourself for not being perfect or enough. But this only creates self-hate.  Instead of focusing on all you have, you are focused on all you are not and don’t have.

Self-love blooms in a mindset of abundance, meaning you have to appreciate all you have and feel gratitude for it. Self-love struggles, wilts, and dies in a mindset rooted in perfection, never good enough.

 Recognize the Difference Between Truth And Opinion

Self-love starts by changing the way you think and see yourself. This all starts with our internal narrative and the stories we tell ourselves.

“I can’t do this because I am too (clumsy, stupid, weak, etc.).”

“I cannot have this in my life because (I am not good enough; this is not meant for me; if I was like this, I could get what I want).”

A hard look at your internal rhetoric can reveal why you have struggled to love yourself.

When you are down on yourself, it is because, at some point, someone or something made you feel not good enough. It could have been a comment from a family member, a judgemental magazine article, or a random video you watched. It made you question your worth, and you used this knowledge to hate yourself.

I want you to realize that most of these thoughts aren’t facts. They are only our opinions of ourselves, but we treat these opinions as incontestable facts. When we tell ourselves we can’t do something, we are setting ourselves to negative thoughts. A self-fulfilling prophecy confirms in our brains that our opinions are facts.

When you say I cannot, I can’t, or this isn’t meant for me, you destroy hope and growth:

Hope – you decided you could not, so there is no reason to try.

Growth – you cut off the opportunity to try, fail and grow.

You become stuck in a fixed mindset with no choice but to succumb to your fate as a self-imposed loser. This must stop if you want to love yourself because this is negative thinking.

Learn That Failure Is Your Friend

When we fail, we use that as an excuse to loathe ourselves for not being good enough. Failure is growth. Instead of focusing on how you aren’t good enough, focus on what you learned from failure. Failure is a lesson learned.

Don’t let failure be the reason you hate yourself. Choose to love and laugh at yourself when you fail. Laugh, get back up, think about how to grow from this, and move forward. You will fail a lot, and that ok. Failure will grow and foster self-love.

Learn How Not to Take Things Personally

We are flooded with negativity and often find ways to be offended, even unconsciously. This is biology at work, but now it’s time to let go of this defense mechanism.

Stop taking things very personally: know that the comments that hurt you aren’t about you. See it from the other person’s perspective. It can be redirected aggression, or maybe you are in that situation. It may be about you, and you need to show yourself some empathy. Be vulnerable and kind to yourself, and talk non-judgemental to the person who offended you.

By not taking things personally, you stop torturing yourself and love yourself more. Not every negative thing is about you. The world is bigger than just you.

Last Reflections

If you want to learn how to love yourself, the most important thing you must do is commit to learning all about it. Like life, you will grow and change by continuously learning new ways to love yourself and express who you are, and you will be happy.And always remember: you are worth loving.