The trait which takes myself a huge step forward.
By: Tim Budweg
Tags: Love Yourself, Self Improvement, Mental Health, Life, Love

Today, I want to talk about one trait which is in my opinion the best to have. This trait helps you to accomplish even the hardest challenges in your life and you always know that you will be ok, no matter what happens.

Photo by Bart LaRue on Unsplash

Yes, I am talking about self love.

But what is this actually? Some people tried to define love in whole books and probably couldn’t grasp it completely. Everybody understands something different when they read it and yet everybody has an understanding of their love. For the purpose of this article let’s roll with “an intense feeling of deep affection”. Also, “self” indicates this feeling is directed towards myself.

When I love myself I won’t dread people who give me a hard time, because I can easily distance myself from them. I think I am worth too much to myself than getting treated badly by them. I can’t stress that enough: I love myself too much to get treated like this and deliberately decide not to meet them anymore.

For me it took a while to learn this but until now this and Mark Manson’s Fuck yes or no rule helped me a lot to understand my actual needs. Also, it helped to actually take action and actively work towards my needs and what I believe is good for me.

But, how can I start loving myself if I don’t?

I need to learn it. And yes it needs to be learned from no other than myself. Nobody can do it for me and nobody will anyway. It is a harsh truth, a difficult path and made me go through fear, sadness, worry and many more unpleasant feelings. Even so, it is worth going through all of this! Luckily, there are some guidelines which helped me a lot. And some people might say I am arrogant. So maybe, I did something right on my journey to self love. By the way, I think these people simply mistake my “arrogance” for self love and confidence or envy this because they themselves lack both of it. I always try to treat people equally according to my values which I started writing about a few days ago (Here is my last post: It is all my life!).

There is one thing which is very crucial because it helped me most, but I learned in school to write the most important argument or point in the end. So, I do it the same way here:-D.

Guideline 1: Monitoring thoughts…

… to actually get aware of how badly I treat myself. Daily writing into a journal helps for this particular point very much. And yes, I write it down! The human brain sucks and forgets stuff and I don’t want to forget how badly I was treating myself in order to eliminate this.

Guideline 2: Think positive thoughts actively

I began thinking positive thoughts. “Oh, I did that great!”, “This was an awesome choice!”, ”I like my honesty.”, “I got some strong arms;-)”, or my favorite “Nice Butt!” — It is important to choose sentences I really believe. I started with some actions I thought I did really great and I even said the compliments out loud to myself. Then, I slipped in some compliments about my body and personal traits. I really think that you are what you think. But learning to think that I am good and awesome took me a while.

Guideline 3: Accepting myself

Yeah, well this it. The most important guideline. Accepting what I am. Every single thing. Especially, the traits I am afraid somebody might hear them. This is who I am right now, and this is totally ok. If I don’t like something why is it that I don’t like it? Do I think that society or my family or my friends think that this is wrong? Am I afraid of a possible future? Why is this?

Guideline 4: What can I do right now?

Wait… Didn’t he say the most important one is the last and he already mentioned it at #3?

While I was writing the last guideline one more came to my mind. So consider it a bonus:-D This works not only in this case but is always a good question I ask myself when I don’t know any further.

What can I do right now to do something good for my body or my mind?

For me this is going to the sauna, doing yoga or simply playing a game of Heroes of the storm. Sauna relaxes me deeply, yoga helps me process my thoughts and relaxes me, and playing Heroes just takes all of my attention away from what I think about right now. Some psychologists might say pejoratively “typical” avoidance. Well, yeah. Sometimes this is exactly what I need in this very moment:-) The key is to not push it away for too long. What are your treats? Do you know them already?

Thanks for reading. I hope this helped you in some way.