“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.”
Mahatma Gandhi
Who you are all starts with the thoughts that you think about yourself. Then, as Gandhi says, you thoughts eventually become your destiny. If you are constantly thinking negatively about yourself then you will ultimately have a negative destiny. The key to being happy and living a fruitful life all starts with the thoughts that you think about yourself. To be happy, you need to learn to love the person you are and learn to think positively about yourself, the choices that you make, and the life that you are living.
1. To Love Yourself, You Need to Be Yourself
To love the person that you are, the first thing that you need to do is to actually be that person. It’s always a temptation to change your personality to fit what is popular. Maybe the real you would prefer to stay in on a weekend and sit down with a book but you force yourself to go out drinking. Never force yourself to do or be someone that you’re not. If you’d rather stay in and you know that it would make you happier, than stay in for the weekend. Focus on your mental health and focus on being you.
2. To Love Yourself, You Need to Speak Kindly to Yourself
When you look in the mirror, do you smile at the reflection that you see? Or do you frown and turn away from it and tell yourself that you’re not good enough? You need to know that if you don’t speak kindly to yourself then you will never love the person that you are. Try doing affirmations in the morning. Look into the mirror and smile at yourself. Then go through a list of attributes that you love about yourself. Tell yourself that you are loved, that people enjoy your company, that you’re intelligent and successful. Tell yourself exactly what you need to hear. A study done by the Department of Psychology at Stanford University shows that doing giving yourself affirmations improves education, health, relationship outcomes, and lead to a more expansive view of one’s self. Affirmations trigger the subconscious mind to believe in the things that you are telling yourself which helps the results to have a long-lasting impact.
3. To Love Yourself, You Have to be in Charge of Your Life
Sometimes, people let their lives to be governed by the events happening around them. They act as if their life is simply floating down a river on a raft and if they get stuck on a rock then there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it. They wait there until someone else comes and pushes them past the obstacle. That’s not the way to live your life. You need to know that you are in charge of your actions and that nothing truly evil can happen if you’re fully in charge. You might have a bad day here or there but if you’re in charge then you can choose to be happy during those bad days. You can choose to have a full and positive attitude no matter what may happen to you. You will know that you have the ability to choose between a ketone diet or no diet at all. You can choose to love yourself unconditionally no matter what you look like. And you will be happier because you know that you’re in charge.
4. To Love Yourself, You Must Heal Old Wounds
If something has happened in your past and you find it hard to forgive, learn to forgive. If you forgive yourself and others, your mental health and your ability to love improves vastly. Forgiving others has been shown to decrease your experiences with depression, anxiety, and even improve your ability to sleep. If you have unresolved issues in your past, reach out to those people and forgive them. If it’s you who is at fault, then ask for their forgiveness.
Learning to love yourself may be a difficult process but the results are well worth it. Ask for help if you need it or ask those who know you well for things that you can love about yourself. Find one or two things every single day that you adore and tell yourself that you adore it. You will be happier and more at peace if you can learn these things.