Love Yourself First

Colorful Art

Whatever you are doing, love yourself doing it. Whatever you are feeling, love yourself for feeeling it. -Thaddeus Golas

Lately, we often hear many people expressing love for themselves. More and more, we come across content on social media that suggests to love ourselves. Several artists and influencers also express self-love through their songs or short movie. However, do you know what it really means to love yourself?

Love yourself is a phase where we find peace with ourselves. We can accept all the strengths and weaknesses that we have. We can completely accept ourselves as we are. This self-love will increase our confidence. We will be more confident in our physical appearance and our non-physical abilities.

Not everyone can love themselves easily. It takes a strong will and intention to achieve it. We can start with the simplest things, such as knowing the things we like and what we don't like. Start getting to know ourselves better by exploring ourselves slowly and deeply. Self-love is not something that can be obtained instantly. Self-love is a continuous process as long as we live.

How to love yourself? There are many things we can do to start loving ourselves. Here are seven things we can do:

1. Find out your own personality. Sometimes our personalities can adjust to the environment and people around us. Our personality in front of our family may not be the same as our friends' personality. Of course, it will be different if we meet new people for the first time. For that, it is essential to know what personality types we have. This can be done by taking a psychology personality test online or indirectly. We can take the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) or DISC (Dominant, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliant) test. By taking the test, at least we can find out our personality type and learn it. This will be very useful for us so that we can better control ourselves.
2. Find out your own strengths and weaknesses. We can find out our own strengths and weaknesses through self-reflection. We can reflect on the events that have happened in our life. With that, we can remind what strengths and what weaknesses we have. Also, we can ask the opinion of our closest people to observe our strengths and weaknesses. By doing this, we can analyze our strengths and weaknesses internally and externally. Furthermore, we can get justification from the self-assessment that we have made. We can also get input and suggestions to increase our strengths and overcome existing weaknesses.
3. Find out your life purpose​. We need to know what our purpose in life is. The purpose of life is needed so that we are more focused on living life. Life goals are not the same as a life purpose. The purpose of life is the reason we live in the world as a human being. Life’s purpose is usually supported by the value of life that we apply in our daily life. Knowing the purpose of life will make us even more excited about living our daily life. We also become humans who uphold the principles by holding to our life values ​​. This will help us grow and become better people.
4. Find out what you like and dislike. We have to know what things can make us comfortable and happy. If you already know, we can do these things when we are heartsick or in a bad mood. Apart from that, we also have to know everything that makes us sad, upset, or angry. By knowing this, we can avoid things that will put us in these bad conditions. We can manage our feeling more easily.
5. Take care of your health. One of the concrete evidence that we love ourselves is to take care of our health. There is no point in upholding self-love when we ignore our own bodies. Maintaining health can be done by having a healthy lifestyle. It can be started by eating nutritious food, drinking water around 8 glasses or 2 liters per day, regular exercise, and meditation. Not only take care of our physical health, but we also have to take care of our mental health by doing meditation.
6. Have a me-time. Start taking time in the middle of your daily busy life to take a short break. Take time to be able to have time with yourself. This free time can be used to do hobbies, take a walk to a place you like, meet the closest people, or so on. This will make you more relaxed because you take a break from your busy daily activities. Besides that, me-time will make you feel content or in a state of peaceful happiness because you can release your stress.
7. Learn to say no. Learn to say no. This may sound trivial and insignificant. But in fact, we often forget to ask ourselves if we can do all the things that are right in front of us. Sometimes, we would rather please others than please ourselves. It makes it hard for us to say no when someone asks us for favors. We hesitate to reject other people even though our condition does not support to help them. Therefore, start saying no to things we can’t do or to things we don’t like politely.

Loving ourselves doesn’t mean we are selfish and don’t care about other people. Precisely with this self-love, we can better know how to adjust ourselves when dealing with various personalities. With this self-love, we learn that to be appreciated by others, we must respect ourselves first.

Loving ourselves is important to our well-being. It will boost our mood, increase our self-confidence, and make us more grateful for who we are right now. If it is not us who love ourselves, then who else will love it. If we can’t love ourselves, how can we love others? So make sure to try your best to start loving yourself first.

Self-love is not selfish, you cannot truly love another until you know how to love yourself. -Coach Phill Hunter