A LifeStyle Grounded In Self Love

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Jana Corinne, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.

In a recent poll I conducted. I asked what people thought about self love. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people claimed that they knew self love was important, but could really use some more work on this topic.

So if we know that self love is important, then why do we fail to practice it?

The start of a beautiful relationship with another person first starts with self love. Self love means different things to different people. In my opinion, it means respecting yourself. I view it as respecting your realistic yet ambitious standards for yourself and your environment. It means taking care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It means being your own best friend, your own cheerleader in life, and your own support system FIRST. It means fulfilling all of your basic human needs yourself BEFORE asking others to fulfill your needs.

When we practice self love on a daily basis, it becomes a strong habit and that habit becomes a lifestyle.

So how do you practice self love?

Strategy #1: Start paying attention to self dialogue

How do you talk to yourself?
There may be times throughout the day where you scold, criticize or relay negative messages to yourself without even realizing it! The first step is to recognize these moments throughout the day. Do you see a pattern? Is there a particular time of day, a particular person or group you are around, or a particular situation in which you find this pattern frequent? I recommend writing these down in a notebook or journal. By recording them daily, weekly, and monthly, you can analyze your patterns of self talk. Can you image what YEARS of negative self talk does to your health? To your life?

Strategy #2: Nourish, Exercise, and Rest your physical body
These seem like no-brainers,but you’d be surprised how many people don’t do these things as often as they should! You only get one body in this lifetime, so take good care of it!
-Nourish: The cells in your body are constantly growing, working, and repairing themselves. Feed your body nutritious food that fuel your cells and that give you energy!
-Exercise: Challenge your body so it can grow stronger. Exercise your muscles, get your blood pumping, achieve that flood of endorphins!
-Rest: allow your body to rest, repair and rejuvenate itself. Don’t get enough of this? You’re more prone to things like injury, cloudy decision-making, low performance, and negative behaviors.

Making a strong effort to frequently nourish, exercise, and rest your body will make you feel good!
When you feel good, you look good! Your inner radiance shines through! ..in your eyes…in your smile…and in your overall body language.
And when you feel good AND look good, your confidence is through the roof! …allowing you to do some pretty amazing things!

Now some of you reading this will probably say..“yea, I already know this” and go on with your week…falling into the same trap of what I call “knowing your way out it”. You already know this stuff…but you don’t actually DO IT.

BUT some of you will make an action plan! Some of you will create a personal plan to incorporate this into your daily routine so that it eventually becomes a HABIT….and you will see the benefits physical self care has on your confidence.

Strategy #3: Allow yourself to express your emotions

We are human beings—It’s normal to feel emotions! 

But when we don’t express our emotions (“or bottle them up inside”), we carry that tension in our bodies. It’s an added stress.

The body can only remain in a tension state for so long until it has to be released—often at an inconvenient time for us. When this happens, we might become embarrassed or ashamed about our lack of control over our emotions and that’s when the negative self talk begins in our minds.

So whether it be emotions of joy, excitement, sadness, anger, etc., give yourself the proper time to feel them and express them in a positive way. 

Think about some positive ways that you can express emotions like joy, excitement, sadness, or anger and allow yourself to do so. 

A note about anger—anger gets a bad rap. But anger is an important emotion when listened to and channeled correctly. Anger helps alert us. It helps us to recognize when we need to protect ourselves and make a change. If channeled correctly, anger can become a huge motivating factor in creating amazing change in our lives. It can give us the courage to do what needs to be done.

Begin by implementing these 3 strategies into your lifestyle. Make a commitment to yourself to practice self love daily and witness the changes in your life. You will begin to see some wonderful things happen!