If You Were Your Own Friend, Would You Follow Your Life Advice?
Self-Love.
It is such an important thing we all should hold onto in all of our decisions in life but, for some people, a very challenging concept to understand.
Particularly, for someone who comes from an emotionally unstable and toxic background, with extreme difficulty in prioritising themselves, this concept is even more difficult to achieve than for people who always knew what this meant in practice.
Before getting into how to really practice self-love, it’s crucial to understand what self-love actually means.
According to BetterUp:
Self-love means that you have an appreciation, affinity, and positive regard for yourself. It’s closely related to self-esteem and self-compassion. When you have a strong sense of self-love, you understand your own value and treat yourself in a loving way.¹
If you are someone with low self-love capability, it is quite hard to understand if you’re practising it in the way you should practise.
Your self-love standards will always be quite low because that is not what you are used to.
You are used to prioritise others around you, instead of yourself.
Now, there is one, so deeply moving exercise, that I started doing, that simply changed my life.
As someone with once low self-love capability, whenever I felt a decision I was making was against my own will, I’d always ask myself:
Am I being selfish?
And the answer to my own question was always, as you would expect, the same:
Yes, I am being selfish.
I would always prioritise others.
People around me would say:
You should prioritise self-love. You should learn to love yourself first above all.
Perhaps for those people, it was an easy concept to grasp and to put into practice, but to me, it was simply far from reachable.
So I started thinking:
If I always prioritise others, what if, what if I treat myself as if I was one of my dearest friends or family members?
If I was my own friend, would I tell myself to continue meeting up with toxic people, just because they are feeling really bad about their lives and have got no one else to turn to? No.
If I was my own friend, would I tell myself to continue working in a toxic job environment, that led me to burnout? No.
This exercise allowed me a simple thing: Clarity.
Clarity in what my life is and what it actually should be according to a person who practices self-love and puts themselves first.
Thank you for reading.
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[1]: What self-love truly means and ways to cultivate it — https://www.betterup.com/blog/self-love
