TIP 1: MASTER THE MEAN GIRL MIND
Okay, so the first tip that I have for you is that, in order to get closer to a pure state of self-love, you need to really consciously start working on that negative voice or that mean girl voice inside your head. You know the one. The one that tells you that you’re not good enough, that it’s not gonna work out for you that you’re not smart enough, pretty enough, skinny enough, whatever.
We all have that voice inside of our head, that tells us that we can’t. And when we believe that voice over and over again. It really makes it hard to find that sense of self-confidence and self-love.
There are two particular techniques that I have learned that I wanted to share with you to battle that inner mean girl. I am by no means a licensed therapist, I am sharing this with you based on my own personal experience.
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The first exercise that you can do to really stop believing that voice inside your head is called re-characterization. Now most of the time, we feel so deeply connected to the voice inside of our head because it’s us. And to some degree, we all trust ourselves. I mean, we’ve been with ourselves since the day we were born. And so when we have this voice inside our head that sounds very much like our own voice. It’s really easy to believe, even though a lot of these limiting beliefs are false. If we didn’t, we’d all be out there achieving our goals. And so what we actually want to do to stop making this voice so potent is we want to re-characterize the way that it sounds. So when I learned this exercise, the example that was given was to actually make the voice sound like something like Mickey Mouse or another funny voice. So try to sit down right now. And whatever thoughts are coming into your head, try to change the voice of those thoughts into like Homer Simpson. When you can learn to do this over time, it takes as I said, the intensity out of those thoughts in your head. And it’s a lot easier to not listen to them and to start trying to speak more positively to yourself.
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Another technique I like is called Difference. You’re trying to take those negative thoughts that say you shouldn’t go live on Instagram because everyone’s gonna laugh at you, and you actually defer those thoughts till later. You know, most of the time when it comes to a lot of fears we have they become redundant when we actually do the thing that we were scared to do like going live on Instagram, for example. And so, if you actually intentionally defer those thoughts, you say to your brain, I’m going to think these thoughts later, I’m going to put these thoughts in a safe space for now. What’s going to happen is you will realize how redundant those mean girl thoughts actually were, the thoughts that we’re, you know, riddled with fear.
TIP 2: LEARN SELF-INTIMACY
I promise you on the journey to self-love, this is one of the most extraordinary things that you can actually do. What I actually mean by this is bringing all the ways that you act in an intimate relationship with someone: touching them, spending time with them intimately, or even just caring for them in a more intimate way than you would say, with your friends. And bringing all of that into your self-love journey. So whether or not that’s taking yourself on a beautiful date or pampering yourself, it’s really about getting comfortable with looking at and loving your own physical experience. Humans have a mechanism within us that allows us to feel a lot of comfort through physical touch. And so being able to touch yourself, you know, whether that’s just striking your own arms, whether that is self-pleasure, or whether that is just spending time with yourself a little bit more intimately, looking at yourself in the mirror, telling yourself you’re beautiful. Trying to create an intimate relationship with yourself that doesn’t feel false or awkward is one of the best things that you can do for self-love.
So whatever that looks like for you, you know, take this one as you will. But getting intimate with yourself is super important for self-love.
TIP 3: SETTING AND KEEPING BOUNDARIES
The third thing and this is something that has been a real struggle for me personally. But I can tell you that since I’ve actually really started to find my flow with this, it has been huge on my self-love journey. And that is setting and keeping boundaries. I know we talk a lot about boundaries being such an important part of self-respect, self-worth, and self-love, but particularly as women, I find that setting and keeping boundaries is something that many of us struggle with. I spoke in a video recently about guilt, and our guilt plays a big part in this. Naturally, a lot of women are people-pleasers, but also on the other side of that we’re so conscious of what other people think of us that we’re willing to let them overstep our boundaries, we’re willing to sacrifice our own goals, our bodies, our opinions because we don’t want to offend or interrupt anybody else’s experience. And so what I really want to empower you to do is start to get really comfortable just saying no to people. The more you actually start to stand up for yourself, the more that you’ll actually start to induce those feelings of self-love.
Another little point I had written down for this is setting and keeping your own boundaries, is try to really watch when you find yourself changing for other people. You know, obviously, there are different contexts. You know, I’m not the same person that I am with my friends, maybe when I’m hanging out with my grandma, you know what I mean? Like there’s definitely contexts in which we act differently, but try to really notice times when you are changing who you are, like whether you’re playing small because you don’t want somebody else to feel offended by your experience or you know, you’re changing your opinions around people. This is a big part of boundaries that are going to deteriorate your self-love. If you’re constantly being so malleable around everybody else and just trying to fit everybody else’s mould, you will really take away from that self-respect that you need to build self-love. And so just take a deep, deep, deep breath and say to yourself, I am worthy, I am worthy, I am worthy, and try to just be who you are in every single scenario.
TIP 4: RESPECT YOUR PHYSICAL WORLD
Another thing that’s really important to do is to respect your physical space and physical things. I found a huge correlation with just little things, like keeping my house tidy, making sure I’m taking care of my physical experience. And again, I’m not trying to tiptoe into the area of self-love is having a bath and pampering yourself. But, I’m literally saying having enough respect to take care of yourself, is all down to the mindset side of things, of nurturing yourself. You don’t have to have makeup, clean nails, or anything like that, that’s not what I’m saying here. What I’m saying here is just making sure you’re taking care of yourself: hydrating, feeding yourself the right things, cleaning your space. The more that you essentially parent yourself, the more that you’re going to feel those induced feelings of self-love.
There is nothing like the feeling of being nurtured, whether that be by a parent, a loved one, a friend. And you can do that for yourself, it’s just that so many of us don’t, so many of us are giving it out to everybody else. And we have maybe no one or in our lives, that is giving it back to us. And that’s what we need to step in, we need to take care of ourselves. We need to put ourselves first, so we can go out and serve the world.
TIP FIVE: FEEL TO HEAL
What I mean by this is, many of us have learned to avoid our emotions, we’ve learned to hold in our tears, to not be too dramatic, to just get over things, to get over and get on with things. And whilst I really agree that in some circumstances, this may be the right thing to do. In most cases, it is so incredibly important for you to pause, sit with your emotions, feel your emotions, and let them pass. I see so many people that have just clogged up with negative experiences. And I’m not necessarily talking about deep-rooted traumas here. For that, I definitely recommend going seeing a therapist, but let’s say you know, a little thing like you try to do a launch in business and it doesn’t go well like sit with the experience, sit the emotions that come up, cry if you need to go beat up a pillow if you need to let whatever you need to do to actually move those emotions through you. That is going to help make you so much more of a productive person if anything, but it’s going to allow you to experience so much more feelings of blissful self-love because you’re not constantly inundated with these negative experiences.
And so feeling to heal is something that’s really important. It also taps into that self-nurturing because when you’re feeling these things, you can be really kind to yourself and call yourself. And that will bring you closer to yourself which induces like I said feelings of self-love. It’s okay to take some space, take a step back from the business, take a step back from your friendships, take a step back from your relationship, to just feel those emotions to process those experiences and let them pass by because I guarantee you, it feels horrible at the moment, but you’ll have that point of like, “right, now I can get back on with life”. It comes I promise you. But the more you feel, the easier you will process and the better you’ll be able to get back to that feeling of self-love and self-worth and being productive and kicking goals.
