Self love ♥

What exactly is self love?

Self love grows from your own actions that you take throughout your life. Actions that will support your growth as a person. You can't feel self love from just trying to be a more positive person or forcing happiness in your life. You can't gain self love if you are listening to a self love talk, reading a self love book or even reading this blog. Self love comes from your personal growth, growing into yourself and being fully YOU. It helps you make decisions and cope with life challenges in a way that is productive. It is simply a state of appreciation for yourself.

How does one develop self love?

Check your thoughts:

We are all constantly so hard on ourselves and have a hard time believing what we are capable of. The more that you tell yourself "I suck at this" or " I can't do this", the more you are going to believe it. Even if you just change your verbiage in your head to "this is challenging for me" or "practice makes perfect" , you will find so much more respect for yourself. When learning how to develop self love I often told myself, "you need to treat yourself like you treat your friends and family. " I would never tell anyone that they suck at something or that they can't do something... So why did I speak to myself that way? We are all fully capable of respecting others, but respecting ourselves is difficult sometimes. Respecting yourself is a vital part on the mission of loving who you are. Remember... you are beautiful & deserve to be loved and respected by yourself :)

Celebrate your accomplishments:

Congratulating yourself on your daily accomplishments, or realizing you've accomplished something great is so important. Even the littlest things like having an awesome workout, completing a project that you've been working on, stepping out of your comfort zone or even just because you ate your veggies that day. Be proud of yourself for your accomplishments and don't be afraid to let people know about it. Tell someone! Tweet about it! Don't be afraid to show that you're proud of yourself. No matter how small or big. CELEBRATE! Nothing builds self- esteem & self- confidence like accomplishments.

Minimize the reliance on external validation:

In life in general we are constantly getting externally validated. We live off peoples comments & thoughts. We even get compliments regardless if we are asking for them. A lot of the time we don't even realize that those external validations actually make us feel good about ourselves. But what

happens when we don't receive those compliments? 1.) We start looking for them & 2.) Our self esteem & confidence disappears. We truly don't need external validation in order to make ourselves feel good. If you can all self validate internally, when someone says something opposite of what you feel, then it is going to be easier to say to someone " I disagree, I love myself". If you can self validate you won't feed off others attention, and you will be completely fine when the attention is no longer given to you. Worry about loving yourself, instead of loving the idea of other people loving you.

There is so many different ways one can develop self love. These three are what have became important for me to focus on. I am still improving my self love every day. Happiness, confidence and self love are not things that you acquire and stop improving...it is a constant journey to maintain them, and within the journey you discover that you can always continue to go further. There is always more self-discovery that can be done. The greatest commitment that someone can make is to themselves. Self love are two words we hear very often, but not something we take time to think about.

#selflove