The Importance of Self-Love

As someone who is typically pretty confident, I had a tough summer and last few months when it came to self-image. I was going through a lot of changes and was in a tough place mentally, and I really let that take a toll on my confidence and amount of self-love. Since arriving in France, I’ve found myself being a lot kinder to myself, and that has had a tremendous positive effect on my confidence which has created a ripple effect in creating other positive changes in my life.

Self-love really is the secret sauce to feeling good and achieving everything you want in life- but not only the kind of self-love that is hyped up on Instagram and not only having self-love when you’re looking or feeling you’re best. Don’t get me wrong, these things are important, but the most important thing is to have self-love all the damn time. In fact, it’s most important to give yourself love when you’re not feeling your best.

It’s most important to love yourself when you feel badly about yourself. It’s most important to love yourself when you feel badly about your body. It’s most important to give yourself love when you are feeling bloated or just ate a lot of junk food or drank too much. It’s most important to love yourself when you’re crying and upset and feel like everything is going wrong. It’s most important to love yourself when you’ve made a mistake or gotten in a fight with a loved one or failed at something. It’s loving yourself and being kind to yourself and knowing you’re still worthy of love and respect when you’re at your worst.

Because that’s the thing, no matter how much it appears that someone has their life together and are achieving everything they want to achieve, they still have hard moments where it seems like nothing is going right. The important thing is to stop the negative train of thinking as soon as it starts, or as soon as possible, and come back to a place of having love and kindness and respect for yourself.

Self-Love Exercise: While my video for my self-love tips is in the works (stay-tuned!), a good exercise to work on loving yourself more is to write a list of things you love about yourself every day. I wrote a while back in the post Balancing Big Future Plans with Enjoying the Moment about the importance of cultivating gratitude and writing a daily gratitude list. In addition to writing a gratitude list, add on a self-love list to your daily routine, and watch how your perspective about life and about yourself changes.