Self-love is totally possible. I know it sounds cliche but I believe it possible to love yourself. I also believe it OK to feel like a badass. You see, I don’t want you to be a cocky butthole, but I do want you to know your purpose. I want you to see what gives you passion and excitement. I want you to learn your strengths and weaknesses. I want you to own both and know where you will flourish and where you will need support or help. This isn’t about bragging or being a jerk. This is about ending your days feeling complete and content. This is about feeling “OK” rather than “not good enough”. Self-love is knowing you have work to do and knowing self-improvement is always a journey, but knowing you deserve love, respect, care, and confidence in that process.
You are going to live a life where you won’t feel less than when comparing yourself to others. You won’t feel ashamed when reading magazines. There is no longer a struggle to lose weight and change your body, because you feel totally OK with your body each day (and on those bad body image days you know how to shake it off and realize your badassness). Being confident doesn’t mean that bad stuff won’t happen in your life, because no matter how amazing you are, bad stuff will happen. Life sucks sometimes. And I mean life sucks real hard sometimes. This will cause you to feel upset and have hurt feeligns and other negative emotions. No one is immune to that, but someone with self-love knows they will be OK. Someone with confidence trusts their ability to figure out how to deal with it and knows that they have internal resources and external support to help through the bad stuff. It is possible to believe in your ability to handle life’s soccer punches like a boss, meaning you trust your ability to make decisions, you trust your ability to figure it out, and you trust the people in your life to help guide you.
Right now you don’t feel confident. You probably know you kick a lot of butt during the day. You definitely know how to take care of stuff, but at the end of the day you feel ashamed, lonely, and lost. You feel like you are lacking something like you are just not “good enough”. You analyze what you do and what you did not do and feel not special, or behind in some way. You have tried so many things to try to improve this. You have tried getting a different eduction because maybe if you got a better job you would feel better. You could finally afford the things you think will bring you joy in life. You have tried changing your body. I think that if only you could lose weight or look differently you would have the happiness and confidence you want. You diet you strain yourself at the gym, but nothing really changes. You feel good about the weigh you may have lost, but then feel ashamed when you eat a certain way or have to miss the gym. It feels like no matter what you do you just don’t feel good about yourself.
I am here to say you are amazing, but there are too many things in the way making you feel not good enough. Becoming confident has nothing to do with changing something about yourself or your body. Becoming confident means realizing you have everything you need to be amazing, today, right now. There are just some things junking up your ability to realize that right now. There are a few barriers in the way.
We are about to deep dive and look at how to smash these barriers that keep you from feeling confident and loved. So let’s look at the 5 things that keep you from feeling this way:
The first barrier to self-love is your relationship(s). Next we have those annoying societal and cultural norms. Another barrier are the internal pressure and expectations you put on yourself. You do not feel awesome because of the hurtful emotions you experience, whether you are experiencing them now, in the past, or will in the future. When you feel bad emotionally you lose your ability to feel confident. And lastly the bad stuff you have been through in your life is keeping you from feeling badass, confident, and amazing.
Over the next few weeks I am going to deep dive into these barriers some more.