Hello there beautiful! This week my wellness tip for you is something that we have not been able to fully dive into yet. You know that wellness encompasses so many different dimensions of our health, and it’s all about nurturing who we are from the inside out. This helps to boost our confidence, feel good in our bodies, achieve mental clarity, and so much more in order to be the best version of ourselves.
Therefore, I think it goes without saying that all of this includes knowing how to build, nurture, and maintain the loving-kindness relationship we all should have with ourselves. And because I’m human just like you, and I’ve been at a point in my life where I lacked confidence and self-love many times before, I wanted to share with you what has helped me over the years change all of that.
Our confidence is either built or destroyed for us at a very young age. We learn very early in childhood what standard we should or should not hold ourselves to, who and how to prioritize others in our lives, and of course how to personally love and care for ourselves. All of this comes from the role models that surround us while growing up. Role models we often don’t get to choose.
This can either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you were raised. Either way, life comes at us fast and as we get older and experience more life, our level of confidence and ability to engage in self-love will shift significantly. Engaging in these self-love practices as often as possible can and will help you significantly increase your confidence and help you be able to maintain that level of comfort.
How to Engage in Consistent Self-Love
Know Yourself
There is nothing more powerful and self-assuring than knowing who you are at your core. You have to know what you value, where your morals stand, the type of people that feed life into you and the kind that suck it out, what your ultimate goals are in life, the type of life partner you want to commit to, all your likes and dislikes and so much more. You have to know yourself better than anyone else on the planet.
We get there by spending plenty of alone time with ourselves and learning what our strengths and weaknesses are. We accomplish this by letting go of any perfectionism we often try to hold onto and releasing the fear of being seen as a failure. When we allow ourselves to be completely human and be 100% open to the human experience, we quickly learn we are far from perfect and we will indeed fail many times in our lives before we find the right rhythm and groove for continued success.
And there’s nothing wrong with that! The ultimate form of self-love is allowing yourself to be a continuous work in progress. Even when we get to a point where we believe we know ourselves so well, life always throws a challenge at us to remind us that there is always more to learn. That’s the beauty of being human. When you know who you are at your core no matter what or who life throws at you, manipulation of the mind, body, and spirit is nearly impossible.
Engage in Self-Care
There is absolutely no better way to show yourself love, kindness, respect, acceptance, and appreciation than there is through consistent self-care. Consistently engaging in self-care ensures that you are not neglecting your personal needs. This is extremely important in order to be able to build and nurture your confidence. There are tons of things that you can do for self-care. We talk about it here on the blog all the time!
Some great places to start are with daily walking, yoga (my fav!), at home workouts, weekend spa days, meditation, and of course therapy. But the one thing I want you to keep in mind about self-care is that it has to be what interests you, will fuel your fire to do it consistently, and something that you ultimately can stick to.
Self-care is very much a personal journey and experience which is why it impacts our confidence in different ways. One of my biggest tips for creating a self-care routine is to make sure you have activities that can and will stimulate the three core areas of our health. Your mind, body, and spirit. These can be three separate activities that target each area, or they can be one or multiple activities that target all three at once.
Either way, don’t put your self-care and personal needs on the back burner. Self-care is the ultimate gateway to self-love. If there is anything you take away from this post let it be this. Make self-care a priority in your daily life. Your future self will always thank you for it.
Embrace Self-Compassion
Self-love goes hand in hand with being able to show compassion to yourself. Compassion is a hard emotion to express in general, so of course expressing it towards ourself can come with many challenges. I too have and still do struggle greatly with showing myself compassion, especially on days when my confidence may not be at its best. However, the secret to being able to conquer this emotional wave is to learn from your past mistakes and remain open to new experiences.
Your past does not define you but it mostly certainly plays a crucial part in helping us become the person that we are presently. Everything that we experience in our past teaches us something about ourselves as an individual. We learn how to communicate with ourselves, the type of people that make us feel our best, even the kind of activities that ease our worries. In addition to that, we also learn what to do and what not to do when something we are actively engaging in does not feel good to us. Through our past we also learn how to listen to our gut, be more in-tuned with our bodies, and allow our emotions to guide us (but not control us).
I like to think of our past as the roadmap to who are a meant to become. It lays out everything good and bad that has made us have to face the hard challenges in life, and step up to make the necessary changes in order to get one step closer to feeling personally fulfilled. Understanding this, trusting the process, and allowing yourself to make mistakes is how we grow. Through that growth comes the opportunity to either learn from what went wrong, worked well, or where things could have been done differently, or the decision to remain stagnant.
If you want to build your confidence, nurture it for many years to come you have to be willing to grow from those past mistakes. Being able to do so allows for you to express more compassion towards yourself and continually improve that personal relationship of self-love.
Practice Positive Self-Talk
The way we talk to ourselves greatly impacts how we feel about ourselves. Your words have power, not just what you say to others, not just what you put out into the universe, but also what you think about yourself. It’s so easy to engage in negative self-talk because we are always hyperaware of our biggest insecurities and flaws. This greatly impacts the way we feel about ourselves especially if we feel like we are not putting our best foot forward.
Conquer negative self-talk about shifting your mindset from the negative to the positive. Get in the habit of saying daily positive affirmations to yourself. Become disciplined in creating healthy boundaries not only for yourself but for others as well that will ultimately protect your energy and mental health. And of course, avoid negative self-criticism, which is easier said than done, but the more you are able to pour love and positivity into yourself the greater it will show up through your confidence.
Be Unique
Lastly, embrace your uniqueness. If you have been following me for a while you know that I am such a strong believer in the fact that there will ever only be one you. No matter how many years go by, how many people come in and out of your life, we will always grow into a better and healthier version of ourselves. But none of that will change who you are at your core or what ultimately makes you unique.
Don’t compare yourself to others. When you spend so much time comparing yourself to others you start to believe all the negative things you tell yourself. Yes, there are people who are going to look, act, and present themselves in a certain way that is the complete opposite from who you are. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are “better” than you, it just simply means the two of you are different.
Don’t seek validation from anyone else. The right people will love, adore, and accept you for who you are. All the good and all the bad, and they will ultimately always choose to help you grow from your past and heal from your hurt. This is because they see and know what you bring to the table as an individual, and they are appreciative of that. Self-love is greatly fueled by being able to acknowledge and fully stand in everything that makes you unique.
So, start embracing who you are and fill up the self-love until it overflows. And even then, keep filling that bitch up!
Love and Light,
Kimora