[…] Too often we bash ourselves without giving it a second thought. We knock ourselves and our abilities and we put ourselves down. When someone compliments us on our clothing we reply with “oh this old thing” instead of accepting the compliment and taking ownership of it. Self-love starts with you! […]
It starts with you!
We read magazines, they tell us to hate ourselves. They tell us we’re not good enough, not thin enough, not pretty enough. But we are.
We are perfect. We just need to start loving ourselves.
Self-love
It’s not easy but it starts with small habits. Ignoring the niggling thoughts that tell us we should be something else. Accept the compliments when they come in. Look at the things about us that are wonderful. Appreciate the things about ourselves that we love.
I love my lips. My eyes. My nails. I may not be perfect but there are things about myself I wouldn’t change. There are things about myself that I would. I know that but I never hate myself. I have with age, grown to accept those things. When I look at photos from my younger days I think to myself, damn I wish I’d known how hot my body was. I wish I’d worn bikinis more. I wish I’d worn shorts all the time. We can’t go back. We can’t change the things that happened but we can change how we see ourselves in the future.
Do not read beauty magazines
I’ve really started thinking about the way we teach our minds to think negatively. We read these magazines that are dead set on showing us what is wrong with women. I read them too. I love the fashion pages but I can’t help but get sucked into the posts about women’s bodies too. It doesn’t add anything to our lives.
So just stop comparing yourselves to those ridiculously unreachable standards. All the women in them are photoshopped and still living off one carrot a day anyway.
Not even the women in the magazines look like the images we see. What kind of crazy standard is that? NOT EVEN the MODELS look that perfect in real life. Just let that sink in.
[bctt tweet=”“When a woman becomes her own best friend life is easier.” ― Diane Von Furstenberg “]
Instead, do this!
If you want to read more on self-love, a good blog to visit is Gala Darling. She even has a TED Talk on Radical Self Love that’s worth watching.
Remember these wise words
The only person who can pull me down is myself, and I’m not going to let myself pull me down anymore.” ― C. JoyBell C.
[bctt tweet=”The only person who can pull me down is myself!”]
Be kind to yourself and more forgiving.
You may not be perfect but you’re all you’ve got!
Great post! As the mother to 3 beautiful girls, I am aware of the effect my own modeling of self-love has on them. At 48, the media’s portrayal of beauty doesn’t affect me except that it does inspire me to be healthy–there are a lot of fantastic looking people who in their 40’s and older. Younger women and girls though face an onslaught of impossibly high standards of beauty from the media–which is why I loved the Dove campaign of real beauty. I like what Coley (which is my twin’s nickname for me!) has to say: “We’re all perfectly imperfect.” And that’s good enough.
I can’t imagine how hard it must be trying to raise three girls in a world where woman are constantly being made aware of how perfect we somehow need to be and yet those levels of perfection are constantly being moved higher. In the end “beauty” has become so unreachable when really it is more about the way you carry yourself than how much plastic surgery you can get. I think it’s great that people are becoming more aware of healthy living as opposed to superficial beauty but at some point, the media really needs to look at the damage it’s doing by airbrushing ALL of the images of women that are printed. It’s completely true, we are all perfectly imperfect.
Loved your post! I’m just going to add this….Everybody is perfect!
Thank you so much. You are absolutely right. Everybody is truly perfect and we need to start accepting that about ourselves so that others can accept us as well. X
Thanks for the shout out! I’m so glad that you were inspired to write this. It’s a great post! We’re all perfectly imperfect and self-love is so so so important. 🙂
Hey Coley, thanks for stopping by and reading the post. I’m glad you enjoyed it. I think we sometimes forget to focus on the simple things in life that make us happy!
xx