Personal Development: Learning to Like Myself I had always heard that saying about no one else liking you if you aren’t even someone who likes themselves. I had thought about it for some time, and I thought I liked myself pretty well. After all, how could you not like someone? Well, it turns out, about a year ago I discovered I didn’t like myself at all.
It wasn’t obvious. I seemed to have a good job, I had friends and I seemed like I was doing well. It was just a feeling inside. I am not sure how to describe how I was feeling, except to say that I knew I wasn’t happy, and I was starting to feel disappointed in myself. I wasn’t really the kind of person who went around patting themselves on the back, but I knew that something had to change.
As I kept thinking about it, I saw some symptoms that I was not a fan of myself. For starters, I realized how much I was drinking. I wasn’t drinking every day, but I had one to two glasses of wine every day. That is supposed to be on the normal side of alcohol consumption, but when I noticed how my body was dependent on it when I didn’t have wine, I knew I had to cut down. Soothing myself with wine, to me, meant that I had trouble dealing with my life.
I realized that whenever I thought about how I was feeling,I would always hear my mother’s critical voice in my head. My mother, never satisfied with anything, was a big part of my life. Over time I started to see that I was living for her, and that my opinion of myself was based on her, not on me.
Now that I had some idea of what was going on with me, I made sure to put a plan in place to change some things. I knew I had to replace the negative thoughts from my mother with positive thoughts from myself, so that was where I started. Every time I thought something negative about myself, I would think the opposite.
I didn’t jump straight to saying “I love myself!” because that would have felt fake. I just softened things a little bit. For instance, if I thought “I am terrible at my job” I would then think “but there are some things i do right”. For the first time in my life, I started to look for things that I did right, and to acknowledge my own efforts. It was a strange thing to do, since I hadn’t done it before, but as time went buy I started to feel better and better.
I also went out and got a makeover. A lot of people will say looks don’t matter, but my looks matter to me, and I have to tell you that a new haircut and a few new outfits had me feeling very good about myself.
I feel much better about myself today, and I look forward to continuing to work on myself so that my confidence level goes up and I have a good outlook on life.
