Self-love – how to feel more of it – and how to be more consistent at it. Here are nine steps to help you feel more self-love. Self-love is such a loaded topic for so many of us yet so important if we want to live a happy life. These steps will help you revolutionise your relationship with you so you can do more of what matters most to you.
So where do we begin on a topic like this? Today I wanted to share with you a few of the things that I’ve learned on my journey to self-love. At times for me, the journey felt like climbing Mt. Everest but it has been so, so worth effort. While I’m certainly not perfect I can absolutely see the difference between the old Jen, who was not at all self-loving, to the new me that is much kinder and more self-loving.
Here I’m sharing nine steps to help create more self-love in your life. While every step is important I want to encourage you to listen in, or read on until Step #9 because I feel Step #9 is the missing key to all of this. I strongly believe Step #9 is the big thing that has stopped us from feeling love for ourselves.
Some things I share may resonate with you, and some may not. I just hand this over to you as a chance for you to work on your own self-love project – to think about where self-love sits in your life and how you could bring more self-love in if you so choose.
This episode is a companion to Episode 65 of this podcast where I talked about the Inner Critic vs the Inner Compassionate self. In that episode, I talked about how being more compassionate helps us in our lives. I also promised to share with you a “self-love how to” guide in this episode.
What is Self-Love?
Before we talk about how to create more self-love in our lives let me quickly define what self-love is.
The Oxford Dictionary says self-love is “the feeling that your own happiness and wishes are important.”
I love this definition. It is so simple and clear. Unfortunately, the path to self-love has not been so straightforward for many of us. That could be due to past experiences, childhood, or social conditioning.
I grew up thinking that being self-loving was to be selfish and self-centred.
Ironically I’ve found the more self-loving I have become toward myself the more I can do, and be, for other people. It’s the absolute flip of that old chestnut.
Self Love – How to Be More Self Loving in 9 Steps
So from that perspective, I want to share with you a few things I’ve learned along the journey. Here are my 9 steps to loving yourself more:
1. Make the Choice to Love Yourself
The first step is to actually make the choice to love yourself. This was the game-changer for me and many that I work with. For a long time, I thought self-love was an elusive thing that you had to be lucky to be born with or not. When I realised the first step to loving yourself is to make the decision to love yourself it was mind-blowing. It seems so obvious now but something I had completely missed!!
This revolutionised things for me – because when we make a decision about something it automatically changes the game. We become strong and focused as we step into the frequency of the decision.
Once we make the decision to love ourselves we then need to live it. This is where Step #2 comes in.
2. Understand the Power of Your Thoughts and Emotions
As I’ve said many times on this podcast your thoughts create your reality. So are we thinking self-loving thoughts or not?
Here we need to become aware of the thousands of thoughts swirling around our heads and then we need to look at the quality of them. Are they loving thoughts or are they not so loving?
For a long time, the thoughts of my “inner critic’ or ‘nasty girl’ dominated everything … and that did nothing for my level of self-love let me tell you!
Some of the thoughts that can really undermine us are thoughts like ‘not good enough’ or ‘not smart enough’, ‘not pretty enough’ or “not worthy’. Another huge drain on self-love is when we compare ourselves to others.
So we need to start listening to what we’re saying to ourselves and turning those thoughts around. Bring on Step #3.
3. Step into the Frequency of Acceptance … then Self Love
The best way to turn these thoughts around this is to step into the emotional frequency of acceptance – for ourselves. I found this was a great stepping stone on the way to self-love.
When we are more accepting of ourselves we are reducing the harshness and paving the way toward love. It is something that we can practice over time – it doesn’t have to happen overnight.
After accepting ourselves we can then start to think about loving ourselves. I know at this stage this can still be a tough ask for some people. So even if you feel you cannot direct love to yourself initially you can step into the frequency of self-love by feeling love for others and things around you.
As you feel love for others you can then, bit by bit, start to send that love to yourself. I speak a lot more about allowing and accepting in Episode 21 of this podcast.
4. Listen to Your Inner Wisdom First
Another huge step toward self-love is to become your own North Star. By this, I mean listening to your inner wisdom first.
Since we’ve been very small most of us have been trained to listen to others first. For me, this led me to always seek answers outside myself. It was confusing and a big time-waster.
It’s also a slippery slope toward the comparison game.
The truth is your own answers are within you … the key is to take the time to listen which brings me to Step #5.
5. Create Space to Be Not Do
To understand and truly love ourselves we need to know what we want and what’s most important to us.
These are answers that can ONLY be found inside ourselves.
To find these answers inside we need to create a small space daily to be “be” rather than do. I know in our busy world this might seem too much but let me tell you there is such value in it.
Here I am suggesting you start by taking just five minutes a day to just be – to allow your body and mind to come to stillness. Perhaps have a cup of tea and look at the sunrise or sunset or take 5 minutes after your lunch to sit and be still.
I wore the mask of ‘busyness’ for a long time to avoid being still. But there is such power in the stillness.
It’s in the slowing down that we speed up. It is in this space when we just allow ourselves to be rather than being busy and on the go, that we are able to connect with our infinite self and receive the ideas and inspirations that are always flowing to us.
6. Create a Tiny Self-Love Ritual You Can Do Daily
Another step that helped me on my path to self-love was to create a tiny daily ritual of self-love. And when I say tiny I mean tiny. It need only take a couple of minutes but it needs to be something you can do for yourself consistently every day to show yourself that you feel love for yourself.
For me, my first tiny self-love ritual was to take my supplements on daily basis. This was a sign to me of me loving myself and supporting my body and helping it to be the best it could be.
So what tiny little ritual can you build into your day to show you that you love you? The key is for it to be super simple and something you can do every day that you can attach the meaning of self-love to it. It could be taking supplements, taking a walk, and having a cup of tea before the rest of your household wakes up.
This leads me to Step #7 – we’re going to move from the mind to the body now.
7. Involve Your Body in the Process
What we know from neuroscience is that when we change our physiology we can change the way we feel emotionally. This can be as simple as putting our shoulders back, opening our chest and face up, and looking up to the sky instead of looking down.
Research shows changing our physiology like this will create a cascade of positive emotions that will run through our body and change how we feel inside. It is a powerful way to break the negative cycle of negative emotions. Amy Cuddy has done a fantastic Ted Talk on this that I will link to in the show notes.
I’ve found moving my body regularly has been a powerful step in my journey to self-love. I love yoga, walking my dog Lucy and dancing. Putting healthy food in my body also makes a huge difference in how I feel. I stopped eating sugar years ago and feel so much better for it.
What is one simple thing you could do to involve your body in your self-love project?
8. Celebrate The Uniqueness of You!
The next step in the journey of self-love is to celebrate the uniqueness of you. There is only one you on this planet. There has never been anyone like you before you, no one like you now, and no one like you coming in the future. You are a unique individual with a unique energetic fingerprint. It’s time to celebrate that and love that.
Your path in the world is uniquely yours and it is about loving yourself on that path, and giving yourself the support and self-love you need so you can keep on growing.
9. Celebrate the Divinity Within
As an extension of this, we come to Step #9 and the belief that each of us is a part of the Divine … the great “All that is”, consciousness, God, Great Spirit – whatever name works for you. We have just forgotten this.
Imagine being a part of love rather than separate from it?
I believe this is the missing key to feeling self-love.
When we tap into this it’s like tapping into self-love on steroids.
If you’re listening now and you have some beliefs around spirituality you may accept this idea. If you don’t you may see this as a big, and pretty out there, call.
Wherever you are on this spectrum I ask you to give this idea a go. My experience is that this opens the door to self-love because it is like we have found the missing part of the whole. We have returned to wholeness. There is such beauty and love when we connect with the divine within.
And this is something that is completely available to any of us right now. We just have to accept it as an idea and step in and experience it for ourselves.
Experiment
So now we’ve talked about it … I want to suggest an experiment to you.
Imagine just for one day or if that’s too much, just one hour, you do an experiment where instead of criticizing yourself, comparing yourself or pushing yourself to get to an outcome, you bring in energy and frequency of self-acceptance and self-love. And you see how maybe, just maybe, you are part of a larger, loving whole?
Why not try this now – take a calm breath in and out and on your next breath – breathe a feeling of love into your body.
Feel the energetic difference in your body after only a couple of minutes.
After a while, you’ll find that you’re actually receiving more ideas and more insights.
So if you can just try this experiment, for just one hour of a day, and then expand that experiment over to over half a day, and then a day, and then you will see how self-love can become a way of life that can create more ease, flow, and abundance in your life. I’ve found it really is a much easier and better way of living, particularly after all these years of living with a really tyrannical inner critic.
Journal the results you get so you can take note of what is going on and see the differences.
So this is a very simple experiment for you to try yourself, and I’d love to see that in the comments to the podcast.
Again, thank you so much for being a part of Your Freedom Unlimited. I really appreciate the fact that you’re here. I also appreciate your reviews and ratings. Please write and review in the Apple App Store, or wherever it is that you listen to this podcast beat on Google, on Stitcher on Spotify. Your reviews will help more people find this podcast.
Over To You
As ever on Your Freedom Unlimited, it’s now time to hand this over to you. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that there may be some ideas you can try on for size.
In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments email me at hello@jenramsey.com or DM me on Instagram @jenramseyfreedom. I’d love to chat more about your journey with self-love and to lend your hand in whatever way I can.
Can you rate and review this podcast and also subscribe to it wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts. Every review and every rating help so I really appreciate your help in getting this work out to the world. Until we speak again lots of love
Jen xo
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