I’ve recently been thinking a lot about self love and sadly, feel that this term isn’t used as much as it should be. When was the last time you heard somebody say, ‘She/he has a lot of self-love’? Instead you’re more likely to have heard, ‘Oh doesn’t she/he just love her/himself.’ Right? Self love is quite often viewed as something negative. However, there’s a difference between loving ones self and arrogance. This post is not about the latter.

For me, self love is the building block for leading a happy life. It’s at the core of everything that we do, from our thoughts, to our actions and even down to the people that we choose to spend our time with.

Self love sets standards. The standard that you love yourself, sets the standard for the love that you receive from others. I’m not just talking about relationships, but every single interaction that we have. Here’s the thing, when we learn to truly love ourselves we tend to have less tolerance for people who do not respect or value us. Meaning not that we find it easier, but that we are more likely to distance that person from our life and instead surround ourselves with people who have a higher standard of respect. We then too begin to attract people with similar standards. 

It works with other areas of your life too. For example, your career. The more love that you have for yourself, the more success (however you may choose to define success) you believe you are worthy of and hence, the more success you set out to achieve. The concept is simple really when you think about it, yet it’s not always so simple to actually give yourself enough love.

The world that we live in doesn’t help. We’re constantly surrounded by social ideals; from what we wear, to how we should act and even what we should look like. We live in a world of marketing and social media, which most of us fill a good chunk of our lives with. It’s difficult to escape comparing ourselves to billboard models and Insta girls and guys. But let me let you in on a secret, it’s not real. There’s photoshop, FaceTune, filters, angles, lighting, followers being bought left, right and centre and god knows what else. We sometimes need to take a step back and start noting what we like about ourselves, rather than what we feel that we are lacking.

Now I won’t go fully into social media, because that’s another topic that I’ll most probably write a different blog post on soon. However, I do want to stress the importance of praising yourself more often. Self love isn’t about thinking you’re perfect, it’s just about acknowledging everything that’s great about yourself, knowing your worth and working to improve anything that you’re not fully happy with. Self love enables us to better ourselves, without us even realising it. The only way that I can describe it is that when you start to love yourself, life becomes a little lighter. You see more happiness and find that you have more love for others too.

So go on, give yourself a little love. You won’t regret it, I promise.