Happy Tuesday, everyone! I hope you all chose to have a great weekend and an awesome Monday! Remember, you are always at choice for how your day is. This is a great reminder for everyone, including myself.
Today, I want to talk about loving yourself. Many of my friends know that one of my favorite books is “You Are a Badass” by Jen Sincero. Jen preaches in every single one of her chapters to “love yourself.” It is by far one of the most important things we can do, so that we can make ourselves happy and start being badasses.
Ok, so love yourself. That’s easy. I’ll just tell myself that I should love myself. Right? We wish it was that easy! We all know it’s important, yet we all struggle with it! Hopefully today I can give you a couple of specific ways to stop talking bad about yourself and start loving yourself instead.
We are all pretty familiar with this idea that we have a conscious mind. We consciously make decisions constantly all day, every day. Our conscious mind is all over the place, running through our thoughts like a mad man (sometimes more so for some than others). It is filtering everything we see, hear, and think. Our conscious mind isn’t fully developed, though, until sometime around puberty. That means there’s something else guiding us up until that point and continues to guide us even after our conscious mind is fully developed. That something else is called our subconscious mind.
Our subconscious mind, unlike our conscious mind, does not have a filter. It takes everything in at face value. It doesn’t understand sarcasm or jokes. It will believe anything anybody tells it, including ourselves. All our lives, especially as our little kid selves, our subconscious mind takes in information and begins to formulate beliefs and values. These beliefs and values are called icebergs. They are underlying beliefs that run our lives and influence our every day decisions. These icebergs can absolutely be good! For instance, an iceberg can prevent someone from becoming a smoker if they have an iceberg that says, “smoking is bad and will only cause problems for me.” But, some icebergs can be bad. For example, an iceberg that says, “People aren’t safe; I must build a shield to protect myself.” Now all of a sudden that weight you wanted to lose is actually a fortress of flabby solitude. We can learn to change these underlying beliefs to make them into more productive beliefs for ourselves.
The first thing we have to do to change these icebergs is become aware of what they. Identify a problem you are having; losing weight, believing you’re beautiful, quitting smoking, etc. Then write down what some of your internal beliefs might be that could have created them. Ex. eating is my comfort, I don’t have a significant other so I must be ugly, I need to smoke for stress relief, etc. Once you’ve identified your icebergs (become self-aware) you can start the process of changing them.
Here’s another thing about our subconscious mind. It is always around. You can’t ditch it. So we need to spend time around people and in an environment that is suited to who we want to be. Who is it that we spend the most time around, by the way? Oh yeah, it’s ourselves! So we also need to be aware of what we are saying to ourselves. Your subconscious mind is listening to you. So STOP self-deprecating. Like I said before, our subconscious mind does not understand the difference between truth, sarcasm, and jokes. It takes everything unfiltered and believes it. So in the words of Jen Sincero, “Hence, what you tell yourself on a regular basis is muy importante.” Stop cracking jokes at your own expense. How would you feel if it was someone else saying those same things to you? So why would you say it about your own self? Love yourself. Instead, tell yourself how beautiful you are. Tell yourself, how awesome you are. Say things like “you are a badass” and “I love running, and I am sexy!” You are listening. You will begin to believe yourself when you hear yourself enough times. Be nice to yourself, and love yourself.
I hope this can help someone become better at loving themselves. Don’t forget to always be looking for the positive and work towards being more optimistic! Here is my daily Find the Positive: 1. I got to finally be back home after two weeks of traveling. It was so great and refreshing to take a day to myself and relax yesterday. 2. My puppy still loves me even though I haven’t been around much for these last two weeks. She’s been super loving towards me and is nearly potty trained! 3. I got to start planning for a camping trip with my best friend! I’m really looking forward to camping and hiking with her.
Please feel free to share your FTP, or if you don’t feel comfortable commenting please remember to journal about them! If you have any questions, comments, or just need to chat please comment below or send me an email! Have a great week, it’s your choice!
AT CHOICE 
This was a great read. It makes me reflect on my own icebergs, and how the ones I value most are also those that hinder me at time, because they are out of my awareness. The hardest thing for me is recognizing some of those beliefs. I recently learned that sometimes it takes the mental agility to let someone else help me identify what’s going on at the bottom of my iceberg. 1. I got to see my family today, this means a lot because of how long we’ve been disconnected. 2. Listened to someone’s good advice during a conversation today, sometimes it takes that outside view to get the whole view of a situation. 3. I wore my new kilt, that thing is awesome so I had to!
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