Love Yourself (and the Rest Will Follow)
When Michelle was pregnant with Samantha, I got lots of unsolicited advice about parenting, which is what often happens when you’re about to have a baby, especially your first. I’m sure most people meant well, but it got to be a bit overwhelming since much of it made no sense to me. I didn’t have any real context for what they were saying. I did, however, get some parenting advice from Chris Andersonn, an amazing personal and spiritual counselor, that had a profound impact on me.
Chris said, “Mike, when your daughter is born, you have two primary jobs. They’re both important, but the second one is even more essential than the first. The first job is to teach her how to be in the world. This means you’ll have to help her learn things like how to walk, talk, read, write, look both ways before she crosses the street, tie her shoes, ride her bike, and much more. As she gets older, you’ll have to teach her how to drive a car, manage her money, make good decisions, and all kinds of practical things about how to successfully navigate life. Now, this is a really big job; it’ll go on for many years, you’ll probably screw it up a bunch of times, but it’s what you sign up for as a parent. And, as big as this first job is, it’s not nearly as important as your second job as her father. The most important job you have is to teach her how to authentically love herself as she grows up.”
I was a bit surprised to hear Chris say this. It wasn’t something I’d heard before, even with all the advice I’d been given in the past few months. But the truth of what he said resonated with me deeply. After a bit of a pause, I asked him, “How do I do that?”
“You love yourself, and let her see that,” Chris said. “This isn’t easy. Self-love takes real commitment, courage, and follow-through. But if you do, that’s how you can best teach her to genuinely love herself.”
This was and is great advice—not just for parenting but for life. However, as I’ve learned over the past 8 years as a father, and the past 40 years as a human being, understanding the concept of self-love is quite a bit different (and easier) than actually loving myself.
How do you feel about self-love? More important, how well do you love yourself? For most of us, loving ourselves is something we may know is important, but often we have difficulty actually doing so in an authentic way. Why is this? What makes loving ourselves so tricky?
First, we have a tendency to demand perfection and to be hypercritical of ourselves. Most people I know and work with, myself included, have some version of “I’m not good enough” that runs their lives. While we may be aware of this phenomenon, we’re often unconscious about certain aspects of it—both how it manifests and the negative impact it can have.
About a year after Michelle and I started dating, I was talking to her about some things that were frustrating me. I began to really rail on myself in a negative way, although I wasn’t fully aware of what I was doing. She stopped me and said, “Hey, don’t talk about my boyfriend like that.”
A bit surprised by her comment, I said, “What do you mean?”
Michelle said, “Listen, if someone else were talking about you in such a negative way, I’d be upset with them. Just because you’re you, doesn’t give you the right to talk about yourself like that. You’re my boyfriend and I love you; it offends me to hear you say those negative things about yourself.”
Michelle’s feedback stopped me in my tracks and made me realize that my self-criticism had a negative impact not only on me but also on her (and anyone else who cared about me). When we’re obsessed with self-criticism and perfection demands (i.e., holding ourselves to unrealistic expectations that we never can achieve), loving ourselves is difficult, if not impossible.
Second, we sometimes feel embarrassed, guilty, or even ashamed of loving ourselves. My friend Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (aka SARK), an incredible artist and the best-selling author of many inspiring books, tells a great story in her TEDx talk entitled “Succulence is Power.” In it, she talks about walking into an elevator in New York City and being “blinded by the radiance of a man” she saw. She said to him, “Wow, you have the best energy!”
He responded by saying, “Thank you, I’m so in love with myself.”
Susan said, “I thought to myself, ‘Can he say that?’ Then I thought, ‘Why am I not saying that?’ ”
We’ve somehow picked up along the way that loving ourselves is not okay—we think it’s arrogant, narcissistic, self-absorbed, and something we shouldn’t do (or at least shouldn’t admit to doing out loud to others who might judge us for it).
And finally and probably most insidious is that we don’t know how to love ourselves and are often either unwilling or uncomfortable admitting this to ourselves and to others. This fear and self-judgment keeps us stuck. We worry that we’re doing something wrong or, even worse, that there’s something wrong with us for not being able to sustain self-love in a genuine way.
Self-love is one of those things that often falls into the category of “you know.” It’s referred to in various ways and by many people, but often in the vague sense of “Well, just love yourself … you know.” Unfortunately, we don’t know, or at least we aren’t quite sure what it looks like, feels like, and is like to love ourselves—especially in particular areas of our lives (usually the ones that are most painful and difficult for us). Simply hearing people say “just love yourself” doesn’t seem to address the true depth, challenge, complexity, and importance of learning how to do it in an authentic and sustainable way.
Self-love is what we’re all searching for. Sadly, we spend most of our time thinking that someone or something else can give us what only we can give ourselves. To be truly fulfilled in life, we have to find the love within us and give it to ourselves. No other person, material possession, or accomplishment can do it. It’s up to us. Self-love, as Whitney Houston sang about in her 1986 megahit song, is the “Greatest Love of All.”
So how can we start loving ourselves in a more conscious, real, and effective way?
It’s important to remember that we actually know how to do it and it’s in our DNA, even if we’ve forgotten. One of my favorite memories of both of my girls when they were toddlers (between about one and two years of age) was watching them see themselves in a mirror. At this stage in a child’s development, they are usually beginning to walk, and they have the ability to recognize that the little person they see in the mirror is actually them; it’s quite fascinating and adorable.
Rosie really loved this. We had full-length mirrors on the closet doors in our master bedroom, and when she was there, she would often get so excited to see herself. I would say, “Who’s that in the mirror, Rosie?” She would then squeal with excitement. Then I’d say, “Rosie, kiss the baby!” She would run over to the mirror and start kissing herself with such authentic joy and love; it was beautiful to see. I’m sure some of it had to do with the positive reaction she got from us, but at some deep level, it also seemed as though Rosie was just expressing her natural and innate love for herself, without any of the cultural conditioning we learn as we get older. When was the last time you did that when you saw yourself in a full-length mirror?
It’s also important for us to remove the conditions we place on our “love” for ourselves and to treat ourselves with an enormous amount of compassion. If we only “love” ourselves when we do “good” things, “succeed” in specific ways, or take care of ourselves in ways we deem important, it’s not actually love; it’s approval. While there’s nothing wrong with us feeling good about ourselves in relation to these and other positive things, truly loving ourselves is an unconditional process—which means celebrating all of who we are, both our light side and our dark shadow self. By letting go of our conditions and loving ourselves unconditionally, like how we often love babies, animals, or others whom we have little or no specific expectations of, we can start to deepen our authentic love for ourselves.
Even if we’re not exactly sure how to do it or it may feel a bit awkward at first, we can give ourselves permission to express love for ourselves in any and every way possible. It’s less important what we do specifically and more important where it comes from (i.e., a genuine place within us that wants to experience love for ourselves).
There are lots of things we can do—both big and small—to practice loving ourselves. Speaking kindly about ourselves, taking compliments graciously, forgiving ourselves when we make mistakes, taking care of our health, having compassion for ourselves, honoring our emotions, pampering ourselves, celebrating our successes (and failures), appreciating our “flaws”—these are all simple (although not always easy) things we can do to practice self-love. We can also ask for help and look to others who seem to embody self-love in order to get support, guidance, and inspiration from them. Loving ourselves is a lifelong, never-ending practice.
Self-love is the starting point, not the endgame, of our conscious growth and development. When we put our attention on loving ourselves in an authentic way, everything in our lives that’s important to us—our work, our relationships, our goals, and more—flows from there with a sense of ease, joy, and, most important, love.
And, when we truly love ourselves, most of what we worry about and even much of what we strive for in life become meaningless. We may still have some worries, and we’ll definitely continue to have goals, dreams, and desires. However, from a place of true self-love, the fear behind our worries and the motivation for our goals dramatically changes from something we have to avoid or produce in order to be valued to something we’re genuinely concerned about or really want to accomplish.