Love Lesson

You are what you love about yourself.

You bring what you love and don’t love about yourself wherever you go.

You want to thrive at work, as a creator, a leader, a founder, well it’s time to level up and love you, completely.

Did you know that self love is choice? It can be the chosen response you have to everything you think, feel and say about yourself. Imagine if you made a commitment to practice love in action without conditions, how different you would feel? Just imagine if you were okay making mistakes, allowing yourself the love and compassion to accept what you’ve done and where you are. Instead of being hard on yourself. Imagine you were able to love yourself into a state of calm or happy.

What’s really incredible about self love is how undervalued it is. We haven’t really figured out why we’re so addicted to romantic love and yet we are confronted with applying the same amount of love inwardly, to ourselves. Love from another to you (outside in) makes us feel so worthwhile, whole and full, well temporarily anyway. In truth, nothing external can actually make you whole, nothing. But so many of us struggle with self love (love from the inside out) because we have been conditioned to only love our perfect, idealistic selves. As children we assumed our parent’s love was conditional, based upon our behaviour and school backed that up, so then we followed suit.

I think many of us started a narrative in our heads that we would only like our perfect, smart, winning, thin (or whatever the external condition was) selves. Your life is really an outward manifestation of the relationship between you and you. Whatever you are struggling with on the inside of yourself you will see somewhere in your external world. As adults we need grasp self love, and build a deep and ongoing unconditional love for ourselves and teach our children to do the same. That is, if we want to truly feel whole and connected, at peace and free.

Love is available for each and every one of us to practice and live right now, in this moment. We really need to learn how to accept ourselves and our lives, as they are right now. Regret and negative experiences can strip us of self love and should only serve as a lesson. To master self love, you have to love your whole self, unconditionally. At some point we just need to make peace with where we’ve come from, no matter what that looks like or how bad it was. We don’t realise this but as we dwell upon our past we end up right back there, we literally bring our past into our now, we relive our worst lives by inviting them into our present lives. We’ve got to learn to reconcile our past without recreating it in the present.

You can, if you are willing, start to love yourself right now. It’s easy, actually really nice, free and doesn’t take as much time as you might think. So, where do you start? Firstly, change the way to speak to yourself and what you believe about yourself. Write a new story, a love story, yours, one between you and you. Be the giver and receiver of your own love. Self love needs to be a disciplined practice until you feel it and know it. Once you truly love yourself, you need to keep loving yourself unconditionally, in spite of what’s happening. It really is a way of life.

With love Nardia xxx