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Feeling Good About You

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were all born in a beautiful place with loving parents who were happy in themselves and who knew how to meet all our emotional needs and take care of us so we could flourish and thrive and reach our full potential and be our best self with our best life?

If that had happened for you, how good do you think you might feel about yourself? Pretty good, eh?

The truth is that unfortunately, that’s a very rare occurrence because our parents probably didn’t have that either. They can only give what they can, coming from where they’re coming from.

Even when parents do their very best coming from where they’ve come from, it can fall short of allowing us to feel intrinsically good about ourselves. Whether that’s because of situation, circumstance or Enneagram personalities or Love Languages etc, many children and young people do not get their emotional needs met, or sometimes even basic care needs met, and do not get to flourish and thrive as well as they might.

This means that we have the capacity to feel good about ourselves – we just need the right care and messages to bring us to this space.

Good news

The good news is that this is something we can do for ourselves. We can meet our own emotional needs to feel good, rather than allowing outside circumstances or experiences to dictate how we feel about ourselves, or needing to rely on other people to make us feel good about ourselves.

Indeed, if we are needing or wanting approval from others to feel better about ourselves, or needing or wanting acceptance or love or permission etc. we actually just stay in the space of low self-feeling because even if we get the approval, or acceptance or love or permission, etc. this week, we’ll just need it again next week and the next. We just end up becoming more needy.

And even if we get these given to us, if we have low self-worth, how are we really going to be able to believe it?

Instead, by cultivating the space of feeling good about ourselves – faults, flaws and all – not only do we not need outside approval, acceptance, love, permission, etc. – when we already feel those things for ourselves we can actually ‘let them in’ when they come from others so much more authentically because we can believe them!

Let’s start working on this now

The biggest single problem I have found is that people spend much more time focusing on what they don’t like about themselves rather than what they do.

It’s like if we find fault with ourselves and beat ourselves up over it – and then make a mistake and beat ourselves up over that – and then compare ourselves to someone else and feel inadequate so feel the hit of that – and then feel bad over another fault we have . . . that somehow, things will magically improve and we’ll feel good about ourselves!

I want to tell you right now, that never works! We can’t build a positive from a negative.

If we want to start feeling good about ourselves we need to start noticing ‘what’s good about us!’

Sometimes, when we’re feeling really low it can seem there’s nothing good about us and we can just feel hopeless.

Yet the truth is you were born a baby. What baby isn’t born with good inside them? All babies have good in them, be it their higher Enneagram personality (Part One, chapter one) or their yet-to-be-discovered talents or abilities, or loving nature, etc.

You were born a baby and have all those too. You may have been pulled away from that truth for whatever seemingly valid reason or reasons – and to a small extent or an enormous one – but the truth it still is.

So if you really wanted to, I know you could start to find some good things about you . . .

1. Taking Action

Whether you do this with pen and paper or put it directly into your most convenient device, start making a list – right now – of any good qualities you know are in you innately. Below is a list to get some ideas going; you can see some more in Part One, chapter nine. What words describe you?

~ Kind, thoughtful, helpful, honest, loyal, friendly, reliable, caring, good friend, good listener, trustworthy, bright, smart, musical, good at P.E. (or other subject), funny, fair, creative, artistic, compassionate, capable, loving, generous, achiever, likeable, tender-hearted, organised, sociable, patient, unique, articulate, animal lover . . .

Could you start with any of these? Keep adding to your list – every day. You can include physical things too, like you might like your hair or your eyes or your body or have a nice smile. Make your list up to at least 40 qualities you like about yourself. Yes – at least 40! I’ve had clients get to 15 or 20 and then say “That’s enough!” No it’s not enough! There’s no ‘enough’ when you’re recognising positive things about yourself! (My clients have to find 50 qualities!)

Even if you start with only 2 or 3 but add another one each day that you are willing to recognise in yourself, you will start to feel a little bit better about yourself – and by the time you get to 40, you’ll feel far happier about yourself!

And with all the things you currently don’t like about yourself – stop giving them attention! What you focus on grows and you want your good qualities to be growing, so focus on them.

2. Acceptance

The next thing you can do to help you feel good about you is to start accepting other people as they are.

It is much more difficult to feel self-acceptance if we’re judging other people all the time!

Decide now that, unless it affects you directly, it’s none of your business how someone else chooses to act, behave, speak, wear their hair, eat, live etc. Instead of using your time and energy to judge them, use it to cultivate your own sense of feeling good about you from a positive space.

When you accept everyone is responsible for themselves and that their choices are their concern, you create the room to let in your own self acceptance. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with them or condone their behaviour; it just means you stop exhausting yourself judging it. Once you stop judging and start accepting, you’ll find it feels much nicer and you will feel a big shift in the way you look at your world too.

Having paved the way for self-acceptance, know that – however pulled off this truth you are – you were born perfectly good enough, loving and lovable and worthy and deserving of good things. You still are. (Part One, chapter four).

If you were willing to begin to accept yourself as you are what belief would you first need to change? See Part One, chapter two and see if anything there resonates with you. Just start with one belief and then turn it around as explained in Part one, chapter four – Reprogramming your conscious mind and Reprogramming your subconscious mind. Know you can do this.

Realise that what you tell yourself really does matter and be willing to start saying to yourself “I am willing to allow myself to accept myself exactly as I am.” Even if it feels a lie right now, the more you say it, with feeling, the more your brain will take it on board and the easier it will become.

Allow yourself to connect with it a little bit more each time, even if at first it seems stupid or pointless. If you do, you will notice a huge difference in how you feel after a month!

3. Approval

Equally important is self-approval.

Needing to have approval from others never feels good for very long because unless we agree with the approval, we won’t really believe it.

As I’ve said above, the paradox is that the more we approve of ourselves, the less approval we need from others because we feel in good space anyway. And if we do receive approval, we can enjoy it because we’ll believe it!

Start today to say “I am willing to approve of myself” “I am willing to approve of myself” “I am willing to approve of myself exactly as I am”. At first it may seem untrue and pointless, yet if it was true now you wouldn’t need to be saying it! The whole point of saying statements like this is that it paints the picture for where you want to get. You have to know where you want to get before you can go there!

The more you say “I approve of myself” with the focus and willingness to allow yourself to feel this, the quicker you will notice the change. (Even 200, 300, or 400 times a day isn’t many of your 60,000 to 90,000 thoughts!)

The other benefit is that when you are constantly saying “I approve of myself” it makes it very much more difficult to let yourself do things you disapprove of so saves in advance a whole lot of beating yourself up!

You can then let this sense of approval flow out into your every day life to see your world from this different perspective too. This shifts your focus to giving power to what you do want and lays down judgment!

To speed up the positive shift of self-acceptance and self-approval you could use The Swish visualisation (Part Two, Confidence) and adapt it for self-acceptance and self-approval images. You could also do the visualisation called Whole and Worthy in Part Two: Self-Harming – every day for a month would be great. Also see the visualisation called Inner Child in Part Two, Worthiness and Deservability and do that often too. Perhaps alternate this with the one above on that daily basis . . . The more you accept and approve of yourself the better you will feel about yourself!

4. Love Yourself

I know that first up, this can seem off-the-scale weird and uncomfortable. Yet, all you’re really doing is turning your capacity to love ‘in on yourself’ as well as naturally loving, or being willing to love others. When it says in the Bible “Love thy neighbour as thyself” it means you count too and are deserving of your own love too.

It’s actually the secret to happiness, because love is the most powerful emotional force we have and where love prevails everything flows in positive energy. I now project love into whatever I’m doing, like emptying the bins or decorating or writing emails or shopping . . . and solve things for myself by injecting love into ‘the thing’ or my feelings about it. I cannot tell you how awesome it feels.

When you have this feeling flowing through you because you Love Yourself, you are guaranteed to feel good, live in your Palace mind and be your best self, living your best life.

Go to the topic How To Like and Love Yourself here in Part Two and see Part One, chapter nine. Allow yourself to get comfortable with the prospect of Loving Yourself and feeling good – for no reason other than you are alive! It’s a fab way to live.