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Self love

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Embarking on a journey of self-discovery in a world that often demands perfection and relentless achievement, the transformative path of embracing self-love and building confidence becomes an empowering narrative for women seeking resilience and personal fulfillment. In this blog post, we delve into the art of self-love and confidence-building—essential components for navigating life’s challenges and thriving as a modern woman. How to Ignite the Power of Self-Love: Building Confidence and Resilience offers actionable insights that will guide you through this empowering journey, fostering a deeper connection with yourself and unlocking the true potential within.

Embracing the Journey

The journey to self-love is a personal and transformative one. Begin by acknowledging that imperfections are part of what makes you uniquely beautiful. Share personal stories and experiences that resonate with the struggles and triumphs of embracing oneself authentically.

Building Confidence Brick by Brick

Confidence is not an inherent trait; it’s a skill that can be developed over time. Provide actionable tips and strategies for building confidence, whether through setting and achieving small goals, celebrating accomplishments, or practicing positive affirmations. Share stories of women who have transformed self-doubt into unshakable confidence.

Nurturing Resilience in the Face of Challenges

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks and adversity. Discuss the importance of resilience in personal growth and provide practical advice on cultivating this trait. Highlight stories of women who have faced adversity head-on, showcasing their resilience and the valuable lessons gained from overcoming obstacles.

Self-Love Rituals and Practices

Explore various self-love rituals and practices that contribute to overall well-being. From mindfulness exercises and self-care routines to embracing self-compassion, offer actionable insights that readers can incorporate into their daily lives. Share personal anecdotes or success stories illustrating the positive impact of these practices.

Voices of Empowerment

Feature interviews or quotes from inspiring women who have embraced self-love, built confidence, and demonstrated resilience. Their voices can serve as a source of motivation and encouragement for readers navigating similar journeys. Include diverse perspectives to resonate with a broad audience.

Conclusion:

Embracing self-love, building confidence, and cultivating resilience are powerful tools that every woman can wield on her journey to personal fulfillment. By sharing stories, insights, and actionable tips, we hope to inspire and empower our readers to embark on their own transformative journeys, realizing the strength and beauty that lie within.

In a world where self-love is revolutionary, let’s celebrate the unique journey each woman takes toward embracing her authenticity, building unshakeable confidence, and cultivating resilience in the face of life’s ebbs and flows.

Self-love requires understanding and engaging with yourself at the most intimate level, and opening up to yourself in a way that might be uncomfortable and unfamiliar for most of us.

Here are our 5 tips to help you live with self-love:

1) Live with Intent:

Live mindfully, truthfully, and intentionally. Do not lose yourself in your moments, and if you do, find out why you lost yourself and what you can do to stay present.

Your life is limited – time is your most important currency – and the more you show yourself that you value your time, the more you prove to yourself that you love your life.

2) Live with Care:

Treat yourself well; physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Listen to your body and your mind at the most basic level – if something doesn’t make you feel good, then it is probably bad for you. Protect yourself, from the dangers of both greasy food and toxic friends.

Your mind is your window into the world; keep it clean, keep it strong, and your world will stay equally positive.

Practice a proper diet, exercise regularly, sleep enough hours, and engage in healthy social behavior that secures your personal growth.

And make sure to live with boundaries. Don’t limit yourself, but don’t confuse self-love with hedonism. Moderation is good for the soul.

3) Live with Forgiveness:

You will make mistakes. You’ve most certainly already made a ton, filling you with various bouts of guilt and regret trapped in the back of your head.

You are human, after all, and that’s what makes life worth living: the unexpectedness of your own humanity

But learn to forgive, yourself and those around you. Every day you wake up is an opportunity to grow away from the person you were the day before.

If that person made a mistake, then try to understand and forgive, as you can work towards being a different person tomorrow.

4) Live with Need:

Your mind is your greatest asset, so trust it. When presented with a situation to overindulge, ask yourself: do I need this or do I want it? In most cases, what you think you need is simply a case of you wanting it.

And while it is more than fine to pleasure yourself with your own desires every now and then, it is important to remember not to fall into self-made destructive habits based on desire and want.

Live according to what your mind, body, and soul need.

Turn away from the pleasures of laziness, of automatic happiness, of destructive behavior, because these are short-term, and they care nothing for the person you could be.

You are the only person who must live with yourself for your entire life, so make your happiness last longer than a day.

5) Live with Yourself:

And finally, it is crucial to learn to live with yourself as if you were someone else.

When faced with the task of self-loving, we think too much in the abstract; we think of it as a mental challenge, a psychological question rather than a task we can actively work towards achieving.

But loving yourself is as simple as loving anyone else, so ask yourself: how would you love yourself, if you were someone else?

Treat yourself with the same respect, kindness, and mindfulness that you would offer the people who matter most to you in your life.

Love yourself with the same patience and tenderness you would give your own child, partner, sibling, or parent.

Be kind but be stern; learn to discipline, but learn to forgive. You are your own greatest fan, your own greatest rival, and your own greatest love.

Learn to see yourself in ways you have never considered.

Self-love seems so easy in movies and shows. Just let go of the thoughts, problems, and people causing stress in your life, exchange them with sources of joy and happiness, and voila: you are a self-loving king or queen.

But true, transformative, authentic self-love isn’t so easy. While you might feel great for some time, there will be many moments when you want to give up, where you might convince yourself that your attempts at self-love are meaningless and childish and stupid, that the world is hard and cruel and you should just learn to live with it.

But don’t stop. Keep going. Self-love isn’t about happiness. It’s about improving your life as much as you currently can, and accepting it.

 

Identify what your life’s goals are, and be determined to eliminate distractions that may hinder you from achieving them!

I wish I could convince you that you have never heard this advice before. It is something I had perceived to have a negative connotation, and I guess you also share(d) the same notion. But here I am, trying to change your mind and, essentially, change your life.

The advice is simply “always look out for number 1.”

My earliest reaction to this statement was to Ctrl+Del from my memory. But, like every advice built to tackle your insecurities, this one hit deep and was determined to remain in my consciousness, until I began to question what it really meant to look out for number one.

Does it mean I should put my needs before others? Isn’t this a selfish line of thought? You see, it is true that people criticize what they do not understand or things that touch sensitive spots. Let me call you out on this note: you give too much of yourself but barely get anything in return. You are your biggest limitation, because you do for others things you hardly do for yourself. The whole world’s problem is on your shoulders, as if you do not have problems of your own. Sound familiar? Please dear, these are proven foundational triggers of depression.

Do not get me wrong, I do not believe in taking a self-centered approach to life, thinking solely about yourself alone and carrying out actions that intentionally hurt people around you. My point is to give top priority to the pursuit of happiness, because happiness is no doubt the ultimate goal in life. In fact, you should guard your happiness so jealously that no-one will have the power to define it for you.

Let us begin by establishing that ‘number one’ is you and everything that’s important to you, everything you find fulfilling, everything that makes you strive to be better. There are quite a number of instances that if we think deep enough, it won’t be hard to recall when we put others’s needs above ours.

When you look out for number one, you are thinking and critically taking decisions that affect you positively. You must begin to question your motives to ensure that it benefits you in the long term. This is not selfish, especially bearing in mind that there is an existent ’cause and effect’ principle of life: meaning whatever you do will affect you either positively or negatively, the question is would you rather live with the negative, or perhaps, not so favourable effect?

The idea of looking out for number one also brings to the fore the importance of consciousness in decision making and questioning the norms. It also calls for a deeper understanding of what your values are: can any/everyone define your moral judgement and are you easily influenced by people in your circle. Can you also analyse this circle to ascertain whether or not it is facilitating positive growth?

Wondering why it may be hard to accept this advice? Well, there are two broad reasons.

The first is the fact that we live in a somewhat communal society, where families and associates are close knit. The implication of this is the pressure it has for individuals to ‘live’ for their families and people around them. The second is the fact that we are too quick to judge such an advice without carefully weighing its possible connotations.

Let me add a third one, which I find rather humorous: it is that a lot of selfish and self-centered people live by this principle. Which makes me question whether the concept was established by selfish propagators, or if the narrative behind the concept is facilitated by the kinds of people who practice it, thus creating a stereotype. A typical chicken and egg situation, don’t you think?

Bottom line is to first identify what your life’s goals are, and be determined to eliminate distractions that may hinder you from achieving them. Because at the end of it all, we are all chasing something. Will you help someone chase theirs while you leave yours to suffer?

This is what we mean when we say to always look out for number one.

About Obianuju

Obianuju is a brand and communication specialist. She is passionate about development communication and the use of community radio in rural development

If you feel like you need one, here’s permission to celebrate yourself. Speaking of gender equality in a diversity workshop the other day, we discussed how many men were naturally a lot more inclined to swagger into the CEO’s office and ask for a pay rise, whereas most women cowered and cringed even at the thought of it. I had heard of stories where men would demand a pay rise as their wives had just been made redundant or quit work or gone on maternity leave and they were as a result the main breadwinner. They often got what they wanted.

Until my perceptions of what is acceptable were challenged the other day, I thought such audacity was unimaginable. Then the workshop trainers asked, “Why shouldn’t you demand what you are worth? Most men do it with no encouragement.” Thinking about this statement, I realised there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a woman sauntering into the CEO’s office and asking for a pay because her husband has been made redundant, or she’s received a better job offer elsewhere, or simply she deserves it. It is often unimaginable because we, as women, can’t imagine doing so. Far from us being such demanding divas!

Instead we clip our wings and cut ourselves down to size daily so we can fit into the pigeonholes we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe we should fit in. And sadly, this goes right back to our childhood – as one of my colleagues admitted that growing up even though she was the younger sibling she saw nothing wrong in her mum asking her to cook for the family or iron her younger brother’s shirts. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the discussion on stereotypes during the workshop she realised she had never questioned the assumption that no matter her age she was the caregiver of the men in her family.

Looking at power politics, we discussed how once the minority find themselves in a position of inferiority, the reaction is often anger followed by the desire to be more like those in authority. Hence women trying to be more manly in contexts where men hold the power and women are seen as inferior. Sadly, this inferiority complex also results in women pulling or keeping other women down so they can look more authoritative. How many times have you seen a woman putting another woman down so she can be perceived more senior by those in authority?

Men do the same thing of course – putting someone of their own gender down – to have the upper hand, to look smarter, richer, more virile – and the list goes on. Yet, as men have the traditional position on power in most societies, women putting each other down or throwing each other under the bus just to be accepted into this elite club of power is somehow more disappointing. That constant sense of competition, frustration that one can never really, truly measure up to standards we set so highly for ourselves.

Sadly, we cut ourselves down to size most times, without any help from another woman – sometimes to fit round bottoms into square expectations and somehow for the sheer fear that we will be cut down to size by a man so it may as well be self-inflicted. Which is another reason men are far better at accepting compliments. Tell a man his suit looks good, or his presentation was top notch, you will only see him swagger with even more braggadocio. Tell a woman her outfit is amazing or her sales report for the month was excellent, she will either make excuses about ‘this old thing’ or refer to her work of blood, sweat, tears as ‘oh it was nothing.’ We downplay ourselves.

By: Sinem Onabanjo

It is a terrible feeling to be expected to do or complete something that you are not sure you can do. This can cause undue and unnecessary stress. When you are yourself, you are honest about your limitations, and this gives you the margin you need to maneuver and if necessary outsource jobs or tasks that you can’t do by yourself. I do that alot myself, first for my sanity and secondly to avoid burning out.

One of the biggest lessons I have learnt in the last three years on being yourself is that ; No matter how much you plan, how many team members you have, how great your ideas are, or how much capital you have, you could face disappointment and failure if you are not authentic. We have all had experiences where we felt like we were swimming against the current. Things were just not going well (or as well as we would like) and we had to stop, reevaluate, and regroup.

Everyone knows what you can and can’t do. Your employees very quickly learn your strengths and weaknesses. They get to know what makes you happy and what drives you crazy.

There are a number of benefits to being authentic. Here is just a short list to help motivate you

You are not expected to be perfect

Humility in business is not the same as self-degradation. An element of respect exists when you are sure about your capabilities.  After all, we only have 100 percent. If you are giving that 100 percent in an authentic way, that gives you a better chance at success.

You will learn more.

By knowing and being yourself, you are better able to acknowledge things that you do not know well enough. You won’t be too proud to ask questions because you – and, hopefully, everyone you work with – know how genuine you are. People will respect your ability and even eagerness to pick their brains.

Your goals are clear.

People who are themselves and live happy, fulfilling, authentic lives, have clear goals and ambitions. They are very clear on their motivations and do not overextend themselves to achieve needless results. In other words, they have a laser focus on the important things.

While sharing intimate insights into your life would not be an appropriate means to build fruitful business relationships, it has become quite a trend for colleagues, employees, and employers to share their more human sides.

By using your authenticity and being who you are at your core, you can build trust in your relationships and create a business climate in your life, and work that allows for real fulfillment and joy.