How to Actually Love Yourself
Exactly what I did
Hi there,
I’ve been thinking about you this week as we move into 2025. And I want to start this year with your most important relationship — your relationship with yourself.
This is a long post — and it goes deep on increasing your self worth and confidence and my own path to self acceptance. I really, truly believe that this message applies to everyone — I’ve never met a single human who doesn’t struggle with their worth at some point. The truth is that most of us struggle with our self worth a lot. Most of us at some point or another fear that we’re not smart enough, attractive enough, successful enough, or just plain enough.
My life’s work is helping people learn to feel more secure in who they are so they can have healthy, fulfilling relationships. It’s your life’s work to grow to know, understand, and accept yourself — beyond what you’ve been taught or conditioned to believe about yourself.
Let’s start with a basic definition: To me, self love means accepting yourself — in spite of not always liking yourself. Self love means forgiving yourself instead of shaming yourself — and pushing yourself to grow from missteps.
Self love is not thinking you’re perfect. It’s not stagnation or avoiding accountability.
It’s fundamentally about feeling good about who you are — with imperfections and room to grow. It’s accepting that you’re a human being, and that even if there are things about yourself you don’t like, you are worthy and enough.
And most of all: You are deserving of love.
You learned your own sense of worthiness from Day 1 — from the way you were cared for and from the way you were nourished — and as you aged, from the way you were punished or rewarded. Outside of your family, you learned worth from societal messaging and your culture that told you when to get married, when to have kids, how much to achieve, how much money to make. Your sense of inherent goodness comes from that early conditioning, and none of us can escape it. Whether your upbringing left you with trauma or not, that conditioning is there for all of us.
But that life’s work of yours is to find your internal compass — self acceptance and self love — which will inform how you want to live. It will challenge your programming and give you the agency to decide for yourself and to withstand the ups and downs that come with everyday life — and with love.
Getting to a point of self acceptance and self love took me some time. I had to reconcile the parts I didn’t like — especially my habit of not speaking up in my relationships, my own low self worth, and my fear of abandonment.
I didn’t have a choice. After my divorce and losing my mom, I had to learn to stand on my own two feet. These two major sources of love and stability in my life had vanished — and it was all down to me.
I had to take responsibility for my own happiness and security. I couldn’t rely on my partner anymore, and I had to learn how to meet my needs for security — both financial and emotional — in a deeper, more sustainable way. I had to figure out how to bring more joy, adventure, and meaning into my life without relying on someone else to fill those spaces.
Today, I’m going to tell you exactly how I raised my self worth and have helped countless others do the same.