How to Be Happy with Yourself – That Is the Question

Oh, my mother would have loved to tell me how to be happy with myself.

• She’d tell me to make sure I looked good whenever I go out because you never know who you’re going to meet. What she meant by that was that maybe I’d meet the right guy that would come and take care of me the rest of my life.
  
  
  
  • Well, right away this was a problem for me since I thought I was fundamentally defective and couldn’t look good.
  
  
  • She’d tell me go to the right college (so I’d find that same right guy that I might meet when I went out looking good). I did just that. I went to Rutgers University and graduated in 3 ½ years. And I even met a guy. Today I’d call him the “right guy” because married to him I learned that how I looked or what college I graduated or choosing a guy just because he looked good enough would never make me happy. That big long 19 year relationship lesson taught me that being happy with myself is an inside job.

So if the guy’s not the answer and how I look isn’t the answer and going to a top college isn’t the answer, how can I be happy with myself?

Stop for a moment and go look in the mirror. What do you see? Is all you see only what’s wrong with you?

Or if I told you to go write a list of your accomplishments would you have a little voice piping up and letting you know that those things are no big deal? Does it say you didn’t do such a great job or that someone else did better?

Or do you know your accomplishments and like how you look in the mirror and STILL aren’t happy with yourself?

If you said yes to any of the above, you are living with some level of damaged self-esteem. Babies don’t have damaged self-esteem. They are quite pleased with themselves. You were a baby and when you were, you were quite pleased with yourself. So what happened? Why are you not happy with yourself now?

Because I grew up in a family that ended up making me feel quite lousy about and with myself and the feelings got more than I could stand, I’ve made a study of how to feel happy with myself for over 40 years. And it’s worked. I feel quite happy with myself.

So how did I do it? Or more importantly, how can you do it? How can you learn to feel happy with yourself?

I’ve discovered that the method is like a 3-legged stool. If you only have 2 of the legs, the stool will topple. If you don’t deal with all three of the areas I’m going to talk about, you probably won’t learn to feel good about yourself i.e. the stool won’t work.

Let’s talk about BELIEF as the first leg of the stool. You have some mistaken beliefs about yourself that you picked up somewhere between that baby who was happy with herself and the adult who’s reading this because you don’t feel happy with yourself. Now you may try or have tried some of the tricky things you find in self-help books or online sites and you still really can’t seem to change your inner belief that you’re somehow not ok.

The second leg of the stool is HEALING. This is the one that most people neglect. We all have a past. Something or some things happened between the happy-with-self baby you were and the unhappy-with-self adult you’ve become. If you are willing to heal your past, then you will be able to change your beliefs about yourself. Your past is holding you to those erroneous beliefs as if you had invisible leg irons keeping your there. If healing the past sounds like something you resonate with, take a look at how this emotion-based program, might help.

Now once you heal the past and can begin to see the falseness of your negative beliefs about yourself and a very interesting thing occurs. You learn how to take INSPIRED ACTION – the third leg of the stool. In other words, you trust your gut, your intuition, your hunches on how to proceed in your life and soon enough because you are connecting to your own inner wisdom, you discover you are quite happy with yourself.

This is not an overnight process but it doesn’t take too long either. In a matter of a few months, you can be on your merry and happy way with tools to take you through a fabulous and very happy rest of your life.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

What to Do if You Were Taught Not to Take Care of Yourself

Selfish or Self-Care?

It seems when I was a child I was never taught about self-care or to want things. Whenever I wanted something, I was accused of being selfish.  It didn't matter if I was tired or just not wanting to do chores. I heard it so much and so often and didn't want to think I was anything bad like that, I stopped taking care of myself in many different ways. If taking care of me was selfish, than taking care of and pleasing others was unselfish . And I'd much rather be unselfish. I suspect many people and maybe more women are taught this self-defeating, unloving attitude by other women - mostly their mothers who had learned the same thing in their early lives.

If you experienced something like that dynamic somewhere in your past, you might find it difficult to rest enough, difficult to eat well, difficult to take care of your body in other ways. You might find it difficult to take care of yourself in relationships. You might judge your emotions as unworthy of a good (unselfish) person. You might also find it difficult to have healthy boundaries and difficult to stand up for what you know is right.

How do I know all of this? I know it because I have lived it in one way or another. So what do you do if you see yourself in these words?

• Start paying attention to how you treat yourself. Take a little notebook and write down the ways you see you not taking good physical care of yourself. Then get support to change those old habits. Find someone or someones who will help you understand that you are infected with wrong thinking. Funny. My mother also said, "God helps those who help themselves." I'll buy that one. So I help myself.
  

• Start paying attention to how others treat you. Are you taken advantage of in relationships? Are you expected to give more than your partner? Are you underpaid? Do you do work that is unsatisfying? Talk to someone who loves you enough to be an honest mirror and listen to what they are saying. It is most likely the truth and you most likely know it is deep down inside yourself.

Find support to learn to love yourself from the inside out.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching