This review helps me feel like I’ve accomplished something in just a month, and it lets me take a big-picture look at my life, something I might not be doing often enough. I look through my calendar and notes and to-do lists and stuff like that, and it doesn’t take long.
Things I’ve learned and want to remember. Other big life events (some of them unexpected). Health and fitness challenges I’ve been doing. Then I spend about 10 minutes that day looking over my past month: So what I’ve done is just set a reminder for the beginning of every month to do my Monthly Review. If I do a quick journal entry reflecting on every month, once a month, then it makes everything easier. I just started doing this, actually, after realizing that my Year-End Reflection took a lot more work than it needs to. Don’t hold it back from yourself any longer.I talked about the Year-End Reflection as a way to look back on your year, realize your accomplishments, solidify your learning … but that can take a lot of work, because we forget a lot of what we’ve done. It only takes a few moments - feel your stress and pain, send yourself love, let yourself feel it.ĭo it 8 times a day. Let yourself receive this love like the love you’ve been craving. No matter how little you’re able to generate, feel it wash over your stress, pain, anger, doubt … like a thick, syrupy liquid soothing the pain. Now try it for yourself, generating the same feeling in your heart, but sending it to yourself instead. Imagine them going through difficulty, and send love from your hear to theirs, hoping to make them better. Imagine first that you are sending love to someone you love very much - your child, your parent, your best friend. As weird or silly as it feels, just try it. Let yourself actually feel it, physically in your body, for just a few moments. Pause and feel any stress, pain, self-doubt, anger, frustration, anxiety you might be feeling. When you see the reminder, the act is very simple (even if it doesn’t feel natural to most people yet - give it time): The reminders only need to be two words: “Love yourself.” Put reminders on your fridge, on your computer, on your phone, on your bathroom mirror, in your car, at your desk, near your TV. Set reminders for yourself, everywhere you go. Giving ourselves love is such an important act of self-care, and yet is rarely ever done. We could deal with uncertainty and chaos and difficulty in a much more resilient way. It makes us more stressed, less happy, anxious, depressed, stuck, procrastinating, less happy in relationships, less focused, more likely to reach for comfort foods or distraction or shopping to comfort ourselves from the stress and pain of being who we are.īut if we could give ourselves love, it would start to heal all of this. We are harsh on ourselves, and don’t like how we look or who we are, in many ways. We get angry at ourselves for eating too much, drinking too much alcohol, messing up in a social situation, getting distracted and watching videos or playing video games, and so on and so on. We don’t trust ourselves to stick to something, because we’ve formed a really bad picture of ourselves over the years. We stress out about uncertainty because we don’t think we’re good enough to deal with it. This is the basic problem that most of us face, every single day. 
Disappointed in themselves, angry at themselves, constantly feeling inadequate.ĭo you relate to this? I think most of us can find a good chunk of this in ourselves. I coach a number of people, 1-on-1 and in small and large groups - and pretty much everyone I meet is hard on themselves in some way. That’s self-love, and it’s a completely foreign concept for the vast majority of people. What is this “self-love” (not in the sexual sense)? Imagine pouring out love in your heart to someone you love dearly - what would that feel like? Now try doing the same thing for yourself. We should give ourselves at least 8 doses of loving ourselves every day. If we have, it’s so rare as to be a forgotten memory.īut it’s my belief that we should do it throughout the day, like trying to drink 8 glasses of water.
Many of us have never consciously done it. In fact, this is so often neglected that when I mention “loving yourself,” many people don’t know what that means. These are wonderful acts of self-care, and they are necessary and important.īut there’s one act of self-care that is very often neglected, and it might be even more important than all the others: the practice of loving yourself. Many of us are (rightfully) focused on taking care of our health, eating nourishing whole foods and trying to be active … while meditating and flossing and taking some time of disconnection, away from devices.
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