Learning to Accept Love from Yourself and Others is Key to Your Success
Do you love yourself? Not many things can cripple your motivation to get things done like a lack of self-love. Yet often you might not even be conscious of this or consider it to be a real problem. You might ask, “Why should I love myself? Isn’t that just vanity? What’s the point?” However, loving yourself and giving yourself the emotional nourishment you need is crucial to your ability to accomplish your goals.
You Need Nourishment to Move Forward
You may wonder why love is important, anyway. Consider this: when the marines have meals, the youngest among them are fed first. This arises from an understanding that they need to be well-nourished in order to build up the reserves of strength and energy they’ll need in order to accomplish what lays ahead.
The same is true emotionally, as well. You need to nourish your emotional side in order to have the motivation to keep you going. You need self-love to replenish your reserves of energy and balance out your self-criticism.
Balance Your Self-Criticism and Keep Your Inner Child Happy
Why do you need to balance your self-criticism, though? Well, self-criticism is something that we all tend to learn fairly early on in our lives. We learn that we need to be able to handle things on our own, that we should be setting high expectations for ourselves and living up to them, that we should get things done without needing to ask for help or outside validation. Yet while self-reliance can be an important skill to develop, putting too much focus on it can make you neglect yourself.
At our core, each of us still lives with the child we were all those years ago. In addition to your most basic physical needs,, such as food, shelter, clothing, etc, you have basic emotional needs that need to be filled as well to keep that inner child satisfied. If you continually make yourself work without respite, if you’re thankless and cold and critical to yourself, your inner child will grow resentful. This is just the same as how a real child would grow resentful if you never treated them with warmth or let them have fun.
Imagine how hard it is to go about your day when you have a child with you who becomes resentful and uncooperative. This is what it’s like trying to advance your life with a neglected inner child. Pay close attention to your inner child’s emotional needs and make sure you’re not neglecting them.
Be Good to Yourself So You Can Be Good to Others
In addition to helping you stay motivated to accomplish your goals, learning to love and appreciate yourself better will also improve how well you treat the other people in your life.
We’re often told that the so-called “Golden Rule” is to treat others as we would like to be treated. In other words, love your neighbor as you love yourself. However, if you don’t treat yourself well, or don’t love yourself, then where’s the foundation to treat others well under that model? We all know that the people who like themselves the least tend to take it out on others and bully them, so we’ve seen this in action.
This is just another way of demonstrating what we already know: being properly nourished and loved is important and has a direct impact on how well you do in both your professional and personal lives.
Cognitive Skills Training Improves Self-Esteem
However, self-love can often require unlearning a lot of negative self-criticism and resolving issues with your self-esteem. To accomplish this, you have to be in control of your emotions. One of the best ways to learn emotional control and improve your self-esteem is with cognitive skills training.
Each of the core cognitive skills you work on in connection to self-esteem will help you deal with emotions more healthily. Shape recognition helps you describe and define your emotions, direction and orientation help you understand the relationships between people and things, environmental awareness helps you build mental templates for similar situations, etc.
If you’re interested in utilizing cognitive skills training to improve your emotional management and self-esteem, learn to love yourself, and move forward with the confidence you need to accomplish your goals, contact Critical Thinking for Success at 847-845-0422 for a consultation. We pioneer the cognitive skills training program and serve clients of all walks of life from throughout northern Illinois. Give us a call—your inner child will thank you!
Critical Thinking For Success
666 East Dundee Suite
Northbrook, Illinois 60062
847-845-0422
