by Haasini Alumalla
Self-love is the ideology that one has an importance and regard for their own well-being and happiness above negativity and societal pressures. I believe that the focus on one’s self-love is extremely beneficial to their professional and personal success later on in life.
Each and every profession requires, somewhat, an amount of self-love in order to keep going and to not just continue, but also succeed. Growth is never linear and so when we fall down, in our professional pursuits, it is important to have a strong sense of self-love in order to not give up. This is because having a sense of self-love will inevitably lead to self-respect; when you respect yourself enough, you will have the desire to not only continue your job but prosper to new levels because of the now new positive image you have of yourself from respect. In simpler terms, when you respect and love yourself enough, you will want to thrive in your professional pursuits. Therefore, having a strong sense of self-love in your professional life can lead to success and new opportunities.
One’s personal life can be looked at the same way for success. “We accept the love we think we deserve” (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Chbosky); In saying this, we allow other to treat us how we assume we should be treated. However, if we assume of ourselves as lovable and worthy, the “princess treatment” would follow. For example, think of someone that allows undesirable treatment to follow their life. This person allows for this negativity to enter because they assume it is what they deserve. Some causes of this could be living in a messy house without cleaning up, bad grades, etc; these causes would lead to a person thinking less of themselves which in turn would allow others to treat them as less too. However, when we place self-love at a priorital standpoint, it allows for us to value ourselves enough to not allow ourselves to keep a messy room or accept bad grades; in turn of this, we allow others to treat us as lovable as we see ourselves. Therefore, having a strong sense of self-love in your personal life too can lead to success and new opportunities.
Some examples of ways to practice self-love are:
- self-care baths
- journaling your goals
- nature walks
- stress-free painting
- pep-talks to yourself
- loving affirmations
In essence, practicing self-love is different for everyone; figuring out how you can practice self-love is extremely important in achieving the professional and personal success I have mentioned earlier. The figuring out of what makes you love yourself more can be difficult when there are many options; I suggest to start from this example:
- Go to a mirror, it can be any mirror, however, a full floor length mirror is preferred.
- Once you are in front of this mirror, say something nice about yourself; It can be both personality and looks wise. Even if you find it hard to find a variety of nice attributes about yourself, there has to be at least one thing.
- Once you find that one attribute, or multiple attributes, focus on that and hone in on how much you love that about yourself.
- Later on, for the attributes you dislike, you can always take a free time from your day to improve and work on that attribute you dislike in order to grow your self-love.
In essence, once we love ourselves, the love from opportunities in life will follow.
The Drumbeat 