To Love Yourself You Must Change
We aren’t born the way we should die
Everyone tells you to love yourself, but that’s incomplete advice — and frankly, it’s tearing the world up.
To love yourself is to respect who you are. But if you haven’t earned respect, how can you love yourself?
It’s time to make a change, to learn how to earn respect from the most important person in your life.
To love yourself, you have to…
1 | Look deep into the mirror to find the problem
If you met yourself on the street, what would you think?
You walk into your group of friends, and there you are. You shake your hand and start chatting — go on, close your eyes, visualise it.
So, what do you think? Do you like that person? Would you hang out with them?
For me, this exercise was powerful — genuinely life-changing. I didn’t realise what I didn’t like about myself, because I’d never deeply reflected.
I used to be the ‘class clown’ type of kid — a bit of an entertainer. I had plenty of friends, and people liked to hear my jokes when I blurted them out.
But something deep down inside me knew something was up.
The days when I’d make a room full of people laugh, I’d feel empty inside — like I wasn’t being my true self. I couldn’t figure out why, and I started to dislike myself.
Why didn’t I feel authentic when I acted off of my natural impulses? That was the most authentic approach I knew. I’m acting the way my brain demands, how could I not be being myself?
In my head, I asked:
I’m liked by plenty, but why don’t I like myself?
That’s when I understood my problem, and what I needed to do.
Even if millions respect you, you can’t love yourself if you wouldn’t like and respect your mirror self. It’s that simple.
To love yourself, you have to…
2 | Understand what it is that YOU respect
Even though others liked it, I never liked the class-clown type.
Something that was programmed deep inside my DNA thought the class clown was annoying and obnoxious.
On the flip side, I noticed that I was always intimidated by (and respected) the quietest person in the room. The one who didn’t say much but only spoke when they needed to.
I respected their ability to hold in what they had to say until it was necessary to speak — an ability I didn’t have.
So, here’s the key. There was a gap — a delta — between what I respected and what I was (we’ll revisit this).
Was I going to live a bad life because I was born a loudmouth, but respected the quiet people most? A torturous reality.
Could I ever love myself?
It raised a question inside me — a pivotal realisation in my life:
Is behaving in line with our impulses being our true selves, or is it just how we act before we’ve learned any better?
To love yourself, you have to…
3 | Realise that your impulses ARE NOT who you are
That first thought that goes through your mind is what you have been conditioned to think. What you think next defines who you are. — Anonymous
Your impulse, your default way of being, is a combination of many things. Your hereditary DNA, how you were raised, and the environment you were raised in.
At first, I thought that thinking too deeply about how I’m perceived was disingenuous, but that’s not true. We have plenty of irrational thoughts that if followed through would result in terrible outcomes (see Call to the Void theory).
We don’t form opinions of people based on how closely they behave to their impulses, but on how closely they behave to their morals and values.
So why are we so stubborn as to act on those initial thoughts?
Why did “love yourself” turn into a movement where we stopped trying to change ourselves?
That’s just the easy way out.
Imagine telling an aspiring basketball player they couldn’t study the game, and work on things to create a better version of themselves.
You don’t stick to what you were born as. That’s just your blank canvas.
You’re not going to make the team if you just love yourself as a player right away — you need to spend hours studying film and even more time on the court getting in repetitions.
To love yourself, you have to…
4 | Take steps to become what you respect
Being yourself is nothing more than deciding what morals and values you want to embody, and then embodying them. It’s about carving out a personality using your cognitive decision-making.
If you take nothing else from this article, take this in:
Becoming someone you respect is about grabbing that delta between who you are and what you respect, and squashing it down until it’s zero.
Here’s what I mean.
My problem was blurting things out. My goal was someone who spoke only when it was necessary. The delta was what was between those two.
My journey to loving myself began when I learned that even though I have something to say, I don’t have to say it. I can pause, and sort my thoughts. I can wait for the right thought to intersect with the appropriate moment and then let it fly.
This is a long process. It involves years of journalling and writing things on the page like:
I didn’t like the way I behaved today —I spoke too much in that group setting when there was no need to. Tomorrow I’ll try to do better.
I had hundreds of journal entries like that. This takes years of consistent work, but it’s possible. And it’s all worth it when you slowly start becoming someone you love and respect.
To love yourself, you have to…
Put all the steps together
Find out who you are.
You need to take a good, hard look in the mirror to find out where you’re currently at. What are you like? What would meeting yourself be like?Find out where you want to go.
Understand what it is that you respect. Who are the people you idolise, and what do they have in common? This will help you identify the gap between who you are, and where you want to go.You’re not done yet
Your impulses are not who you are — you can change.Take steps to squash the delta.
Becoming someone you can love is about going from what you are to what you want to be. It will take time, but it will happen with consistent effort.
Now you see that to love yourself, you must change. And remember step 3 — do not limit yourself. You have the capacity to be anything you want, it’ll just take time.
Thank you for reading.
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Without you reading, the message I’m passionate about flows into the ether. I just want to share what I learned with more people.
I wish I could’ve given past me these kinds of mindset shifts, so I’m trying to reach as far and wide as I possibly can. Please share this post with someone who you think might enjoy it too.
Until next week,
Eren
