3 Steps to Sustainable Self-Love
In my last blog post, I told the Parable of the Painter and promised you a moral this week. The moral is: Your self-worth is determined by your capacity for self-love. So let’s chat about self-love :)
3 Steps to sustainable self-love
Self-worth is a tricky thing. Life doesn’t come with a built-in grading scale, so we either create our own or adopt someone else’s. The only thing you can’t do is escape it. We spend decades trying to achieve worth based upon the scale we choose, not realizing worth exists outside the scale.
There is no shortage of input from the world on our worth. It all starts from our parents, siblings, and other humans involved in our early years. They give us feedback about whether our actions are acceptable or unacceptable. Good or bad. We seek praise and try to avoid punishment. The scale starts to form.
Then we go to school and learn our work really does get graded by others. Anything less than 60% is utter failure, though anything less than 80% is typically frowned upon. We start to see where our peers fall on this grading scale. We compare ourselves.
Perfection, based on these scales, is impossible. No matter how much praise we receive, it’s never enough to create sustainable worth. I’ve achieved many things in my life so far, but none of them have given me anything more than a beautiful moment. Achievements don’t create worth.
So no matter what your praise-to-punishment ratio was growing up, you’re left with some amount of worthlessness. People’s reactions to that remainder amount are myriad. Some chase more achievement, some embrace it and become self-destructive, and some sit back judging others to take the focus off themselves.
This hole. This perception that we don’t measure up eats away at us daily. In a hyper-connected world constantly feeding us the accolades of others, it’s only that much harder to feel like we’re worthy.
I was blessed to be raised by parents who love me unconditionally in a religion that teaches God loves us despite our shortcomings. I had the best chance of anyone to create a healthy grading scale, but I didn’t. No one does. The truth is, it doesn’t matter how much anyone loves you, including God, if you don’t love yourself unconditionally.
True self-worth comes from true self-love.
This begs one of life’s biggest questions: how do you love yourself unconditionally?
I don’t claim to have the end-all-be-all answer, but I can honestly say that I love myself today more than I’ve ever loved myself before. That deep, unconditional love I have fostered for myself hinges on one thing and one thing only:
THE ABSENCE OF JUDGMENT.
It’s that simple. However, you probably know by now that simple is rarely easy. So let me share with you a few truths I’ve discovered that will enable you to live life with dramatically less judgment and experience profound love for yourself:
IT’S A DAILY PRACTICE. I’ve read my fair share of self-help books and attended many personal development seminars. Every time I walk away invigorated and geeked up on life. But like everything, it wears off. There is no magic pill for living without judgment. It is a conscious day-by-day moment-by-moment choice. To make that choice, however, you must be aware of your judgments. How do you know if you’re judging something? Easy. Any time you label something as “good” or “bad” (or “right” or “wrong”) you are making a judgment. The first step to a judgment-free life of self-love is honing your awareness of any time you make a judgment about yourself.
Exercise: Begin to pay attention to any time you deem something you did as “good” or “bad.” Write it down! This is vital to building your awareness. Keep a judgment journal on you at all times (in all likelihood a note on your phone) you can update every time you catch yourself judging yourself.
THERE IS NO “GOOD” OR “BAD.” If you feel your gut churning on this one, I’m not surprised. Many people have a visceral reaction to this one. I did too when I first heard it. Growing up in the church, “good” and “bad” as well as “right” and “wrong” were universal truths. I mean, what the heck is the point of the 10 Commandments if there’s no such thing as right and wrong?! We’ll get to that. The reality is, at birth we have no clue about the concepts of good, bad, right or wrong. They simply don’t exist in our mind. That is until one day, when you’re creating a crayon masterpiece on the kitchen wall. All of sudden the concept of “right” and “wrong” comes crashing down upon you as mom rips the crayon out of your hand and then smacks it on your butt a dozen times. This moment in life, a moment that happens to everyone, is crucial. It alters our perception of the world forever. From that point forward, we begin to learn with each new action what is considered “right” and “wrong” based upon the family and society we grow up in.
You don’t need to look far for examples of how “good” and “bad” aren’t universal. Slavery comes to mind immediately. Two hundred years ago slavery was neither “bad” nor “wrong.” We can even look at more controversial acts such as murder and rape. While appalling in our current culture, it was common place pillaging in the Viking days. Even today there exist hunter/gatherer tribes in remote regions that “murder” their elders when they can’t keep up pace. An act that, in their society, is neither “good” nor “bad.” It’s simply necessary, which brings me to my next point.
THERE IS ONLY WHAT “WORKS” OR “DOESN’T WORK.” If you want to create a society where everyone feels safe from intentional harm from another member of the society, then murder doesn’t work. Every society on earth has rules and norms. That’s why the 10 Commandments were so important. Moses was leading his people out of Egypt, a plight that lasted forty years in the desert. I don’t know about you, but forty years trekking through the desert would certainly push my limits of kindness! Needless to say, there was tremendous unrest amidst the society, and they would go to Moses to resolve their quarrels. This made Moses very busy, and didn’t scale well should something ever happen to him. Thus, Jethro (best Bible name ever and Moses’ father-in-law) tells Moses he needs to train up more men to serve as judges. To do so effectively, however, they would need a common set of rules. Voila! Three days later Moses is given the 10 Commandments. These original laws were deemed to separate “good” from “bad” and “right” from “wrong.” God’s will in written form. After all, if you were a society member who would you trust? Moses? Or God? However, if you peel back those meanings and look at the commandments objectively, it’s clear why Moses needed them. In order for his society of fugitive Israelites to work, they needed rules. You can’t have everyone killing each other or nobody would be left to inhabit the promised land!
Something magical happens when you rephrase “good” and “right” to “what works,” and “bad” and “wrong” to “what doesn’t work.” Judgment disappears. Both of yourself and others. The only thing you need to determine whether something “works” or “doesn’t work” is a goal. If your goal is to lose 15 pounds, then eating Twinkies doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean you’re fat, pathetic or hopeless (common thoughts when you’re overweight). Twinkies are delicious! There’s nothing wrong with them. It just doesn’t work to eat them if your goal is to lose 15 pounds. A friend who continually asks for favors and never gives back doesn’t make them a bad person. It just doesn’t work if your goal is to build friendships with mutual benefit. As an added bonus, taking judgment out of the equation enables you to have honest conversations with people you want in your life who aren’t playing by your rules. Just remember you have no control over the judgments they make :)
For every goal in life, there are actions that work and actions that don’t work. Sometimes, so many people have achieved a particular goal the actions that work are easy to identify. Other times, you have to explore yourself to figure out what works and doesn’t work. Finding out something doesn’t work isn’t failure. It’s progress.
Exercise: In your judgment journal, every time you write down a judgment you made of yourself, reword it in terms of what works and doesn’t work. For example, if you wrote down “it was bad that I ate twelve cookies last night,” rewrite it as “the fact that I ate twelve cookies last night doesn’t work to lose 15 pounds.” Notice how you have to write down your goal for the phrase to make sense. You might even find that some of your goals are downright ridiculous or impossible! If so, simply write down a new goal.
Following these three points will revolutionize your self-worth. Worth isn’t something you have to gain. It’s what’s always there when you remove all the judgment. Love is the same way. Love is not a verb. Love is not action. Love is an energy that we can either channel or block. Judgment blocks love. Once you’ve gotten into the groove of removing judgment from yourself, try it with others. Keeping track of your judgments of others in your journal and rephrasing them the same way will unlock new levels of love for people in your life you never knew possible.
It all starts with loving yourself.
