How To Nurture Your ‘SELF’

When you take the time to nurture yourself, it’s easier to have a happy, peaceful and upbeat mindset. You’ll feel better about your life in general, soak in all the positivity while radiating the same.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In the hustle and bustle of life, we often forget that the most important thing is to nurture ourselves. You might feel guilty for taking time out for yourself – but you must know that it’s the most effective thing to do.

Nurturing yourself every day is a critical part of good living – a simple secret that leads to a healthy mind, body, and soul.

Nurturing yourself is not a luxury – but a necessity. By taking responsibility for your own well-being, you free others from being responsible for your happiness.

Here are the most important things that you should focus on – about yourself – for making life better with each passing day.

1. Self Love

While some people might say that ‘self-love’ is essentially narcissistic and selfish at times, I would rather disagree.

If you don’t love yourself, how can you expect others to love you? To put it simply, ‘self-love’ is more like appreciating yourself – for the kind of person that you are.

It is a way of acknowledging your physical, psychological, as well as spiritual growth, and valuing your own needs rather than trying to be a people pleaser.

Self-love helps us to grow and bloom in the most beautiful manner – encouraging us to not settle for anything less than what we deserve.

It’s extremely personal and something different for each person because we all have many different ways to take care of ourselves. In order to nurture yourself, you need to understand what is important for your well-being.

Here are 10 beautiful yet simple ways to practice self-love.

2. Self Worth

“Sometimes the hardest part of the journey is believing you’re worthy of the trip.” ― Glenn Beck.

There are a lot of times when we ask ourselves – ‘Can I do this?’, ‘Am I good enough?’, ‘Will I be able to pull this off?’ – so on and so forth.

These are the times when self-doubt creeps in us and our confidence trembles. It’s important to know our strengths and weaknesses and to value our inherent worth as a human.

Precisely, self-worth is less about measuring yourself based on external factors – it’s about who you are, and not what you do.

It means having unshakable faith in yourself and in your abilities, no matter what the circumstances are.

3. Self Esteem

Self-esteem is often considered to be synonymous with ‘self-worth’, but there’s a fine line between the two. The two are, of course, intrinsically related to each other, and your self-esteem is undoubtedly influenced by your self-worth.

However, they are not the same. In fact, Self-esteem is primarily built upon sources outside of yourself that you don’t actually control, while self-worth is more about owning your strengths and valuing them aptly.

Self-esteem is primarily built upon the value derived from doing the things that get you the desired outcomes.

But it’s more than just about ‘doing’ something. Imagine how you feel when someone appreciates you for a good job – that actually is a boost for your self-esteem.

4. Self Help

There are times when we fail to motivate ourselves. It seems that the world around us is crashing, we feel unloved, nothing around us seems to be right.

Those are the times when self-help is most required. It’s an act of telling yourself that you’re stronger than you think you are.

It’s about holding on to that bit of courage and moving ahead, with the hope that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. The concept of ‘self-help’ is intrinsically attached with ‘self-care’.

But if there arises a situation where you feel that you’re not able to provide the best of help to yourself, you shouldn’t hesitate to take advice from a professional therapist. Sometimes, all we need is a little assurance to move ahead in life.

Here are some best self-help books that everyone should read in their lifetime.

5. Self Care

Once you get comfortable in your own skin, you’ll automatically start caring for yourself. Self-care can include myriad practices that you find enjoyable in your daily life, which help to promote your physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental health in some way or the other.

It can be as simple as getting uninterrupted sleep at night or giving yourself a day off from work to indulge in painting, or just taking a walk around the garden to soak in some freshness.

Having said that, it’s also important to understand that self-care isn’t just about finding ways to relax. It’s about feeling wholesome.

In order to care for your health and well-being, you must find a balance in life. Sometimes you might need more self-care in one specific area in order to restore balance or shift your focus from the stress areas for your own good. One of the best ways to start with your self-care regime is to stop caring about what others think!

6. Self Confidence

Self-confidence is essentially about knowing your skills and believing in them. Having ‘self-confidence’ means you know your potential and have a sense of control over your life.

When we are generally aware of our strengths and have a positive outlook towards life, we nurture our self-confidence.

We are better at setting realistic goals and expectations, we tend to communicate assertively with people, and are better at handling criticisms.

However, it is good to have a balance in how you feel about yourself. Some people suffer from low self-confidence – which means that they are unsure of what they are good at, or skeptical about their own abilities.

On the contrary, people with high self-confidence (often termed as ‘over-confidence’) tend to think very highly about themselves, and set higher expectations than what they can achieve.

Here are some simple ways that’ll help you to nurture your self-confidence.

7. Self Growth / Self Improvement

Every individual needs to be mindful about their ‘growth’ – and if you’ve been thinking that self improvement will just happen as the time passes, you’re wrong my friend.

In fact, self-growth requires immense attention as it encompasses a process of developing new skills, behaviors, actions, attitudes, habits, and reactions to benefit certain aspects of your life.

The beauty of self-growth is that the possibilities are endless – you can learn as much as you want in your field, and as you continue to grow, you will be embarking on an extraordinary and meaningful path in life.

To put it in the words of Toby Robbins, “No matter what you’re pursuing, self-improvement is a critical part of your progress and happiness.”

In order to nurture self-growth, one needs to understand their shortcomings and essentially work on them. It involves changing certain habits, honing the existing skills while gaining new ones, practicing gratitude, meditating, amongst others. Needless to say, achieving self-growth requires effort but once you become mindful, the process will tend to be easier.

8. Self Discipline

“You can never conquer the mountain. You can only conquer yourself.” – Jim Whittaker.

‘Self-discipline’ is more of a value that one imbibes. It is the ability to push yourself forward and stay motivated even when there are distractions and hardships.

It’s the zeal to take action, regardless of how you’re feeling – physically or emotionally. Happiness, success, and fulfillment stem from focus and self-discipline.

Studies have shown that people with self-discipline are happier in general than those who let themselves free to do anything and often fall prey to their own misjudgment.

Self-discipline is like a muscle: the more you work on developing it and using it, the stronger it will become.

Real also: Powerful ways to build self-descipline

9. Self Motivation

Self-motivation is encouraging yourself to continue making progress towards a goal even when it feels challenging.

It is the ability to drive yourself to take initiative, stay focused and pursue your goals. It’s more like an inner encouragement – to get better. It’s what pushes you to keep going on tasks, especially those you’re pursuing because you want to, not because someone told you to.

While appreciation from the outside and validation from others always make us feel good, it’s our inner satisfaction that brings incomparable peace and happiness – and that’s what is self-motivation.

Feelings of enjoyment, finding purpose, and achieving excellence comes from pursuing intrinsically motivated goals. In other words, our deepest desires, wants, and dreams come from within and drive self-motivation.

10. Self Respect

Drawing lines from ‘self-esteem’, ‘self-respect’ can be defined as holding yourself in esteem and believing that you are good and worthy of being treated well.

An example of self-respect is when you know you deserve to be treated right and, as a result, you do not tolerate others lying to you or treating you unfairly. It is important here to understand that if you don’t value yourself enough, nobody else will.

As I said once in the beginning as well, showing yourself respect does not make you narcissistic or conceited. In fact, it does quite the opposite. When we respect ourselves, we are more worthy of receiving love and, in turn, giving love to others.

As Jack Kornfield once mentioned, “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” It is essential for us to understand and appreciate ourselves.

If we keep pretending to be someone else, or try to please others by being what we are not – it’ll cause more harm to us than good.

Life isn’t as complex as we think it is – and it’s on us to keep it simple.