“Nobody will think you’re somebody if you don’t think so yourself.”
African-American proverb

“Self-love is not opposed to the love of others.”
Dr. Karl Menninger

“Happiness is: Looking in a mirror and like what you see .”
Author Unknown

People have a need for affection and being liked. But it’s very easy to make a mistake here and go about it the wrong way.

Because while trying to get others to like you may seem like a simple and common solution there is an alternative. One that I find works better.

It is to focus on liking yourself more rather than trying to get people to like you.

Here are six reasons why I put my focus in that place. And after that a brief guide to how you can increase how much you like yourself.

1. Liking yourself gives you power and strength.

If you go for trying to get people to like you you’ll most likely come off as needy and desperate a lot of the time.

This is a bad position to put yourself in. Because liking and respecting yourself goes hand in hand with people liking and respecting you.

If you bend to other people all the time then they may like what you do for them. But they may not like you on a deeper level because there is a weakness and lack of confidence and personal power there.

2. People like people who like themselves.

What is attractive to a friend, an employer or a potential partner? To me, it seems like a lot of this boils down to people liking people who like themselves.

Someone who likes him/herself is positive, confident, takes care of his/her health and opportunities in school/at work/in life.

3. More inner stability, much less of an emotional rollercoaster.

Getting compliments and being liked is wonderful. The problem is just that if you rely too much on validation from others then you let the outside world, other people, control how you feel.

And that can be a real roller coaster.

Because if you really need the positive validation from people then it’s hard to avoid listening to their negative input. Or you may feel bad when there is a temporary lack in the validation.

So what do you do?

You let go of focusing on needing that input and replace it with focusing on validating and liking yourself instead.

4. Life becomes more fun and relaxing.

If you like yourself then it becomes natural to just be your best self and let people like the real you.

Doing the opposite and trying to get people to like you leads to a lack of honesty in any kind of relationship and life becomes a like walking on egg shells while using different masks with different people.

5. What you think and feel about yourself flows over.

The more you like yourself, the easier it becomes to like, help and be kind to other people. How much you like or do not like yourself flows over into your world.

6. You minimize self sabotage.

If you don’t like yourself, if you deep down don’t really think you deserve what you go after then you will tend to sabotage for yourself. Perhaps in subtle ways.

You may get a gut feeling that this success is wrong and so you start doing stuff that screws things up.

If you like yourself there will be a lot less self made obstacles in your mind to overcome on your path to success.

How to like yourself more

So, the benefits sound pretty good. But how do you go about changing how you feel about yourself?

Here is a brief but in my experience very effective guide that works in real life.

Do the right thing.

I write about this a lot. That’s because it’s simple thing to keep in mind and if you live it then it can bring your awesome results.

When you do what you think is the right thing then your self esteem goes up. If you just coast then you tend to feel kinda lame about yourself.

So do awesome stuff and you feel awesome about yourself. Do OK stuff and feel OK about yourself.

This is not always an easy thing. But people who do the right thing get fine inner rewards (and often outer rewards too). What you do tends to correspond to what you get in the long run.

What is the right thing?

Well, that’s up to you to decide and it can vary from life to life and situation to situation.

Some of the things I think is the right thing to do is to keep my life in order and organized, to workout regularly and take care of my health, to be positive and open, to spend time doing things I really like doing, to get out of my comfort zone and face fears and to be a person of action.

When you do the right thing you like yourself more and so the self sabotage decreases. The standards you set for yourself flows over to your world too.

What you accept or don’t accept from yourself is what you tend to accept or not accept from other people.

And what you think and do to the world around you – for example being judgmental or being open and kind – is how you tend to think about yourself and treat yourself too.

Don’t take yourself for granted or focus on the wrong things. Appreciate yourself.

What you do or do not do has a huge effect on how you view yourself and how much you like yourself. But what you focus on in your mind is also important.

Because if you do good things but then focus on small faults or failures then that won’t help you.

So make a habit of focusing on appreciating the good things about yourself. Take two minutes right now to think about positive things about you or good things you have done and accomplished.

Or take a few minutes tonight to write down five good things about yourself in a journal.

This extends to what you focus on in the world around you too. Because as I mentioned in the previous tip, what you focus on in the people around you tends to be how you see and treat yourself.

So you may want to add five or ten things that you appreciate about the people around you to those journal entries and two minute appreciation sessions.

The more you do things like these, the more this kind of thinking will naturally pop up in your everyday life too.

You are changing how you think about yourself and what you have a tendency to focus on.

“Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.”
Brian Tracy

One big problem that I used to run into is that you simply don’t seem to be able to get started with making a change.

You want to make a change but feel stuck. You don’t seem to be able to take action and start moving.

If you feel this is a challenge for you then here’s what I have done to get out of such a place. Perhaps you’ll find something useful in my experience.

Do a reality check.

It’s actually pretty simple to get started. Even if you feel stuck. It may however not be as easy as you wish and there lies a problem.

Making a change isn’t that easy and it will require effort. You have to accept that. And work from that model of reality. If you think that things will fall into your lap effortlessly or by some kind or magic then any effort or action will feel so hard and difficult that you will probably not even try. Or if you try and fail, you’ll just quit instead of trying again.

So check your reality. Are you looking for an easy answer or a magic pill? Or will you work hard while at the same time listening to advice that can help to make the process easier and allow you to work smarter?

A few tips for finding a view of reality that will help you:

1. What have other people before you or around you done to improve their situation?

Ask yourself this question. Talk to people who have made the change you want to make (lose weight, quit smoking, improve the social life etc.). Or if you can’t find anyone, read the top rated books on Amazon.com on that topic or read blog articles. But make sure that you take advice from someone who has actually been in your shoes and gone where you want to go.

2. How much work am I putting in?

It’s very easy to be a bit delusional about how much actual work you are putting to make that change. Instead of guesstimating, ask yourself this question and be honest and measure it. Log what you spend your time on during a week. It’s not uncommon that you need to put in more work than you may think to make that change. And that you doing a bit less actual work than you think.

3. Realize that you are responsible for your life.

I really like this quote from Nathaniel Branden’s The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem: “No one is coming”.

You can look for the next big thing that will fix you. Read more blog articles. Read more personal development books. Look for people to help you. And yes, some articles or books or people will give you support and insights that resonate deeply with you. But in the end, if you are an adult then no one is coming. No one is coming to save you. You have to take responsibility for your own life and what happens in it. Other things and people can certainly aid you quite a bit. But you are responsible.

You can go around blaming society or some people for your problems in your social life (or finances or health). You can always find scapegoats to judge to feel better about yourself. You can look for people that will “fix you”. You can do this for the rest of your life if you like. It won’t change much. Whatever has to be done, it’s you who have to take responsibility and do it.

Yeah, things might always not go your way and you will probably have bad luck from time to time. But you still have to focus on yourself and doing what you can do in whatever situation that may arise in your world.

4. If you have a really serious problem, seek professional help.

This is also a part of doing a reality check. How serious is your problem or challenge? There is a difference between getting a bit nervous before a meeting at work or a date and having a big panic attack and feeling like you can’t breathe or are about to faint.

If you have a serious problem, then please seek professional help. The advice on this blog is for small or medium sized problems (at least as I experience it). If you have a really bad problem then the advice here or on other blog or in books may still help you a bit.

But I still believe that best option in such situations is to seek professional help. Perhaps one on one counseling with someone with vast experience, someone that comes highly recommended.

Get out of your comfort zone.

Doing a reality check isn’t that fun all the time. If you are anything like I was you may have noticed that you aren’t putting in enough work or that you aren’t really taking responsibility for your life. So it can be an uncomfortable thing to do.

After you have gotten a more accurate picture of what needs to be done you need to do it. This requires moving out of your comfort zone in real life and not just while sitting comfortably on your sofa.

I don’t think there is much one can do to avoid discomfort when making a change. Yes, you can lessen the discomfort and you can make it easier for yourself. But trying to avoid it completely is one thing that makes people go running around in circles for magic pills and leaves them stuck with little actual progress to show. That’s why you need to do a reality check. You can’t make much progress or live life fully if you live in fantasy world where everything is supposed to be painless and easy.

Now, there are some things you can do to make it easier to get out of your comfort zone and start taking action.

1. Make one small change.

If you try to change many habits at the same time for example then that will probably fail. You will spread yourself too thin and run out of energy and time as regular life starts to interfere.

Focus on changing one habit at a time. And if you have trouble making a big change then start with a smaller one. It’s better to make small changes little by little in real life than walking around in endless daydreams of drastic and incredible change that never comes. As you make one small positive change your confidence goes up and it becomes easier to make the next change. And over the months and this year and the next you can make a lots and lots of progress.

Let’s say you want to be less nervous and awkward in social situations.

To solve that you can take small steps. Steps like first just saying hi to people. And being more involved in conversations at work or in school to exercise your conversation muscles. After a while those things will feel more comfortable. And so you can expand your comfort zone a little bit more.

And so you gradually desensitize yourself to social situations or whatever you are uncomfortable with. You make it the new “normal” for you.
So, identify your problem. Then make a plan with some smaller steps you can take to gradually lessen your discomfort.

2. Make it social.

Sign up for a course in something so you have to be there each Thursday and learn. Locking in this time into your schedule probably makes you more likely to show up than if you will do “some self-studies sometime when you get the time”.

If you are going to a party where you know few people then it may be easier to bring a friend. If you have decided to start going to the gym it might be easier to actually get going and keep going there every week if you have a gym-partner.

However, there are potential downsides to bringing friends too. If you are at the party with your friend then you might not meet and get to know that many new people. If you are going to the gym with a partner it might lead to the two of you talking and focusing less on getting a great workout.

But try it out and find what works for you. By involving more people and/or signing up for courses somewhere you will feel commitment to people you like and a bit of positive social pressure to actually go there when you are supposed to instead of slacking off on the sofa.

3. Ask yourself questions that changes your perspective.

If it feels uncomfortable to do something then I find that I can often reduce that by changing how I think about it in my mind.

I do so by asking myself better questions. Question like:

• What’s awesome about this?
• Will this matter in 5 years?
• Honestly, am I overcomplicating and overthinking this?

Sounds a bit silly perhaps. But by providing better questions you can get more positive answers out of yourself. And you replace destructive thought loops in your mind that can paralyze you from taking action with a healthier and a bit more relaxed perspective.

4. Focus on the positive past.

Realize that it can be fun to get out of your comfort zone despite what your mind and feelings might be telling you before you get started. Think back to the previous times when you have broken out of your comfort zone. Focus on the positive memories, when you got out there, when you took a chance. And you will probably remember that it wasn’t so bad, it was actually fun and exciting and something new to you.

A lot of times we automatically play back negative experiences – or negative interpretations of events – in our minds before we are about to do something. And we forget about the positive memories and our previous, positive achievements. Avoid that trap. Let the good memories flow through your mind instead.

Final words.

If you are here then you have probably heard about this blog from a friend or perhaps you had a problem that you wanted to solve and found it via Google. If you are here then you probably want to make a positive change in your life in some way.

You may still need time to get started with that. Perhaps you haven’t had enough yet and not reached a point where you know deep down that you really need to get started with making that change now. If that is the case then this article will be here when you are ready, when you one day wake up and say to yourself “That’s enough! I’m sick of this and I’m getting started with changing this today”.

If you are ready now then get started. Use the advice in this article to start making your 2010 the best year ever.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23912576@N05/ / CC BY 2.0

“He who knows others is learned;
He who knows himself is wise.”
Lao-tzu

Who are you? What is your daily and weekly life really about?

Those not always easy questions to answer. So today I’d like to share three tips that have helped me to get to know myself a bit better and to see my life more accurately.

1. What part of you do you see in them?

What we see in others is quite often what we see in ourselves. And what irritates us in people may be what we don’t like in ourselves. What you judge in someone you are actually judging in yourself.

Therefore what you notice and what irritates you in others can teach you important things about yourself. Things you may not be aware of. In a way people can be like a mirror for you. A mirror that can help you to learn more about yourself, what you fear and how you may be fooling yourself.

So, what people generally irritate you? What do you often judge or criticize people for?

What can that tell you about you?

2. Do the unusual thing.

When faced with a choice in your daily life, step back for a minute and think. Then take the option that is and feels unusual for you.

If you often back down just don’t for this one time. If you often get into arguments with people then just this one time don’t and instead just let it go or treat the other person with kindness. Do the opposite of what you usually do and see what happens (while using common sense of course). Do something new and something you wouldn’t expect from yourself.

This is a fun and great way to get new experiences and to learn things about the world and about yourself that you wouldn’t if you kept going like you usually do. It’s also a great way to be surprised about life as things often turn out more positively than in your fear filled daydreams if you just take action.

Getting stuck in the same old routine until it becomes a rut can suck the life out of you. Doing the unusual thing in small and big situations, no matter how it goes, is a great way to feel alive again and to reveal aspects of yourself that may have been hidden from you.

3. Journal.

Journaling is a fine way to get a more accurate picture of yourself and your life. A few ways that I have used journaling to get to know myself and my life are:

• Journal about how you use your time. Just write down what you do during one day. Or during one week. Write down what you spend your time on and how much time you spend on each thing. You may, as me, be surprised about how much time you waste on procrastinating and pretty pointless busy work. Even if you may have an image of yourself as an effective person.
• Journal about what you think. What do you think about during a normal day? Or a week? Write it all down. By doing so you can find recurring patterns of thought such as fears or maybe that you spend a lot of time regretting what happened in the past. Or you may find that you are actually a more positive person than you may think. This is a really interesting exercise because it can help you spot both positive things and negative things about yourself and just how accurate your current image of yourself is. You’ll probably run into some surprises.
• Journal about what you eat. I used this to lose weight. If you want to lose weight you have to consume less calories that you use. So how do you know what to eat and how much? You got to monitor it in some way. I used the free and very simple Fitday.com to monitor what I eat during the day. This is essential stuff. Because the three normal and most of the time actually pretty healthy meals I ate in the past consisted of the same amount of calories I used during the day. So little progress was made. To keep things within effective and healthy limits I think it’s important to monitor what you do. But not to get obsessed about these things though. The main point is to keep an eye on what you are actually doing instead of guesstimating a whole lot.

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“He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.”
Marcus Aurelius

“Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake.”
Paramahansa Yogananda

Finding peace within is a wonderful but also a difficult thing. It is easy to go looking for it in the wrong places.

So here are 5 timeless thoughts to help guide you to the places where you can actually find it.

1. Simplify.

“The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one’s life.”
Peace Pilgrim

Making thing simpler has certainly brought a lot of inner peace to my life. So, a few of my favorite suggestions on how to simplify your life:

• Use a limited to-do list. Only 2 or 3 of the most important things.
• Set limits. Set limits for daily checking of inboxes. I do it only once a day. Set time limits for small decisions and make them within seconds after you have thought about them to avoid procrastination and overthinking. Set time limits for tasks such as 15 minutes each day for answering emails or for using Twitter. Set a limit for commitments and say no to be able to feel less stress and produce better results.
• Remember to “keep things extremely simple”. I have written down that sentence on my white board and it is a daily and constant reminder that helps me when I lose my way.

2. Accept.

“Acceptance of others, their looks, their behaviors, their beliefs, bring you an inner peace and tranquility – instead of anger and resentment.”
Unknown

When you accept what is you stop feeding energy into resisting what is. You don’t make a problem more powerful and sticky in your mind.

Instead, somewhat counter intuitively, when you accept what is it loses much of its power. It just is.

And you feel stillness inside.

Now, accepting what is doesn’t mean to give up. It just means that you put yourself in a better position take action if necessary.

Because now you can see more clearly, you can focus your energy towards what you want and take the appropriate action to change your situation.

3. Forgive.

“Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions.”
Gerald Jampolsky

By accepting what is it is much easier to let go of things and to forgive what has happened.

Forgiveness is important because as long as you don’t forgive someone you are linked to that person. Your thoughts will return to the person who wronged you and what s/he did over and over again.

The emotional link between the two of you is so strong and inflicts much suffering in you and – as a result of your inner turmoil – most often in other people around you too.

When you forgive you do not only release the other person. You set yourself free too from all of that agony.

One thing to keep in mind is to not just forgive others but also yourself.

By forgiving yourself – instead of resenting yourself for something you did a week or 10 years ago – you make the habit of forgiveness more and more of a natural part of you.

And so forgiving others becomes easier too.

Also, what you think is a question of forgiving others you may sometimes – after some time and inner struggle – discover is just as much, if not more, about forgiving yourself rather than the other person.

4. Do what you enjoy.

“Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy. If you’re happy in what you’re doing, you’ll like yourself, you’ll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you’ll have more success than you could possibly have imagined.”
Roger Caras

When you do what you enjoy there is a natural peace that arises within. You are in alignment with your outer world.

This also leads to a lot more success than if you have a lot of inner turmoil and really don’t care that much for your work.

One of my favorite tips for finding things you enjoy or love doing is simply to explore life. To be curious and try things out and see what you think of them.

This can bring many insights both about yourself and about how things really are when you do them rather than when they are just theories floating around in your head.

5. Be careful with your inner peace.

“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.”
St. Francis de Sales

By using the tips above and by living in the present moment you can find a lot more inner peace.

Not only during days when things go as planned.

But also on days when your world is upset and things aren’t so easy. On such days your inner peace will be very useful to help you make good decisions and to get things done.

So be smart, stay calm and be careful with your inner peace.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cowboyneal/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”
Marcus Aurelius

“No one can give you better advice than yourself.”
Cicero

People like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca may have died thousands of years ago. But what they spoke about back then is still helpful today. Our outer circumstances may have changed dramatically over the last few thousands of years, but on the inside we seem to have stayed pretty much the same in many ways.

So here are seven of my favorite tips from the streets and palaces of ancient Rome.

1. It’s just a perspective.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
Marcus Aurelius

This is very important to remember. Not only to be able to chill out instead of getting into crazy fights and conflicts about any kind of issue in your daily life.

But also to stay open to different perspectives that can help improve your life instead of getting really defensive and never be able to admit that there may be a an even better way.

By keeping this mind open you become more accepting of other people and their perspectives and thoughts. And it becomes easier to see and find common ground instead of getting your focus stuck on differences.

2. You don’t have to create anger and other negative feelings.

“A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.”
Seneca

Sometimes it is of course necessary to bring up and resolve a conflict. Often though, conflicts or quarrels are just a waste of time and a good way to create negativity within and in your environment. Perhaps someone wants to be right. Or release pent up emotions created elsewhere.

Avoid taking such bait by others or giving in to temporary negativity in yourself. Just let it go.

3. Will more solve your problems?

“For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.”
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”
“What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.”
~ Seneca

Society is to a large degree built on getting more.

Of course, to a degree this is very useful. But it may not be the thing that will solve all your problems.
You may not find your answer or happiness in more. It may just alter your troubles and problems. And/or give you more of them. What is already there inside of you perhaps gets highlighted and magnified when you get more. Instead of getting whatever you want when finally making all that money your wanted you may find that greed, jealousy and selfishness within you and in your world increases.

You may have thought that when you finally arrived at that place your problems would just disappear. But the ego always wants more and is never satisfied.

So trying to fill yourself up with more – money, power, smartness, prettiness, a feeling of being more enlightened than others – and then finally becoming happy may become like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

4. Be patient.

“Patience is the greatest of all virtues.”
Cato the Elder

When I met people in real life and tell them about this blog they sometimes wonder how one can build a website with so many readers. I guess different people have different answers. Mine always includes being patient. I think that is one of the key factors why this blog has become pretty popular. I have just been patient and have seen it grow, sometimes slowly and sometimes very quickly.

I think people often make the mistake of giving up too early. Your mind probably has what it thinks is a reasonable timeframe for success. This might not correspond to a realistic timeframe though.

It’s useful to take a break from advertised perspectives – “You can double your income/lose 30 pounds in a just 30 days!” – and let more realistic perspectives seep into your mind. Learn from people who have gone where you want to go. Talk to them. Read what they have to say in books or online. This will not give you a complete plan but a clearer perspective of what is needed to achieve what you want.

5. Laugh

“It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.”
“No one is laughable who laughs at himself.”
~ Seneca

Taking things too seriously can make life a lot harder and painful than it needs to be. It may be a common or “normal” way to look at things. But you are always free to choose how to view, react and think about things.

Taking things and yourself less seriously can really help you to decrease conflicts, anger, sadness and anxiety. And laughing at life and yourself releases tension and tends to make you less susceptible to the gray and dreary clouds of negativity that may plague others. Check out Lighten Up! for more on this.

6. Focus on clearing your own fields.

“It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others, and to forget his own … You can’t clear your own fields while you’re counting the rocks on your neighbor’s farm.”
Cicero

What someone says about you may not be much of a reflection of you but of the person that said it. This is a good thing to remember whenever someone is saying something negative about you. It is even more useful to remember whenever you feel negatively about someone else. It can help you to learn more about yourself, what you fear and how you may be fooling yourself. It can be a reminder to go back to focusing on what needs to be cleared on your own fields.

7. Focus on doing what you think and feel is right.

“We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them”
Cato the Elder

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
Marcus Aurelius

“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.”
Marcus Aurelius

By letting go of the things that don’t really matter that much and instead focusing on what YOU think about things and doing what YOU think is the right thing you can save a whole bunch of time and improve your results and your self esteem. Doing so will also raise your sense of what you deserve in life, something that is vital to be able to go after what you want and to avoid self sabotage halfway to achieving your goal.

All of this will raise your opinion of yourself and you start to realize that what someone else says simply doesn’t make matter that much anymore (a welcome relief for sure).

Now, this may sound selfish. And it is. And that is OK. Because by improving your own life and making yourself stronger you are in a much better position to both help other people and yourself. And you may realize that what is most important in your life is something that can help other people too. Win-win is a pretty great solution.