For Our Benefit: Ways To Practise Self-Acceptance

For me, 2020 is the year of self-acceptance and self-improvement. As you may know, 2019 was a difficult year for me in many ways, and towards the end of the year I recgonised some unhealthy habbit forming and started to make changes ahead of December. Now, full of New Year spirit, January has got off to a great start on my personal journey and so, I wanted to share with you some ways we can all start to practice self-acceptance, however hard it might seem sometimes.  

Set A Goal

Goals are always a key motivator. The key to self-acceptance is all about setting an intention to ourselves. If we have a specific mindset that we recognise within ourselves like negativity, by setting a specific intention or goal to allow the shift from doubt or shame to trust in ourselves means that we are able to progress with less hatred of ourselves. Goals need to be set but they also need to be achievable. This is something that we don’t always think about when we’re trying to make a drastic change to our personality. Learning to accept ourselves is not about setting one big goal, but it’s about setting smaller ones to make sure we are slowly, steadily on the right path.

Celebrate Your Positives

Learning to accept ourselves is about switching mindsets. It’s far easier for us to list all of the bad things about us rather than our positives. We tend to cling to these negative thoughts rather than the positives. This could very well be to do with the people we surround ourselves so it’s easier for us to not expose ourselves to harsh criticism by being strong in a “traditional” sense. By starting to hone in on the things that are strong about you in terms of your abilities gives you the opportunity to look at the positives and realise that you’re not necessarily a huge bundle of negativity. Making a list of the positives about ourselves is a good approach. When we don’t have any positive mindset we can struggle to see the wood for the trees. When we start to make this type of list it gradually gets longer and longer. This means that we can finally begin to weed out those positives and put them at the forefront of our lives. At the same time, we can also start to look at the things that we’ve overcome in life and the goals with accomplished. As we begin to find ourselves overwhelmed by negativity we’ve got a crib sheet to look at to keep us on the positive side of things.

Create A Support System

It’s not just about us. We’ve got to remember that a lot of what we think about ourselves is due to the stimuli and the environment. You may very well surround yourself with negative people and not realise it. By addressing who you surround yourself with could very well provide a key to limiting those negative influences. If you talk yourself down too much or you feel constantly negative, is it because there are people who aren’t able to accept that you want to change? When you start to figure out who brings you down you can then surround yourself with people who are more accepting. Sometimes we have people around us that we can’t necessarily get rid of, like family. But as an act of self-preservation, we have to find a way out so we can minimise those negative people from our lives. Sometimes we can’t help but be in contact with these people but if we could start to distance ourselves, perhaps by moving away (but without running away), we can have the space necessary to start focusing on ourselves.

Learn To Calm Your Inner Critic

One of the most difficult mountains to climb when trying to accept ourselves is the negative thoughts we have. We all have an inner critic, that voice that tells us we can’t do things. But it’s a very harsh judgement that we place upon ourselves. The inner critic could very well be the voice of someone who was an overriding influence in our lives but now we realise it is not a conducive one. When we feel we’re starting to make positive inroads in accepting ourselves the inner critic could be the last hurdle. Learning to calm our inner critic is partly to do with embracing specific techniques like positive self-talk but it can also be about finding ways to drown out that negative voice. Many people turn to meditation or develop a mantra as a way to quieten that voice. Meditation is a very good approach because it helps you to focus on your breath and learn to just be. 

Grieve The Things You Couldn’t Achieve

Regret is the millstone around our neck. If we feel that there are things in life that we couldn’t realise. Maybe we had ambitions when we were younger. But it’s crucial that we learn how to grieve these things. Perhaps we have made changes in our lives that have stopped us doing the things that we thought we wanted to do. But if we take the opportunity to more of these things or realise that it’s not the time for them just yet, we can get back to being the best version of ourselves right now. Grieving is a very healthy process in every aspect of life and if we don’t have a positive perception of who we are, it could be because we didn’t achieve what we wanted. Learning to focus on processing the past will help us to understand that there are things that didn’t come to pass. This is not a bad thing and is part of the key to accepting things and not resigning ourselves to a certain way of being. Letting go of the past and the things we cannot control gives us the power to focus our energy on the things that we can control.

Be Kind To Yourself

Being kind to ourselves is difficult when we don’t accept who we are. Learning to be kinder to who we are by having certain habits will help us understand that we are fallible. We are human and that we make mistakes. Being kinder to yourself and practising self-compassion is what will help you to become someone who doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Learning how to be kinder to yourself isn’t just about giving yourself a pass when something goes wrong. It’s also about learning the things that aren’t healthy for you. Sometimes it’s to do with people that we surround ourselves with, but it’s also about learning to forgive ourselves. When we practice gratitude this allows us to focus on positive acts by listing a handful of things that were positive today so we are able to focus on the positives in a sea of negatives. We have to be kind to ourselves and while it can take some time to get to this point, learning to focus on preserving ourselves and not being so harshly critical of who we are is a stepping-stone to accepting who we are.

Fake It Until You Make It

A lot of learning self-acceptance is about practising it. When we are convinced that we’re not worthy of anything but there are people that we feel set the benchmark, it’s important for us to use them as templates. We all have people we admire for certain traits and sometimes learning to be a version of that person we admire can help us unlock certain qualities within ourselves. Sometimes it can be an aesthetic thing, like making changes to ourselves such as a bit of lip filler or even having breast enlargement surgery that can make us feel that we are deserving of something better all of a sudden because we’ve always felt inadequate in that department. For others, it’s about learning to look the part in other subtle ways. Learning to fake it until you make it is one of the best ways to become a different and improved version of yourself. What we can do is gradually assume a new personality but this means that there are other things that need to be in place for us to achieve this.

The concept of self-acceptance is something that can take a long time for us to come around to, because we’ve already got into a specific negative mindset. Sometimes we’re not even so down on ourselves but when we feel that there’s something that we need to change within ourselves, whether this is achieving a new goal or starting again, we’ve got to ask ourselves if we are trying to make a change because we don’t really accept who we are. Whenever we make a specific change that is supposed to benefit our lives we have to remember that the change needs to be integral to our thoughts and intentions. Accepting ourselves isn’t resigning ourselves to fate but it’s also having that inherent understanding that everything we do in life should benefit us.