The Importance of Self-Love: A Journey to Finding Inner Peace and Happiness

In this post, I want to share some of my personal insights on self-love and how it has helped me grow personally and professionally.

Why I love my inner child so much

As an introvert, I find it incredibly easy to lose myself in work and relationships. I know that I don't spend as much time as I should doing things that bring me joy and happiness. This often means that I tend to go through periods where I'm not really feeling good about myself.

What does it mean to love yourself?

When I first read this quote by Nelson Mandela, it struck a chord with me. He writes:

"It is easy to talk about love, but it is difficult to experience love, unless we can love ourselves. If you can truly love yourself, you automatically start loving others."

We sometimes struggle with loving ourselves. We don't feel worthy of loving, and we don't love what we see in the mirror. However, love doesn't need to come from external sources, but from within.

Here are two things that have helped me grow as a person.

1. Surrounding yourself with positive people

When I was younger, I had a friend who would tell me that I was beautiful whenever I felt insecure about my appearance. While this was great for boosting my confidence, he would also get annoyed if I would try to make fun of my appearance.

Later in life, I realized that it isn't about how I look; it's about who I am and how I interact with the world. I started to see that other people have more value than I did. People are more important than their appearance and achievements.

The more positive people I surrounded myself with, the easier it was to surround myself with more positive people. And this eventually helped me love myself.

1. Understanding my triggers

Many times, I become anxious when I feel like I've done something wrong or messed up. I try to avoid these situations because I'm afraid that I might mess something up.

My first job was working at a grocery store. One day, when I was stocking shelves, a customer tried to give me too much change, which resulted in me accidentally spilling water all over the counter.

It took me weeks to get over this, and it almost ruined my relationship with that customer. The lesson here is that no one is perfect all the time, even if we try our best. Our mistakes can make us feel like we're being punished by the universe.

However, if you understand your triggers, you can avoid them. In my case, I knew that I could never tell anyone about the incident because I didn't want to ruin my relationship with the customer.

Instead, I used the situation to learn something and reflect on my behavior.

I realized that my reaction was irrational and was actually based on insecurity. Whenever I felt like this, I always started looking for imperfections in other people and myself.

I had to change the way I handled myself in those situations