Part 1 of 5
By now, most of us have heard about self-care, self-love and all of the things associated with it. There is an entire industry dedicated to “self-care” that will sell you all things soft, cuddly, and sudsy. Self-care spa day anyone? However, I’m here to tell you that self-care and self-love are about a lot more than a spa day, cuddly clothes, and treating yourself to a massage. Not that those aren’t great things to engage in, but self-love is much deeper than those acts. Self-love is a prime factor when it comes to embodying your full potential and feeling empowered as a person. The question is, what exactly is self-love? How can we practice it? And what about it unlocks our personal power?
In this 5 part blog post, we will explore what exactly self-love is and how we can more readily achieve each of the aspects of self love.
How do we define Self-Love?
The term self-love gets thrown around a lot these days, but when I talk to my clients about it, no one really has a clear picture of what it exactly means. In fact, it is one of the topics that every client I’ve ever had ends up working on in our sessions.
Like many of these self-development concepts, it is important to define them for yourself, as we are all unique beings. However, having a foundation from which to start that definition is key to developing a strong understanding and definition of the concept for yourself. The more that you understand and are aware of something, the more empowered you are in that area, so by developing a deeper understanding of self-love and a better relationship with it in your life, you are empowering yourself to grow and thrive.
Self-love is the overarching term that explains how we treat ourselves with care, both physically and non-physically. In short, self-love is the measurement by which you value yourself and what you do to show yourself that value. Even though that seems like a pretty clear explanation, it still leaves room for further clarity and definition.
Perhaps one of the best definitions that I’ve managed to find in regards to self-love comes from Mental Health Advocate Sarah-Len Mutiwasekwa. She states that self-love can be broken down into 4 areas: self-awareness, self-worth, self-esteem, and self-care. If one of these aspects is absent in our lives, then we are not really giving ourselves complete self-love. So what are each of these lenses of self-love and how do we go about ensuring we are experiencing and practicing all of them?
In the next 4 blog posts, we’ll go into further detail on each of these 4 aspects of self love, but for now we can give a brief explanation of each.
Self-awareness is the ultimate foundation of not only self-love, but also all personal growth and transformation. Self-awareness is basically exactly what it sounds like, how aware of yourself are you? How honest are you about yourself? How aware are you of your conditioning? Of your motivations? Your triggers? Your emotional state? etc.
Self-worth is the value that you place on yourself, and it is based upon your personal values that you hold. How we choose to value ourselves, and what factors we gauge that value on are unique to each of us as individuals, but you can see that without self awareness, we aren’t able to understand what our personal values are. Without self-awareness, we aren’t truly able to define our values or know our self-worth.
Self-esteem is a term that we’ve all heard throughout our lives, and unlike the value defined piece of self-worth, self-esteem has more to do with how we feel about ourselves. This again is build upon the foundation of self-awareness, and even still, builds upon our understanding of our self-worth. How do we feel about ourselves once we are aware enough to know our self-worth?
The final piece of self-love is self-care. This is yet another “loaded” term that has been thrown around a ton, especially in the personal development and wellness industries. Self-care is more than just a spa day to feel better. Self-care comes down to everything we do to show ourselves that we are aware of ourselves and that we do in fact love ourselves. You can think of the former 3 aspects of self-love as the defining parts of self-love, and self-care brings it all together as the encompassing behaviors of expressing and showing our selves that love.
In the next 4 blog posts of this 5 piece series, we will break down each aspect of self-love and dive deeper into the understanding and defining of this concept so that you can become more empowered in your life. Stay tuned for more!
If you’re looking for support in empowering yourself and defining and implementing self-love, I encourage you to apply for FREE to 1:1 coaching and/or to check out the monthly meetings of the Women’s Empowerment Community Circle in Colorado Springs – a virtual circle is coming soon so that you can be a part of this community no matter where you are. You are worthy of love and support, and I am honored to help be that support.
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