Imagine that you were your own best friend. Your significant other even. Imagine talking to yourself as if you were one of them. Say that friend came to you with a problem, and they sound hopeless and sad and frustrated and desperate. You, being the type of person who loves to lend a helping hand and be there for your friends, start to think of the best words to say to show them that you understand what they’re going through, and that everything’s going to be okay. You try your best to be objective of the situation, no matter what it may be.
Now, there might be a cynical part of you that feels there’s a chance that things might continue to go south, but you don’t want to focus on the negative. You give your friend something positive to bite on because you want them to feel better. You want to turn their bad day around and bring light back into their life. That is the value that you give to your friends. You don’t judge them and call them stupid. You don’t berate them. You’re patient with them and you try your best to say something positive, because that’s what you would want in return, right? RIGHT?
You as your own worst enemy
Sadly, whenever YOU’RE having a bad day, instead of thinking something positive to tell yourself, you go into panic mode and then into victim mode. You start focusing on the problem and wonder to yourself why did it have to happen to you, especially now, of all days. If it’s something you’re partly responsible for, you call yourself names and tear yourself down. You’re not the kindest person when it comes to yourself. If you’re having an idea and you want to do something, you instantly find ways to talk yourself out of it and shoot it down. When things start getting hard, you start believing that you can’t do it, when we BOTH know that’s a crock of shit! It’s almost as if all the evidence of numerous times when you CAN do it, all the times you gave yourself a challenge and DELIVERED, fly out the window when you hit a bump along the road. It’s like you suffer from temporary amnesia when you’re facing a crisis in your life.
You as your own friend
But here’s a novel idea. Imagine yourself as one of your best friends when you’re having a crisis. If they came to you first with a problem, what would you tell them? Do your words tend to be words that heal, or words that wound? Just as you would talk to a friend, talk to yourself. Pretend to be two different people if you have to (it’s okay, do it in your own privacy. You’re not crazy.). But start having a conversation with yourself just as you would with a friend. Start with ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘How do you feel about it?’ ‘What are you going to do about it?’ And then after you’ve explored all your emotions about what went wrong, start doling out the words of hope, like:
- ‘You’ll get through this.’
- ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’
- ‘God is good.’
- ‘It could have been worse!’
- ‘Everyone makes mistakes, it’s nothing to worry about.’
- ‘I love you anyway.’
You are a work in progress
That last line, ‘I love you anyway’, is often going to feel difficult to say. Chances are that you’re a perfectionist. You live to get things right. You want to be successful, or you don’t want to be clumsy any more, or you want people to like you, and so on. That’s fine. But just because things won’t always go right all the time doesn’t mean you should be so hard on yourself! Remember that you’re human, and leave perfectionism to God. You need to start being more loving to yourself. You are never going to have everything figured out, at least right now anyway. So stop being stingy to yourself with self-love during the bad times just because you didn’t know something or didn’t do something right or couldn’t predict that something bad would happen ahead of time. Remember that you don’t have those kind of superpowers. You live in the now. You live in the real world. Accept yourself as a work in progress. REALLY DO THIS.
So I insist that every time something in your life doesn’t go the way you wanted, instead of beating yourself up about it, talk to yourself about what’s going on inside and how you feel. Then find the magic healing words to say. And always end with ‘I love you anyway!’
Thoughts inspired by Louise L. Hay on the subject of self-esteem from her book ‘I Can Do It’.
