Why is it that the relationship we have with ourselves as the one we prioritise the least? We should prioritise our relationship with ourselves above anything else. If you’re not doing this and need to know how to improve your relationship yourself here are five easy ways that you can become your own best friend.
#1 Practice Self-Awareness
Practicing self-awareness is more than just understanding how you feel on a particular day. Self-awareness is the ability to identify not only your strengths but your weaknesses as well. You may be prone to over gloss your weaknesses if you have a lot of confidence, but if you learn about your specific weaknesses, you learn how to improve them.
Being self-aware is not about being self-critical it is about recognising the things that you do well in the areas that you can improve upon. Understanding the things that may make you unique or quirky is also essential to become self-aware. Don’t be embarrassed by your uniqueness understand that it is part of who you are.
#2 Plan the Perfect You
An idea brought to us by Therapy Ideas for helping improve the relationship we have with ourselves is to plan the perfect person that we want to be. You want to write freely about who you would like to be. This writing process should not be edited. Think as freely as you want about how you would like to act, behave, work, think, look, and feel.
Then take small steps to ensure that you can become the ideal you. Some of the thoughts on your “perfect you” list may be impossible, but others are quite attainable if you break them down into small steps. Do you want to get a college education? The first step would be enrolling in school. All of the things that you would like to do may be attainable when you break them down into bite-size chunks.
#3 Listen Critically
For some reason, when we enter a high-pressure, high-risk situation, our self-talk can be ruthless and critical. Understanding that this can happen is essential to improving the relationship that we have with ourselves. Psych Central encourages you to think deliberately and logically and use your inner voice to speak kindly about your behaviors, beliefs, attributes, and habits.
You would not let someone else speak words of discouragement to you. You would stop them and correct them when they were wrong. You should do the same to your inner voice. No matter what negative things come out of that spot in your head, you should consider critical thinking and listening skills to correct the dialogue.
#4 Ditch the Cliff Dive Scenario
A Cliff dive scenario is a form of cognitive distortion, and it’s when you use terms such as always or never, nothing or everything. When you dive off the cliff, you jump or don’t. This kind of thinking can be toxic to your relationship with yourself because in life there are usually hundreds of gray areas.
Avoiding thinking about alternatives or different solutions to the problem can make you feel insecure. Feeling insecure and stuck can make you anxious and disappointed with yourself. If you notice your thinking regarding cliff diving scenarios, make sure you try to examine different ways to get down from the cliff.
Can you walk? Can you repel? Is there a ladder? While not every scenario is diving from the cliff, you can relate the gray areas to this idea when you present yourself with all or nothing thinking.
#5 Look on the Bright Side
Negative self-talk is one of the biggest reasons we have a poor relationship with ourselves. Ditching negative self-talk is going to be the easiest way to improve your relationship with yourself. Simple tweaks in the language you use can drastically improve how you view yourself and the world around you.
The Huffington Post highlights the perfect example of how to do this. Instead of saying “I’m so disorganized on never get anything done” you should train yourself to say “I’m having a thought that I’m not going to get it done.” Instead of saying “I am so stupid” you should try saying “I had a moment where I did feel stupid.” These small changes will drastically change how you view yourself.
#6 Put Yourself First
Be your own best friend and biggest champion, forever and always. There is no one else in the world that can take better care of you than you can. Being your own best friend means that you must respect and address your needs desires and boundaries. Self-care is the cornerstone of a healthy relationship with self.
Now you have many tools to change a relationship with yourself. Don’t overwhelm yourself start with one at a time and soon you will know yourself better than anyone else in the world.