ACTIVITY 1: IDENTIFY AREAS OF CHANGE
In order to truly love yourself, you need to remind yourself of the things you love and acknowledge the bits of yourself that you’re not happy with and either learn to love them, or become ok with the way they are.
We’re going to start with an activity that is relatively easy and write a go old pros and cons list about ourselves.
Grab a piece of paper and drawn a line down the centre of the page. At the top of each column write ‘What I love about myself’ and ‘What I don’t like about myself’. Then brain dump everything into either column. Go beyond just physical, think emotional, mental, habits etc. They can be deep or superficial, it doesn’t matter.
Now you’ve got everything written down, tear the page in half, read everything you love about yourself and then put the ‘What you love about yourself’ column somewhere that you see regularly. Refer to this column when you’re having a bad day or thinking something negative about yourself, or any time you pass it by. We as humans are good at reminding ourselves of what we don’t like and are bad at, but rarely remember the positives; so this will help here.
Then turn to the ‘What I don’t like’ column and ask yourself why you don’t like these things about yourself? Is it because society makes you feel like you have to be a certain way? Someone in your life told you otherwise? You were bought up to think this way? You’re comparing yourself to someone else?
Then write 2-3 things you are going to do to either change this into something you love about yourself or what you need to do to accept it as it is. It might be a regular habit that you need to introduce. It might mean removing toxic people from your life. It might be something as simple as a new haircut. Whatever it is, give yourself a little plan to learn to love more about yourself.