Developing self-love is an important milestone for anyone on a personal growth journey. Besides making you feel much more wholesome, self-love is required to cultivate positive characteristics such as self-esteem, charisma, and confidence.
The only problem is that lacking self-love is comparable to being caught in a tar pit. You’re stuck – And all attempts to climb out of this hole are futile.
Because you don’t value yourself, you feel worthless. Because you feel worthless, you value yourself less. Being caught in this pit is a universal experience – One we all experience at times. However, it’s not a place you want to stay as doing so degrades the quality of your life tremendously.
That’s why it’s important to learn the role of positive self-reinforcement – To help pry you out of this pit by drilling in healthier ways of viewing oneself.
What is positive self-reinforcement?
Your reality is a reflection of your self-image. If you see yourself as a loser, you’re going to carve out a reality that’s congruent with this identity. Your outer reality wants to have a congruency with your inner reality, as your reality is a projection of your inner workings.
Positive self-reinforcement is to associate desirable traits, characteristics, feelings, and thoughts with yourself via drilling and repetition. Think about positive self-reinforcement as reprogramming a faulty system to synchronize with a higher perspective.
In this article, we’re looking at your internal reality. If you want to learn how to alter your perception of your external reality, follow the link below:
A tool to facilitate growth and healing
The more you associate positive qualities with yourself, the quicker you will begin unconsciously shifting towards these ideals.
The most common barrier holding people back is their own perception of themselves, because the world mirrors how we think and feel.
Commonly, people experience self-worth issues – Resulting in being stepped on, pushed around and taken advantage of. But when people flip this perspective, the external reality accommodates this interior shift.
The antidote to limiting belief systems
Negative self-perceptions stunt your personal growth and result in limiting belief systems. Many of these limiting belief systems are unconscious, and you probably don’t recognize when you’re reinforcing something negative about yourself.
The key to stopping reinforcing negative self-perceptions is to identify each time you put yourself down. Here are some things to think about:
How often do you roast yourself for mucking up?
Do you beat yourself up for failing?
Do you believe you should be doing better in life by now, so you resent yourself?
What you associate with yourself can instill motivation, encouragement, and support, but it can also strip you of these things. This is why it’s important to treat yourself as you would treat your pet, your partner, or a family member.
To learn more about limiting belief systems, click on the link below:
Changing self-perception with positive self-reinforcement
Words and phrases anchor ideas. You want to anchor the idea that you are progressing in some way, that you’re going forward rather than backward. If you frequently tell yourself how much life sucks, soon you will believe it because you’re anchoring this idea into your reality.
The technique of positive self-reinforcement is to hijack this phenomenon, to improve the way you see yourself – By using a specific phrase to reinforce a better idea to yourself.
This is why you should practice anchoring positive and impactful phrases with yourself to reinforce a better idea of yourself. So watch your vocabulary, and be aware of how you think, feel, and speak about yourself.
Drilling in positive perceptions of yourself
What becomes your point of focus heavily influences your life. You will gravitate towards a self-image corresponding with the traits and characteristics of your focus – So make sure they’re good for you!
Think of all the ideas that you associate with yourself. Write them out like this:
- I’m nobody, I could never be someone that people look up to
- I am awkward and don’t make friends easy
- I fail at everything I do
- I’m not worthy of respect or admiration
- I should be doing better in life
- Life is difficult
- It’s scary
- I’m dumb
Identify whether these ideas bring you up or down, and think of a more positive idea that you can replace with it. For the list above, some examples include:
- People don’t know me well because I haven’t put myself out there
- I’m working on my social skills
- There’s many things I’ve done well in my life
- I am worthy of respect because I am a good person
- I’m doing the best I can
- Life is a challenge
- It’s an opportunity to grow
- I’m learning more every day
Think of what needs improvement
Write down repeating situations or occurrences where you beat yourself up. If you are constantly reinforcing the belief that life is terrible, then you will continue to move down the path of a terrible life, because it has become your point of focus.
If you think of yourself as a loser, is this going to help you feel good about yourself? Likewise, if you don’t see yourself as someone who is sociable, is this going to help you become more sociable? No. In most cases, it’s going to have the opposite effect.
Exercise self-awareness to identify negative self-perceptions, and understand the repercussions of them. Replace these terms by adjusting your vocabulary and associating better ideas with yourself.
Utilize affirmations
Affirmations can be powerful tools to drill in certain ways of thinking about yourself. By affirming characteristics with yourself, you will begin to believe them.
An affirmation is when you repeatedly say a phrase and associate the feelings of that phrase with yourself. The idea of affirmations is to work on your conscious mind by deconditioning old programming that doesn’t serve you, and replacing with it healthier programming that does.
Here are some examples of different affirmations. You can use these, but I suggest making your own that are relevant to what you need to work on.
Affirmations can be worded differently. Experiment with different phrases to see what impacts you the most.
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- I am strong
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- I choose to be more assertive
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- I’m actually quite resilient
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- I like to challenge myself
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- I love the person I’m becoming
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- I am becoming happier
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- My life is getting better
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- I can’t believe how much work I’m doing on myself
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- Every day I feel a little healthier
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- Life is becoming exciting
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- I’m funny
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- Everyone loves me
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- I embrace new ways of doing things
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- I’m interested in trying new things
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- I’ve got this!
How to make affirmations more effective
- Feel into it: It’s important to really feel the phrase you’re saying. It should be a feeling that you’re trying to resuscitate, not just words themselves. So associate the phrase with a feeling, and make sure there is meaning behind the words.
- Believe it: The best affirmations you actually believe. And if you don’t you make yourself believe them. Have you ever hyped yourself up or assured yourself by saying something like “I’ve got this” without even realizing it? It just sorta comes out as habit? That’s because it’s genuine and you actually believe it. This won’t always be the case but try to believe the affirmation.
- Take steps: If you go straight to “I’m powerful beyond measure” while you still feel weak and insecure, your unconscious mind won’t make the leap. You need to make steps as a way to bridge the gap between desire and reality. A better path would be to start with “I’m becoming more powerful”. Once you feel better about yourself, then go to “I’m powerful”.
- Don’t use negative statements: A negative statement is something like “I am not insecure”. Even though the intent is good, the keyword is counterproductive. Your mind will make an association with that keyword and ignore the rest, so make sure the statement is positive.
- I choose statements: While your unconscious mind can argue what you say you are, it can’t argue by saying that you choose to become someone/something. Try using I choose statements such as “I choose to be more assertive” rather than going for “I am assertive”.
- Quality over quantity: Take your time to speak each phrase and load it with meaning. Take it slow, savor the feelings. Don’t just rapid-fire because they’re not going to do much.
Visualize self-compassion
Visualize yourself giving yourself love.
As your ability to visualize can actually really move things internally, constantly seeing yourself support yourself is a good way to reap the benefits of that support.
What I often do when I’m feeling down is visualize my higher self coming down and reassuring me. He will tell me that I’m doing great, and guide me to become more like him.
Try this yourself.
Let’s say you feel guilt about something. Picture your higher self appearing and telling you that it’s okay. Your higher self can sit with you and reassure you that we’re all human and make mistakes and that you shouldn’t hold onto something that happened.
The more you make a practice of supporting yourself via visualization, the more support you’re going to feel, so definitely give it a try. To learn about my own experiences with this technique, click on the link below, and let’s go!