Gael's Blog

At the very heart of my concept of confidence is self-love. This is certainly the most important element of Inner Confidence. Explained simply, self-love is self-esteem in action. It is not enough just to think or believe we are great we have to prove this to ourselves. We do this by acting in a way that demonstrates that we value ourselves. This means that we must treat ourselves and look after ourselves in the same caring way that we would treat anyone else whom we loved and respected.

January resolutions often reflect this need to take better care of ourselves:

I will exercise more/walk upstairs instead of using the lift
I will stop smoking/eating junk
I will go to bed earlier

But there other ways we can show love to ourselves, such as:

• treating ourselves when we have done well or made a very good effort
• ensuring that our self-talk is encouraging and never self-demeaning
• focusing more on our strengths than our weaknesses
• giving ourselves fun
• saying ‘yes please’ when others want to help or nurture us

February is a month when we traditionally share and show our love for others, so I have chosen it to be a time when we can focus on showing ourselves some more love too!

So for now, forget January’s broken resolutions. After a good dose of self-loving treatment you should be much more motivated to re-visit them. Your challenge now is to do the following:

♥  Each week, take at least 3 different actions that will demonstrate your your self-love to yourself (and the rest of the world perhaps! Remember that in order to feel differently about ourselves, we must act differently.

♥  Make a note of each action which you took and note down the level of satisfaction that it gave you. (You can use a 1.5 or 1-10 scale if you wish) You will then have a guide to the kind of self-caring actions that work best for you.

If you would like to understand a little more about how and why you may have developed some bad  habits in relation to Self Love, why not take a look at my book Self Esteem.

I hope you enjoy our challenge this month!

Gael