How to Cultivate Your Most Important Relationship: The One With Yourself

The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself. 

 

The most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

 

Having a relationship with yourself is, like any relationship, difficult and full of many ups and downs. Without carefully tending to it, however, living a fulfilling life is impossible. Why?

Only you can figure out what you want, and once you know, no one can take it away from you.

 

Figure out how the best badass version of yourself feels in the future: work towards that

As difficult as it can be, understanding what we want to do with the one life we’ve been given is an incredibly important task that we be responsible for ourselves. A lot of us look to other people like our teachers and parents to tell us what we should do, or we allow societal pressures and our perceived talents to push us in one direction or another. The truth is, no one has the answer to what you should do with your life — nor does it necessarily lie in what you are naturally good at doing.

 

It is your job to figure out what you want out of life. This might be broad and will evolve over time, but it will probably fundamentally be constant. If you know what you really want, you can always work in that direction, and check in on yourself along your journey. Which are your priorities? After taking the first steps, if you ask yourself consistently whether you are going in the direction of your want, you can keep yourself on track.

 

Once you know what you want and you firmly believe you are working towards getting there (don’t lie to yourself, make sure you are on track), no one can take that away from you. You will feel incredibly connected to your desires and work. Others’ comments and opinions will not matter because they are not you, and you are going down your own path.

 

There is no healthy relationship without loving yourself first.

Preach. You cannot experience the true beauty of love until you understand and develop a loving relationship with yourself. Once you do this, you love for the right reasons, and you choose only to give your love to people who will be able to accept it and promote your well-being right back to you. When we don’t have a good relationship with ourselves, we often find ourselves in abusive or otherwise unhealthy relationships. We can rationalize (consciously or subconsciously) that we deserve these relationships or that they are ok when we do not feel fulfilled on our own.

Further, when you are close to yourself, you have more truth in your interactions with people — family members, friends, significant others, etc. This allows the people you care about to love you for you instead of an idea of you that you might construct if you do not feel comfortable in your own identity.

 

We come into the world alone and will go out alone. (depressing but true.)

We die at some point in our lives. At the moment when we are taken from this life, you do not want to regret not having been good to yourself and your wants and needs. Further, we never know what we will lose in this lifetime. Our parents will be gone one day, our pets will pass on, and much of what we know can disappear in an instant. Through it all, you have to build a strong love for yourself to get through the difficult times everyone will be faced with.

 

Other people can help comfort you, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for picking yourself up.

 

Your relationship with yourself dictates how altruistic you become

How can you start to cultivate your relationship with yourself? Do things alone. The simple act of doing things alone is incredibly powerful. When you accomplish a task or a big feat on your own, you bond with yourself, just as you would bond with a person you have a wonderful shared experience with. Further, you become stronger, more confident, and more understanding of who you are, which feels amazing.

 

Here are two things I implore you to try doing alone:

Eat alone in public :

So many people have a negative stigma about eating alone at a restaurant or in a cafe. If you avoid eating alone, I challenge you to do it more often. Become comfortable with it, and make your eating time alone feel just as fun and normal as eating with a friend.

 

Travel alone:

I love the feeling of getting on a plane alone and taking off to a new place. It’s incredibly liberating, and it is a strong reminder of how self-sufficient you are as a human when turbulence happens, and you have to comfort yourself.Being in a new place alone is also invigorating. When you only have yourself to rely on, you are guaranteed to overcome new challenges and have novel experiences. If you cannot travel far, try taking small trips near home with yourself. You’ll be glad you had the experience of discovering something new on your own.

 

Set intentions for yourself.

You should set intentions for yourself and remind yourself of them every day. Write them down. Memorize them and repeat them in your mind like a mantra. Without intention for what we are doing, we lose sight of who we are, why we do what we do, and, as sad as it sounds, why we are alive. Having a burning intention will help you to get out of bed, keep going in hard times, and give you the focus and motivation you need to work for what you want.

 

Learn how to self-care and soothe.

Remember what I said about being born and dying alone? It’s important that you learn how to care for yourself for this reason. Some self-care items should be habits: exercising a few times every week, eating well for your body, journaling often, etc. Develop a routine for self-care that helps you to reboot yourself consistently throughout the week. The second part of this is self-soothing. Everyone should have a crisis-management plan in place for themselves. What if something bad happens? Have an action plan for dreaded times like these. It will help you to focus on self-soothing by taking action rather than allowing the crisis to consume you.

 

Challenge yourself.

To learn more about yourself, constantly challenge yourself. By putting yourself in uncomfortable and new situations, you learn your wants, needs, and pain points more thoroughly than if you always do the same old things. Great entrepreneurs and other heroes throughout history have always challenged themselves. Gandhi did so by fasting and giving up material desires. Elon Musk makes his companies’ goals bigger and bigger. Serena Williams never settles at her current level of precision in tennis. Challenge yourself to keep exercising for a few extra minutes, to work for an extra hour towards something you love, to cut out sugar for a week, etc. These small acts of challenging yourself add up to a great deal of knowledge about who you are and make you an even stronger, more badass person

 

Your Relationship with Yourself.

One of the things that differentiates human beings from other creatures is that humans are self-conscious. We think about ourselves. We talk to ourselves. We might be happy or unhappy with ourselves. We are in relationship with ourselves. The relationship you have with yourself is critical because it is the foundation for all your other relationships in life. The stronger your relationship with yourself, the stronger your other relationships can be. Like other relationships, your relationship with yourself is all about trust. To trust yourself, you must trust your wisdom and knowledge about yourself. You must love and appreciate yourself. You must have self-confidence and the ability to lead yourself. Let’s take a look at your relationship with yourself in terms of the Covenant Virtues. Building the best relationship possible with yourself means reflecting on questions like those below.

 

Seek Wisdom

Wisdom is the combination of knowledge and character. How is Your Self-Knowledge? How well do you know yourself? What kind of thinker are you? Are you more analytic or intuitive? What kinds of information do you need to make decisions? How well do you perform under pressure? What makes you happy? What makes you cranky? Do you have healthy emotional responses? Do your emotions overwhelm you? Do you suppress your emotions?

How is Your Character? What are your good habits and character strengths? What are your bad habits and character challenges? How well does your perception of yourself match what wise family and friends think about you? Practice Love. You can’t fully love other people unless you first love yourself.

 

How Do You Feel About Yourself?

How do you feel about your: Mental strength? Physical fitness? Appearance? Ability to make friends and have relationships? What are you proud of about yourself? What are you happy about yourself? What makes you feel sad, disappointed, or embarrassed about yourself? Do You Love Yourself? What qualities make you the unique, one-of-a-kind person that you are? Have you accepted the things about yourself that you cannot change? Are you proud of what you’ve accomplished and who you are? Get Results. To get results, you must have strong self-confidence.. Can you lead yourself through difficult situations and get results?

 

How Is Your Self-Confidence? Are you confident that you can achieve things?

Do you over-question yourself to the point that it undermines your performance?

Are you over-confident? What are the differences between self-confidence, pride and arrogance? How Much Do You Trust Yourself? In what situations do you trust yourself?

In what situations do you not trust yourself? Do you have the ability to Do the right thing for the right reasons even if pay a big price? Rise and do difficult things even when you are tired? Resist temptation? Avoid toxic people and relationships? Set goals and achieve them? To see things through to the end?

 

Your relationship with yourself is like your relationship with other people. The more you put into it, the more you will get out of it, and the better all your other relationships will be.

 

You need balance in your relationship with yourself. If you aren’t honest with yourself about your challenges, you’ll never fix them. If you are too hard on yourself, you won’t build the confidence you need to succeed.

 

You need wise people who love you and want what is best for you. They can give you accurate feedback and wise counsel on how you are doing. They can help you find your center if your self-reflection gets unhealthy.

 

Like other relationships, your relationship with yourself is all about trust. The more you develop your wisdom and knowledge about yourself, the more you will trust yourself. The more you appreciate and love yourself, the better you can love others. 

 

Your relationship with yourself is very important because it is the foundation for all your other relationships. If you have a strong and stable relationship with yourself, you can be strong and stable in your relationships with others. You will be in the best place to love them and help them grow. You will be in the best place to accept their love and grow from it.

 

A good relationship with yourself gives you the foundation for success to leading a good life to happiness.