It's Time to Fall In Love ~ With YOU!
I’ve saved the best for last. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much natural talent ekes out of your every crevice – you will not achieve satisfaction in life if you do not love yourself. Instead, you will sabotage your own success, knowingly or not. You will believe others’ doubts about your abilities. You will internalize criticism. You will judge yourself through the eyes of others instead of your own.
If you really aren’t crazy about you right now then do both of us a favor and stop wasting money on self-help programs and business start-up guides. Stop taking classes and wondering why you aren’t rich yet.
Coming to terms with you is the very first threshold step to having the life of your dreams. Skip this and you guarantee failure. Because success is not achieving some goal that you have set for yourself (or that others have set for you); success is the joy you feel when you are living your own life; your way. The joy is in the process; not in the completion.
If you don’t love yourself, you will not embrace the type of lifestyle that you were meant to follow because that lifestyle is simply a reflection of you. You cannot feel the power of joyful love until you have fully embraced and loved the full you – you know, the you with warts and flaws and bad breath and occasional strangeness. Those oddities and undesirable characteristics are what diverge you from the average. They help define, you; like it or not. These things aren’t bad until you decide that they are. Someone along the way told you that these characteristics of yours were bad and you believed that someone because you trusted them. You now see yourself as they did.
Let’s say that you decided that there is something about you that you want to change – that really doesn’t reflect the true you. Fine. Change it if you can and if you can’t change it, forget it!
It’s as simple as that.
Achieving all of this might require a few visits to the shrink’s couch or alone on a mountaintop. It might take some time. The fact that you are anxious about achieving more for you and your family is a good indication that you are ready to take this on. You just need to know how and in what order to take on each challenge.
So get to know the real you. Forget everything that others have said or implied in the past (easier said than done). And decide that you are ready to move past self-pity into your new life. You are ready to love yourself.
Hugh DeBurgh, The Passionate Warrior, has dedicated his life to the achievement of the ultimate family lifestyle. You can find him writing about Creative Family Lifestyle Design over at his blog, The Way of the Passionate Warrior. Currently he is on the second leg of a worldwide travel adventure with his wife and four young children. Follow Hugh on Twitter or sign up for his RSS feed and don't miss an update!