How to Accept Yourself: 3 Incredible Strategies!

This article is also available in:  German The growing diagnosis of anorexia nervosa (eating disorders) in our society is incredible. Roughly 90 percent are women between 12 and 25 years of age. This is a great example of the illusion of needing acceptance. Especially through the beauty industry the image of the beautiful woman is completely controlled by fear. Individuals that have an eating disorder could think: “My body is way too thick,” “I do not feel comfortable in my own body,” or “For sure, others think that I am fat.” As an illustration, these thoughts and sensations are the backbones for these irrational eating behaviors. How can we accept ourself and let go irrational behaviors? I found 3 incredible strategies that helped me, and a lot of others, to avoid long-term irrational behaviors. These are bulletproof strategies when implemented correctly in daily life.

First Strategy – A Survey with Close Friends and Family

This is really simple and, at the same time, very challenging. Just ask your close friends and family to share details about you! Also, be honest with them and tell them the motive behind your intimate/personal survey.

Ideas for your survey.

The best idea is to call your friends and family and explain it to them personally. Writing in WhatsApp or chat is okay; however, this is not challenging, and misunderstandings can happen quite a lot. Your life is the most important thing to you, isn’t it? Therefore, value the lives of others and make the survey as personal as possible! Think about something honest. For instance, a story about “how I did not accept myself.” This is always fitting and emphasizes the fact that your close friends and family can help you out in your own personal growth. One example/topic: Hey, I came up with a strategy to be more confident about myself and accept myself. Maybe we never talked about this before (if that is the case). For a long time, I’ve really had problems going out to parties because I feel I am not worthy of having a girlfriend/boyfriend, and at the same time, I do not want to fail at talking to a nice girl/boy and be hurt. For that reason, I developed a short survey to find out what others like about me, because I have a hard time finding/reflecting a strength that helps me to be more confident in this topic. It would be a great help, if you have 5 minutes, to do the survey. Tip: Also, ask them to do it directly on the phone, when there is time, or meet up together, because you learn a lot more. Basically anything can be a topic:

• Not accepting your own physical body.
• Not accepting your way of learning.
• Having a hard time outside when talking to strangers.

Ideas for the survey questions.

(Fit in your name in all the questions below.)

• List at least 3 different things you like about the person.
• In which 2 situations did the person help you the most?
• List at least 2 physical characteristics you like about the person.
• List at least 2 mental characteristics you like about the person.

Very important: Add at least 4 more individual questions to the list on your own. Why is this strategy helpful for your self-acceptance? First of all, you move outside of your comfort zone. Especially individuals that lack some sort of self-acceptance or self-love have an incredibly hard time even talking about this. 

“Have the courage and open yourself to the unknown, because only then will the universe open up all the possibilities you yearn for!”

Second Strategy – Find Everything you Love about Yourself

When you start to focus on the fact that you do not accept yourself, it is almost impossible to get out of that negative spiral. First of all, you have to be aware enough to also see the good inside and that it is only your decision when you want to end the negative spiral.

A good starting point to accept yourself more is to find everything about yourself that you like or love.

Create a list with 5-10 things you like and 2-3 things you love about yourself. It’s important that this can be anything for you to imagine (body, soft skills, hard skills, mental skills). For example:

• 1. I love my voice.
• 2. I like my eye color.
• 3. I like my job.
• 4. I like my big toes.
• 5. I love my hair.
• 6. I am a good listener.
• 7. I am a good teacher.
• 8. I am a peaceful person.
• 9. I love to read books.

Is it hard to find something for you? A good approach is to start with the first strategy to do a survey with friends and family. This way, it is much easier for you to accept and find something you also agree with. Another good strategy is to let go and continue to think about what you really like/love about yourself.

Third Strategy – Loosen up Your Weaknesses

Maybe you read the header “Loosen up your weaknesses!” and you think: Let me explain in detail why your weaknesses are as important as your strengths. For example, it could be one of your strengths that you are very open-minded, and so it is easy for you to make decisions in your life. A open-minded decision could be to go on a spontaneous trip to South Africa. But why do you really think about a trip in the first place? Is it really beneficial to travel now? This depends on your circumstances. For example, one of your weakness is that you have a hard time mastering something new. For instance, reaching native level in a new language or learning to be an extraordinary investor. You have the following challenge: you always feel unhappy in the middle of the procedure when you start to be okay at the new language or you get good at investing. Why is it important to know your weakness (difficulty mastering something)? It is crucial to loosen up your weakness because it is connected to your strengths (open-mindedness and easy decision making). Knowing this, you have the freedom to act accordingly because this unhappiness above (not reaching the master level quick enough) activates your strengths. It might be that your thoughts and ideas of the spontaneous trip to South Africa came up in your mind because you reached a certain level of your weakness, in this case mastering a new language.

The strong and proud act of illusion.

“Yes, let’s go on a spontaneous trip to South Africa! I earned it” At that moment, it seems so positive to act open-mindedly, but if you only do the trip to escape from your true goals, it messes everything up. However, only knowing and focusing on the weakness is not enough. You have to transform your weakness into another strength by re-programming your subconscious mind. Slowly but steadily, you integrate another strength, or first, you neutralize your weakness. Strengths and weaknesses are very close to each other! So, only focusing on your strengths and hiding your weaknesses can quickly imbalance your system.

Knowing both your strengths and weaknesses is essential.

Therefore, a very good strategy is to write everything you know about your strengths and weaknesses down. By doing so, it is a lot easier to accept yourself.

“Every shadow contains a gift!”

– Richard Rudd – Gene Keys **

My Favorite System: Discover Your Strengths, Weaknesses and the Higher Purpose of Life

Gene Keys is a magical system, not a mechanical system. A path to the open countryside, which can be performed online. I highly recommend you to read my new Gene Keys article – My Deep Inner Exploration for You + Amazing Tools That Gene Keys system, mentioned above, massively increased the quality of life for me, discovering my weaknesses and strengths on a whole new level massively, and also helped me to feel more and more gratitude from earth, because our earth heals itself sustainably through our THINKING, FEELING, and DOING!

Bonus Strategy – How to Accept Yourself?

In my main article (Complete Self-Love Blueprint) are a lot of detailed methods to remember/learn that help to immensely improve your self-acceptance.

The Implementation

That you do all the strategies above is only the first step towards self-acceptance, because you have to implement it in your neural network as a daily habit. The key: commit thirty to sixty days for one habit. To be able to do so, make it simple, remind yourself, stay consistent, and run it as an experiment. Lifehack also writes in detail about 18 easy tricks to make new habits stick! I can recommend reading it.

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