(an abridged excerpt from the book)

There are so many aspects to this seemingly simple concept that I have chosen to pick out just a couple from the book: self-love and self-esteem.

We are going to look at what they are, why they matter and a couple of ways of working on them.

What is the Difference between Self-love and Self-Esteem?

These two concepts are really interconnected, but there are key differences that make it important for us to work on them separately at least some of the time.

Self-love is unconditional; we love ourselves as we would a baby. Not many adults can run around naked, weeing and pooing everywhere and still be loved, but a baby can, and that is what self-love is. It comes with truckloads of acceptance and no need to prove anything or even have bladder control.

Self-esteem is about us thinking that we are good and valuable, so it does have an element of evaluation in it. With healthy self-esteem we may feel we are attractive, competent, interesting, worthwhile, amongst other qualities. We know we are valuable and look at things in a way that confirms that (rather than confirmation of the opposite as with low self-esteem).

Why We Need Good Levels of Self-Love and Self-Esteem

It is essential for our health and happiness. Narcissism is on the rise, and although this may seem an extreme display of self-love, it actually reflects a deep uncertainty of our worth. If you have good levels of self-love and self-esteem, you don’t go fishing for that on social media, using the perfect selfie as bait.

Self-love and self-esteem are also essential for:

• self-care
• healthy relationships
• accepting ourselves no matter how we act or what we are doing
• loving ourselves even if we do not fit society’s idea of perfection or manage to rise to unattainable standards of wealth or beauty.

If we have low self esteem we may even get ill (sick), in fact low self-esteem has been linked to immune- and cardiological-disorders. No pressure!

Working on Self-Love and Self-Esteem

A cursory look around self-help books and online articles will show a lot of people value external and practical ways of boosting self-love and self-esteem. Although I think that there is a lot of value in improving the external aspects of our lives, for this section I really want to focus on internal work.

This is because the roots of our attitudes to ourselves are within us, and improvements in self-esteem may not last if they depend on keeping up certain habits or changes in our environment. Self-care is hugely important, but knowing that we deserve it vastly more so.

In the two sections below I have included one exercise each from the book, I hope you enjoy them!

Working on Self-Love

Just think: “wow, I am amazing” and now notice your reaction. Is it internal laughter, discomfort, complete agreement? With self-love there is nothing to prove, nothing you could possibly do to get more love. You are just enough as you are. An advertiser’s nightmare. A tiny baby’s reality. OK, let’s have a go at the first exercise.

Exercise: Calling in a Self-Love Mentor

You know how little children can have invisible friends? We are going to intentionally create one for ourselves. This friend is going to be our self-love mentor; both a teacher and a mirror reflecting our own love back to us whenever we think of them throughout the day.

It can be a unicorn, an angel, a 6ft teddy bear, a purple monster. On a more mundane level we could call it a tool for focusing our attention in a specific way. But this mentor is far from mundane, they are brilliant. You can have them look like and be literally anything. Glitter explosions may go off every time they move, they may be a superhero with special powers; whatever feels right to you. If you have no clue what they should look like, I would go with a capybara.

Please close your eyes, take your time and visualize the perfect self-love mentor for you, in as much detail as possible. You can try imagining them in the room with you. Throughout the day, as often as you feel like, you can tune in to them and see how they are responding to how you are acting or how you are feeling about yourself. Their job is to send you love and accept you unconditionally, seeing you as the best version of yourself. They are all for you.

Visualise them looking at you with complete love, acceptance and appreciation for the entirety of who you are. Then let yourself see them through your eyes and bask in that perspective.

I want you to regularly visualize this mentor standing near you, maybe once a day. Send love from your heart to them and the instant it reaches them feel it reflect back to you, strengthened and doubled in volume. Even though your first few steps towards self-love maybe tentative this mentor believes in you and is there to model the perfect way to give yourself love.

You can change the image of this mentor if you choose, but at the end of the day what you pick is not too important, so do not worry. The most important thing is your sense of their way of being, which is perfect self-love and self-acceptance. Deep within us all is the knowledge of how to have self-love, our mentor is simply with us to remind us and help us to get to that state.

In the future when you feel ready you can simply send all of that love to yourself, feel it within yourself, without the aid of a mentor. But until you are ready to accept love for your own sake, you can work with your invisible friend to help fill you up and to teach you how it is that we can have nearly perfect self-love.

If you want to, you can draw your mentor or describe them. You can also journal about your progress, including details of what comes up for you when you feel love, any blocks or emotions that are triggered, and if there are any areas of yourself that you feel are hard to love. For fun you can write a message or even a letter to yourself from your mentor, giving you feedback, and you can write a letter of appreciation to them. Getting in touch with an invisible friend gives us a way to access a part of ourselves we don’t know that well, so get to know them as much as you like! It’s all you at the end of the day.

Working on Self-Esteem

Low self-esteem may be seen as the route of many of our issues in society today, even contributing to mental and physical health issues. You would think that growing up relatively privileged in the West, safe, educated and with a bright future we would all be full of self-respect and esteem. Unfortunately the opposite seems to be true.

Do not be hard on yourself if you have realized your self-esteem is low. Maybe it is hard to believe that we deserve all these resources when so much of the rest of the world is poor. Maybe it is the way we were raised, or the social norms that surround us. Whatever the reason, working to improve it as it will have a great effect on our quality of life.

Exercise 1: Inner Child Work for Self-Esteem

Because our self-esteem levels have their roots in our childhood experience, it makes sense to do some work with our inner child. We may say horrible things to ourselves, that we would never say to a friend or a child, so working on boosting the self esteem of our inner child also helps us to bypass that negative self-talk.

1. Sit or stand somewhere you are comfortable, where it is quiet so you can do the visualization in this exercise. Picture yourself as a child in your mind’s eye. Whichever age feels right is good, but if you are not sure, then pick 4 or 5 years old. Visualise your clothes, your chubby little hands, your round face, your mannerisms.

2. Now say hello to this child in your mind. They may come up to you and want a hug or to sit on your lap, or they may be content to stand or play where they are. I would like you to imagine sending them love, from your heart. This love surrounds them, as with a warm blanket and you can actually feel them accepting this love.

3. Now I would like you to tell your inner child what you really like about them. If you want to, you could write out a list of statements and then one by one say them to the child. With each statement really see the child’s reaction. You might see them swell with pride, or feel warm, feel secure. They won’t be about achievements (such as you won that award), but things you like about their personality and maybe even appearance. The statements might look like any of these:

You are really funny

You have a wonderful sense of imagination

You are very clever

You are very brave

I like your hair

Just to name a few.

4. And now that you have done that, sense the child’s state, how they are feeling. Now repeat the exercise, but every time you say one of the statements to the child have them repeat it back to you, and try to really take it in. Imagine that if you cannot accept the compliment, the child will not be able to believe it, as you are the same person. So really try and let that positive statement in. After each statement that you give to and receive from your inner child, repeat it from both of you as a “we __” statement.

For example, you say to your inner child “you’re very brave”, she says the same back to you, you bask in that for a moment together and then you visualize both of you saying “we are very brave”.

5. You may find that when you are doing this exercise you feel some kind of block. Maybe it is hard to visualize yourself as a child, or it is hard to remember yourself happy, or you find it hard to find compliments or accept them. Wherever your block is, the first step is to accepting that it is there and to accept the emotions around it. Send a feeling of love to this block or blocked feeling. If you cannot work around it right now, try and accept that too.

I highly recommend that you journal about this exercise. You can include the phrases you told your inner child and yourself and what reactions you felt. You can then repeat this exercise in the future and compare the results.

Motivation for Increasing Self-Esteem

Here are a couple of thoughts that may help motivate you to do this work:

• We can be role models for others, especially the younger generation and inspire others to be kind to themselves.
• We can build our lives, careers and relationships on a solid foundation of kindness and respect. For example; a friendship between two people with good self-esteem is a meeting of the minds and sharing enjoyment, but low self-esteem can lead to over-attachment based on fear, competitiveness, rivalry and/ or a need to keep the other person down at our level.
• It helps us to have great intimate relationships. Rather than expecting our partner to fill us up, we feel we have permission to take care of ourselves.
• We can ask for what we want and need and really believe that we deserve it.

So I hope you have learned a couple of useful things about why and how to be kind to yourself and I really hope you put it into practice. Kindness starts at home, and then ripples out to everyone else. This is genuine love and kindness and you will really feel a difference when your giving and receiving comes from a place of satisfaction and grace.