How to Be Your Own Best Friend And Create Happiness For Yourself
Most of us have a vague idea of our relationship with ourselves. We find it hard to be left alone – working, meditating, talking to ourselves, or just reflecting on how life is passing by. So it’s important to learn how to be your own best friend.
Although on the surface, we know how happy or sad we are every day. But beyond that few people dig deep to find what affects their happiness and well-being.
So what does it mean to have a healthy relationship with yourself? It means that you’re your own best friend. You think and act in ways that help you move towards your goals and desires. And when the going gets tough, you allow yourself to take a step back and figure things out.
In short, you use your energy in positive actions to support yourself instead of making it work against yourself.
Here is how to be your own best friend:
1. Create Positive Habits
Creating positive habits is the most important step in the evolution of your relationship with yourself. First, you should build habits that lead to good health – sleep, nutrition, exercise – these are the foundation of self-care.
Second, you should build habits that encourage self-love. Spending time on your hobbies, meditation, treating yourself to delicious food, watching your favorite movie, talking to a dear old friend – there are many ways to love yourself.
Third, you should build habits to achieve personal goals. So if getting promoted is your personal goal, spending one hour every day on improving your skills is a great habit to install in your everyday routine.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Create positive habits for health, self-love, and personal goals.
2. Practice Positive Self-talk
We all experience the inner critic to some degree. But if its voice is too hard and goes on for a long time every day, you’ll feel sad, anxious and guilty most of the time.
It’s important to slow down, reframe the situation, and take a positive small step forward when your self-talk sounds too harsh.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Create positive habits for health, self-love, and personal goals.
3. Engage in Healthy Relationships
The kind of relationship you have with yourself determines the kind of people you will draw in your life. It works both ways.
Eliminate the people in your life who make you feel anything less than good. A quick way to test a relationship is to see if someone is happy in your peak moments of achievement and happiness.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Create positive habits for health, self-love, and personal goals.
4. Build Awareness From Negative Experiences
Most of us don’t want to face our negative experiences. And why would anyone want to? They are painful, right? But the truth is that painful experiences carry golden lessons that can help us better understand ourselves.
How so? First, when we become curious about negative experiences, we build awareness and discover personal truths.
For example, if you feel intense emotions when an opportunity slips out of your hand, it shows a characteristic trait that you are highly ambitious and want to seize every possible opportunity.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Use negative experiences to know more about yourself.
5. Choose Improvement Over Perfectionism
Most people want to change their lives overnight. But this is a recipe for failure. When you are trying hard to be perfect, every small mistake will lead to guilt and frustration.
You will be too impatient and instead of being grounded in the present, your mind will be lways racing towards what will happen in the future.
A good relationship with yourself requires that you let go of small setbacks and instead of being critical in such times, you support yourself and take gradual steps for improvement.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Seek improvement, not perfection.
6. Accept and Embrace Your Flaws
Nobody, no matter how successful or great, is perfect in this world. We all make mistakes and have our own imperfections. Being flawed is an integral part of being human. Therefore, we need to accept and embrace our flaws.
Embracing your flaws lightens you up and frees you from the false constructs of the ego which tells us that we should fit a certain stereotype.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Embrace your flaws, they make you human.
In the end, building a healthy relationship with yourself is all about being compassionate and friendly with yourself, just like you would be with a friend.