Every other self-help book on the face of the earth tells you to love yourself. And rightly so, part or most of the problems we face in life come from our inability to love ourselves, whether that’s loneliness, people-pleasing, or self-acceptance.
While many self-help books, blog posts and videos on the internet address this and tell us, “oh! You have to fall in love with yourself”, nobody seems to be getting to the nitty-gritty part of the deal, HOW? How do you fall in love with yourself? For some reason, the advice is generic and limited to doing skincare, spas, and making time for ourselves!
But guess what? None of that actually helps you fall in love with yourself. Because the feeling of love has a lot more to do with learning to identify who we are and changing the part of ourselves that makes us dislike ourselves.
So, in this article, I am breaking down everything I have done that has helped me fall in love with myself. Not just the external me, but also the person I am!
A taste led monthly editorial membership designed to sharpen discernment, reduce decision fatigue and regulate impulse buying.
Step 1: Identifying the habits you don’t like in yourself and working on them.
I could start this paragraph with, ‘one of the most important things we need to do to love ourselves is’ but I won’t do that, because every other step in this article is important to complete to fall in love with ourselves. But the first step is definitely this, identifying the habits that we don’t like in ourselves and beginning to work on them.
You see, the reason we love someone has little to do with the external factors and more to do with our perception of who we believe that person to be. We love and admire people who are disciplined, well-groomed, clean and neat, kind, confident, fluent, articulate, visionary, and have many other habits that make them stand out.
The appeal of habits might differ from person to person, after all, love is more subjective than being objective. But in any case, it’s important to understand what habits we like to identify with so we can start working on them.
So, identify. Identify every little habit that you find attractive. Begin planning where and how you can improve yourself to start falling deeply in love with yourself.
Step 2: Dress like your most sorted self.
I hate to be the one who breaks it to you, but here it goes, fashion is not vanity. Fashion is not frivolous and no! Fashion is not superficial. If it were, people wouldn’t be fighting over cultural appropriation.
We adhere to our identities, and fashion is clarity of self-perception. Fashion is having agency over the self. Fashion is self-development. Fashion is self-respecting. So, in a way, fashion is a form of wellness.
When you look good and you feel like yourself, you naturally start liking who you are. And that is an important thing to understand on the journey of self-love.
You need to look good to start taking care of yourself and it starts with becoming clear about how you perceive yourself internally. I have written a detailed article on how to find your style and aesthetic, which you can find here.
Begin your fashion journey here
Step 3: Building identities that are admirable
As I said before, we love people less for who they are and more for the identities we associate them with.
We admire a sports personality for their discipline and focus, a poet for their intellectual depth, an actor for their persistence and ability to portray complexities, a pop icon for their style, and so on. We admire them for the identity we associate with them. And to start loving ourselves, we must also start building towards these identities that help us see ourselves in the same light.
A taste led monthly editorial membership designed to sharpen discernment, reduce decision fatigue and regulate impulse buying.
Do you like someone who is disciplined? Pick up a sport. Tennis, gym, boxing… whatever makes you feel cool about yourself. You like someone who looks sorted? Pick up an aesthetic and start slowly building your wardrobe. Do you like someone professional? Pick up a structured career. You like someone creative? Great! Pick up a hobby and stick with it.
Whatever it is you want to identify with. Pick that up and build it. You will be surprised how easy it becomes to love yourself. When you love your identity, you love yourself.
Step 4: Radical self-acceptance and dialling down the inner critic
So far I have listed things that need you to change yourself. But there is plenty of stuff we cannot change about ourselves.
We can’t change where we come from, our origins, culture, language, our descent, to some extent our appearance as well (we don’t want to go crazy about the things that are not in our hands). So, what do we do? We self-accept.
Not just marginally. But fully!
Don’t have a skin tone that fits the beauty standards of the world? So what? Does it make you any less attractive? Don’t speak a language that others perceive as the gold standard for communication? So, what? It’s 2026. Get a translator! You don’t come from a big city? So what? Do big cities make you a better person?
That’s it. You radically self-accept the part of yourself you can’t change. Besides, why should you change? Your uniqueness is what makes that world beautiful. Who wants to live in a world where everyone looks, speaks and has the same story? Imagine what a robotic, mechanical and factory-like world that would be?
So, accept yourself and start taking pride in who you are!
A taste led monthly editorial membership designed to sharpen discernment, reduce decision fatigue and regulate impulse buying.
Step 5: Enhancing or working on things you already like about yourself
For the most part, we are taught to work on our faults and self-acceptance. But what about the things we already like about ourselves? Why not work on it to become the best at it? It will certainly make us happier and more enthusiastic about ourselves. So, work on it. Work on it to become better and better each day. Because, despite the many faults, we all have things in us that are deeply beautiful that we can always rely on to love ourselves. Especially on days we struggle to love ourselves.
So that’s it. Those are the five things I did that helped me fall in love with myself. If you are currently struggling to fall in love with who you are, then I am sure these five steps will help you fall in love with yourself when you work on them consistently.
Hey there! I’m Tahlia and nice to meet you.
I’m a dentist by graduation and a content creator by interest. I live in Malnad, IN. I tap my feet to the rhythm of music and love reading books. Photography and eating Pani Puri are some of my other favourite things.
Leave a Reply