Loving Yourself: 3 Ways to Love Your Flaws and Take On the World

You wake up in the morning, stumble out of bed, and go to the bathroom. Wiping the sleep from your eyes, you look in the mirror. “My God! I am gorgeous!” you say to yourself. “Wow! I’m practically a movie star!”  

Doesn’t happen this way, you say? Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. 

While I am being somewhat silly about the positive feelings you should have toward yourself, I am completely serious about learning to love the body you are in. Sure, you may want to change some aspects of yourself, but you can decide to love them even while you are changing them. 

In fact, I wouldn’t just say that you can decide to love them, but that you need to.

By loving what you are at the moment, you begin a process of holistic change. You send out a more positive energy to all around you, which allows you to attract better people to your life. You gain confidence in yourself, which allows you to accomplish more and to stand up for yourself when you should. 

In effect, loving yourself as you are at the moment is the key to changing yourself into all that you dream to be. 

If you find that difficult - or practically impossible - to imagine, try these simple exercises to begin flexing that “self-love” muscle:

1. Look yourself in the eye in the mirror and say, “I love you.” 

Now, this does seem easy, but it can be a horribly difficult task for some. Go easy on yourself. If, as you try this, you feel like running away or breaking the mirror, take a deep breath. Walk away from the mirror. Calm yourself for a moment. Come back. Look in your eyes again, and try, “I am okay with myself.” Once you are okay with being okay, try moving to, “I like myself.” Work on that for a bit. Finally, move to “I love myself.” 

2. Change negative self-talk to positive self-talk.

Focus on how you talk about yourself throughout the day. Do you comment on your “love handles” or joke about your “batwings?” How often do you put yourself down during the day?  

Don’t finish a negative or self-deprecating comment. Instead, stop yourself and change the comment to a positive one - or, at the very least, a neutral one. 

Bringing your awareness to the hate you direct at yourself is a critical (and often surprising) step in developing self-love and a positive body image.

3. Dress in a way that makes you feel good.

Do you find yourself stuck in a rut of dressing in yoga pants or sweatshirts? Has it been a long time since you put any care into how you look?  

If so, you are only reinforcing a negative feeling about yourself. By changing the way you dress and taking some time to look good, you will begin to take more pride in yourself. 

It’s just about an instant cure to a negative body image.

Find clothes that make you feel good. Iron that shirt you love or put on those terrific heels - even if you don’t have anywhere particularly important to go. Take a few minutes to dab on cologne, put on make up, or do your hair. 

It is amazing how much better you will begin to feel, and even more importantly, when you take care of yourself, you send a signal out that you are worthy of even better from life. This begins a cycle that allows you to develop a better sense of self.

Who knew that clothes had such power? 

Go out and love yourself today. You are one of a kind! 

Financially Stuck: Are Old Beliefs Keeping You Poor?

Are you truly open to allowing money to come to you?

While you may be screaming “yes!”, hold your horses. Just like any relationship, you have a personal relationship with money, and so, you have a power balance going on: money can control you, you can control money, or you can have a balanced and flowing relationship with it, allowing it to come in and out of your life with love and trust. 

So, while you may say that you are absolutely open to having money, your beliefs about money may tell a very different story. In fact, you may have an internal conflict raging within you—on one hand, seeing money as evil or bad, and on the other, seeing it as your very life-blood to achieve what you desire in life. You fear both having too much, believing that you must do something unethical to earn it—or having too little, fearing an unfulfilling, impoverished existence. It really is a mess—and it absolutely blocks your ability to allow money to flow to you easily. 

Answer the questions below to help you to learn how to create more balance and joy in your relationship with money. By opening yourself to a healthier experience of your finances, you can also open yourself to a better, more fulfilling, more supported life. 

The You Whisperer Questions: 

1. Do you see money as evil or bad? Were you told that “rich people must be bad or unethical?” How do you think this affects your relationship with money?
2. Do you not feel like you deserve money? Do you feel that a spiritual or good person doesn’t need financial wealth? Where does this belief come from?
3. Have you ever been able to do something good with your money? For instance, have you given to a homeless shelter, saved a dog from a pound, or given to a charity that helps starving children? How did that make you feel about the power of money? 

Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness, But Happiness Might Buy Money: 3 Ways to Be Happy and Prosper

You may have heard the phrase “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” 

Of course, when you are in a job that you hate or are just barely struggling to keep food on the table, this seems like an impossibility. How in the world are you supposed to do what you love, when you would risk everything to do so? After all, you have so little now!  

I know it is scary, but there are ways to make a transition to loving your work and making more money an easy and painless process.  

A major roadblock to doing what you love is the common belief that work should be hard and dissatisfying. After all, if you hate your job, it makes it okay to be paid well for it, right?  

Wrong. You can love your work and make a good living doing so—in fact, you should be doing this. Best of all, you can start this process now with your current job, and then allow yourself to easily flow into a new job, if that is what you desire. 

To do so, follow these 3 steps:

1. Imagine the kind of day you would like to have. 

First, start to see your current job as what you make of it. 

Do you go to work each day expecting to have an awful day with a terrible boss and horrible customers? Most of us do, but this is obviously not going to create a job that is even mildly enjoyable for you. Instead, I would like you to use visualization each morning to imagine the kind of day that you would like to have. Imagine what the day would be like if you had an absolutely amazing, fulfilling day.  

How different do you feel at that moment, in that kind of day, than you normally do? Connect with this positive feeling, and stay with it all day.  

If you begin to find yourself falling back into your old way of feeling about work, take a minute or two to close your eyes and reconnect with the positive feeling. You will be literally amazed at how much better your day will be if you begin to cultivate this little practice each morning. You might just find that while it may not be the job of your dreams, it is a job that you can enjoy.   

2. Create the positive work (and money) experience you desire. 

Now that you have a positive feeling about work, begin to take a real look at your options with this particular job, and what you truly want to do in life. To your surprise, you may have found that when you change your expectations about your current job, you actually have such a positive experience during work that you truly do love it. If so, you can make the decision to stay—you are in a good situation that is fulfilling to you. You will likely begin to have more and more positive experiences that will bring you all that you desire from your work, including more money and even promotions, if that is what you desire. 

However, you may have found that this job just truly does not fit either who you are as a human being, or your dreams and desires for yourself. By observing this job from a new attitude, you may have realized that you are compromising yourself and your beliefs by doing the work that you do. At this point, it is time to leave this job. Remember, if you live to 80 years of age, you only live 29,200 days. Why waste any more of them in a job that you hate? 

Of course, you certainly can make the decision to stay, but you will likely be doing so out of fear or obligation, and that will repetitively send a signal to your mind that you are expecting more of the same—and more of the same will flow to you, depleting both your energy and your creative self. 

You truly do deserve better. I know that the immediate response might be fear—fear of the unknown, fear of how to get a better job, fear of the effect that this decision will have on others. Just put that aside for a moment. 

Ask yourself: What kind of job have you always dreamed of? What kind of job has called to you? What do you love doing? Put together a clear picture of what you think that you would like to do for work. Just like creating a perfect partner, write down a list of what would make a perfect job for you, and believe that you can bring that job into being. As always, refuse to settle for less than what you truly desire. 

How would you feel each day if you had a job that fulfilled you like this? Connect with that feeling, and know that a job matching this feeling is flowing to you now, and with it, all the money that you desire.   

3.  Take action to make your dream a reality. 

Visualization and meditation is a wonderful tool to connect you with the job - and prosperity - of your dreams, but do remember that you also need to take action to create opportunities for yourself as well. Reach out to people that might be able to help you. Research job openings. Apply for work. Begin writing your book or creating that business if that’s what you dream of.  

Whatever it is, get going. I could dream of writing this article all day long, but without actually pulling out my computer and typing, it would not come into reality.

Align your thoughts, words, and actions to be happy and prosperous! 

Are You Threadbare? 3 Ways to Reclaim Your Personal Power and Set Healthy Boundaries (Part 3)

Ready for the big finish? Want to prepare yourself for the fall out that setting boundaries and reclaiming your personal power will likely cause? 

Then you will enjoy my story - and lesson learned. In fact, here's lesson #3: 

#3: People are going to dislike you for setting boundaries. Do it anyway. 

A few weeks ago, I followed a time management suggestion in Tim Ferris’s awesome book, “The 4-Hour Work Week,” and put an auto-responder on my personal e-mail account to set expectations on when I can respond to things. You see, I get a lot of e-mail each day, and I often have people get quite upset with me if I cannot get a  response to them until later in the day or (“Oh the humanity!”) the next morning. Worrying about this causes me to stop what I am doing just about every hour to check e-mails and respond, breaking my concentration for whatever project I am working on at the moment, often totally derailing my focus.

In reading this fantastic book, I realized that I had allowed this to get totally out of control and needed to set new expectations on how I was handling my time. So, copying Mr. Ferris’s autoresponder almost to the letter, I set up mine. Here it is: 

“Greetings, Friends! 

Due to an extremely high workload and immense amounts of e-mail, I am only checking my e-mails once a day at 4:00 pm EST. 

If you have an urgent issue that cannot wait until 4:00 pm, please contact me via phone at XXX-XXX-XXXX. You’re welcome to call me whenever to say hello.  

Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more without losing my mind in the bargain.  

I hope all is wonderful in your world today - 

 Tara”

As you can see, I offer people the option to contact me right away if there is a need so pressing that it cannot wait until I check my personal account at 4pm each day. 

Cue the ominous music; this is where it gets ugly.

Unfortunately, I set something wrong on my Mac mail and managed to send this autoresponder - often several times - to anyone who had ever e-mailed my personal account. I quickly realized my error, and sent out a very nice apology explaining what I was doing and why I was doing it. 

And the shock, awe, and truly unbelievable started.

Several people called me in a panic wondering what I was doing and letting me know that the stupid autoresponder had gone out a zillion times. Another person called me, totally freaking out, because “What would my business contacts think?” and telling me “You cannot do this with your business contacts - sometimes people need to get a hold of you right away.” 

I did mention that this was ONLY my personal account, right? And, do I really need to be at the beck and call of people 24 hours a day? Does anyone?

It gets worse.

Then, a person (who shall remain nameless) decided take my autoresponder and send it out to a whole list of people, some of whom are business contacts (and would not have seen this autoresponder) with the subject line, “Would you do work with someone who sent you this?” In the e-mail, this person decided to totally fabricate my intent, saying that I sent this to all my business contacts (I didn’t send it to one), that I was just trying to make myself look important (I could seriously care less about being “important”), and that I was even blocking my family from communicating with me more than once a day (I wouldn’t even dream of doing such a thing). 

In response to that e-mail, a couple of people called me names that I have never even thought about another human being, and certainly don't deserve. They had clearly been told that I had done and said things that I had never (and would not ever) do or say. These were, in fact, people that I thought liked me and who I had always treated with kindness. 

Wow. This was the reaction from me just trying to set a healthy boundary on my personal e-mail account - hysteria and slander. Unbelievable.

Be forewarned - if people have become accustomed to using you as a human doormat for a long time, they will be very angry when they no longer have anywhere to wipe their feet. They may lash out. They may try to make you feel bad. People who are jealous that you accomplish the things that they either can’t or won’t make the effort to do might even cite this as an example of you being a horrible, manipulative, self-centered person.

If you are not legitimately hurting someone, ignore them. I was not legitimately hurting anyone by saying that I would only check e-mails once a day and giving my cell phone for emergencies that could not wait. Seriously, I am not the President of the freaking United States (thank God); generally speaking, no one in my friends and family list really have anything that urgent to discuss, and if they do, they can call me - I’ve given them my personal cell number.

Geez. 

Set your personal boundaries, be damned the consequences. It is okay for you to take care of yourself and not be a doormat. It is okay for you to say “no.” 

You do have a right to make the choice to set forth the way that people are and are not allowed to treat you. It is really okay for you to release people from your life that drag you down, hurt you, or treat you in ways that are not the way you choose to be treated - and I don’t care who they are or how they might be related to you. You define who has the honor of being in your life and who gets the backside of the door. 

While we are at it, you do have the right to make yourself and your needs a priority, even if your priorities are not things that others consider important; they are important to YOU, so they are important. 

Take a moment to write down how you want to be treated. What relationships violate these qualities? Limit your time with those people or eliminate them from your life altogether.

Then, write down your priorities. What’s really important to you? Who is really important to you? How much time do you get to work on things that are important to you? How much time do you get to spend with those that matter to you? 

If, like me, you realize that the amount of time that you are spending on other people’s priorities and problems is way more than the amount of time you spend on the experiences and people that refresh, renew, and revitalize you, then it’s time to clearly define your boundaries and start cutting dead weight from your life.

Start by setting appointments in your calendar for the things that matter to you. Block out time to be with your spouse or partner. Block out time to do yoga. Block out time to work on that novel. Block out time for whatever is important to you; but seriously, schedule it in - if you don’t something or someone else will come along and will take that time. 

Refuse to compromise this sacred time to other people’s priorities. 

And, when someone tries to get you to give in to their demands, remember that “no” is a complete sentence. Keep repeating it.

Sure, they might have a fit, but at the end of the day, you get to have a life that is healthier, happier, and fulfilling to you.  

And you know what? That might just be the best goal of all. 

Have you ever felt pulled apart at the seams? What worked for you to rectify the situation? Have you had negative responses to setting healthy boundaries? I’d love to know your stories and tips for success!