Today is Day 25 of my 31 Days of Self-Love posts to celebrate Self-Love Month with suggestions for jump-starting your own self-love and joining The Self-Love Movement™.
It’s often advised that you should be your own best friend. It’s a nice idea but it can be hard to accomplish. I think that most of us would like to be our on best friend but we don’t know how. I didn’t back in my DoorMat days when I didn’t love myself. I was too busy trying to please everyone around me.

Eventually it hit me that I needed to pay attention to how I treated my best friends. What did I for them that I didn’t do for me? I learned a lot. There were many differences between how I treated a best friend and how I treated me. This behavior is common in people who don’t love themselves. You probably wouldn’t:

•    Tell a friend he’s stupid when he doesn’t know something.
•    Beat a friend up verbally for making a mistake.
•    Tell her she doesn’t deserve something she wants.
•    Ignore what he says he needs.
•    Call her fat.

Chances are you wouldn’t do any of those things to a friend. When you care about someone you don’s want to hurt him or her! Yet we so easily hurt ourselves by doing those kinds of things. If you truly want to be your own best friend and love yourself you must change how you treat yourself. Write down all the behavior you think a best friend should give to the other person. What would you do if your friend rattled off what’s wrong with her? What would you do if he berated himself for making a mistake?

Create a manifesto saying that you’ll be your own best friend. On a paper, write:

“I choose to be my own best friend. I pledge to do my best to treat myself as good, if not better, than I’d treat my best friend.”

This means that you’ll:

•    Accept that you’re trying your best.
•    Do kind things for you.
•    Reassure yourself if you make a mistake.
•    Acknowledge that you deserve what you want.
•    Put satisfying your needs first.
•    Accept your body with love.

Write your own list on your manifesto. Sign it at the bottom. Keep it where you can see it to remind yourself that you’re your best friend. If you honor this, self-love can grow!
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Join The Self-Love Movement™! Take the 31 Days of Self-Love Commitment—“I commit to do my best to do something loving for myself, however big or small, for the next 31 days.” and get my book, How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways for free at http://howdoiloveme.com. Read my 2013 31 Days of Self-Love Posts HERE. Join the Self-Love Movement™! on Facebook.