Today is Day 20 of my 31 Days of Self-Love posts to celebrate Self-Love Month with suggestions for jumpstarting your own self-love.

“Am I willing to love me?”

I always wanted to love myself. It seemed like the right thing to do. But back in my DoorMat days, my self-love was weak and building it seemed tough. It’s hard to begin self-love when you don’t even like or respect yourself. My feelings of worthiness were in the toilet. I was too fat to love! I’d run down my list of faults and feel unlovable.

Other than family, who I believed had no choice but to love me, I didn’t feel loved. People took advantage of my kindness yet gave little in return. When you don’t feel lovable, it’s hard to make the effort to do acts of kindness for you. I thought that was for me to give others, even if they didn’t treat me well. We often buy into the erroneous belief that when people treat you poorly, it’s your fault.

I heard so much about the benefits of self-love and really wanted it for me. So I made an effort to try to do things that would make me happy. Each kind act reinforced my self-love. But often I forgot to do those things. When I thought about loving me, I was able to be kinder about how I treated myself, but realized that my habit of not being kind to me was much more ingrained. I needed a way to remember to find ways to show myself love. Since I was so far from loving me, I wrote on a piece of paper:

“Am I willing to love me?”

I hung it on the back of my front door. Every time I left my apartment I saw it, read the question out loud, and said “Yes!” It stoked my desire to be more loving to the person who should be most important in my world—me! Every time I read it and said a resounding “yes!” I smiled and felt good. So I made a few more and put one near my workspace, one by my bathroom mirror and one by my bed. Each time I read the question and answered it, my resolve to build self-love got stronger. It felt fabulous to acknowledge my desire to love me.

Willing means you’ll try, that you’re open to loving yourself, even if you don’t right now. It doesn’t mean you’ll have to be different or work hard.

“Am I willing to love me?”

I highly recommend you make your own signs with the question and put them where you see them often. I printed it out from my computer but you can write it by hand. The most important thing is to make the signs and read them out loud to raise your consciousness about your desire to build your self-love. You don’t have to love yourself yet to do it. You just need to be willing to consider it. The more you acknowledge your willingness, the stronger your will is to be more loving to self.

Eventually I changed the sign to “Do I choose to love me?” “Yes!” It turned into the affirmation, “I choose to love me.” Baby steps can bring great change!

When you go from being willing to love you to choosing to, you’ve taken a big step toward building self-love. Each time you acknowledge being willing or choosing to, you get closer to building strong self-love. It keeps the idea of doing kind things for you in your consciousness. If self-love has eluded you, ask yourself, “Am I willing to love me?” If you can, hang papers with that questions and ask it out loud often to raise your consciousness. Once you’re feeling it, take my 31 Days of Self-Love Challenge and give yourself 31 days of kind gestures. When you see how good it feels, hopefully you’ll want to continue and change willing to choose to love yourself.
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Take the 31 Days of Self-Love Challenge–a pledge to do something loving for yourself 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 31 Days of Self-Love Posts from 2011 HERE.

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