How do you learn to love yourself?

I get the question a ton - how do you learn to love yourself?

I used to have a completely different answer for this question. I used to tell women they needed to accept who they are right now, they should learn to talk to themselves with love, they had to meditate and give themselves affirmations daily to remind themselves of love.

However, now, I have a different answer. You have to get to know yourself first. How can you love someone you dont even know?! You cant.

You get to sit with yourself and observe your behaviors. You get to watch the way to talk to yourself and others. You get to observe how you hold yourself, and what you eat and when, how you feel in all types of situations and how you treat others. Just as you would imagine, it takes a lot of time. Imagine how long it takes to get to know someone else, and we are constantly evolving, it is going to take a long time to get to know yourself as well.

What a beautiful process this can be if you let it. You can start to observe how you behave and evolve that in to something you love and appreciate more. You can start to process how you talk to yourself (admit you do it, we all do), and mold that language in to something you love and verbiage that encourages and motivates you to be better.

It may not start out very pretty - looking internally at ourselves honestly is a really hard thing to do (which is why most people don't do it), and you may see a lot of things you do not like, but that is the start of changing everything and finally learning how to fall madly in love with yourself. And that, is the basis of love in every other relationship in your life.

The first step to self-love is taking time to truly get to know yourself and being honest with yourself.