you are your own biggest critic

Hello everybody...here’s hoping that you are well and have been taking good care of yourselves. This past weekend I was watching a show called ‘How to look good naked’. I had never watched this show before and I thought I’d give it a try. In a nutshell, it’s a show that helps women feel more confident about their bodies, and teach them how to dress for their body shape. In the beginning of the show these women would look at their bodies and say “this part is too big, this is ugly, this does not look good”...they seriously could not see anything about their bodies that was lovely. What I realized as I watched this was that we are our own biggest critics. We focus and obsess so very much about what we cannot get right, the parts of our bodies we feel are ugly, the things we are bad at...we over analyze ourselves to the point where we cannot see all the lovely things we do. Let’s talk about how we can get out of that mentality and start to see ourselves in a positive light.

No one is perfect: I don’t know who told mankind that we had to be perfect. Whoever did that was a very very cruel person I tell you because they have caused such misery to the world. How would we ever learn to grow if everything was so perfect? If you always so obsessed about being perfect, you will miss out on the fun in doing things and you will tend to be rigid and on edge because you want to control every little thing. Don’t get me wrong I am not saying do not put in effort in what you do, or stop aiming for quality and excellence...I am saying while you aim for the highest qualities, leave room for growth. Be flexible and accommodating. Learn to make new mistakes because that means you are trying out different things.

Don’t put yourself down: Don’t walk around feeling inferior to others. Walk around thinking you too are as capable as others are. Carry yourself with confidence.

Take compliments graciously: Say someone says to you ‘oh you are so beautiful’ and you reply ‘thanks but I really hate my nose I think it’s too big, look at it, isn't it such a big nose? I really wish I could get it reshaped’. Don’t do that. Take the complement and focus on the fact that you are beautiful and stop paying too much attention on your faults.

Hang around people who make you feel good and inspire you to be a better you. Comments that some people make can make you feel really small inside or you feel a lot of pressure to be someone you are not around certain people. Try by all means to avoid negative people because they don't do anything to help you feel more confident. Don’t take everything that people say to you as though its true. Sometimes people speak out of anger or they have their own issues and may say things that hurt you. Do not take that to be true. Just tell yourself, “wow they have their own issues and they wanna take everybody down with them”.

Have principles: Have your own principles and live by them. If we were all meant to think and act the same then only one person would have been created. We are different, and you need to know yourself better - what you like and what you don’t enjoy. It’s okay to be different. Set your own principles and stick to them. If you don’t, you will just blow with the wind. If you don’t have anything you believe in then you have nothing. You will go by what other people believe and this causes you to not have any confidence in who you are.

Discover your strengths: Everybody is good at something. Focusing on your strengths gives you confidence. If you spend time doing things that you are not good at, you will feel like there is nothing that you can do right. Take time to find out what your strengths are and sell that. This is not to say you should be totally oblivious of your weaknesses, know your weaknesses so that you can make an effort to improve them but don’t use them to make you feel like you are not good enough.

Be positive. Think positive. Speak positively about yourself, about your future, and about your progress. Do not be afraid to project your strengths and qualities to others. By doing so, you reinforce those ideas in your mind and encourage your growth in a positive direction.

Educate yourself and be prepared: The internet is so great for information. I love it! You no longer have to act dumb. Whatever you want to know about, Google it. Sport, music, history you name it...its all there...don't you just love that? Educate yourself on all sorts of topics and know the current affairs, it helps for small talk when you meet new people. If you are giving a presentation of some sort, prepare well for it. When you are prepared you feel confident because you have the knowledge.

Lastly, start liking yourself. There is only one you so you had better start liking yourself because that’s all you got. Take time to discover who you are and love yourself. If you can spend so much time criticizing yourself, you can definitely switch your focus to spending as much time encouraging and thinking positively about who you are.

Be Blessed,

with love...tafie