New year, new me. It seems like that is always the theme this time of year. There is always a push to be changing and fixing yourself. Bettering yourself is a wonderful idea, but I really feel it is better to approach it from a place of loving yourself and not hating yourself. So I feel it’s better to work on self-acceptance first.

Self-acceptance is your satisfaction or overall happiness with yourself. It has a broader reach than self-esteem. While self-esteem focuses more on the positives, and the value we place on ourselves as individuals, self-acceptance is embracing all of yourself, both positive and negative.

Why is this important?

Self-acceptance quote "Accepting yourself is about respecting yourself. It's about honoring yourself right now, here today, in this moment. Not just who you could become somewhere down the line." Kris Carr

You are living with yourself, right now. All the strengths and weaknesses you deal with day to day are your reality. Self-acceptance is being able to embrace all of that, and stop judging yourself. Embracing everything about yourself, the good, the bad, and the ugly, allows you to move past self pity and self hate and into a more productive place.

Once you can have compassion and understanding for yourself, you stop wasting time being critical of your short comings. You can recognize your failings, and move past them. You can actually appreciate your good traits, and take advantage of them to help build the life you want.

Self-acceptance quote "Instead of trying to mend me, I decided to enjoy me. Instead of trying to solve me, I decided to discover me. It was one of the best decisions of my life." S. C. Lourie

Change that comes from a place of acceptance instead of derision is more successful. You will relieve so much pressure on yourself by being ok with where you are in life and who you are right now. Being happy and feeling good about yourself doesn’t leave you drained like self criticism. You can do so much with that energy. Loving yourself as you are means being ok with not being successful right away with a change. When you aren’t worried about your deficiencies you have mental energy available to focus on other things.

Can you imagine not obsessing over what you aren’t? Imagine the freedom. Picture being aware of it, but being able to focus on your strengths instead. Celebrating yourself as you are. It’s a beautiful thing.  I know, because I recently found that freedom. I’ll be sharing my story in an upcoming blog post.

Back to that freedom. Can you see why it is such a basic foundation to happiness? People are always searching for ways to be happy. There is lots of talk about improving self-esteem, but I think we all need to start much more basic and fundamental. Really, everyone tries to start backward. Losing weight, getting organized, buying new things, none of those things are going to help your self-esteem, and working on your self-esteem isn’t going to work, until you accept yourself.

In this blog, I want us to start at the foundation. I want us to work on improving our self-acceptance. All the rest will fall into place after that. I’ve striven for better self-esteem for so long. Once I started to understand and accept myself as I am, the rest just sorta happened. I still need to work on it, but that’s why I’m excited about the blog. I want to work on it with you!  How fun to have someone to do this with!

Sounds great! Now what?

Well, that’s also coming in future blog posts. So, click to subscribe, and be sure to come back and read more!

Please feel free to leave comments below. I’d love to hear from you. 🙂

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