Self image - learning to love your body

Self-image is how we see ourselves and as a result how others will see us too. For example, if we see ourselves as beautiful and attractive then most of the time others will see this. Women are obsessed with skinny celebrities and size zero models. Men are led to believe that being tall with a good firm body and muscles will bring them these skinny women. Essentially we seem obsessed with comparing ourselves to anyone who makes us feel bad and the media is happy to portray these people to us as the main path to wealth and everything we desire. What we don’t realise is that we are comparing ourselves to people who are idealised and unattainable. Often many of the pictures we are looking at in magazines have been retouched.
Aesthetic beauty doesn’t necessarily ensure attractiveness or a good self-image. There are still people out there with that perfect body and what mass culture would consider as good looking but they still don’t feel good about themselves which leads to a low self image. The key to having a high self-image is to learn to love what you have and not to focus on what you don’t have. Most people are actually drawn to someone who is friendly, interesting to talk to and confident about themselves regardless of how they look or whether they fit into the mass view of good looking. Interestingly a lot of people who lack confidence can come across as being stuck up and unfriendly, when in fact they are just uncomfortable in their own skin to be able to talk to people freely.
Some top tips to improving your self-image are: -

• Decide to have a positive motivation, which means that you strive to be fit and healthy rather than the negative motivation of wanting to lose weight and be skinny.
• Write a list of all your best attributes and read them everyday to remind yourself what you love about yourself.
• Decide what negative thoughts you have about yourself and how they have held you back so far. Recognise how limiting they have been to your development and decide to not let them hold you back any longer.
• Your subconscious mind over the years has developed ideas of your self image from what it has been told and what your experiences and thoughts have been. Therefore, anything negative stored in your mind can be removed by changing how you speak to yourself. Positive affirmations like “I am beautiful and strong”, etc mean you are literally talking to your subconscious mind where these negative ideas are stored and replacing them with more positive statements about yourself. Be your own best friend.
• Redefine your external dialogue. People will perceive who you are by the way you talk about yourself. Don’t belittle, self deprecate, apologise for yourself. Believe in who you are and others will follow.
• Define who you want to be from now on including all the qualities you have already and want to add to your repertoire. Breathe life into this new you.