Most of us have a vague idea of our relationship with ourselves. We find it hard to be left alone—working, meditating, talking to ourselves, or just reflecting on how life is passing by. So it’s important to learn how to be your own best friend. On the surface, we know how happy or sad we are every day. But beyond that, few people dig deep to find what affects their happiness and well-being. So what does it mean to have a healthy relationship with yourself? It means that you’re your own best friend. You think and act in ways that help you move towards your goals and desires. And when the going gets tough, you allow yourself to take a step back and figure things out.
Create positive habits.
Creating positive habits is the most important step in the evolution of your relationship with yourself. First, you should build habits that lead to good health—sleep, nutrition, exercise—these are the foundations of self-care.
Second, you should build habits that encourage self-love. Spending time on your hobbies, meditation, treating yourself to delicious food, watching your favorite movie, talking to a dear old friend—there are many ways to love yourself.
Third, you should build habits to achieve personal goals. So if getting promoted is your personal goal, spending one hour every day improving your skills is a great habit to incorporate into your everyday routine.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Create positive habits for health, self-love, and personal goals.
Practice Positive Self-talk
We all experience the inner critic to some degree. But if its voice is too hard and goes on for a long time every day, you’ll feel sad, anxious, and guilty most of the time.
It’s important to slow down, reframe the situation, and take a small positive step forward when your self-talk sounds too harsh.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Create positive habits for health, self-love, and personal goals.
Engage in Healthy Relationships
The kind of relationship you have with yourself determines the kind of people you will draw into your life. It works both ways.
Eliminate the people in your life who make you feel anything less than good. A quick way to test a relationship is to see if someone is happy during your peak moments of achievement and happiness.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Create positive habits for health, self-love, and personal goals.
Build Awareness From Negative Experiences
Most of us don’t want to face our negative experiences. And why would anyone want to? They are painful, right? But the truth is that painful experiences carry golden lessons that can help us better understand ourselves.
How so? First, when we become curious about negative experiences, we build awareness and discover personal truths.
For example, if you feel intense emotions when an opportunity slips out of your hand, it shows a characteristic trait that you are highly ambitious and want to seize every possible opportunity.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Use negative experiences to know more about yourself.
Choose Improvement Over Perfectionism
Most people want to change their lives overnight. But this is a recipe for failure. When you are trying hard to be perfect, every small mistake will lead to guilt and frustration.
You will be too impatient, and instead of being grounded in the present, your mind will always be racing towards what will happen in the future.
A good relationship with yourself requires that you let go of small setbacks, and instead of being critical in such times, you support yourself and take gradual steps for improvement.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Seek improvement, not perfection.
Accept and Embrace Your Flaws
Nobody, no matter how successful or great, is perfect in this world. We all make mistakes and have our own imperfections. Being flawed is an integral part of being human. Therefore, we need to accept and embrace our flaws.
Looking at a new point of view is a great way to help you change your unhealthy attitude towards failure. Instead of saying, “If I fail, it means I am stupid, weak, incapable, and am destined to fall short”, you can shift your perspective with kindness by saying, “If I fail, I am one step closer to succeeding; I am smarter and more savvy because of the knowledge I’ve gained through this experience”.
Embracing your flaws lightens you up and frees you from the false constructs of the ego, which tell us that we should fit a certain stereotype.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Embrace your flaws; they make you human.
How to Be Your Own Best Friend And Create Happiness For Yourself
Building a healthy relationship with yourself is all about being compassionate and friendly with yourself, just like you would be with a friend.
If I ask you to describe a good friend, what comes to mind? Is this the kind of person who accepts you unconditionally? A loyal person? Or authentic, honest, and trustworthy? Most of us can really be good friends with others because we know that humans deserve kindness rather than cruelty. You’ll learn how to cultivate that same thought for yourself. Knowing how to be a good friend to yourself—through having self-compassion.
I have talked about having compassion in many of my blog posts before. It is because I truly believe that being kind to yourself is the foundation of self-improvement.
“We tend to associate personal growth with determination, persistence, and hard work,“ which I absolutely agree with. Personal growth means being committed and having a strong will; however, we often forget that compassion is also present there.
Self-compassion gives us the motivation to improve ourselves and be true to ourselves. Being true and supportive.
It sounds like the same qualities make a good friend, right?
Whether you admit it or not, we sometimes are the harshest people to ourselves. We say words to ourselves that are too rough to even say to others.
Thinking that you are your own best friend is a “trick” that will remind you to have self-compassion—because you deserve the love and kindness that you give so easily to others as a good friend.
How to Be a Good Friend to Yourself
Some people think that self-compassion is selfish or narcissistic, but it is actually not true. “Being kind and nonjudgmental toward oneself is a good practice for treating others compassionately.” With all that said, here are some tips on how to be a good friend to yourself:
Stop judging and being hard on yourself
There are three components of self-compassion, and the first one is self-kindness.
Being kind and understanding rather than harshly critical of yourself is exactly the first step on how to be a good friend to yourself because, as I mentioned earlier, we, ourselves, are the harshest to ourselves.
One of the great exercises to help you cultivate self-kindness is journaling. You can do it through journaling or do whatever works for you.
Allow yourself to feel fully
Another tip on how to be a good friend to yourself is to allow yourself to feel fully.
There is nothing wrong with feeling sad, disappointed, or frustrated. Our culture taught us to escape these kinds of unpleasant emotions by, for many, engaging in unhealthy and destructive habits that lead to more suffering.
Being your own best friend means allowing yourself to feel and express your positive or negative emotions in a healthy way. You can do this by crying, listening to music, dancing, or keeping a journal.
Wise words!
Overall well-being depends on being a good friend to oneself. Like nurturing connections with others, you must care for yourself. Beginning with self-compassion, acknowledge your strengths and accept your weaknesses without judgment. Honor your emotional and physical self-care by resting, relaxing, and doing what you like. Strive for reasonable goals and enjoy minor wins. Allow self-reflection to help you improve. Remember that self-love is the cornerstone of good relationships. Self-love and understanding improve your life and relationships. Treat yourself like a friend and watch a happy, harmonious relationship develop.
How can you be a good friend to yourself?
Self-compassion is a learnable skill. It is a practice that will not just help you improve and love yourself but also breathe more love and understanding into the world.
I hope this post will help you to be the most compassionate, gentle, and loving friend for yourself and to others as well. Comment below on how you think you could be a good friend to yourself. If you have any other tips on how to be a good friend to yourself, feel free to also share them in the comments!
Abundance of Love and Light