I am on a journey to loving myself. Not loving myself in a vain or conceited way that we often think about when we say somebody loves themselves, but that I love myself in a way that I am so comfortable in my skin and so comfortable with who I am that nothing gets in the way of me being the very person who God has created me to be.

One thing that I am learning is that I need to love myself unconditionally. I need to love myself with no conditions or boundaries in place. If I place conditions on loving myself then my self-talk looks like this… If I mess something up or if I fail at something then I stop loving myself.

When I stop loving myself it looks like this… I beat myself up internally, I tell myself that I am no good and so I stop trying at all. I hide away and put walls up around myself to protect me from other people. If I think terribly of myself then what do other people think of me? So I just hide away. All my thoughts are negative and self loathing.

I am not perfect, in fact I am far from it, so I am going to mess some stuff up. I am going to make mistakes, say things that I really shouldn’t say and do things that I wish that I hadn’t done. If I stopped loving and thinking kindly of myself every time that I messed up then I would hide away from the world permanently.

If I love myself unconditionally then my self-talk looks like this… no matter how great I do at something or how poorly I do, I choose to love myself. I choose to love myself no matter the outcome, before I even step out and do something; I am going to love myself no matter what.

I will choose not to beat myself up, not to sew seeds of doubt and self-condemnation. Just because I mess up every now and then does not make me a terrible person, I am flawed and I will make mistakes but that does not change who God has made me to be.

So many of the battles that we face are battles of the mind. Taking captive of our thoughts is so important and if we can take a hold of our thoughts towards our selves and keep them always framed in a language of love then we will be well on our way to loving ourselves well and well on our way to being the person that God created us to be.