Self-love, abundance, and success

Self – Love, abundance, and success. What is it? Is it ok to have it? The short answer is an enthusiastic, absolutely, yes. The long answer is more complicated. We, as a culture, have so much trouble with self-love. We have been taught to put others before us and to place ourselves before others is selfish. But that’s not what we’re talking about. If we constantly put others first, sooner or later there is nothing left to give. Using the “bucket” metaphor based on the work of Dr. Donald O. Clifton, later enhanced for schools by Merrill Lundgren, the “bucket man”, you have a reservoir of resource within you that allows you to do what you do in a day. Often, it’s a sense of well-being which allows us to go to work and be there for our family and friends. If we don’t keep our “bucket” full, it becomes more and more difficult to do those things which are important to us. We must do things which keep our own bucket full. As in the airline preflight safety speech, we are instructed to place the oxygen mask on our own face before assisting those in our care, we need to put activities in our daily lives which “fill our buckets”. These activities can include hobbies, listening to music, exercise, reading, yoga, meditation, or hanging with friends. Whatever recharges your batteries will fill your bucket. This is self-love or self-care because you cannot properly care for something until you have affection for it. Without taking the time to be a friend to ourselves, we cannot adequately be friends to others or do the things which can bring sustainable abundance and success.

It goes beyond this by suggesting being with people who support and encourage us. Have you ever been around someone who has nothing positive to say? They have the ability to literally suck us dry. Simply being around them in a consistent manner leaves us exhausted and struggling with self-confidence issues. Success can never be acquired in this environment and you deserve so much better. What if that person is us?

If you think about it, when we don’t care about ourselves, how can we believe in ourselves? Believing in ourselves begins with seeing passed the flaws and seeing the intelligent, compassionate core within us. All humans are born with the intellect to learn a great many things. Putting that Intellect to use in compassionate ways is something we are born to do. Doing such things leads to success                                                                                              and abundance. Belief in oneself is believing in this core that we all possess. Be one of those people.