How to Feel Good About Yourself (11 Things)

How to Feel Good About Yourself (11 Things). Updated 12/31/21

Well, 2020 was quite a year, wasn’t it?

If you’re feeling exhausted, take heart and take care.

Truly, I don’t think we even know yet the toll that the emotional exhaustion of the last year has taken. And considering all the things that have happened, it’s normal if you feel spent and exhausted.

It’s also normal if you’re struggling to feel good about yourself right now.

Often, a new year brings with it feelings of a fresh start.

This year, the fresh start metaphor is strikingly absent for most of the people I know, including family, friends, neighbors and clients. While there is some hope in the air, much of the news continues to be dark and devastating.

In better times, the fresh start metaphor has a kind of chain link reaction on emotions and self-perception for many people. It brings with it a sense of new possibilities and new beginnings.

And then that sense of possibility and new beginnings can translate to increased feelings of optimism, joy, happiness and self-worth. Sometimes you may even notice a lifting of worry and anxiety, or a sense of moving away from feeling down and uncertain.

The end result is that in better times, the collective and environmental zeitgeist that’s going on around you may bring with it a “feel good about yourself energy” that helps transform your mood.

This feel good about yourself energy is mostly in short supply right now.

Unfortunately, this is what happens when ongoing traumatic stress bombards you in ways you’ve never before experienced or anticipated. So, during times like these, what might help most is to revert to the basics.

Personally, I’m trying to pay attention to this myself. For me the basics looks like getting up and going outside, taking a shower, writing in my journal, talking to a friend, taking a walk, resting, making a grilled cheese sandwich and writing this blog post.

Not necessarily in that order, but you probably know what I mean.

All of these very simple things do help me feel good about myself and my life, or at least better. And I imagine you have a list of your own simple things that help you feel good about yourself.

Definitely, now more than ever, please take the time and make room for these things.

Whatever you’re experiencing, please know I’m holding you in my heart.

I’ve decided that perhaps the best way I can hold you in my heart right now is to remind you that you’re doing the best you can. And also, that there are some essential truths that you embody that can bring you home and bring you back to an inner space where you do feel good about yourself.

I’ve gathered up 11 of these essential truths. I didn’t have to go far to find them, because I’ve been writing this blog (with you in mind) for quite a few years now.

So if you can, hold these truths about yourself close and remember them when you’re struggling to feel good about yourself.

11 things to appreciate and help you feel good about yourself

1. You have a deep and abiding wisdom within you.
2. You already know so much about how to live your life.
3. You can step away from the advice and suggestions, and trust your quiet knowing.
4. Your feelings are always valid; you never need to minimize them or compare them to anyone else’s experience.
5. Your innate creativity opens up the conduit to your deeper knowing.
6. Your natural empathy helps you imagine what it’s like to stand in another person’s life.
7. You possess tremendous gifts, and some may be buried in the depths of your wounds.
8. Your senses contribute mightily to your feelings of wellbeing and happiness.
9. You have it in you to join with yourself, to see and accept all parts of yourself with compassion and love, and move forward as a whole, integrated woman.
10. You can define success on your own terms, not by what society or family tells you about how you should live your life.
11. You only have to be you, and you’re unique. As Martha Graham famously wrote to Agnes DeMille…There is only one of you in all of time…And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.

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We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

-Tennessee Williams