“We love each other, period.”
Love! My favorite topic! I love the topic of love and what love can do for the world. I have written about this core value many times and always focus on some form of loving others and how important it is, but today I wanted to talk about love differently. Instead of asking you to love others, I want to ask you to love yourself!
Many of us share the same desire to be loved. We want others to love us, and we try our best to be that person that loves others with the hope of, in turn, being loved because it makes us feel good. Sometimes we fail at this. We try to love but find ourselves not doing a good job of it. It leads to failed relationships, failed initiatives, and projects, and we end up giving up on love.
What went wrong? Were they just not appreciative? Maybe I did something wrong? Maybe I didn’t try hard enough? Love can leave us confused and frustrated when it doesn’t work. The last place we look to find why it failed is in the mirror, but maybe we should check there more often. What do I mean?
Well, many times, our love projects fail because we don’t love ourselves. We don’t realize it most of the time, but if we don’t love ourselves or feel worthy of love, we will not be good lovers. If you want to improve the love you give, you have to strengthen the love you give yourself. Be proud of yourself, celebrate yourself, and be happy in your own skin. If you can get great at loving yourself, you will get great at loving others.
We have disappointed ourselves because of our failures. We have let ourselves down because of what we have done or failed to do. We have been critical of our looks or our mannerisms. All these things make us not love ourselves, making it very difficult to love ourselves.
When I started my TLC journey with Jack, I just wanted people to love us and join us, but it was not happening. As I look back, I realize that we were trying so hard to get others to love us, but we weren’t being ourselves. We kept trying, but it didn’t work. I don’t know the day or the year it happened, but at a certain time, it all changed. We started loving ourselves. We acted like ourselves, dressed like ourselves, celebrated ourselves, and even made it a point to tell ourselves we were proud of ourselves.
Do you know what happened next? Well, as soon as we started just loving ourselves, period, we started attracting more people. I guess they loved us, period, because things started to really pick up and have been great ever since. All we did was love ourselves, and then loving others became easier and more effective. It’s so cool!
At TLC, we love each other, period, but we can’t do a good job of that unless we love ourselves, period! Let’s please understand this, and let’s start loving ourselves again! You are all amazing miracles of God, and you are all beautiful. I need you to know that so you can love yourself and become a better lover! Let’s go change the world with love, but it’s gotta start with us, PERIOD!
Thank you for reading, and have an amazing week and also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my friend, mentor, and brother JACK FALLON! Drop him a message this week as he celebrates a milestone birthday Saturday, May 21st!
