We start by romancing ourselves
How are you actively creating and nurturing a relationship with yourself?
During this month that primarily celebrates the love of couples, the love of partnership, the love of togetherness I have found myself swirling in new questions and examinations of the love we have for ourselves.
It’s such a common thing to gravitate our energy outward and pour resources into our relationships with others. Without setting up an either/or dynamic here, I am committed to amplifying the importance of growing a relationship with yourself. This month I found myself thinking about how likability might be at play in terms of the level of prioritization we give to our self-relationship.
What is the impact of wanting to be liked?
In the coaching and healing community there’s an on-going discussion of the potential for tension between wanting to be liked by others and your own values and desires. The simple impact of prioritizing being liked by others is that it can diminish your awareness of what you want for yourself. A recent post I saw on social media got me thinking about how striving for likability can also easily morph into people-pleasing. This post went so far to equate people-pleasing with self-abandonment. Woah! I don’t know about you, but the words “self-abandonment” certainly give me major pause and invite deep reflection.
In coaching we get curious about the “voices” that are instructing us and commenting on our life. The messages of “right” and “wrong” that dominate the ways we assess our lives. While part of coaching is trying to soften the binary-thinking in favor of more nuance (#greyarea), we also try to get clearer on what’s ours and not ours. And, as we are able, we release what isn’t our most aligned messaging to make space for what we truly want.
This work often leads us to other interesting domains such as the presence, persistence, and impact of external validation as well as the potential of putting energy into internal validation practices as a first step. What does it mean to validate ourselves?
In all of the work that I have done with clients in these areas, I have never gone so far to say that people-pleasing is self-abandonment. And yet, the discomfort I have with that framing makes me think there might be some truth to it.* Perhaps it’s simply a bolder, more confronting framing of my own assertion that our relationship with ourselves is foundational and we must pour care, intention, and love into our self-relationship.
(*Sidenote: my coach training helps me be curious about discomfort as areas of potential big learning and perhaps even the very places I need to go deeper. When discomfort comes up I do my best to not flee. I stay in the discomfort and ask myself: what’s here?)
In coaching we shake up the concept of “people-pleasing” by asking: What would please you? How does this fit with your values? Turning the concept of people-pleasing inward – to please yourself – feels massively world-shifting for many. We don’t exist in a vacuum! Life is relational and interconnected! Many of us were well trained to prioritize the needs of others over our own needs! It can feel self-centered to consider what pleases us.
I’ve often talked about my commitment to prioritizing collective care and liberation. So there’s an important distinction here that centering the self is not the place we stay forever. We begin with ourselves. We learn to not dismiss or ignore the importance of the relationship we have with ourselves without turning away from community. What is the impact of changing where we start?
In this exploration I am also inviting us into new definitions and meanings of self-centeredness, away from our society’s assertion that it’s unequivocally wrong to be self-centered. I imagine a pebble dropping into a body of water and ripples spreading outward. Centered in self: knowing ourselves, giving ourselves love, being aware of our needs, considering the worthiness of our desires, and not disconnected from others. Our active cultivation of a relationship with ourselves ripples outward. Our world needs the waves made by people who love themselves. Our world needs people who are not self-abandoning.
In talking about how we build a relationship with ourselves, I have often suggested that we frame it as how we’d “befriend” ourselves. What if we extended the same kindness, grace, and compassion to ourselves that we extend to our friends? There’s acceptance and kindness in this framing which I find meaningful and motivating!
But in the spirit of this season of love, I find myself even more interested in loving ourselves, calling ourselves beloved (paraphrasing Raymond Carver here a bit).
I want to know if I can be alone and enjoy my own company. I want to seriously consider what romancing myself would look like. I will buy myself flowers! I want to acknowledge the ways I am lovable. I want to fall in love with myself.
What does it mean to fall in love with myself?!
Even typing these words makes me giddy and a little embarrassed. What a weird, wild thing to offer myself what I so instinctively give to others.
Will you join me in this exploration in whatever ways feel accessible and intriguing to you? Will you be playful and curious about cultivating a relationship with yourself? Will you go a step further and open up to the countless ways you might fall in love with yourself? If any parts of you feel abandoned, acknowledge them. Reach out a hand to yourself. And welcome yourself back, with gladness, with appreciation that you – wonderful, beloved you – are here. What an amazing place to start.