I have a friend, Maggie, who has been my friend since 1968, and she calls me her "best" friend to appreciate our connection. It always makes me smile and I feel the same for her. Often my clients have difficulty learning to appreciate and trust themselves, and I think Maggie's phrase should apply to the only relationship we will have from birth to death, the relationship with yourself. Are you your best friend?
Whether you realize it or not, the relationship you have with yourself sets the pattern for how you connect with others. By developing an educational way to relate to yourself, you create a personal experience of giving and receiving friendship. (This is also a preview of my latest book " Commuter wedding: how to stay close when you're away ")
Above all, you will have more confidence in your decision-making skills when you recognize yourself as your best friend. When you feel comfortable with constructive internal dialogue, you can create an internal support system: you will become more confident in your evaluation of your thoughts, feelings and options. The following exercise explores how you treat yourself as a friend and develops your findings in the previous exercise.
Official exercise: development of inner friendshipLeave your diary and find a comfortable place where you will not be disturbed and write the answers to the following questions:
1. How do you deal with yourself?
* Are you in solidarity with yourself?
* Are you looking for your opinion or are you ignoring it?
* Do you consciously talk about decisions with yourself before making them or do you worry about them ineffectively?
* Do you like spending time with yourself or avoiding being alone?
* Celebrate your successes and successes?
* Do you motivate yourself to do well?
* Do you tend to criticize everything you do?
Add other aspects of how you relate to yourself:
2. Compare your internal relationship with your definition of friendship. You may be dismayed to find that you treat yourself very differently from the way you treat friends. You may keep promises to a friend, but often deny the promises you make to yourself. You cannot treat yourself with kindness and respect. Maybe you mentally "get annoyed" or criticize yourself. You can never break a date with a friend, but keep putting off your time with yourself. The best test of your friendship with yourself is: if someone else treated you the way you treat yourself, would you want to be his friend?
3. Become a friend for yourself. In the previous exercise, you discovered the kind of friendship you like. Now that you have compared your way of having an external friendship with your way of having an internal friendship, you still have work to do. You decide to improve the way you treat yourself and implement your decision by developing three simple ways in which you do so.
One way to deal with this is to treat yourself like you would treat a good friend. Ask yourself "What would I do for Maggie if she was in my shoes? What would I tell her?" You are likely to be kinder to her than to yourself. How would you talk to your friend if you thought she forgot to do something? Do you treat yourself harder? By comparing the way you treat yourself with the way you treat your friends, you will begin to develop clear guidelines on how to be your friend. Write your ideas about friendship and put them into action.
4. To develop trust, be consistent. You need to be consistent to create an internal bond and a strong habit of being a good friend to yourself. Always treated with care and consideration. Create a list of guidelines for your internal friendship and publish it where you can see it often. Renew your plan to be a best friend to you every week for at least six weeks. With consistent practice, treating yourself well becomes much easier and feels more comfortable.
A great advantage of knowing who you are is knowing how to pamper yourself and comfort you when you are stressed or tired. Use what you have learned about your style to develop a style to recharge and relax. What makes you most comfortable? What calms you down? What helps you to recharge? It can be anything from a bubble bath, a yoga session or your favorite music to a long walk in the countryside, a telephone conversation with your best friend or a nap. Make a list of your favorite "personal chargers". Make sure the list includes simple things you can do cheaply (like relaxing with a cup of tea and reading a favorite book) for things that are very special (like spending a day in a bed and breakfast or having a massage and a face treatment ). Keep the list where you can refer to it whenever you need a refill and use it often.
Some people believe that being a good friend to yourself is selfish, but you will find that it is really the other way around, because if you keep your inner friendship, it becomes easier to be a good friend to others and recognize when others are good friends to you .
