If you loved yourself, you wouldn't stand still

Believe it or not, I've gotten some hate comments before.

I love talking about self-development and mindset (they're what saved my life), but a lot of people have gripes with that.

They argue that always believing we can improve is dangerous to loving ourselves.

This just isn't right.

Let's say you're unhappy with your body and you plan to lose weight.

If you don't love yourself where you're at now, newsflash, you're not going to love yourself once you lose the 20 pounds.

That's far too superficial.

On top of that, the goalposts always tend to move further and further once you've hit those goals.

When you've lost 20, you're not actually happy until you lose 30 or 40.

Does love ever come?

No. Because that's not loving yourself.

Many people believe that self-development is a way to shame yourself into improving. This makes sense to me.

If you're changing out of shame, you're never going to be happy with where you're at.

And if you're doing it this way, you're doing it wrong.

Internal love vs. external love

Think of a person you care deeply about and love.

You accept them for who they are.

But I'm sure that you could think of a quality or two that could use improvement.

You might even call them out on their bullshit.

That doesn't mean that you don't love them.

In all honesty, it likely points to you loving them more.

So why doesn't this translate to self-love?

It's fully possible to love ourselves but want to get better at the same time.

This is the growth-love fallacy.

We believe that to have a desire to grow, we have to dislike ourselves.

But like above, loving someone can mean holding them accountable to act to the best of their abilities.

Anti Self-Development

The real resistance to self-development comes from people who are not willing to hold themselves to a higher standard.

These are generally the ones who have undealt with traumas or who are okay living the NPC life.

I get it - it's not fun to face the darkness that exists inside.

Yet, it's more exhausting to always run from your problems and clean up after your actions than it is to face them.

You give up a lifetime of happiness and fulfillment because it's too much to open a can of worms.

Like I said, it's not easy.

But just because something is hard doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it.

In fact, it's quite the opposite.

The difficult things are usually the ones that you should do and that bring the most long-term growth.

They add a layer of integrity and agency that is really only understood once you experience it.

Another thing I've heard is that they don't want to feel like they always have something to work on.

Have you heard of trees?

Trees never stop growing until they die.

Once it's grown to a certain height, it starts growing outward and gets thicker.

We are the same way, whether you want to believe it or not.

We are always learning and growing - even if you hate self-development.

This doesn't mean that you have to spend the rest of your life reading self-help books (even I get sick of most of them).

But it does call for you to realize that you are a block of stone ready to be carved and sculpted.

If you don't take the chisel, you'll end up as someone else's art project.

Growing with love

Self-love doesn't need to be hardcore.

Though it needs to be brutally honest.

It's not a single other person's responsibility to keep you accountable besides yourself.

You are the only one who knows yourself deep down. Your strengths, the tricks you might try to play, and the identities you hold.

It's only you who can meet yourself with enough understanding and tenderness, but yet with enough sterness and integrity.

What most people don't realize is that we are like sharks.

We are meant to constantly be moving forward - even if it's just a little bit each day.

If we stay still, we drown. In this case, drowning means forfeiting control of your life.

And if there's one thing that steals happiness, it's not being in the driver's seat of life.

Once you're in the driver's seat, you'll realize that there are so many places that you want to go and things that you want to see.

You wouldn't be able to do any of that without what you've seen so far, the car that you got yourself, or the mileage the car has.

Everything is perfectly aligned to lead you to your next experience.

If you want to sit back and not go, that's fine.

But that comfort now will be the source of your discomfort later.

Until next time, with love,

Noah