Your best friend – You
I have a friend, Maggie, who has been my friend since 1968, and she calls me her best friend as a way of appreciating our connection. She always makes me smile and I feel the same for her. My clients often have trouble 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 oneself. 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 enriching way of relating to yourself, you create a personal experience of both giving and receiving friendship. (This is also a preview of my most recent book “Commuter marriage: how to stay close when you are far away“)
Best of all, you will have greater confidence in your ability to make decisions when you recognize yourself as your best friend. When you are comfortable with constructive self-talk, you can create an internal support system – you will become more confident in evaluating your thoughts, feelings, and options. The following exercise explores how you treat yourself as a friend and builds on your findings in the previous exercise.
Journal Exercise: Developing Inner Friendship
Take out your journal and find a comfortable place where you will not be disturbed and write the answers to the following questions:
1. How do you relate to yourself?
• Do you support yourself?
• Do you seek your own opinion or ignore it?
• Do you consciously talk to yourself about decisions before making them, or do you just worry ineffectively about them?
• Do you enjoy time with yourself or do you avoid being alone?
• Do you celebrate your accomplishments and successes?
• Are you motivated to do well?
• Do you tend to criticize everything you do?
Add any 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 than you treat your friends. You can keep the promises you made to a friend, but you often break the promises you make to yourself. You may not treat yourself with kindness and respect. You may “scold” yourself or mentally criticize yourself. You may 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 their friend?
3. Become a friend to yourself. In the previous exercise, you discovered the type of friendship you enjoy. Now that you’ve compared your way of having an external friendship to your way of having an internal friendship, you have a little more work to do. Decide to improve the way you treat yourself and put your decision into action by developing three simple ways to treat. doing it.
One way to approach this task is to treat yourself as you would a good friend. Ask yourself: “What would I do for Maggie if she were in my shoes? What would I say to her?” You are likely to be generally kinder to her than you are to yourself. How would you talk to your friend if you thought she forgot to do something? Do you treat yourself more harshly? By comparing the way you treat yourself to the way you treat your friends, you will begin to develop clear guidelines on how to be your own friend. Write down your ideas on how to befriend yourself and put them into practice.
4. To build confidence, be consistent. You must be consistent to create an internal bond and a strong habit of being a good friend to yourself. Always treat yourself with care and consideration. Create a list of guidelines for your inner friendship and post it where you can see it often. Renew your plan to be a best friend to yourself each week for at least six weeks. With consistent practice, treating yourself well becomes much easier and more comfortable.
A great advantage of knowing who you are is knowing how to pamper yourself and comfort yourself 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 feel more comfortable? What reassures you? What helps you recharge? It can be anything from a bubble bath, a yoga session, or your favorite music to a long walk in the country, a phone 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 for little money (like relaxing with a cup of tea and reading your favorite book) to things that are very special (like spending a day in a bed and breakfast or getting a massage and a facial treatment). ). Keep the list where you can refer to it when you need to recharge it, and use it often.
Some people believe that being a good friend to yourself is selfish, but you will find that it is actually the opposite, because if you keep your friendship internal, it becomes easier to be a good friend to others and recognize when others are good friends. for you.