A lot of people spend their lives looking for acceptance from people, but the question is; have they accepted their own self? Trust me, before you expect others to accept you, you have to learn to accept yourself. After all, it is from the abundance of what is within you that you can give out. If you have not accepted yourself for who you are, then it will be futile to expect others to accept you. No matter what you expect from others, you must fulfil your own requirements first. That is, how you want people to follow you or treat you will always begin with how you treat yourself. Learn to see yourself in good light, so that it will set the precedence for others to see you the same way.
Image from Pexels
As part of the journey towards self-acceptance is to build your confidence level. Your confidence level will determine how you carry yourself and will also build up your self-worth which will also have a positive implications on your personal ego. Just to let you know, having ego is not bad, what is bad is when the ego becomes overinflated to a level of pride. So to build confidence, you need to appreciate your self-worth. When you accept yourself, it create a level of confidence in you that makes you to know who you really are. One of the things that I have observed in life is that if you do not know who you are, others will make you to believe who you are not.
One of the problems of a lot of people is that they live in self-rejection. They wait for external validation which may not come. If you reject yourself, how do you expect others to accept you? One of the manifestations of self-rejection is in looking down on yourself, thinking that you are not sufficient or that you are disadvantaged. Trust me, you are not disadvantaged if you will see yourself for who you really are. More so, just to let you know, looking down on yourself is not humility but a mark of weakness. So you need to tell yourself that you are the best version of yourself and work to prove it.
As part of the ways to accept yourself, you have to also come to terms with your weaknesses and flaws, so that they will not impede your advancement. If you tell yourself the sincere truth about your abilities, strengths, weaknesses, etc, then you have already achieved a state of self-enlightenment. Of course, no one can use your flaws against you if you already know them. But if you try to hide them, they will become your ultimate bane. There are things about you that you may not be able to change, so you have to convince yourself to accept them. Then you can change what is within your abilities. However, you also need to grow to the point that you will be able to distinguish between what you can change and what is permanent.
You should also learn to forgive yourself over the errors and mistakes that you made in the past. It does not mean you are proud of the errors, but it means that you have moved passed it. What you need to know is that whatever you did in the past, even though you may be seeing the effects, cannot be undone. In fact, the more you try to revisit the past to undo what you did, the more it prevents you from making progress. What you need to do is to learn from the experiences that were gathered from the errors, so as to become better. But to learn from your past errors, you need to first accept them. If you deny the errors you made, then you are not helping yourself. Accept them and learn from them.
Image from Pexels
The final point that we will look at in order to accept yourself and wield the power of self-acceptance is to move with people that know your worth. If there is someone that normally beats down your worth with their words or their attitudes, then you need to stay away from the person because they will affect your mindset negatively to begin to think negative of yourself. It is worthy to note that the mind of people, expressed through their words, can also influence your own mindset. This is why you need to stay and hang around people that know and celebrate your worth, not the people that see themselves as they are managing you.
Thanks for reading