It’s hard to reach the ideal level of self love and body image. Is it all about self satisfaction or just being accepting with where you stand in life? We find ourselves in the dilemma of what to do, how to reach self love, and loving our own body. When we looks at ourselves in the mirror at times, we don’t always know how to asses our feelings from what we see. How can we love ourselves if we’re actually not being ourselves? Isn’t the main point here to ‘be yourself’ as they all say? In order to shed some insight on this, we’ve contacted two amazing life coaches. Sahila Farid, an amazing integrative life coach who offers sessions at Nun Center in Zamalek, and Nour El Assaad, a certified life coach and award winning entrepreneur. These two motivational women have showered us with some tips and tricks on how to enhance loving one’s body and reach self-love.
Saliha Farid’s Insight
Saliha gave us her own definition about self-love, which she said is the ability to be and live as yourself completely and not as your ego intends, but rather from the place within you. So here we go with some of Saliha’s motivational tips:
- Limiting one’s belief means you start asking yourself if you’re moving from a place of fear or a place of love. For example, for those who work, ask yourself if you’re performing your job out of love or out of fear that you won’t have enough money. Try to acknowledge what motivates the inner you!
- Examine what moves the inner you and re-direct yourself! Let’s reflect on this. Perhaps changing the narrative to other words could be a healthy guidance. Instead of having the narrative that revolves around lacking something and fear, transform it to love and abundance. Easy? Not at all, but it’s all in our head after all and changing it will surely ease our minds.
- Being present is another important tip. In other words, how can we love ourselves if we’re actually not being ourselves at this very moment?
- Distancing the inner critic can be a difficult tip, but highly effective nonetheless. It refers to the tone that you talk to yourself in. Try to be genuine to yourself and start replacing the harsh voice with a gentler and kinder one! How do you distance that inner critic though? There are only two main steps. First is to acknowledge what it’s saying and the underlying emotions behind it. Secondly, reason with it and talk to it like you would with a child.
- Reward yourself and do the thing that makes you happy or proud of yourself. Once you’ve achieved it, reward yourself again!
- Ask yourself what you need and start addressing it whether it’s your spiritual, physical, or mental needs, and start doing it. For instance, if you need to sleep early or eat healthy, then do it. During the process though, don’t neglect asking yourself of what prevents you giving yourself what you need. Is it fear, or perhaps the scenarios you tell yourself constantly?
Nour El Assaad’s Take on Body Image
Enhancing one’s perception and perspective on how they see themselves is no easy matter. Loving our body is one of the toughest journeys one can embark on. Once you start addressing them with your strength and positivity, they’ll gradually fade away. According to Nour El Assaad, positive body image comes first with the acceptance and the acknowledgement of one’s own perception. Too many factors often tend to intervene directly with that perception. Now, scroll down and take note of these tips!
- Understand that the way we see our body is perception if you’re having a bad day. If you don’t like how you look at the moment, then remember that it may be a manifestation from the previous day or any other instance.
- Practicing self-love acts often, whether it be feeding our body or addressing our soul’s needs. We feel what we need, so listen and tune in to what your body and soul are telling you.
- Don’t take it to the extreme, work hard, but also allow your body to breath. Do what you feel like doing and allow yourself to enjoy it!
- Date yourself. Body image isn’t just about working out or meditating. It also refers to setting time to talk to yourself and deal with those emerging thoughts.
Remember, you’re doing all of this only for YOU!
