As most people focus on romantic love on this Valentine’s Day, I’m sending a gentle reminder to everyone who reads my post to also focus on demonstrating love to yourself every single day. Valentine’s Day is cute and sweet, and my husband, Bryan, and I take it in stride. It is a commercialized holiday and just from stopping at a few grocery stores earlier in desperate search (slight exaggeration) of a special type of Asian dipping sauce, we could see the stores were all decked out with flowers, balloons, candies, and gifts.

We know every day counts for showing love to each other and our family. It doesn’t take a holiday to remind us. We did celebrate a little this year with Bryan giving our daughter some treats, buying me some flowers, and making us some delicious margueritas. I made a lovely dinner of pasta and salmon. However, I do think we all need some reminding to love on ourselves because we can often be our own worst critics. And it’s really difficult to love others without loving yourself first. It may not even be possible to fully love others if you don’t fully love yourself first.

As a step towards demonstrating some self-love and self-compassion for myself, several months ago, I created a list of how I will be more compassionate with myself. I keep this list in the notes in my phone and refer to it whenever I need to. Maybe you’ll get some ideas on what you might want to focus on for yourself. You get double points for writing it down.

I will show some compassion for myself by:
*Prioritizing sleep and rest when I’m tired
*Not pushing myself so hard, especially when I’m tired. *Don’t delay eating and going to the restroom when I need to
*Replacing my internal dialigue with more positive, gentle, & calming statements
*Ending circumstances/relationships that don’t align with my values and/or cause me distress
*Reminding myself I’m doing the best I can
*Stop judging myself harshly
*Appreciating who I am, my body, and my accomplishments
*Replacing time thinking about how much I have to do with thinking about things I’ve accomplished
*Slowing down
*Sitting down and breathing
*Stop comparing myself to others
*Meditating daily…sometimes several times a day

This is just a sample list and I add to it as I get more ideas. I receive enough judgment, pressure, high expectations, and comparison from others for reasons of which I can’t control. I’m tired of being hard on myself too. Adhering to this list is something within my control. I choose to demonstrate love to myself because I’m pretty amazing when I think about it. I hope you choose the same for yourself because you’re pretty amazing too when you think about it.