Things You Stop Caring About When You Love Yourself

[caption id="attachment_836140" align="alignleft" width="1068"] Bigstockphoto.com/Stock photo of a young Jamaican woman smiling at the camera[/caption] It’s amazing how calm your mind can be when you love yourself. It’s not like you’re unaware of all of the things that could go wrong, all of the ways people might judge you, all of the events you could be missing out on or gossip you might be a part of—or be left out of. You don’t forget about all of the things you used to worry about; you just don’t pay them the attention you used to. Those things are just noise, and you’ve become very good at tuning them out. When you do suffer from a lack of self-love, your brain will play tricks on you. It will tell you that the answer to feeling better is on the outside—that you’ll find it by pursuing this person’s approval, by achieving this look, and by getting into this social group. But that’s simply not true. Here are things you stop caring about when you love yourself.   [caption id="attachment_696363" align="alignleft" width="439"] Shutterstock[/caption]

Being the hardest worker

So many people out there just want to be the hardest worker to prove something. They don’t necessarily need this status or that promotion to feel happy. The external award will not make them happy. It will only briefly dissolve nagging feelings of unhappiness they feel, but those feelings are coming from something else. People who love themselves are okay with saying, “Let someone else be the one who doesn’t have relationships and is married to their work. I’d like to see my friends, be in love, exercise, and sleep.”         [caption id="attachment_716025" align="alignleft" width="420"] Image Source: Shutterstock[/caption]

Dating someone others approve of

People who truly love themselves do not even think about how their best friend or mom or colleagues will respond to their boyfriend. They don’t care if he’s traditionally handsome, in great physical shape or wealthy. All they care about is how their partner makes them feel. So if you’re wondering what the woman with the perfect abs and the high-power job is doing with the man with the beer belly who is designing a video game while living in a studio apartment, you may have your answer.           [caption id="attachment_716475" align="alignleft" width="420"] Image Source: Shutterstock[/caption]

Wonder why someone was rude or mean

People who love themselves have a shield around them that deflects cruelty from other people. They understand that when someone is rude—whether that’s a stranger or a friend—it is almost never personal. Even if a friend is being rude because she is harboring anger about something you did, when you love yourself, you know that it is your friend’s job to speak up and communicate why she is angry. Until then, you won’t let yourself be bothered by immature, passive aggressive attempts to “get back at” you.         [caption id="attachment_710061" align="alignleft" width="420"] Image Source: Shutterstock[/caption]

Why he didn’t call

People who love themselves don’t spend more than five minutes trying to figure out why a date, who said he’d call, never called again. When you love yourself, you wouldn’t be willing to change to make someone else happy, so trying to figure out why a guy didn’t like you is a waste of time. Having the information will change nothing about the way you behave—when you love yourself, that is.             [caption id="attachment_624838" align="alignleft" width="505"] Corbis[/caption]

Why you weren’t invited

To the girls trip, to the pub crawl, to the wine night, to the Pilates class—whatever. You weren’t invited, even though quite a few friends of yours were. When you love yourself, you understand in an instant that you weren’t invited either because of something beyond one’s control, like limited seating or because someone simply forgot or because someone doesn’t like you that much. And when you love yourself, you don’t plan on doing a single thing about that final fact.         [caption id="attachment_698746" align="alignleft" width="468"] Shutterstock[/caption]

Looking dumb while taking a risk

When you really love yourself, life opens up. There’s a reason that many successful people will tell you to get right with yourself—whether that’s through therapy or meditation—before pursuing your goals. Once you love yourself, you stop seeing things like the possibility of failure, or the ways you may embarrass yourself. Those are fake fluff that once interfered with the only two things you need to see: the place you want to be, and the thing you need to do to get there. Once you love yourself, you see those two things very clearly. You stop worrying about looking dumb when you take a risk and you only think about the rewards you may reap.       [caption id="attachment_710276" align="alignleft" width="426"] Shutterstock[/caption]

Scaring people off

When you love yourself, you understand that you are all you need to be happy. Having friendships and relationships is wonderful, but you would never compromise yourself to have those because then you’d lose the only sure thing in your life—your relationship with yourself. For that reason, when you love yourself, you stop worrying that you’ll scare off a boyfriend or friend by telling them what you need. You need them to call more, to be more open, to communicate more and so on. If you need it, you say it. If the person leaves because you said it, that person wasn’t meant to be in your life and you’re okay with that.       [caption id="attachment_702372" align="alignleft" width="420"] Image Source: Shutterstock[/caption]

Networking

Networking is a part of any job but there is genuine networking and then there is networking. Genuine networking is what people who love themselves do. If they genuinely feel that both parties would benefit from a collaboration or just a connection, they speak to someone, and they are upfront about their reasons for talking to them. The less genuine type of networking—the type people who don’t love themselves do—involves pretending to want a friendship with someone who you secretly want an opportunity from. In that type of networking, one person has nothing to offer the other by way of career and they know it, so they pretend to want a friendship to get what the other person has.     [caption id="attachment_709009" align="alignleft" width="420"] Image Source: Shutterstock[/caption]

Blaming others

When you love yourself, admitting your mistakes stops being so scary. You know, at your core, that you are good, that you meant well and that you did your best. So long as that is true, you don’t mind admitting that you made a mistake. When people don’t love themselves, their ego cannot handle admitting fault so they must send out the blame.               [caption id="attachment_822954" align="alignleft" width="900"] Credit: Bigstock[/caption]

Trying to be the center of attention

People who demand a lot of attention typically do so because they do not know, in their gut, whether or not they really deserve attention. They need constant exterior confirmation that they are smart, that they are interesting and that they are likable. They tend to dominate conversations at parties, not ask others about themselves and generally be the loudest person (either through voice or action). When you love yourself, you can silently sit back with the knowledge that you are worthy of attention, so you don’t need to seek it all night.

Brag or make anyone feel small

People who don’t love themselves need to constantly control exterior factors in order to feel some false semblance of self-love. One way they do this is by making other people around them feel small. When you don’t love yourself, you don’t really believe that you are big—that you are a presence. But it makes you feel a bit better to make those who are a presence feel small. People who love themselves know where they stand, and that doesn’t change regardless of how big or small the people around them are.         [caption id="attachment_706179" align="alignleft" width="420"] Image Source: Shutterstock[/caption]

Keep helpful info to themselves

When you know you are intelligent, skilled, likable and useful, you don’t worry about competition. In fact, you don’t see competition. You see that there is a large game everyone would like to play, and you believe there is a use for everyone, somewhere. Everybody will find their fit and their role—just as it’s meant to be. For that reason, people who love themselves don’t mind sharing useful information with their peers.           [caption id="attachment_609226" align="alignleft" width="378"] Shutterstock[/caption]

Refuse to apologize

When you have an abundance of self-love built up, your pride can survive a little hit from time to time. So if you need to apologize to someone who, to be honest, is wrong just to keep work, love or family relationships running smoothly, you will do so. When someone else is being immature, shortsighted or selfish, you see that they do not have the self-love to handle admitting when they’re wrong. They will not be the one to end this dispute. So you see it as your responsibility, as the only person in this dispute who loves herself, to step forward and apologize. You can handle doing so, but the other person cannot.         [caption id="attachment_719139" align="alignleft" width="420"] Image Source: Shutterstock[/caption]

Spending time on people who waste yours

If someone cancels on you at the last minute repeatedly or only talks about themselves the entire time you’re together, you stop giving them the time of day. You don’t mind saying, “I think we just handle friendships differently and this won’t work out.” You understand that they may berate you in response, and that’s okay—they probably don’t love themselves so they struggle to admit fault. You love yourself, so you can handle this.         [caption id="attachment_626593" align="alignleft" width="500"] Image Source: Shutterstock[/caption]

Vices

Shopping, alcohol, gambling, drugs, clubbing, binge eating, gossip—you name the vice, and when you love yourself, it has very little power over you. Typically, we give into vices when we sense moments of self-hate coming our way. These vices are like a soothing balm to negative feelings. But when you don’t have much self-hate, you don’t have much need for vices.

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