The greatest love of all

There is hidden wisdom in seemingly cliché advice. Even if the expressions don't have an impact on you, if you watch the eyes of people who say them, you can see the words locking into place like keys. Here are some examples:

• Life is short.
  
• God will take care of it.
  
• Focus on you.
• Be yourself.

These clichés are so prevalent that they come at you like an echo throughout your life. You start to wonder if the world is trying to tell you something.

One cliché in particular has to do with loving yourself. You hear it in different forms:

• Love thyself.
• The greatest love is self-love.
• Love yourself, for if you don't, how can you expect anybody else to love you?

If you really want to drive home a message, engage more than one sense. This video by Whitney Houston drives the point home:



While there is wisdom in something simple like, "love thyself," the message is a little incomplete. It lacks a "Why?" Why should I love myself? If you give a concept meaningful reasoning, then it starts to form a principle.

Here is a principle that I discovered that captures the importance of self-love:

How can you take care of yourself, if you don't love yourself?

If you don't love yourself, then you start to treat yourself poorly. This makes you unhappy, which by extension, makes you unhappy at yourself. As you can see, this is a vicious cycle. You will often find that those who are constantly struggling in their lives, also have poor self-evaluations. They simply keep burdening themselves with stresses and worries. For example, if you constantly think you're not "good enough," you will never feel like you deserve the finer comforts in life. If you can't stand to look at yourself, then you are likely to abandon taking care of yourself.

The people who maintain themselves and their level of happiness the best, are the same people who have an abundance of positive feeling toward themselves. It's hard to have one without the other.

self-acceptance helps you work in groups

Accepting yourself is an important aspect of being honest with yourself. The more faults you've accepted about yourself, the more faults you can see, and therefore the more complete a picture you can get of who you are.

I used to walk around with the notion that I was full of 100 strengths and very few weaknesses. Now that I'm accepting who I am, faults and all, I have a more complete picture that shows me with like 15 faults, 15 strengths, and 70 areas that I'm neutral on.

For someone as egotistical as me, that's a paradigm shift to the way I view myself: while I have those positive 15 that make me shiny, the majority of my traits are just average. I am just an Average Joe!

Having said that though, with this higher resolution perspective on yourself you can get a higher resolution perspective on others. Since you are not pretending that you are best at everything, you won't be afraid of recognizing the positive and negative traits in others. This is useful to help you work in groups, because it makes you value the strengths of others and recognize the complementary aspects that you all share.