Ep. 43 Why Loving Yourself is Important

The most important person for you to love in your life is yourself. The most important person for you to love isn’t your significant other, kids, friends, family, or anyone else in your life.

If that offended you, let me explain why this is true.

The quality of each relationship in your life depends on your relationship with yourself.

You can't love others on empty. If you don't focus on yourself as needed, you will not replenish yourself in the way needed to keep going.

This world is not set up to naturally recharge you. You have to engage and be intentional in your life in order to rest and recoup.

One of the most beautiful things I've ever heard has stuck with me for over 20 years. It is the concept to love "from your saucer, not your cup.”

Imagine a little teacup on a tiny little saucer. So often we pour out of our cup to others. The more we love and serve other people from our “cup” the more dangerously close we get to burnout.

Instead, care for yourself so well that your abundance to give is overflowing. When it overflows, you are able to give from your saucer, not your cup. You are able to give from a healthy place with a much lesser likelihood of burnout.

If my earlier statement that “the most important person for you to love isn't your significant other, kids, friends, family, or anyone else in your life,” then you may be struggling in a way that I have been.

For as long as I can remember, I had tied so much of my self-worth to being needed by people in my life. If people needed me then I felt worthy, important, special, and valuable. If they didn’t need me, then I felt crappy about myself and useless.

This resulted in deep-rooted “people-pleasing” that I never realized before.

It has been a lot of work to start uprooting my people-pleasing ways, but it has already been so freeing and healing.

Another reason why your view of yourself is so important is that it doesn’t just stay confined within the walls in your mind. Your view of yourself impacts every area of your life.

Here are some examples of how that is true . . . confidence at work, negative body image, people-pleasing, living with an accomplishment-based mindset, your moods, and how you treat others.

How you understand your own worth subconsciously impacts how you see and treat people.

The more you dive into loving yourself, the more you’ll see how your self-image affects everything in your life. You’ll see how learning to love yourself allows you to love other people even better.

Although I thought my motive in helping people in my life was completely selfless, unknowingly I was feeding something inside of myself. By serving them I was feeding my self-esteem. But now I can love and serve other people from my saucer, not my cup. I can do so because I no longer have an ulterior motive.

Sure, it was an ulterior motive I was not aware of, but it was still there and it was still doing damage. Until we take a deep look, we often aren’t aware of everything going on beneath the surface.

Challenge: Spend time with the thought that the most important person for you to love in your life is yourself. If this is a very new belief for you, then it's natural for this to feel foreign to you at first. Continue exploring that thought to rewrite your perspective on the need for you to love yourself first.