Day 23: Lover, Love Thyself

You are standing at the edge of a crevice in the earth; it’s just a little too wide to jump across. You’ve just left a thorny wilderness, and across the crevice are sunny fields full of bright flowers. Your Perfect Customer is standing next to you at the edge of the ravine, and you know enough about her by now to know that she wants more than anything to jump the ravine and relax a little.

So you squeeze her hand and smile at her, and say, “Go on. I’ll catch you on the other side.”

Wait, what?

It’s going to be pretty hard to catch your Perfect Customer on the far side of the ravine if you’re still standing on the near side.

In much the same way, it’s going to be pretty hard to convince your Perfect Customer – let alone anyone else – to love you if you still have to make that leap yourself.

Your customers are smarter than that. They can tell when you don’t believe in what you’re selling them. And when what you’re selling them is yourself, they’ll walk away long before they would have even liked you if you don’t love and believe in yourself.

So today we’re going to put a hold on the customer love and work on the self-love.

There are some materials involved here; they’re pretty basic but not everybody has them to hand, so gather them up and then come back to the computer. It’s okay; I’ll wait. You’ll need:

• Two to four sheets of writing paper. Preferably wide-ruled but anything you can write on will do in a pinch
• A yellow #2 pencil. (If you can’t put your hands on one of these, anything you can write with, but the yellow #2 is best.)

Ready? Let’s begin.

Step 1: Stop.

No, really. Stop what you’re doing. Drop everything. Don’t even read the rest of this post until you’ve completed this instruction:

Close your eyes and smile for fifteen seconds.

Our bodies are pretty clever. It turns out that happiness is a feedback loop: when we’re happy, we smile, and the physical act of smiling triggers a release of endorphins, which makes us happier. Knowing this, we can encourage a state of happiness in ourselves by deliberately smiling; that triggers the endorphin release even if we’re not already happy.

So by smiling for fifteen seconds, we’re making ourselves happier, which in turn makes us more comfortable and more receptive to positive events. And we’ll need it, since the next step is all about positive events.

Step 2: External Affirmation

Now that you’ve spent your fifteen seconds smiling – hopefully more, but fifteen seconds is all I asked you for – get out your first sheet of paper and your pencil, and write down every compliment you’ve been given over the past week, no matter how trivial, and even if you didn’t think they were right.

This may take some work. Negative events and comments tend to stick with us far more effectively than positive comments – it’s our brains’ way of keeping track of things it thinks we should avoid – so it’s harder to dredge up positive comments. (If you can’t fill a sheet of paper with compliments from the last week, think farther back. You want at least a single page’s worth of comments.)

Still, it’s important to make this list, because by recalling the things for which other people thought well of us, we’re setting the stage for thinking well of ourselves too.

(For a lot of people (myself included!), accepting a compliment feels tantamount to megalomania. That’s not what we’re doing here; this isn’t about boasting or self-aggrandizement. We’re just looking at the things that people have liked about us, and the only truth that we’re assigning to them is that the people who spoke the compliments believed them. We don’t necessarily have to believe them ourselves; knowing that the speakers were sincere is enough for this part of the exercise.)

Now that we have that list, let’s move on.

Step 3: Semi-Internal Affirmation

I’ll warn you up front: this one’s going to be hard for a lot of people. I’ll give it to you up front, but I have a suspicion that you already know the basic gist what I’m going to tell you to do. Take out a fresh sheet of paper, smile again for a few seconds, and:

Make a list of the things that you like about yourself.

Here’s the problem with that: we’re really bad at it. Seriously, ridiculously bad. We have an enormous blind spot when it comes to talking about the good things about ourselves. At best, we blank; at worst, we decide that there’s nothing good about us at all.

So let’s change it up a bit. I’m going to give you a thought exercise. Instead of making a list of the things you like about yourself, take each of the compliments you wrote down in step 2 and rewrite them as if you were saying them about yourself.

Start each line with “I” – either “I am” or “I <verb>”. Do not skip one because you don’t believe it; do this with all of the compliments from step 2. Don’t add “someone thinks that” at the beginning of any line, either mentally or by actually writing it in. You’re making statements about yourself, not statements about someone else.

By writing out these compliments as statements of fact – not just things someone said, but things that are true – you are getting yourself in the habit of thinking of them as facts. Once you’re in that habit, you’ll start believing them – and once you start believing the good things about yourself, you’ll start seeing other good things about yourself. And then others, and others, and it’ll snowball and pretty soon you’ll realize that you do love yourself because you’re a pretty neat person after all.

And when that happens, you can say “Go ahead, I’ll catch you,” and it’ll be okay because you’ll already be on the other side of the ravine.

(PS: The wide-ruled paper and yellow #2 pencil aren’t just a whim, and they don’t add anything substantive to the exercise. Instead, they serve two functions. First, handwriting and typing use different parts of the brain, and handwriting in particular engages what Betty Edwards calls the right side of the brain – the non-linear, leaps-of-intuition parts of your mind, which are essential for these exercises. Second, those specific choices of implement – wide-ruled paper and yellow #2 pencil – are designed to make you feel like a kid again. Kids are more open to this kind of exercise, because they haven’t been conditioned to feel like self-love is a vice. I would have suggested crayons but then you’d have figured out what I was up to.)