A fact of interpersonal relationships is: before others will like you, or even begin to like you, you must like yourself. We can actually call this fact the “Golden Rule” of interpersonal relationships. If you don’t like yourself it becomes difficult for others to like you and, because of this fact, quality relationships with those around you can become more difficult to maintain whenever you find yourself not liking yourself.
When you don’t like yourself it shows in your verbal language,
body language and other behaviors. In all interpersonal communications, whether good or bad, the language you use to talk, your body posturing, along with other behaviors have a strong influence upon new and existing relationships, each and every one of them. Your behaviors, including both verbal and non-verbal communication, speak volumes about how much you like yourself.
Liking yourself should be a natural act for everyone. Unfortunately it’s not. Liking yourself is a learning process that starts from infancy. As a growing child, the more people like you, specifically those close to you, the more you develop a liking within you for yourself. From this point of reference you learn, through the experience of numerous interactions and many life events, what liking is and what it means to you. What should be obvious here is that you learn to like yourself.
With this concept in mind it should make logical sense that you can like yourself more, after all liking yourself is a learning process, as we have seen. However, liking yourself more means getting to know yourself more. This requires some introspection on your part, a looking inward within yourself, and we all need to do this if we want others to like you more.
Many of us have things about ourselves we don’t like and most of us have more than one thing or behavior about ourselves we don’t like. Perhaps it’s the language we use to talk with or how nervous we get when first meeting someone. Maybe it’s how we behave when someone points out a fault of ours. The good news is that you can change your attitude about practically anything you don’t like about yourself by paying attention to it and becoming aware of it.
It’s important to note that the attitude you take about yourself can fuel the degree of liking you have for yourself. If you consistently have a negative attitude about yourself and your future youwill become even more negative through time and therefore may find yourself disliking yourself even more. If, on the other hand, you take a positive attitude about yourself, an attitude that facilitates your liking for yourself, as often as possible, you can develop a deeper liking for yourself.
When you pay attention to something you don’t like about yourself you have choices to make in what to do about your findings. The choices are: change it, accept it, or ignore it. The choice is always yours. However, ignoring it will certainly bring you back to facing it again sometime in your future, whereas changing it or accepting it can bring you to a point of liking yourself more, which in turn will influence others to like you more because they will see what you see in yourself. Also, you will be a happy and cheerful person to be around, which will attract people to your company.
Any time you engage in the evaluation, change, and or acceptance of those things you don’t like about yourself you are making an investment into liking yourself more. This investment, much like the interest acquired from a savings bank account, is accumulative. The more you find to like in yourself the more you will like yourself, and when people see that you like yourself more they can’t help but to like you more.