3 Ways Self Love Affects Your Success

When I started my online journey a few years ago, I was making videos on youtube and hated everything I watched about myself. I hated how I looked, sounded, talked, and so on. I always secretly thought that my success would be possible if only I were built differently.

As a result, it took me more than 5 years to get my first 100 subscribers on youtube. During that time, however, I watched so many videos on how to succeed on the platform thinking that I was missing some “secret”. I watched countless videos, learned how to design amazing thumbnails, built email marketing funnels and lead magnets to push traffic to my channel, promoted my channel with both free and paid strategies, and a lot of other techniques yet all those efforts led me to 100 subscribers in 5 years.

One thing that remained constant however was something I never noticed about myself. It was my self-image. That had never changed. It came with all the self-doubt, hate, and anger towards my identity.

This changed when I got an email from an internet marketer earlier last year. It was about manifesting wealth and money — And God knows I’d need some.

In the article, she wrote about how she manifested money through self-love. I don’t like talking about manifestation a lot because a lot of people think that it's a tool by which the universe mysteriously does their bidding. But I always read case studies that have to do with manifestation and the law of attraction to find out practical ways in which to use them if they exist.

So when I was reading through this sales email, I noticed that she was speaking to one thing that I had never really addressed — My insecurities and why they were holding me back.

Plus the reasons she gave for self-love were convincing enough for me to try and improve my own. Here are some of the useful reasons from that email and how I approach them now which has helped me double my subscriber count in the last year and better still has enabled me to find more success in other areas of my life like reconnecting with my long lost friends or finally becoming profitable in my businesses.

Self Love Makes You Respect Your Boundaries

Without self-love, you are vulnerable. Self-love is about but not limited to knowing your worth. Through self-love, you value yourself and are ok with letting go of anything that conflicts with your values.

This means that you will respect your boundaries even in business, which can be an important factor in building trust with your audience.

Trust in a business is an asset that always stands out among a sea of similar businesses. Without self-love, you will either have the desire to please everybody which may leave you vulnerable to being taken advantage of or it will leave you with apathy with which you will not care about your audience enough to keep their trust.

With self-love, you'll have those two vulnerabilities in check which will help you and your business in the long run.

You Respect Your Time

One of the strongest indicators of someone who does have much self-love is a person who doesn’t respect their time. Without respect for your time, you will not have the discipline to stick to the work you are supposed to do to move you towards your dreams.

Respecting your time comes with tremendous discipline and discipline is really necessary if you are to get anything done. During my 5-year failed journey, I always lacked the discipline to commit to what I had set out to do so it affected the quality and quantity of work I did because I did not respect my time enough.

I spent it doing things that were supposed to make me feel better about myself and those were often quick fixes that were unproductive and destructive. The lack of self-love created the need to indulge in these quick fixes which made me lose respect for my time and thereby losing my discipline.

You Value Yourself and The Services You Provide

Valuing yourself is the story that influences your choices. Without self-love, there is no useful story to get you through the challenges that life throws at you. You are therefore at the mercy of the swings in your environment.

When you don’t value yourself, you won't value others in turn. So when you are not busy hating everyone or throwing mean comments somewhere, you may find yourself making a product or service that isn’t good for your audience. This could mean that you make a substandard product or straight out scam your audiences.

When you value yourself, however, you transcend all those whims of environmental pressures and act to the interest and benefit of yourself and those whose attention you need.

How do you cultivate self-love?

Self-love requires work to cultivate. It is easy to resent yourself and everybody. People who do that tend to be lazy. I used to be this way. But self-love requires work.

I am not going to promise you that sitting down for one hour every morning in meditation will make you love yourself better. If that works for you, great. But in my experience, it takes conscious effort and sometimes you are going to fall short, but part of self-love is that you must not beat down on yourself over it when you do.

What I can suggest is a daily conscious effort to cultivate self-love throughout the day.

Do practice self-love in thought, word and deed. Many people think that doing good is enough. But what you say and what you think is important as well. I’d argue that what you think will always show up in your actions and speech.

Watch your thoughts and try to get rid of unhelpful ideas that have lingered there. This may be as simple as not dwelling on something negative that happened in the past or it may be as complex as trying to form a new belief.

We all know good practices and bad ones... Try dwelling on the good as much as you can... In the beginning, maybe you will dwell on the good a little more and just keep on being better.

Once the average thoughts you are having are positive, you will begin experiencing self-love and the signs that you love yourself. But you must keep on practicing and don’t let your mind dwell on self-hate or hate and negativity longer than you dwell on positivity.