Habits to Help You Protect and Grow Your Self-Acceptance

episode 86 cover art Habits for Building and Supporting Self Acceptance

The guests this season shared many ideas of habits that they practice that help with self acceptance. Here’s a list for you to consider.

Do things that make you happy every day. Think about what you used to enjoy doing as a child. Do you have ways that you can incorporate these activities into your day, into your weeks?
Speak to yourself in ways that are supportive, encouraging and kind. What would your best friends say? How would your best friend speak to you?
Write down your fears to reduce their power. Sometimes we think that just keeping ideas in our mind is safer but actually the opposite is true. Writing them down, the whole long list of them, takes them actually out of your head, and frees up your brain for thinking and enjoying and living as opposed to ruminating and storing anxieties.
Savour moments and own your story. What are the things that give you pleasure? Could you slow down and actually experience that pleasure? Stop. Take a moment and eat that ice cream without watching TV or being on screens. Talk to a friend without distractions around you. Go for a walk and look up at the sky and the trees and the clouds, and feel the pleasure of at least one experience every day.
Write it. Tell it. Own it. What is your story? Do you need to write it down for yourself or to share with all the people? You get to decide what your story is. You don’t have to live up to what other people say or how they think or feel about you.
Try things that will stretch you and balance new experiences with old favorites. What is the thing that you want to try, but you’re a little bit too afraid to do it. Could you get a friend to go with you? Could you do something smaller that will give you a bit more confidence for that bigger thing. It’s great and it’s fun to walk on old paths and eat the food that you love but it can also be exciting and interesting to explore a new path, to try something you’ve never tried before, to introduce some randomness and some spontaneity into your life.
Slow down. I often find that when I am trying to be really fast and in a hurry is when I make the most mistakes. So when I hear people talk about slowing down to speed up, that really resonates with me. Does it work for you as well? Would slowing down help you get farther or get to a place without as much stress and tension and without breaking things along the way.
Have fun and make time for fun. From last season, we know that play and fun could be different for everybody and . That’s okay. What’s fun for you? Maybe that’s sitting down and reading a book. Maybe that’s going on a rollercoaster. Maybe it’s going to your farmer’s market and sitting in the sun. Whatever it is, make some time each week, each day. To have some fun in your life.
If you’re really struggling on your own, there is therapy and coaching. It is possible to find some group coaching classes or support groups so explore the resources that are available to you in your city, in your town, and you can even find groups online if you live in a small city or in a small town. You can also get access to resources if you have the internet.
Whenever you need a pick me up, do something that is fun. Do something that makes you happy. Whatever you’re struggling with, create habits around those. For example, do you want to be a saver? Start saving money. You want to be somebody who exercises, go for a walk every day or dance every day. You want it to be somebody who shows care to others? Look around you as you go through your day for opportunities to help someone else.
Reflect on the things that bring you joy. Can you make one of them a regular practice?
Slow down and tune into yourself. Sit in silence. Listen to the answers from within you.
Take a few minutes and breathe. Try box breathing or some other method. You can even incorporate this with progressive muscle relaxation where you take a couple of minutes and you go through every part of your body tensing it and relaxing it.
You can use mantras to practice the identity you want to develop and to bring awareness to what is possible, positive and true about yourself and about the world.
And you can create a love playlist to yourself, a playlist of songs that brings you to a place that is wonderful and happy. Create one on Spotify, on iTunes, on whatever resource you have access to for music. And when you need it to show yourself a bit of affection, a bit of love, when you’re feeling down or you’re feeling sad, play your love playlist.

Put in the Reps for Self Acceptance

I invite you to select one thing to try every week for the next six weeks. Jay Shetty talks about how his coach Thomas Powers advised him to look for the open, random, and supportive, known as ORS. The coach told him to look for ORS in everything instead of being controlled, selective and cautious. This concept of ORs is really an expansive one, an invitation to find opportunities to live into your purpose every day. It relates to self acceptance and acceptance more generally.

What, if you could think differently about yourself and your life. What if you’re not bad or good and could open up the box you have twisted yourself and your story into. What if life has a degree of randomness to it? How does that make you feel? And if life can be so random, how does that then change what you can do?

Then when we introduced the concept of being supportive, that brings in the idea of self-care and care for others. This framework is perfect for trying something new, savoring the experiences you have, deciding and choosing. And sometimes that choice can even be to say yes to someone else or to something new or to something different. You don’t need perfection or certainty but rather to have a spirit of fun exploration, excitement.

Invitation

I invite you this week to let yourself get carried away. Maybe that could be letting laughter erupt from you rather than holding it back. It could mean complimenting someone rather than just thinking nice thoughts about them. Maybe it means saying yes with an open mind in a situation where you would ordinarily say no for fear of novelty, rather than fear of safety. Open up your box, lower your walls, create a bit more space for love and joy.

I recommend listening to the whole episode of Jay Shetty’s podcast episode 6 Strategic Steps to Discover Your Passion for suggestions on how you might apply ORS in your life. I also suggest that you listen to episode 64 of Changes Big and Small for a list of questions that you can use for reflection in building self acceptance. Both of those links will be in the show notes.

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