About five years ago I kind of reached the darkest corner of my life. My career sucked, my relations with women sucked and I was completely demoralized. I felt frustrated, useless and trapped. I didn’t even have the smallest clue of where I should head next.
You won’t believe it but reaching the deepest bottom of your life has its advantages:
- you get that push of motivation which I call: it’s NOW or NEVER!
- there’s no lower point in your life than that, so all you can do is go up.
So I chose NOW. I got into personal development and, instead of wasting time on PC games I started reading every self-help article I could find and applying the stuff I read about in my life. A few months later I realized that nothing changed. I was still in that ugly corner, from where I didn’t seem to have budged at all.
Why? Why? Why am I still here? – said that sad voice in my head
Because I didn’t love myself
Now that I look at it, loving yourself is the first step you have to take in order to live a better life. I’m not telling you to be a narcissistic (well, maybe a little bit), but just accept yourself for who you are, from the bottom of your heart. Once you do this, both you and the world will change completely. I’ll tell you all about this in a second.
Most of us underestimate ourselves and tend to mostly see the negatives than the positives. We’re focused so much on what we don’t have, on our flaws, on how great the people around us are that we forget to look at us from a sincere perspective. Basically, we forget to truly see how great we are and how many qualities we have. And once we give in so much to the negative side of things it’s really hard to come back, as our reality is now focused on all the bad things in life – most of them being just a creation of our imagination.
The day I became a happy person
I knew I was missing something. If self-development worked for other people, it has to work for me as well. And the change, although it took months, started from yet another break-up. I was used to them as I always felt insecure around women and was surrounded by all sorts of complexes. So I swore to myself that no matter what will happen in my life I will always appreciate myself.
That’s where the real battle begun. It took some months of thought tracking and positive reinforcements. I remember going to work (which is about a 1-hour walk in total) and repeating the following words in my mind:
- I am a great person
- I have a lot of qualities
- I will succeed
- I am f..cking extraordinary
- I am beautiful
And the list can go on. As I said, this happened for a few months, each day.
Apart from the above, I made sure to make myself compliments, each time I looked in the mirror, start the day with a positive thought and praise myself for small wins. Whenever I finished something small or did something good I was like: “Oh, you’re so great, look what you just managed to do”.
You’ll start feeling a lot better even from the first days, but it’s important not to give up when it happens, as this is a long-term process. You’re, in fact, changing a lifetime mindset.
Here is how my life changed
- I became much more confident
- People around me were a lot more beautiful and I started seeing the positives in them instead of the negatives. I’m also talking about the people that I knew for years.
- My self-esteem went high up
- I was communicating better, became much more assertive and started making people sincere compliments
- My relations with women improved a lot and I wasn’t feeling insecure around them anymore
- I got a great job and moved to the Romanian town of my dreams
- Three months later I got promoted to Marketing Manager
- I started working on my own projects
- Not only that I began thinking much more positive, but I became confident that positive things will happen in my life
The biggest problem with us people is that we’re always looking for complex solutions when the real answers are much more simple and have been known for thousands of years. I just had to go to the very basics and begin the change from inside.
My final thought for you is: When you start changing yourself, the whole world will change around you.