Collaboration with a Purpose: Self-Love and Acceptance

Posted on by Ipuna Black
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Photo credit: Powerful Nonsense

Our worst enemy is our thoughts. Our thoughts can hold us back from achieving greatness or push us forward toward limitless. Everyone wants to strive for limitless. One key factor to achieving this feeling is to feed our brains with positive thoughts. It’s difficult to have positive thoughts if you don’t feel good about your core self. What causes you to feel good about yourself? Self-love and acceptance. We should love and accept all aspects of ourselves. Of course, there is always room for growth, but we all have to start at a baseline. It’s important to love and accept ourselves right now. Not when we have this or take away that. If we can love and accept ourselves now, we can feel good about ourselves, which will help feed our minds positive thoughts to achieve more.

Positive and Negative Bank Accounts of Thoughts

Meet my friend Debbie. She is broke = 0 dollars in her bank account. Debbie can handle this situation in two ways.

Debbie Downer

  • Feels sorry for herself and her situation.
  • Tells herself that she will always be broke.
  • Pushes everyone away because she convinces herself that no one likes a broke person. (She is partially right, but she can fix this!)

Debbie Doer

  • Dusts herself off.
  • Asks family for help, but presents them a specific plan on how she will help herself (e.g., what jobs she will apply for and in what timeframe, what she could do in return to help her family until she receives an income)
  • Puts a smile on her face and begins interviewing for jobs immediately.

We are always going to have rough times in our lives, but we can choose how we handle the situations. If we want to be like Debbie Downer, we will continue to deposit negative thoughts into our brain bank account, which will overdraw our emotions and ability to cope with the situation. The spiral continues downhill. Or we could choose to take the Debbie Doer approach. Accept that we are broke. Dust ourselves off and take some steps forward. With each step forward, we will deposit positive thoughts into our brain bank account. The positive thoughts help us with optimism and hope. That’s much better than living with despair, regret, and anguish.

Our positive thoughts add fuel toward how we feel about ourselves. Self-love and acceptance exist when we feel good about ourselves.

Self-Love

My definition of self-love is knowing my strengths and weaknesses and accepting all of me at all times. Here are three tips on self-love.

  1. We are not perfect, so even if we do something disappointing, it’s important to love ourselves through good and bad times.
  2. Beating yourself up with negative thoughts isn’t productive. Acknowledge your mistakes, and with love, work on improving.
  3. Before bed and in the morning, remind yourself of all that you are grateful for, including your great qualities and deeds. This will help with your self-esteem and positivity.

Acceptance

“Acceptance in human psychology is a person’s assent to the reality of a situation, recognizing a process or condition (often a negative or uncomfortable situation) without attempting to change it, protest, or exit.”

Simplified, I believe accepting oneself includes being okay with who you are. Here are three tips on acceptance.

  1. Being content with your body and only changing it if you want to change it. Don’t change it to please others.
  2. Know your limitations. You can always shoot for the stars, but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t dunk because you are only five feet even.
  3. Value your diversity. No two people are alike. This doesn’t mean everyone has to conform to one thing. Accept that you may be different from another person both internally and/or externally, and that is just fine.

Summary

It took time for me to mature and love and accept who I am both externally and internally. It’s not always easy to push negative thoughts aside, but the more you practice it, the easier it gets. (Just like riding a bike some may say or for me- just like cooking….wait….I don’t like to cook!) 

This world revolves around love. There is no other feeling like it. It’s hard to accept love from others if you can’t first love yourself. I hope today that you reflect on all the unique and diverse aspects that make up you. Love those aspects. Accept your strengths and weaknesses while you love yourself through this journey called life. Tell yourself that you are AWESOME! (Is that an old folk’s word? I still really like it.) Reach for limitless. You are not alone. We are all on this journey together.

Thank you for reading! I look forward to your comments!

Collaboration with a Purpose Past Posts

  1. Coping with Loss
  2. Strength
  3. One Step at a Time Toward the Impossible

Amazing Blog Collaborators: 15 bloggers with 1 Purpose- To write about Self-Love and Acceptance

This is the fourth Collaboration with a Purpose blog post. Please check out all of the amazing and inspiring posts on Self-love and Acceptance. You will definitely feel loved when you are done reading! (Links will come as the articles are posted.)

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56 thoughts on “Collaboration with a Purpose: Self-Love and Acceptance”

  1. Hi Ipuna,

    great article, as always with great topic.
    You are correctly identified our greatest enemy, our thoughts.

    It is very strange enemy, because he is very tricky, and he can become our best friend if we help him. I love your definition of self love 🙂

    Thank you

    Liked by 2 people

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  4. Great post, Ipuna! I agree we could choose to act positively rather than focus on the negativity; the power of attraction can draw more positivity to us when we’re more positive, and it starts within ourselves. ❤️

    Liked by 4 people

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  6. I am awesome! Yay! I feel a notch better already. Thanks for keeping it real, even if you can’t cook. Love your honest. “No one likes a broke person (She is partially right)” away with the victim mentality. Your posts just keep getting better. 👍🏾👍🏾👊🏾

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  7. Pingback: Self love and acceptance. – lifeaswehaveneverknownit

  8. Always on point Ipuna. We can decide how we handle things, how we will recieve them and how we will react. I can pick to be angry/mad/negative or I can be happy and positive. The happy always feels better, so I don’t know why we forget this. Nobody says, “I was just miserable today, and I enjoyed it hahaha. God Bless you Ipuna :):)

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  15. I think it’s important to acknowledge that we’re not perfect because either our pride can get in the way or we beat ourselves up. Either situation doesn’t end well and it’s always a delicate balance. It’s always better to remain humble and equally celebrate our victories. This type of balance in loving ourselves, yet keeping our ego in check is one I find to be a challenge, but practice makes perfect.

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  16. Pingback: Hello, It’s Me: How to Practice Self-Love & Acceptance – Mylene C. Orillo

  17. Thank you for reminding us to “know our limitations.” Funny but it’s true, if you’re only five feet, you can’t force yourself to dunk. Even if we try so hard, there things that we really can’t do. That’s where friends/loved ones can step in.

    You are awesome, Ipuna. Thank you for being an amazing person and for being an inspiration to us, always. ❤

    Liked by 1 person

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  18. I loved the idea of having a bank account of thoughts. Perhaps I must get my account worked up.
    If our brains were computers I think those negative thoughts shouldn’t be even in the recycle bins….they should be deleted permanently.
    Another collaboration and yet another gem of a post!

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  19. Hey Ipuna, YES, the world revolves around love, or it should. Lobe your “zdebbie” analogy. It made complete sense. We can be sure of one thing in this life–we will have problems. It’s about how you respond to the issue at hand. :Our worst enemy is our thoughts. ” I have a scripture for that , 2 Corinthians 10:5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” If we don’t learn to control our thoughts then whatever we think on will take control of us. Thank you for this wonderful insight. 🌹

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  22. “It’s hard to accept love from others if you can’t first love yourself” – There’s so much truth in this! It was a revelation when I realized this. Great post.

    Liked by 1 person

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  24. Love the post, as usual. A teacher told me a story once, about whenever a bad situation hits you, it’s as if you are hit by an arrow. You can’t undo this arrow, but the second arrow is the way you deal with the first one hitting you. Like you said: you can break down and not get up, or you can try and guide yourself through the situation as best as you can. If you don’t love yourself, I think you’ll do the first. If you do love yourself, you’ll try the second option.

    And in the end, knowing that even the worst of days will eventually pass, helps too.

    Liked by 1 person

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  26. Great work Ipuna,

    I believe that self-pity is the worst kind of pity.It is blocking us in all fields.You said it well” It’s hard to accept love from others if you can’t first love yourself.” This is so true.And we must love ourselves with all the faults and virtues, in good and in evil. Great post

    Liked by 1 person

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