30 Days of Being a Love Machine: Day 25

Day 25 Challenge:

Be gentle with yourself - choose thoughts and words that keep your mood light.

On day twenty-three, we challenged ourselves to avoid criticizing our own appearance. Same goes for the things you do or things that happen to you. It’s easy to default to putting ourselves down every time something doesn’t go our way. Whenever I messed up, my go-tos were “of course” and “sounds about right.” I was constantly affirming the negative ideas that everything would go wrong for me. I would call myself “stupid” or comment “what an idiot” any time I was frustrated with myself or made a mistake. Because I was so negative with myself, I found that my life had a lot of problems. It was what I often focused on.

Your challenge is to be kinder to yourself. Be gentle whenever you err, after all, it is human. Instead of expecting the worst, just expect to get through the day or even the moment. Start treating your issues as if their uncommon. You can say things like, “that was weird.” Calling yourself names can get thrown out the window. Start replacing those with “It’s OK” or “oops.” Choose kinder ways of expressing yourself.

How do you get from point A to point B? You can let go of the negative thoughts and words by literally stating, “‘what an idiot’ doesn’t live here anymore. It is no longer my reality.” You can make up your own statement for whatever you’re comfortable with. For myself, I wrote, “In times of contrast, I’m letting go of the habitual ‘of course’ and ‘sounds about right’ because it is a deep-seated negative default that no longer belongs here.” These are great for those common put-downs we have for ourselves.

Start to default to positivity with others too. You can find helpful tips on how to do so in Soulcial Bizarro’s Mindful Mondays “Mind Your Aim” blog post. You can also find other helpful approaches in “How to Stay Happy Around Negative People” by Matt James Ph.D. on Psychology Today. As for expectations with other people, just expect nothing more than spending time/experiencing moments with them. You can always continue to hope for the best.

Move from your heart space for yourself as often as humanly possible. Choose to be happy. Be loving. Be kind. Be gentle.

#loveintentionally #soulciallove #loveliving