Learn to grow from HATING to LOVING yourself (a life coach´s guide)

What if you hate yourself?

What if you feel so far from self-love that it doesn’t even seem like a possibility? How can you change that? In this guide, you will learn how to stop hating yourself, so that you can start loving the who that you are. 

There are so many life coaches talking about self-love, but if the core foundation of your relationship with yourself is rocky rather than stable, it can feel like the steps are too big to get there. Really difficult. Or even impossible.
This guide is here to change that! We all benefit from loving ourselves more, and when our baseline is destructive to the degree of self-hate, it is important to have tools available so that you can understand where to start. This is the simple way to go from self-hate to self-love, and unlock true transformation in your life.

This coaching guide is for you if you are a person who:

• have a destructive self-image (feel like you suck as a person, or as if you are not good enough)
• hate yourself, and practice excessive self-judgment and criticism
• don’t feel worthy of [what you want] (love, happiness, success, etc.)
• want to transform who you are
• want to learn how to love yourself and your life (because YES, that is something you learn and practice to receive) 

With an open mind and an actual desire to change, this guide will be truly valuable for you!

What you will learn in this guide from self-hate to self-love:

In this post, you will find a full guide in text format, as well as a video (audio content) guide further down. Here is what you will get from reading or listening to this guide:

– Why loving statements doesn’t resonate with you

How come some statements can linger around within us for years, or even decades, while other statements just seem to pass right through us, without any type of impact. It´s not about whether the statement itself is positive or negative, because we do have the ability to recall both heart-warming and hurtful statements from our pasts. In this post, you will learn what makes loving statements seemingly fall flat to the ground instead of resonating with you.

– Identify and replace limiting beliefs about yourself

Our beliefs, specifically about ourselves, impact everything in our life; our worldview, our decisions, our behavior – as well as the results that follow. When learning how to constructively challenge your limiting beliefs about yourself, you gain tools to help your personal development for life. Our internal beliefs are often not even confronted (let alone challenged), and already in that first step of identifying what we do believe to be true about ourselves, we gain the power to change our lives completely.

– Transform your self-talk with constructive and empowering questions

Rather than engaging with destructive self-talk (primarily made up of internal questions and answers), you will learn to break free of that harmful habit. Learn how to implement a constructive self-talk habit with empowering questions, that will continuously provide more valuable and beneficial answers.

– How to make transformations happen now

If you want to change, but don´t feel ready to yet, and perhaps don´t quite know how to get yourself there – this guide will be particularly beneficial to you. Life can change in a single moment, and we can all learn how to develop enough power within ourselves to create these moments for ourselves. Making changes happen now is essentially about making a decision to change (something) now.

We all have different experiences in life that help shape us into who we are. Who we are can easily change when we decide to make change happen. Before that can feel like a natural step, though, it is important to shine a light on the actual internal limitations that are keeping us from loving ourselves in practice. 
If your normal is to push yourself down rather than supporting yourself, to criticize your efforts and judge you just for being – what you will feel able and motivated to do is massively limited, simply because you lack your own support. 

An example of the impact of love

Apply the scenario of love and support to another person, and it quickly becomes clear that it has a huge impact on the results that are possible:

Two people are competing in a race. One of them is being actively supported and empowered, while the other is being actively discouraged and judged while receiving loud hateful comments.

First of all, who will likely perform better?
And secondly; who will feel better before, during, and after the race?

Results are provided both in our external experience (what we get/what happens), as well as in our internal experience (how we feel about it). The latter is most important because our emotional experience is the only factor that can determine what ultimately feels important to us. Also, we cannot control our external experience (only influence and co-create), while our internal experience remains ours to master. 

So, you hate yourself? (haha smooth transition there, Sophi)
Okay, let’s get right into how to change that!

How do you grow from hating to loving yourself?

Just thinking about the journey from self-hate to self-love seems like a massive project.
The core to focus on in the journey from self-hate to self-love is:
Anything you don’t believe about yourself will not resonate with you.

What you don´t believe will not resonate with you.

Why you don´t resonate with loving statements

Your loved ones can be like:
“I love you”
“you’re an amazing person”
“you are always gonna be enough”.

And it… What?
It sticks to you? It feels true to you? Warms your heart? 

No. That stuff will reach the ground, rather than your mind or heart.

Why? Because deep within you, you know that it is not and it cannot be true.
Which means: it’s all lies

That´s where we have to begin:

It all starts with your beliefs about yourself

In order to change self-hate into self-love, or at least into acceptance (at first) – we need to focus on what beliefs we hold true about ourselves. Whatever we don´t believe (is true, reasonable, possible), we will not consider. Statements that don´t resonate with us because they are outside of our frameworks of beliefs will not and can not feel true to us until we change our beliefs.

Check your beliefs about yourself

What do you believe to be true about yourself?
Are you a piece of shit?
Are you broken to the core? Unfixable? A lost cause?
A horrible person?
Are you selfish, unkind, worthy of nothing?
Are you completely unlovable?

Or are you kind of all right?
You know; trying your best, doing the best you can through this life to live?
Who are you, according to the people who really love you?

Your beliefs are the framework of your potential

You will never take actions that are outside of what’s possible or reasonable for you to do.
When you believe things that actively make you hate yourself; that deserves taking a closer look at, to discover what’s really going on and is it true. Because one thing we know is that they are not benefiting you, they have not been benefiting your life so far, and they will sure as fuck not benefit you going forward. 
When your goal is to love yourself (or stop hating yourself), the step of becoming aware of and identifying your beliefs about yourself is crucial.

Discover your limiting beliefs about yourself

First aim to discover more about your current belief systems:
What do you believe to be your strengths?
Weaknesses?
Abilities?
Limitations?
Challenges?
Opportunities?

Challenge your limiting beliefs about yourself

Then it´s time to challenge those limiting beliefs of yours:
(Remember to do this part with a curious attitude and open mind because you do in fact not know everything about yourself yet and you are worth being empowered by your beliefs)
Is this necessarily true (now, or at all)?
Does it remain true from an objective perspective?
Do others consider this true? (If no, what´s the difference?)
Would others agree that this is true about you? (Your loved ones as well?)

Self-love starts with building trust

You need to know something really important about yourself:
Now, because of your emotions towards yourself up until this point, you have been treating yourself – how? Most likely, either without love or with hate. Say that you had been treating another person that isn’t you that same way until this point; would this other person immediately trust you and love you, when you start treating them with love, care and respect out of the blue? Or could that perhaps take some effort to build up your relationship to that level? 

Treat your relationship with your mind as if it would be another person

You cannot expect your mind to just start accepting your sudden loving affirmations and statements. Just like any person, your mind might need some reasons to believe you and to back up the logic of those statements. Reasons that actually resonate with you and that feel real to you.
To access your reasons, you just need to ask yourself questions in a curious and open-minded way, rather than sarcastic and judgmental. This is the only way to truly learn and understand truths about yourself; asking yourself the questions that will give you the answers you want and need – as if you truly want to know. 

Before you start asking yourself questions:

1. First up, you need to phrase the questions to align with the answers you want to receive. 
   There’s a big difference in the answers you’ll get out of asking the question:
   
   “Why can I never change?”
   
   versus
   
   “What is one thing I can do right now to get closer to living my dream life?”
   
   We all have automated habits of phrasing our internal questions, and those are based on our individual life experiences up until this point. Along with that, we all have the ability to replace those thought habits with new ones that will optimize our minds to simply serve us better. When you are growing from self-hate to self-love and self-acceptance, the act of rephrasing internal questions to add the most value is massively impactful.
   
   The same way you would use a search engine, how the question is asked will most definitely determine what type of answer you will receive. It is always beneficial to increase your awareness of how you ask yourself questions on a day-to-day basis. Practicing asking more impactful, constructive, empowering, valuable questions in your mind will soon make that an automated habit.
   
2. Secondly, you need to ask the questions in a curious and open way – as if you’re actually interested to learn. This way of asking yourself questions helps your mind to direct all energy towards finding constructive answers, rather than spending half of it doubting your intentions or engagement behind the questions.
   Your mind will not go through any purposeless effort to make you happier. To keep you alive, yes, but not to make you happier. You need to help direct your mind to do the effort, by making it clear to yourself that you actually want the results.
   Just imagine that you´re asking someone else questions, first with an open and curious tone, and then with a snarky or sarcastic tone – when would you most likely get more genuine and honest answers?
   
   If you don’t yet feel reasons to be interested in learning more about yourself, you first need to focus on discovering why you could, would, can, or will care about how that would impact your life.

Become aware of your limiting beliefs to challenge them

You cannot start challenging your beliefs unless you know about them. Unless you have awareness of them.
That is always the first step of identifying: where are your limitations within your beliefs?
The beliefs about yourself are a great starting point. We might have been programmed to believe that we are less than, not worthy enough, or not good enough to be loved. That programming might have been made by somebody else, for example in our family.
Now, we just need to reprogram ourselves to relearn what we thought was real; what we thought we knew.

And that’s it!

We grow step by step

There is NEVER any rush to grow faster – unless you feel a sense of urgency on your journey.
Especially when growing from hating yourself to true self-love. Coming from a sense of hating yourself, you are already treating yourself so much better now than you were before. Please remember to focus on the progress that you have made and that you continue to make in your journey to self-love. Your growth and development are always worth celebrating!
Keep in mind that just because the strategy (or recipe if you will) is SIMPLE, does not make the progress of getting there EASY.

It’s not about big changes happening all of a sudden

Gathering up energy or power to make a big change happen. It’s about taking small, small actions, that are different from yesterday (or from before then); small steps forward. 

For example:
What’s the smallest thing you could do to show yourself love right now?
What are the absolute tiniest of steps that you can take to show yourself love right now?
A super simple thing? Even simpler than that, even easier than that? 

Because you see, then tomorrow, or later on today, you’ve already started.
Then you will not have to start something, you just have to continue. Then continue, with as small steps as you feel like taking, so you actually get it done.
After some time, after some effort, you’re going to notice that you want to do more.
Because you can – let’s face it: you can do more. But after a while, you’re going to feel like doing more – and that’s the main difference.
We always have to build it up from some type of starting point. Doing the absolute smallest thing is much better for tomorrow, than doing nothing. 

Final words of wisdom on the journey from hating to loving yourself:

• Anything NEW might feel UNCOMFORTABLE at first. This also applies to practicing self-love.
  It might feel uncomfortable, scary, or silly – in the beginning.
  This is because our brains are trying to keep us alive (rather than keeping us happy), and something unknown or new simply requires more energy for us to learn, as opposed to when the actions are automated habits in our daily routines. 
  
• Practicing taking small actions is still practicing taking actions as a daily habit, which is extremely powerful and beneficial. When you are practicing self-love in actionable steps every day, it doesn´t take long before those actions are a natural part of your daily routine. Strengthening your relationship with yourself in small steps like this will help you to create a nurturing relationship with yourself, making your internal experience (your mind and emotions) much more enjoyable.

Here is the video (audio) guide on how to grow from hating to loving yourself.
For more video guides, subscribe to LifephiloSophi on YouTube.

Thank you for reading

Share this with someone you wish could love themselves as you love them.
Comment to let me know what topics you want to learn more about! Share your feedback so that we can grow together. I truly hope you found this guide valuable, and thank you for being here, actively learning more about growing from hating to loving yourself. That is a big step – allow yourself to feel grateful for taking it!

(Remember: Even if you don´t love yourself yet, you are so loved)