Growing and maintaining a good friendship takes time, effort and generosity of spirit. Maintaining a good relationship with our friends requires a gentle honesty, unconditional love and a respect for the other’s values and beliefs.
We make time to have fun with our friends, to share their joys and their sorrows, we listen to their innermost needs and we can be relied upon to be there when our friends need us most.
It is an excellent trait to be able to empathise with others and to be able to attend to their needs and fulfil their wants. However, all too often people tend to put everyone else’s needs first before getting around to thinking of their own. This is especially true of women because most women are encouraged from an early age to be put others’ needs first and to not think of themselves.
Bestowing all your time on others’ needs gets in the way of you looking after yourself. You are just as deserving of your time and care as any of your friends. Your needs are as important as anybody else’s and sometimes it is necessary for your own well-being to put your own needs first. Putting your own needs first is not selfish, it’s what I call ‘selfing’, looking after yourself. You will find that you function much better in the world when you do take care of own needs.
How would it feel to treat yourself as you would your own best friend for a day ? Why not try it out and see what happens ? The more you practice looking after yourself, the better and the easier it becomes.
Five Steps to becoming your own best friend:
- Take some time to consider your achievements and compliment yourself on them.
- Make space in your day to do something you want to do, like reading another chapter of your book, a trip to the cinema to see the latest film or going for that walk you keep putting off.
- Compliment yourself. If you’ve just had a new hair cut or a new outfit, look in the mirror and tell yourself how good you look.
- Stop looking for perfection. Take that pressure off, things only ever need to be ‘good enough’.
- Forgive yourself when you make mistakes and reward yourself when you do something well
