In the experience of a setback, you will feel depressed, become negative, or even depressed, and what you need most at that point is to love yourself.
Because no matter how people around you encourage you and accompany you, and the only one who can really get you out of it is yourself.
There is a lot of advice on the Internet about this,
How to Face a Devastating Setback and Thrive.
How to Deal With Setbacks and Challenges
9 Strategies to Manage a Personal Setback
However, I also have my approach, which I believe will be helpful to you.
Please remember, “The one person who can really love you is yourself.”
When it comes to loving ourselves, we’re all familiar with it. There are already many good
articles online that tell us how to love ourselves.
But after much trial and error, personally, I think there is one method that is very effective.
That’s changing the way you think about yourself.
1. Looking inward for love and affirmation
You often blame yourself, and there is often a voice in your heart, as if the parent who criticized you when you were little was sternly, and relentlessly, telling you, “You’re not good enough, you’re not excellent enough, you don’t deserve to be loved.”
The scary thing is that you often agree with this voice, and even, you are the critic.
Yet as long as you are still criticizing yourself, you will look outward for love. This is the scariest thing you could do.
Because it makes you start to divide and keeps you from being with yourself. It even makes you feel miserable and depressed when you are alone.
You should not feel happy in the eyes of others, but, in your own eyes, you are happy.
The happiness that comes because of the praise of others, or the external affirmation, will slowly fade away after a while. You may then look outward again for encouragement and affirmation. This may lead to some other unhappiness and trouble.
2. Change your attitude towards yourself
I’m assuming you’ve heard the term, “self-acceptance”. To put it simply, what is its essence? it is actually an attitude toward ourselves. When voices criticizing yourself pop up, do you identify with them and make yourself feel bad, or do you not accept them and make it easy for you?
For example, if you had planned to go for a run this morning, but didn’t do it because you didn’t get up on time, there will be many voices in your mind: “You are a lazy person, how can you get in good shape? , “I know you won’t do it as planned.”， “You’re just easily tempted by things.” Do you hear these voices? Do you hear these voices? You can put them down on paper and you can find that it’s a very unkind attitude toward yourself. With blame, with denial, its purpose is to get yourself in a sense of shame to do what you think should be done well or perfectly.
Perhaps many of us have grown up with this motivational model, along with some achievements, but this kind of progress, with its method of attacking oneself, cannot go on forever. Because it creates internal conflict and makes people increasingly unhappy. Until one day, you may not be able to handle it.
Whenever you find yourself feeling uncomfortable, quiet down and observe yourself, is it that you are treating yourself with a bad attitude? If so, change that attitude immediately. Look at yourself in a different light, see your efforts, understand why you are not doing well or perfect, even so, you still deserve to be loved, still deserve a big hug. Then tell yourself “I don’t need to treat myself with an attitude that is so unkind and so unappreciative.”
3. Change the way you speak to yourself
When something happens, like a mistake at work, or missing a deadline, or uploading the wrong file to your supervisor.
There’s usually a voice telling you, “You just screw things up,” or “You just like to lose things.
At this point we might try to change that voice and say to ourselves, “Is it possible that you’ve been working too hard lately?” and “Is it possible that you’ve had too many tasks lately?” And then smile at yourself in the mirror. How does that feel? When you change the way you talk to yourself, the whole world changes.
There will be times when you encounter things like career setbacks, failed business ventures, and other things that could be seen as disasters.
At this time, it is even more important to love yourself unconditionally. You can say to yourself, “This kind of thing can happen to everyone, and I’m not the only one.”
Sometimes even if you tried your best, something unexpected may happen, such as the global financial crisis in 2008 or the new crown virus in 2020.
When you treat failure and less-than-ideal as a normal part of life, it is less painful to speak to yourself in a calm way.
Please say to yourself, “Have you been too busy at work lately?” “Are you too tired with your studies?”, “Are you too tired with your studies?” , “Are you having too much trouble?” , “Is the new leader not getting along?”
4. Stop setting standards for yourself to be loved
People judge themselves because there are many internal criteria for being loved.
For example, in school, if you have the highest test scores, you are feeling loved; at work, if you have the highest test scores, you feel you are worthy of being loved, and you go into misconceptions. Even among your friends, if you are the one who makes the most money, you are the one who deserves to be loved.
To love ourselves unconditionally. You deserve to be loved whether you get the best grades or performance or not. Say to yourself, “I’m fine the way I am, I don’t need to change anything else, I’m worthy of being loved.”