Pallavi Gupta Tired of being betrayed by others? Read this article to learn how to become your own best friend and build a stronger relationship with yourself.
‘I am My Own Best Friend’
The idea of being your own best friend may sound a bit nutty. The benefits, however, it renders are worth exploring it.
Sometimes, the curveballs life throws at you can send you straight into the bottomless pit of worthlessness, desolation and harsh self-criticism. Putting yourself on the backburner, you start to seek validation and support from your friends and family; hoping to be understood and rescued, you get desperate to feel “your former self” once again.
When your external support system fails to provide you with comfort, all you are left with is yourself. Those are the moments of enlightenment. This realisation, unfortunately, often comes in the most challenging hours of our lives. The uncomfortable truth is: When you hit rock bottom, that’s where you meet yourself.
A positive relationship with yourself, thus, becomes a survival tool and in the darkest moments, it can rev your energy up to keep you moving forward, no matter what!
Building a strong relationship with yourself takes time and effort.
Like all good things in life, becoming your own best friend is a marathon and not a sprint. But once you have got your own back, it can give life-changing results.
4 Things to Do to Become Your Own Best Friend
Before you set out on this life-altering shift, it’s essential to understand how does a best friend help us grow.
Here’s how you can make yourself your own best friend:
1. Get Interested in Your Life and Listen to Yourself
Whether you are stewing over a failure or just landed on cloud nine, you need to be heard and share your experiences. That someone often comes in the form of a closest friend or someone close to you like your mother. You need someone to process your emotions and make sense of the events happening in your life. It feels great to express your feelings and have someone who can give you a different and possibly better perspective.
Sadly, it’s not uncommon to find even the closest people unavailable or busy with their own life, when you need them most. Moreover, there are particular things that you don’t feel comfortable sharing with others. Who do you go to, then? To yourself.
Penning down your feelings about that harried day or the test you bombed at school may offer some assistance when it comes to expressing yourself. Write about everything: what happened, how that made you feel and what you can do to feel better again. If you feel like it, vent out. Scribble a poem, if you are feeling passion, in excess. Writing helps you organise your feelings and emotions, the same way talking to a close friend does.
2. Treat Yourself with Love, Compassion and Kindness
It’s only human to make mistakes. Whether it’s a minor slip-up or the biggest mistake of your life, it’s easy to drown yourself in guilt, regret and worthlessness. A good friend knows how to treat you when you screw up. They are there to comfort you and stop you from bludgeoning yourself emotionally.
In those moments of weakness, a best friend embraces you as you are. No judgement, no punishment, only acceptance!
Just like a best friend, you too can be there for yourself. Instead of beating yourself up, and chastising yourself for that error, learn to be kind to yourself. Whether you fail or succeed, meet yourself with love and compassion unconditionally. Remind yourself that you are a human being, and everybody makes mistakes. The only way to grow in life is to learn from our mistakes and adapt ourselves accordingly.
Being kind and compassionate to yourself will not only make you feel comfortable with yourself, but it will also strengthen your relationship with others by making you more empathetic towards them.
Related: How to Cultivate Self-Compassion
3. Be Honest with Yourself
An off-kilter perception about life or yourself can make you delusional. We need a balanced approach to lead a happy life. Sometimes, our thoughts become so distorted that we fail to look at the bigger picture and only see what we want to see. A major downside of this blinkered attitude is that it may lead you to form a wrong image of yourself and others.
A best friend, having spent a long time with you, knows you in and out. Your strengths and weaknesses, the bad and the good in you. Your dreams, your desires, your wants and your needs — they understand everything about you.
Forming a friendly relationship with yourself can help you lead your life honestly and with integrity. When you know your limitations and start to put trust in your abilities, magic happens! You don’t berate yourself for your frailties and learn to accept yourself as you are. Knowing your limitations can help you set realistic expectations, which, in turn, can improve your chances of reaching your goals.
Leading an honest life enables you to identify what satisfies your soul. You learn to trust yourself, your choices and decisions, and cease to seek external validation anymore.
By spending more time with yourself, you can know more about your characters, traits, strengths, what makes you comfortable and what doesn’t! Every fibre of your being works in tandem, without any internal conflicts, and that’s when you achieve your highest potential.
4. Become Your Own Biggest Cheerleader
Life can be uncertain sometimes.
No one knows whether the book you are writing would be your next tour de force or it would only collect dust in someone’s bookshelf.
No one knows the future of your relationship with your lover; whether you would be able to come out of the current mess as a winner or as a loser; whether you would get your dream job or not; whether you would overcome that debilitating disease or not.
Truth be told, no one knows what’s around the bend. After all, we are not fortunetellers.
A best friend, in those moments of self-doubt and mystery, becomes a ray of light, who guides you through the darkest hours. They believe in you and your abilities and never fail to remind you how awesome you are!
You could be your biggest cheerleader. No one knows you more than you. Every time you take a step forward in your life, do it with absolute faith in yourself. Look for positive affirmations and encouragement within. It doesn’t matter whether the outcome is desired or negative; what matters is whether you are ready to give 100 per cent in whatever you choose to do. You, being your cheerleader, can learn to lead a life of satisfaction if you rise up and give your best shot every time you face failure.
Conclusion
It’s possible to befriend yourself and become your own truest ally through the thick and thin.
By creating time to focus on yourself and your life, embracing yourself as you are, treating yourself with kindness and believing in yourself when no one else does, you can become your own best friend.
Suggested Reading: This Book by Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz
