When asked the question, “How do you show others that you care about them?”, most of us do not spend even a moment in hesitation before blurting out, “Oh that’s simple, I make myself available when they need me,” or “I keep the promises that I make to them.” This question may not require any deep thinking at all, as all of us carry some standard regarding how we want to be treated by others, and because these answers are pretty much all just common knowledge. What might not be as easy to consider as the former question though, is the idea pertaining to how we show up for ourselves. How do you show yourself that you care about yourself, that you can depend on yourself? In which ways do you show yourself that you are choosing yourself?
Examining these kinds of questions at this level will require you to do deeper introspection than you might typically want to do. It is understandable if this process elicits some form of discomfort, as you’re tasked with being open and honest with yourself about something you might never have typically ever thought about or noticed before. However, it’s well worth the effort in being able to understand yourself a little bit better and to expand your awareness of how you tend to live your life. The fact of the matter is that to some degree, all of us have struggled with showing up for ourselves in one way or another. Most of us will go the extra mile for a family member, a friend or our significant other without a second thought– but we don’t adopt the same standards when it comes to our own lives. We make promises to ourselves about a myriad of things:
“I will start making my health a priority again by getting back into exercising.”
“I will fix my sleeping schedule starting tonight.”
“I will eat an appropriate number of meals every day this week even though I am busy.”
“I won’t overwork myself… I will take a break when I need one.”
On the surface, these calls to action don’t seem that compelling, and we fall short of upholding them as a result. We toss the same excuses around in an attempt to convince ourselves that we really could go to bed earlier or eat more regularly if we wanted to. But instead, we’ve skipped dinner for three consecutive days because we were just “too busy to eat”, or knocked out at 2 am because we waited last minute to start on an assignment that just “had to be done that night.” Each time we break a promise we’ve made to ourselves, we also actively compromise the relationship we have with ourselves. Just like how you would start seeing a close friend as unreliable or question your value to them if they were to skip out on you again and again, not showing up for yourself will do the same damage. After a while of being stuck in the same cycle, you might begin to lose confidence in your capacity to undertake bigger responsibilities, because you have already shown yourself, both on a conscious and subconscious level, that smaller tasks get passed up unfinished and unresponded to.
Maintaining and fostering relationships require attentiveness, consideration and consistency– this includes the relationship we have with ourselves. The latter is arguably the most important relationship we will have in this lifetime, which makes it even more essential for us to be aware of how we treat it. In order to nurture long-term self growth, we must show up and put in the work necessary to show ourselves that we’ve got our own backs.