To live your best life and be the real, authentic version of you – no interpretations or versions designed to fit into some external ‘norm’ – you need to develop the ability to love yourself.

Oh so easy to say, but often difficult to do.

Because loving yourself requires acceptance.

Acceptance that you are where you are. No denial. No avoidance. No judgement. Just acceptance that, while you may not like it, where you are right now is where you are.

But, acceptance of your current position is not an acceptance of an ongoing existence as an interpretation. Rather, it unlocks a context in which the past can be acknowledged, the present understood and the future embraced.

It offers a baseline from which you launch your adventure into the person you are meant to be—the real you.

To find that baseline—to accept your present reality—you must first understand exactly what that reality is. To do that, you must deconstruct the interpretation that you have become—the good, the bad and the ugly.

This deconstruction begins with discovery.

Who is it that the world encounters as you interact with it? Who is it that you encounter as you interact with yourself? What version of yourself do you choose to reveal (and yes, it is a choice)?

The attributes that you display—the characteristics seen when you examine yourself, and that the world sees when you engage with it—embody the version of you that you choose to reveal. Unless these attributes reflect your true essence, no one will ever have the privilege of knowing who you really are.

So what attributes do you display?

Your attributes essentially fall into four ‘pillars’—physical, personality and character, emotional, and your attitude to health and wellbeing. Each shapes how you interact with the world: your confidence, belief, sense of worth, and understanding of who you are all flow from your view of these pillars.

If your view of these pillars is distorted, even slightly, your understanding of who you are will be distorted. And when that’s distorted, your relationship with yourself, and with the world, is compromised. And when your relationship with yourself is compromised, you have no chance of even knowing who the real you is, let alone allowing that person to come alive.

So, you must discover how you see yourself today, no matter what that reveals. When you understand that reality, you can begin to unpack why it is so.

What messages have infiltrated your thinking? What circumstances caused certain belief patterns to take hold? How does the way you see yourself today compare with how you saw yourself before those influences?

When you understand why you see yourself as you do, you can stop fighting. Stop judging. Stop condemning. Stop striving to be someone else. You can start to accept that, while you may not like what you found, where you are right now is your present reality.

That acceptance is your baseline—your starting point—from which you can strip away distortions and rediscover characteristics that truly express who you really are.

But where do you start? Try this simple exercise:

First, describe the person who stares back at you in the mirror. What do they look like? What type of person are they? How do they behave? How do they approach life?

Then ask yourself how you feel about that description, and why. Why do you like the bits you like, and loathe the bits you loathe?

What does that tell you about the person you really are? How far removed is that person from the interpretation of you that you have become?