A Love First Thought on Being Your Best Self

How to maintain a healthy balance between striving to become better and loving yourself in the progress.

Being your best self is like living a version of you that you unequivocally love being. That means it cannot be your most accomplished and hard-working self if you are constantly stressed and overextending yourself to hit every target, finish every task, or achieve every goal. You cannot be your best self if being so requires you to compromise on your health and wellness. Your true best self is the balance between your ideal version of you, and the reality of your capacity and needs. You have to love being your best self; otherwise, it’s not your best self, it’s somebody else’s standard for you.

Your best self is your target, not your baseline

Self-love demands that we do not allow ourselves to over-extend as a general rule, or as a default way of being. Practicing self-love means recognizing that when you’re at 80% capacity, you’re not going to hit 100% of your marks and you’re not going to hold yourself to that standard either. It’s okay to try; it’s okay to aspire to the greatness o…