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 of your best self 100% of the time, but it’s important to give yourself permission to only be at 80% capacity when that’s all you’ve got, and to be okay with yourself about that.
Because sometimes, you don’t even have 80%. Sometimes you won’t have 50%. You may have 20%, and those times are not meant to become some justification for you shaming yourself for achieving less. Your best self is a target for you to strive to, every day; it is not the baseline of how much you have to perform at all times.
Hold yourself to a high standard by clearly visualizing who your best self is, and all the greatness that you can achieve as your best self—And Then give yourself permission to treat that version of you only ever as a target. Measure yourself in areas you wish to make progress, yes, but don’t use your high standard of self as a tool to shame yourself with, any time you only manage to exist as a human being.