Love yourself and be confident by first opening up about your feelings and needs. When you’ve existed in a cycle of shame around having feelings, seeing yourself as burdensome for having needs, or consistently feeling invalidated, you may suppress feelings that would otherwise direct you to your authentic needs. Confidence can exist authentically, meaning it comes with the support of self-worth and personal value, or it can exist artificially, meaning it’s been constructed through stories and perceptions.

Authentic confidence is sustainable. Artificial confidence leads to a denial of our inner selves. If we’ve constructed artificial confidence, it can be difficult to ask for help, admit to our own vulnerabilities, and share our needs with others. Focusing on listening to and meeting your needs as they arise, leads to healthy self-love and authentic confidence.

How to Listen to Yourself

It’s not easy. Listening to ourselves is one of the most difficult tasks to achieve for any person. That’s why it’s the 7th step in the eightfold path, Right Mindfulness, because it takes a lot of preparation to become aware. Practicing listening requires time and space. When we give ourselves time and space to ask questions and listen to the response, we can get to the root of our feelings and needs.

If you struggle with the need to explain why you have feelings, you may be skipping right past the feeling itself. Experiencing challenges to your feelings in the past may have led to defensive behaviors. So know, feelings don’t have explanations. And without explanation, they can be shared, validated, and processed. When we have the right care community, we have access to the support we need.

Meditation and mindfulness are two great practices for beginning to listen to yourself. Building self love takes time, start with giving yourself 10-15 minutes daily to sit in stillness and let yourself be heard.

Identify Your Feelings Without Explaining Them

How do we explain why we love our family, friends, or children? How do we explain why we like rainbows, rivers, or mountains? The reasons for feelings can’t be explained. But we know they exist. Seeking out reasons for feelings before processing the feeling itself, robs you of personal validation. As we wonder where, why, how this feeling came to be, we’re distracted from the soothing that takes place when we stop to admit what the feeling is.

After you’ve practiced listening to yourself, it’s a good time to start communicating externally. Some people may love conversations with friends, and finding safe people to listen to your feelings without judgment is such a treasure. If you don’t have a community like that yet, or you’re not comfortable with that level of vulnerability, journaling is a great way to externally communicate what’s happening internally.

When we communicate our feelings, we’re asking for care, either from ourselves or others. Being able to identify that we have a wide range of feelings, as part of our human experience, is natural and healthy. Acceptance of the human experience leads to acceptance of self.

Our Feelings Indicate Our Needs

Happiness is a result of fulfillment that stems directly from getting what we need. We need people to care about our feelings. We need to care about our feelings. Feelings are indicators of what we need physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, or environmentally. Healthy relationships start with honestly identifying feelings and talking about them. This includes healthy relationships with self and others.

Sustainable happiness results from surrounding ourselves with people who consent to caring about our feelings and needs and who choose to work through our experiences with us. We also benefit from having the authority to distance ourselves from people who don’t choose healthy emotional processing methods.

A healthy community of people acknowledges the existence of feelings and respects the communication that needs to occur to attain stability.

Feelings are Based in Perspective

Your feelings are your own. It’s important to honor that first. We all have different experiences that create different emotional processes within. Loving yourself starts with acceptance. When we love ourselves, we naturally grow confidence.

Feelings don’t always come from a healthy mindset and while it’s helpful to be open to emotional evolution, it shouldn’t be as a result of rejecting feelings. Every human is like a color wheel of feelings. We deserve to open up about what we’re feeling and connect with others who are willing to support us through our turmoil.

Maintaining curiosity with our own experiences is a personal and private practice. When we stay curious and open-minded, we find the answers that lead us to fulfilling relationships.

Self-Worth and Boundaries

When we lack self-value, we tend to lean on others for direction. We look to society to tell us what to prioritize or partners, friends, and parents for boundary enforcements. We seek external factors of validation of feelings and permission to move forward on our path. This lack of self-worth and boundaries creates a cycle of prioritizing external approval over internal feelings.

Valuing you self—prioritizing your happiness—means identifying what matters, at your core, independent of outside influences. It’s about listening to the inner voice and giving permission to operate off intuition rather than information presented through outside forces. Boundaries protect that inner voice.

Self-love and confidence start with assigning value to your own inner voice, building trust, and a healthy relationship with self.

How to Love Yourself and Be Confidence

Steps to loving yourself and building authentic confidence:

• Listen, practice mindfulness and awareness
• Communicate, journal or talk through your feelings with a trusted person
• Find the core need behind your feelings
• Honor what you discover about yourself
• Set boundaries and practice basic self-care

Basic self-care is the best way to start showing yourself love. The more you show up for yourself, the more loved you’ll feel. When we feel loved, authentic confidence begins to grow.

Get my self-care checklist to keep track of all the basics is physical, emotional, social, financial, and home health.