How to Improve Yourself Everyday

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You can learn how to improve yourself by getting to know yourself first. You’re a unique individual and deserve to be heard. The first person to listen to your wants and need is you. Once you know, you can communicate, make a plan, and set your goals.

Knowing yourself inside and out helps you discover the areas in life you want to improve. The first step to making any change is assessing what already is.

Practice self-reflection and self-exploration activities like journaling, individual or group therapy, and accepting judgment or feedback from a trusted friend to learn about yourself.

Slowly work on building a relationship with yourself by taking small steps to care for yourself every day. Self-care is the foundation of building self-love.

Self-Care to Self-Love

Most people approach self-improvement with a list of things they want changed, without acknowledging which patterns lead to certain outcomes in the first place.

Self-improvement relies on self-love. Healthy self-love takes time to develop. Creating a self-care routine is a great way to start building a relationship with yourself one step at a time.

Self-care is more than spending time with yourself or giving yourself a break. You are also the one in charge of disciplining yourself, motivating yourself, and making tough decisions. There is a balance to find in pushing yourself to do what’s in your best interest, and allowing yourself time to take a break from life.

Create a self-care habit that includes all the important aspects of caring for a human. You’re your own babysitter.

Your self-care will include:

Physical
Emotional
Intellectual
Environmental
Financial
Spiritual
Social

Addressing each of these areas in your life with care, compassion, and gratitude will open each up to the possibility of change and improvement. You will know where you want to improve your life and how it aligns with your values and carries you toward your goals.

Taking care of yourself in a meaningful way is how you build a relationship and love yourself.

Grab my self-care checklist to get started with all the basics.

Identify Areas of Self-Improvement

Often when people are criticizing themselves, it’s a result of comparison or “should” and “shouldn’t”-ing yourself. For example, believing you need a new car because your coworker has one, or telling yourself you should eat better are comparison improvements.

These improvement plans come from a place of shame rather than a desire to fulfill your authentic purpose. Self-improvement resulting from shame or comparison is really just self-harm in disguise.

Identifying how to improve yourself everyday is a slow process. You want to really listen to your inner voice, find out what you seek in life, and see what areas already support your goals. Have patience with yourself so you can uncover which areas will be most effectively improved.

Identify areas of self-improvement:

Talk to yourself daily
Offer yourself compassion
Create small habits to slowly build self-trust

Self-Improvement Plan

After you’ve taken time to get to know yourself and established a meaningful and supportive self-care routine, you can make a self-improvement plan.

A plan helps you monitor areas of your life you want to change so you can set goals, break them into intervals, monitor and track.

Monitoring and tracking goals can seem ominous or unnecessary, but it’s an important step in creating new habits that stick. Learning to trust yourself starts with seeing habits that lead to results.

Without monitoring the habits and decisions that lead to results, you can undermine your self-trust by telling yourself stories about the results being about luck or that the work wasn’t yours to credit.

In your self-improvement plan, include:

Goals and values
Self-care routine
Motivational quotes or affirmations
1-2 specific areas of focus

Give yourself time to learn your habits and incorporate effective adjustments.

Self-Compassion

While in self-improvement mode, it’s important to be offering yourself lots of compassion. As many improvements start with where we want to seek change, there are a lot of ways guilt, shame, and disappointment can show.

You may realize unhealthy habits you were engaging in, forgive yourself. You may realize unhealthy relationships that you need to adjust or end, forgive yourself. It’s natural to fall off track with new habits and routines. Change is not easy and maintaining new habits takes practice.

Be abundant with the forgiveness and compassion. You’re worthy of the space and grace it takes to do the work.