Smile to Yourself

There is a way that will help us in accepting ourselves, i.e. by appreciating ourselves. Bad impression towards ourselves, whether it is rationale or not, will in a way affect our action towards people around us. As an example, if we are depressed because of our weaknesses, this depression will accumulate inside ourselves and then be channeled as a form of hatred towards others. Instead, we need to learn how to aprreciate and kind to ourselves, and this, in turn, will add loving-kindness to others.

When we can't solve our own problems, we will start to hate others. The product is what we call satanic circle which can destroy ourselves: we hate ourselves => we hate others => as a result, others hate us. We need to appreciate ourselves no matter what we are and who we are. If we do not appreciate ourselves, how others will appreciate us?

We are taught to smile at others. However, many people do not learn how to smile to themselves. Why don't you start to do it? Take out a mirror. Look into the mirror from a distance where you can see your whole face. Then, SMILE:) Give the best smile to yourself. Observe your lips, teeth, wrinkles at your eyes' corners, cheek, hair, and do not forget to look at the light from your eyes and a happy mimic from your smile just now. Smile in such a way that you can feel that your smile has entertained yourself.

This is not an exercise to look pretty, handsome, or attractive. This is how you can accept and make peace with yourself. If you cannot befriend with your own smile, how can your smile mesmerize others? By appreciating yourself, we will benefit ourselves and people around us.

When we appreciate ourselves, we will look at ourselves positively. When we have a positive attitude, we can see our weaknesses as a chance to recognize and improve ourselves. We can also see our strength as a blessing that we can share with others. Hence, we can make our lives valuable and benefitting people around us and environment where we live.


HOW TO APPRECIATE OURSELVES

1. Know yourself
Knowing yourself is the toughest step in the self-appreciating process. Knowing yourself is a process that requires your honesty in seeing and evaluating yourself. Only with honesty can we identify our strength and things that we need to work on and improve further. If we have known ourselves well, we can understand our strength which can be shared to people. We can also understand things that we can learn from others.

2. Appreciate yourself as a being
Appreciate yourself as a being will keep us low profile although we have been given chances to enjoy a lot of success. It also makes us stronger in facing our weakness. All beings are perfect according to its function and responsibility. We do not need to stare back at the weakness that we can't improve on. Instead, these weaknesses will give us chances to look at other things that we can improve on.

3. Aware that we are unique
Realize that we are unique and nobody can duplicate our uniqueness. Among human beings, no-one is like us before we came to this world, when we are in this world, and when we are no longer around.

4. Face your weaknesses
This step is often difficult for us to work on. Frequently we do not want to admit our weaknesses, use only others' opinion to know about our weaknesses. In fact, if we are honest, we should be the one who know our weaknesses more. If we are truthful to ourselves, we will find not only about our weaknesses but also about our mistakes, bad habits, negative thinking, or wrong view towards success and strategy to achieve it.

5. Improve ourselves
If we can identify our weaknesses and strengths, we need to let ourselves to become better. In this case, we cannot do it by ourselves. Other than trying, we need support to improve it.


What will happen if we do not appreciate ourselves. We are entitled to get something that we have done. Consider it as a job and we get paid for what we have done. This is one of the way to appreciate our contribution.

And the important factor to find happiness is to make peace with ourselves. If your view on yourself is healthy, you will be stronger to face obstacle from outside world. When you are humble, the first thing you will notice is that you will not keep depending on others to give the meaning of your existence and the meaning of your friendship.

We also need to learn from someone that can be our model and work with someone that has more experience and knowledge than us. The key is low profile and humble to ask others' help for ourselves development.

The first step to success is to appreciate ourselves. Only by doing this we will know how to appreciate others.

The only person who will spend the whole life with you is yourself. So if you want to be happy in your life, this is the time for you to make peace with yourself and smile to yourself. Have you smile to yourself?:)

Read this article in Indonesian.