The vessel we call “us” can be like a shell. Sometimes, we feel trapped in it and we just want to grow out of it. If you are someone who is not particularly happy with who you are, and you want to feel different about yourself, you’ve got to think about a number of different approaches that can make a massive difference. Let’s show you a variety of touch points that can help.
The Little Things That Make You Feel Good About Yourself
We greatly underestimate the little things. From an aesthetic perspective, we can all feel that when we focus on the imperfections, this is going to cloud our abilities to truly have peace with who we are. But it’s those tiny things that can make us feel like we got a spring in our step. It could be the way your hair has fallen today or the fact that you’ve got a new cologne or aftershave.
Providers like MensFragrance.co.uk can always offer something fresh, and it’s these little things that can completely change how we feel about ourselves on a given day. Such minuscule alterations may not feel like they make a big difference, but you would be surprised.
Surround Yourself With the People That Challenge You
If you’re feeling stuck in who you are, you’ve got to challenge your preconceptions. Surrounding yourself with people that challenge you, critique you, and make you think beyond your capabilities can be exhausting at the outset. However, when you find people that are beyond your typical friend group, you are going to encounter people with different ways of thinking, which will make you think differently about yourself, but also about the world around you. You may realise that is not necessarily about changing yourself, but about looking at something with a newfound perspective.
Change Your Mindset
Changing your mindset comes in a number of different ways; from cognitive behavioural therapy to a very steady approach to altering your thinking. If you want to feel different about yourself, you can change the externals, but you can also find ways to alter your thinking patterns. It is partly to do with the small things that, over the years, create habits that make you realise you made steps in a completely different direction. But there’s also a lot to be said for the practices that can help you to retrain your brain.
Something like hypnosis is not everybody’s cup of tea, but this is because people don’t always like the idea of giving too much of themselves over to something, which is where self-hypnosis can straddle the balance. This article on TheGuardian.com shows you how to self-hypnotise yourself, and is a very simple practice to get yourself into a more calm frame of mind. It’s not a solution that will completely change who you are, because hypnosis, on a very basic level, is something you should always feel it control of. If you feel relaxed as a result, and nothing else, you should celebrate this little Victory.
Practice Gratitude
Gratitude is one of those areas that we all hear about as a way to be better in life. But gratitude is a practice that you can slowly begin to implement into your life. When you start to incorporate gratitude practices, eventually you begin to see the things you are worried about are small fry, but it also enables you to practice gratitude for who you are as a real human being.
Gratitude doesn’t just have to be about the events in your day that you are grateful for; you can be grateful for a part of who you are, which will help you become more accepting of yourself.
Understand Everyone Has Their Struggles
Everybody’s living in this Instagram-friendly-filter world where we think that the grass is always greener on the other side. Everybody has their struggles. You may think that something like the right accessories is going to help you in many parts of your life. But when we start to understand that everybody has their own struggles and we internalise this, we can begin to realise that everybody is putting out a smokescreen of themselves; they don’t want you to see what they are truly feeling. Part of the problem is that we don’t talk about our internal struggles. If you are someone who feels you don’t have the opportunities to talk about your struggles, having that realisation that when you start talking about your own issues people will feel more like they can open up, it’s amazing how much of a difference this makes.
It’s not about feeling different about yourself per se, but about giving yourself the opportunity to think with more clarity and understanding that who you are is enough.