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How Do You Learn To Love?

Updated: Jan 24

In order to learn to love, you must first love your Self. Do you truly unconditionally love your Self? I don’t mean in a Narcissistic way; I mean real love: Which is when you accept your Self exactly as you are and you decide to experience inner joy.


If you don’t, then how do you learn to love your Self? Very few people know the answer to this. Love is a process and it is no coincidence that love is found in the word ‘evolve.’ I am not talking about a ‘chemical romance’ where you feel that you are falling ‘head over heels’. That’s just an addictive rush of dopamine.


When others love you unconditionally that can propulse you into loving your Self. This is the importance of, and the power of, authentic human connection and fellowship. Once you love your Self unconditionally you create the optimum environment for others to begin to love themselves.


To accept your Self unconditionally needs a lot of inner work. It is a journey where you stop judging your Self, drop the inner critic, forgive your Self, and have Self-compassion. Once you have learned to love your Self you can learn to love others. You can’t give what you don’t have.

Joel Osteen wrote "The prerequisite to loving others is to love your Self. I you don't have a healthy respect for who you are, and if you don't learn to accept your Self faults and all, you will never be able to properly love other people."


Learn to love your Self first, instead of loving the idea of other people loving you. When you have not grown up with love, you need to learn it. Loving and being loved are not “givens.” The world would be a far better place if each child who is brought into it was wanted and beloved. One inevitable outcome of a dysfunctional childhood (one where you did not receive unconditonal love) is that you then need to learn to give and receive love. Because love was not something you always knew, you do not automatically know how to do it well, especially when it comes to loving your Self and feeling worthy of being loved by another.


A “secure attachment,” the cornerstone of a loving relationship, develops out of trust that someone will provide what is needed.


Yet love can be learned, especially once we reach adolescence, gain capacities for forethought and conscious intention, and can learn to love ourselves. With a maturing brain that permits reflection and expanded life experiences that make room for a broader social circle, people are able to observe themselves with curiosity, attention, compassion, and kindness.


Compassion may be the magic key to self-love. The empathy we feel when we look at ourselves with compassionate love allows us to recognise our imperfections and accept our human needs. We can stop making irrational demands on ourselves in order to believe we are lovable. Seeking to be “good enough” to be worthy of love only invites us to climb onto the treadmill of perfectionism. Countless innovative psychologists have shown us that “perfect” does not exist in our human experience. For example, Roy Baumeister, in conducting his famous chocolate chip cookie experiments, demonstrated that will-power uses our emotional energy. He showed that self-control is not infinite, and we become depleted after exhausting extended self-discipline. In another example, Sheldon Cohen, Bert Uchino, Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, and their various colleagues, in separate series of studies, examined the physical health costs of emotional pain and negative communication in close relationships. In doing so, these researchers and others have documented an immune system that has wisdom beyond the illusion of physical invulnerability. As the French say, “the perfect is the enemy of the good”—perfection just does not exist and the belief it can be obtained will result in failure.


Curiosity, attention, compassion, and kindness, practiced as ways of honouring ourselves, allow us to develop a loving relationship with ourselves. And once we learn to love ourselves, to treat ourselves with care, consistency, and affection, we can direct our loving hearts outwards.


If your life did not begin on a note loaded with love and attention, do not despair. Love can be learned, and you can have the joy of not only feeling it, giving it, and sharing it, but also of teaching it. What greater blessing can there be?


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly

Dr Olly Alexander Branford MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD.

Fully qualified and certified coach


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Hello,

I am very pleased to meet you. Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my email for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching.

See you soon,

Dr Olly Alexander Branford MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD

Fully qualified and certified coach


“Transformative life coaching uniquely creates and holds the space for you to see your self afresh, with clarity, and step into new ways of BEing, which will transform how you perceive and intuitively create your world. My work is to guide you to raise your own conscious awareness to the level that you want to achieve.”

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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for over five years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works. I have written 400 articles for you and an eBook to guide you on your transformative journey, which are all available for free on my website - click on the link below:


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