How to Invest in Yourself

Self-love is the best investment you will ever make. It brings peace, serenity, and happiness to every aspect of life, including our relationships with others.

What It Means To Invest In Yourself?

Investing in yourself means to love yourself unconditionally. To accept and treat yourself as you would your best friend. You are unique with positive and negative aspects so embrace all of yourself.

Self-love is an unconditional commitment we have to ourselves or, better said, the person the world sees as an outside shell and perceives as someone who does not need improvement because they excel at everything they do professionally, financially, and emotionally.

This perception could not be further from the truth, for what we see externally often reflects how we feel about ourselves internally. Self-love requires us to take a hard look at who we are no matter what our age, financial status, social position, or professional achievements have been thus far in life.

Self-love remains an ongoing journey and will always demand we make choices that reflect the changes necessary to ensure our happiness improves at every level. This choice requires us to change old habits of thinking, speaking, and acting into new options promoting positive outcomes in our lives, thus creating lasting feelings of joy, fulfillment, peace, and serenity.

Self-improvement takes true courage as we have to face our fears. The fears many of us have developed throughout our lifetimes as self-protection mechanisms from adverse reactions we received from others whenever we dared to tap into who were inside waiting to emerge.

Self-love requires emotional maturity because it brings personal responsibility for each of our actions, including those that created fear as manifestations preventing growth and change in ourselves and the lives of others.

Self-love is not about smugly patting oneself on the back anytime we receive a compliment that validates us. Instead, self-love requires we are nonjudgmental and positive, which is never easy to do. We often judge ourselves and others by what they have become instead of seeing each person in our lives as a unique being. 

Whether you or the person in your life has succeeded or failed, we each have strengths and weaknesses just like everyone else regardless of our age, level of success, the amount of money earned, the type of job, where we live, or if we live independently.

The self-improvement includes dealing with the emotional reactions necessary for making choices and working with reasonable timeframes to create positive outcomes. Self-love allows us to see ourselves for who we are, from our physical appearance to our personality traits, often magnifying all that is good and diminishing those things perceived as wrong.

While self-improvement invites us to incorporate what we dislike about ourselves into the equation, honoring those aspects of ourselves with an appreciation and gratitude for making themselves a survival mechanism through which we survived until now is essential to successful self-investment.

How To Invest In Yourself

Self-love provides a platform where most relationships can thrive. Still, self-improvement remains the framework necessary for any relationship to endure lifelong commitment as it addresses personal issues preventing any partnership from remaining strong. 

Investing in yourself includes providing a constructive feedback loop for yourself. When you are open to seeing your strengths/weaknesses objectively, you enable you and your partner to open up regarding your fears. Being available to one another allows room for compromises. Changes can be explored and discussed, allowing the relationship to grow on a platform of love rather than one created by power struggles.

Investing in yourself creates an emotional foundation in all your relationships where feelings of trust, respect, acceptance, and commitment are the bedrock. When you and another feel emotionally safe, being vulnerable to one another is not a risky situation.

How close you are to the person will determine how vulnerable you will be with that person. Investing in yourself will develop a level of maturity in accepting you or your partner as you are, and you will learn and grow, as will the other person. 

Self-love allows us to accept ourselves at every stage of life regardless of our season. Yet, self-improvement makes it possible for one person to see the other as a work in progress, the best person they can be. Each individual is entitled to a moment to express whatever it takes to discover what makes their heart sing.

Self-improvement and self-love are not opposites but partners leading us to the same goals, making us happy, peaceful, and serene, knowing we are loved for who we are. Our choices enable us to remove fear, and when we remove the fear, we no longer deny who we are inside.  

Once we truly see who we are, we invest further into ourselves, choosing personal actions or behaviors to provide healthy outcomes that allow long-lasting happiness, fulfillment, peace, and serenity. The result is a circular cycle where self-improvement offers reasons why we have true, honest and deep self-love, and our deep self-love allows us to make choices for self-improvement.

Self Investment Quiz

Here are some yes and no questions to ask yourself and determine if you are investing in yourself. In addition, it will help you identify some aspects you may want to invest more in to be the best you can be.

Self Investment Question	Yes	No
1. Do you set goals?	Yes	No
2. Are you committed to those goals?	Yes	No
3. Do you believe in your ability to reach those goals?	Yes	No
4. Does it make you feel good when others say they love and support you in reaching your goals?	Yes	No
5. Are you grateful for all the blessings life has given you?	Yes	No
6. Would you change if someone said something negative about how you look, smile, walk, talk or carry yourself?	Yes	No
7. Would you change if someone said something negative about your personality, values, or what they perceived as your character flaws?	Yes	No
8. Are you regularly complimented on how you look, smile, walk, talk and carry yourself?	Yes	No
9. Do compliments feel good to hear even when delivered at random times throughout the day unexpectedly?	Yes	No
10. When someone offers a compliment, do you accept it graciously?	Yes	No
11. Are you grateful for the things in your life that worked out?	Yes	No
12. Do you believe others love and support you without having to prove yourself?	Yes	No
13. Are you a good listener?	Yes	No
14. Do you do things to strengthen your current skills?	Yes	No
15. Do you establish goals for yourself and commit to reaching them?	Yes	No
16. Does it make you feel loved when people say they love/appreciate you?	Yes	No
17. Do you forgive others and let go of feelings of being wronged?	Yes	No
18. Do you believe that good things will come to you?	Yes	No
19. Are you open-minded?	Yes	No
20. Do you take steps to get what you want?	Yes	No
21. Are you in the habit of saying thank you and meaning it?	Yes	No
22. Do you have clear, concise goals with a plan on how to achieve them?	Yes	No
23. Are your action plans specific but flexible to learn from failures/successes?	Yes	No
24. Do you rely on others or the online world for answers?	Yes	No
25. Do you practice gratitude daily?	Yes	No
26. Do you read books, listen to audio or watch videos to further your knowledge on a wide range of topics?	Yes	No
27. Are there have people in your life that support your uniqueness, even if it means they won’t always agree with what you do or how you do it?	Yes	No

Take a look at your answers and pick one or maybe two things to begin investing in yourself. Then, much like a financial investment, you put in the time and money in small amounts, readjusting your commitment or plan when needed. If the asset isn’t yielding the desired outcome, you then look at how you can better achieve your goal and have a better life.

Final Thoughts

I have learned through my self-improvement process that self-love does not mean that I ignore myself or how I make others feel. For me, I began by consciously practicing gratitude daily by my words and actions. Then, I took time to focus on the words I said and began journaling, meditating, and finding time in my day to enjoy myself. 

It seems to me like an excellent way to keep investing in myself as your beliefs create your reality. Investing in yourself is the best gift you can give yourself. Change your life.