What This Trainer’s Most Embarrassing Secret Can Teach Us About How to Live

By Jessi Kneeland

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about confidence. Where does mine come from? What about everyone else’s? How can I better teach and foster it in my clients? Is it a skill that can be taught and practiced, or is it some inherent gift?

I believe confidence, forged from self-love, is a skill. I think self-compassion and self-kindness are skills that can be honed, and given the insane epidemic in our society of body-hating, I encourage everyone to start practicing right now. In an effort to help the cause, I’ve decided to share something with you. It’s easily the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever written about on the Internet. It’s a practice I have, a habit that I’ve never told anybody about until now.

Honestly my secret is something I’ve been doing my entire life, since far before I connected it to my work or considered it useful to society. It’s something I did as a kid, just like everything else, because it felt good. Then as a teenager, as my body and face were changing, I did it as a way of coping and getting to know myself. It was instinctual and intuitive, and it just stuck.

What’s my big embarrassing secret? I admire myself in the mirror.

On a regular basis, I look at my reflection and I make faces and I pose and I think really nice thoughts about myself. If this sounds like the absolute most self-obsessed thing you’ve ever heard… it kind of is. I recently told my best friends I did this and they were like, “Only you, Jessi.” And I know. I know how embarrassingly self-indulgent it sounds to admit that I purposefully spend time admiring myself. I KNOW. But I also think, “Well hey, I’m one of the few women I know who really, truly loves her body.” So maybe there’s something to this. Maybe we’re given so much sh!t from society for truly loving ourselves that dedicating time to self-worship is considered shameful narcissistic bullsh!t.

But when other women talk about “indulging” themselves with relaxing spa days, massages, or whatever, I’m like: Ugh. That all sounds like work. To me, the most restorative and indulgent thing I can do is to spend some quality time deliberately loving myself. Rather than paying someone else to treat me nicely, I get to be the one who treats me nicely. For me that means looking in a full-length mirror with good lighting, posing in clothes I rarely wear (or in my underwear, or naked), sometimes dancing or making faces, and just thinking really nice thoughts about myself.

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Source:: Greatist