6 Quick But Powerful Micro-Shifts To Help You Practice Self-Love Every Day

I've long believed that self-love is a magical energy that can positively transform someone's life. Changing your patterns, like increasing your self-love, doesn't always have to be complex or time-consuming.

Working with daily micro-shifts is powerful and can be a nice way to balance even deeper, more challenging work you might be doing with a counselor or other expert.

We all have a little voice in our head that loves to point out our mistakes and shortcomings, judge us, and even shame us. Just being aware of this voice and recognizing when it's active helps a lot. Your inner critic might remind you of someone, like a very critical guardian from your childhood or a hypercritical teacher or manager.

Any time you take a few minutes during the day to pause and care for your body, you are reminding yourself how important you are, and that's a very loving act!

Working with first-person mantras, in the style of self-help legend Louise Hay, can help to reprogram your subconscious mind. That's the inspiration for my annual page-a-day calendar, A Year of Self-Love, which offers a loving affirmation for each day and a quick action step to implement the affirmation in your life in a practical way.

It's healthy to tease yourself or acknowledge your flawsome-ness in front of others—that's self-acceptance, and it's very loving. But don't minimize your gifts and talents or beat yourself up in front of others just to make someone else feel more comfortable, validated, or inflated.

We're always teaching other people how to treat us by how we treat ourselves, which other people might subconsciously mirror. We also teach others how to treat us by the boundaries we set in our relationships. This might look like gently and lovingly calling out a good friend or partner when they are rude to you or dumping on you.