I was listening to David Wygant's podcast on self-love for the 10th time, and finally decided to actually write down my feelings and thoughts to some questions. I kind of answered a lot of my own questions, but I would really love insight and experiences from other people.

Do I respect myself?

Well sure, I mean I honestly believe that I’m a pretty fucking awesome person, who is insanely attuned and aware of the feelings of others. I naturally give value to other people, by having them feel accepted for who they are (mostly), make friends laugh, and create these immensely powerful connections with people who were strangers just weeks before. A lot of people feel very comfortable around me. I am a very intellectual person who really enjoys learning new things.

A lot of those qualities are dependent on other people. If other people were not a factor in this equation, would I still respect myself?

… I’m not that sure. How do I evaluate my “worth” if not by gauging the reactions around me? Why is it that I look towards stimulants around me, to determine my worth as a person? I have the conception that I have immense amount of value as a person, but for some reason it hasn’t clicked in spiritually. As if I don’t genuinely “get it” or believe it, and I need to constantly remind myself intellectually with “facts” and “evidence” in order to validate myself.

But why do I need to validate myself? Who am I even validating myself for? Am I only trying to validate myself for myself? Why is it even important to me that I possess these attributes?

I guess it is “easy” to just say, accept yourself for who you are, or whatever feel-good saying. But it’s easy to say it recite it out loud or even just think it, but it’s an entirely different thing to genuinely believe it yourself. But at what point is it just merely delusion-ing myself into believing these feel-good phrases, and what point is it when I come to the realization that I genuinely embrace all these qualities about myself.

What do I not respect about myself? These are the qualities that I need to improve on, in order to become the best version of myself.

Firstly, I do not respect how often I procrastinate. There isn’t even that much work to do, but because I procrastinate so much, that work ultimately stacks up in huge waves where I need to burst through multiple assignments in a short amount of time, and then take another hiatus of breaks and more procrastination, because I mentally justify it to myself as if doing all that procrastinated work deserves a reward.

I do not respect how often I fantasize and idealize multiple theoretical situations in my life, because they literally serve no beneficial purpose in my actual life. They cause me to go into a habit where I live out life as if it’s a script that I have prepared for. But I haven’t prepared for it at all; life 99% of the time does not adhere to our mental script. So why do I keep doing it? It’s wasteful brain power that ultimately gets me disappointed. At least meditation has somewhat alleviated this problem. Though recently, it has become rather difficult, and noticeably my mood and state has been suffering as well.

I do not respect my tendency to not approach and open up to people. Perhaps it is because I fear the possibility of rejection, and that my actions of breaking the societal norms would cause complete strangers from “accepting” me, even though they have an immense lack of justification to do so, after all I haven’t displayed anything about my personality, and only my actions to go out and socialize with strangers (which is a rather admirable trait, if I may so say myself). So with all this reasoning, it should be incredibly safe and “easy” to approach and open up people. Yet the habit of not doing so is still a very powerful barrier inhibiting me to do so, but yet paradoxically the barrier is actually inexistent, and is only a figment of my admiration.

TLDR: How did you develop a genuinely strong inner game, without rationalizing or reciting things to yourself, and instead *really** believing in it. *