My white boards are full of drawings, arrows, references to many books written by great academic minds and quotes by philosophers, poets and artists, I have enough material to write several books and all in just a few days. My goal was to reduce all these findings into a simple guide that would help us all to define what makes a relationship healthy, a one paragraph statement, a meme, a defining characteristic. I am still pursuing that goal but I have decided to seek your opinions too. Over the next couple of days, I am going to post on the first relationship that we need to make, the relationship we have with ourselves, because unless we know who we are, what we value and what we like about ourselves then how can we expect anyone else to value, like and understand us?

It is my findings that people find it much easier to tell other people what they like about them than they do to make a list of things they like about themselves, yet if you asked the question what do you not like about yourself they could easily write a list but find it hard to tell someone else what they do not like about them. It seems that we have embedded the lessons of childhood, do not boast, be humble, do not show off, do not have an ego as meaning we can not speak well of ourselves, as if that is someone else job and not ours.  The trouble with thinking like this is that we stop our self exploration, concentrate on what we do not like about ourselves and do not work on the things we do. Instead of looking deeply at ourselves we spend our energy on trying to correct negative feelings we have about ourselves and thinking about ourselves negatively becomes our focus.

So   with this in mind I would like to hear from you, what do you value about yourself? Is it your ethics? Your sense of humour? Your empathy to others? Let me know in the comments and I will add your comments on my white board and see what people value about themselves.