Treat Yourself Like A Person Worthy Of Love And Care

Inside: Stop treating yourself like a self-improvement project. Start treating yourself like a person worthy of love and care.

The work I do with my clients and community members isn’t about fixing you. Or improving you. It’s about shedding the layers of conditioning so you can meet and befriend your True Self.

IMPROVING = to enhance in value or quality or make better. Or to increase the value of or make more useful. IMPROVING = I’m deficient and need to become more valuable.

BEFRIENDING = I’m already valuable and I’m learning to see and honor that truth. This is the difference between fixing what’s wrong with me and caring for what’s already precious.

When you learn new skills, ideas, or practices that support you in honouring your wiring and capacity, taking loving care of yourself, or crafting a life that feels values-aligned and soul-honouring, you are practicing being on your own side. Being a good friend to yourself.

5 objections your mind might offer you when you hear me talk about Befriending Yourself

Objection #1: “But I DO need to improve! I can’t just ‘befriend’ my way out of actual dysfunction.”

You’re right—you may need or want to heal, grow, or change in some way. But here’s what the research shows: when your nervous system is in a chronic state of threat, you can’t actually learn or change effectively.

Self-criticism activates your stress response, which shuts down the parts of your brain responsible for learning, creativity, and problem-solving.

Befriending yourself isn’t about lowering standards—it’s about creating the internal safety your brain needs to actually improve. You’re not choosing between self-acceptance and growth. You’re creating the foundation that makes growth possible.

What befriending yourself is NOT: Toxic positivity. Spiritual bypassing. Letting yourself off the hook. Accepting dysfunction and calling it self-love. Avoiding hard truths.

What befriending yourself IS: Meeting yourself with the same compassion you’d offer your best friend while she does hard things. Telling yourself the truth with kindness instead of cruelty. Self-respect in action. You’re creating an environment in which growth, healing, and positive change is possible.

Objection #2: “Isn’t this just semantics? What’s the practical difference?”

The words you use and the tone you take literally affect your physiology—your blood pressure, stress hormones, and nervous system regulation. When you talk to yourself in third person or with compassion, your brain gains psychological distance from stress. For example, “Hey Kris, I am proud of you.”

This isn’t playing with words—it’s changing your nervous system response. When you criticize yourself, your body perceives threat and goes into protection mode. This pulls you into your old self-protective or defensive patterns.

When you befriend yourself, you create the felt sense of safety your body needs to actually learn and change. The words matter because your brain and body are listening.

I want to pause here to say something important: I’ve worked with people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and early 70s. It doesn’t matter how old you are—change is possible. Learning to love yourself is possible. It’s never too late to learn how to treat yourself with more compassion, to value yourself, to start recognizing your gifting. Even if you’re nervous and only 10% of you believes change is possible, we can start there.

Objection #3: “I’ve been “working on myself” for years. Why would this make any difference now?”

First, I recommend working WITH not ON yourself. You’ve been trying to fix what you thought was broken—but you’re not a self-improvement project.

Stop treating yourself as a problem to solve and start treating yourself as a person worthy of care. Get to know yourself, spend time with yourself, like you would a friend.

Get to know your likes and dislikes, build awareness of your thought, emotional, behavioural patterns. Learn to hear your inner voice and build self-trust.  This is a very different approach.

Objection #4: “This feels selfish. Other people need me.”

You can’t pour from an empty cup—but it’s deeper than that. When you’re running on fumes, masking constantly, and pushing through exhaustion, the version of you that shows up for others is depleted. You’re giving them your scraps.

Befriending yourself isn’t about being selfish—it’s about being sustainable. When you meet your own needs with respect, you show up more present, more patient, and more able to hold space for others.

When you honor your wiring and capacity and build a sustainable pace, you expand your resilience without burning out. You create a rhythm that allows you to rise to true challenges without crashing into the abyss afterwards. You’re not living in exhausting peaks and troughs—you’re building something you can actually maintain.

You’re not choosing between yourself and others. You’re refusing to sacrifice yourself in ways that ultimately diminish what you have to offer.

I believe we make the biggest positive impact in the world when we are filled up and operating from our wholeness and gifting. You can’t do this if you chronically devalue yourself.

Objection #5: “I’ve tried being gentle with myself and it didn’t work. I just got complacent.”

Self-compassion is not self-indulgence. It’s self-respect in action. It’s saying “I matter enough to tell myself the truth, feel my feelings, and still show up.” You probably tried being nice to yourself while still believing you were fundamentally broken.

Being a good friend to ourselves calls us to take radical ownership for our lives and behavior—I want to say that again: radical ownership. We don’t let ourselves off the hook if we’re harming ourselves or other people, but we DO treat ourselves with respect and love as we take steps to repair, heal, and walk out our values.

True befriending means treating yourself like someone worthy of honesty, boundaries, and high standards. Not impossible standards, and not random standards that are built by comparison or old conditioning. For example, if I love myself, I don’t let myself be abused, right? Well, that is a high standard. You don’t do this because you’re broken, but because you matter.

Treating yourself like you’re worthy of love and care gets easier with practice

Befriending yourself is brave and vulnerable work. It is not passive. It requires a commitment and daily consistent practice. Being human in a messy world always requires effort of different kinds. But we have some power of choice over where to focus our efforts and resources (ex. of energy, attention, money, time).

Befriending yourself gets easier and more organic over time. But it’s still practice.

Every day I choose to love and value myself. I choose to celebrate small steps. I choose to be kind to myself when I’m hurting. I choose to live mindfully so that I can receive the gift of this day and disrupt unhealthy thoughts. I choose my response to life. We all have the power to choose.

We can choose to stay in old patterns or learn new ones. We can choose to believe one thought or another. We can choose to be on our own side or judge and shame ourselves.

I hope you’ll treat yourself like a person worthy of love and care. The REMEMBER PDF below is free and will help you love yourself well in the hard days, remember who you really are.

Krista xo