What do people mean by "Love Yourself" ?

Loving yourself isn't about obsession. It is about reaching a level of acceptance and contentment with the various aspects of who you are.

 

Similar to what Gen said.

There is a difference between "loving yourself" and "egocentric". Loving your self is being able to accept who you are and be happy with yourself. Egocentric, on the other hand, is having the world and everything else revolve around your needs 24/7.

 

I heard of a book called I'm OK, You're OK. I haven't actually read it, but I'm going to paraphrase what I think the book is probably referring to. (In psychology, this is called internal working models of self and others.)

Basically, it matters both how you feel about yourself and how you feel about other people in general.

The healthy attitude is 'I'm OK, you're OK'. Basically, you have a positive opinion of yourself, and you have a positive opinion of most people in general (possibly barring a few who've made bad impressions, of course).

Being egocentric is 'I'm OK, you're not OK'. Basically, you have a good opinion of yourself and a bad opinion of others. You tend to think you're better than most people. This would not be healthy, obviously.

A lot of people with low self esteem have 'I'm not OK, you're OK'. Basically, they feel that other people are mostly good, but they aren't. These are the people that the advice 'love yourself' is usually directed at - since they already know how to love other people, but don't give themselves the same consideration.

And of course there's the last group, 'I'm not OK, you're not OK'. These people combine low self esteem with a negative view of other people.

Incidentally, if your views of yourself and others differ, you tend to have a bias to attributing negative outcomes to one and positive outcomes to the other. Egocentric people tend to blame others for their failures, while taking credit for successes. People with low self-esteem often blame themselves for failures, and attribute successes to others.

 

Loving yourself is essential if you want to love and be loved by another.

It is not the self-aggrandizing kind of ego-centric self-love, nor even the natural self-love most easily demonstrated in children.

Loving one's self involves all the things that loving another requires: caring for yourself, your health and well-being, responding to your needs as they arise, respecting yourself, i.e. not tolerating ill-treatment from others, and not accepting anything less than what you deserve, and finally, self-knowledge, without which these last three attributes could not be carried out.

Ask yourself: who would you rather love? Can you love a self-loathing person, indifferent to caring for himself, or being a doormat to anyone (including you) or who ignores the signals that life gives him when he needs something from you?

It is far better to love someone who cares about himself, who is confident enough to ask for help and to give it, who respects who he is and who sets boundaries both for himself and for you and, finally someone who knows clearly his likes, dislikes, needs and desires and seeks to know these things about you.

Finally loving yourself also means compassion, acknowledging when you've done something wrong, and even though you have done everything you can to fix it, finally forgiving yourself because you know who and what you are: a precious human life, worthy of forgiveness.

 

Loving yourself is accepting flaws and accepting positive attributes. Loving yourself is being content with who you are as an induvidual. It's about accepting the fact that you are who you are.

Egocentric is being a pompus ass who thinks that they are better than everyone else and can't be shot down and are "always" right.

 

It basically means that if you were to talk to a clone of yourself on the street, you would like and respect that person. Sticking to your personal values, pursuing happiness, and putting yourself at equal importance to others are all signs of people who love themselves.

That's without touching arrogance/narcissism, which means you love yourself to the exclusion of others. That's not cool. :/

 

The previous posters are spot on - one other thing I've found is that when you love yourself you are able to accept praise in what you have done - but not in an ego-centric way - but more of the "you know what, I did a good job there didn't I?" type way and feeding it back into what you do.

I kept being told the same thing, and one summers day last year I heard this song
Whitney Houston - Greatest Love Of All - YouTube and you know what - she's right. Since then I've tried to take a bit more pride in my appearance (not in vain a "spend an hour in the front the mirror to ensure everything is perfect before walking out the door" type way, but in a more, "I really should check I don't look like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards in the middle of a storm"), been a little more confident and take the complements I receive - but at the same time also remembering to compliment other people when they deserve it.

And you know what, it's imperceptible at first but over time you can feel it slowly building and you feel a brush of confidence coming over you, and the feeling of knowing how to improve the areas you don't like so much, alongside realising which are the areas you are already better at than you thought.

 

It's about accepting everything about yourself, acknowledging the positive parts about you, and accepting the bad parts. Stand strong for your beliefs, don't be embarrassed and relish every compliment you get, no matter how small/worthless they might seem.

 

Loving yourself means seeing yourself for everything that makes you uniquely you: flaws and strengths; normalities and deviations; and taking them for what they are, good, bad, ugly, gorgeous. You are just fine in any way, special and equal like anyone else.