How to Replace Your Best Friend in 4 Easy Steps

It’s amazing to have a best friend. 

I watch my kids talk about their best friend and you can see that their best friend forms such a huge part of their world and who they are.  Wouldn’t you want to have that kind of best friend as an adult?  A best friend who loves you unconditionally, understands you (quirks and all), and appreciates spending time with you?

Now maybe you DO already have a best friend that you love.  Maybe it is the love of your life, or maybe a platonic friend.  Maybe you have cultivated this friendship over years, or maybe it is relatively new.

But let me shake you up here for a second… You need to upgrade your best friend.

Seriously.

You deserve a best friend who:

• makes time for you
• encourages you
• boosts you up to new levels
• understands your dreams and encourages you to reach for them
• sees the greatness in your potential and unwaveringly inspires you to grow towards that
• knows exactly what you need!

And imagine if this best friend were available for you 24-7, whenever you need a friend.

Now this is all well and good but where on earth are you going to find someone like that?  Okay, here is the secret…. your new best friend HAS to be YOU!

Sometimes we spend too much time looking for solutions outside ourselves for the things that are bothering us. The first step to becoming the person you want to be in this world is by starting to treat yourself the same way you would want your ideal best friend to treat you.

Four Easy Steps to Becoming Your Own Best Friend

So here are four easy steps to becoming your own best friend:

1) Commit to becoming your own best friend

Expecting someone else to do a better job of loving, inspiring and supporting you is unrealistic. You’re the only person who is with you 24-7. You know yourself, you know your strengths, you know where you can fall down at times. You know all the challenges you have conquered and where you have disappointed yourself. You also know that you have done the best you could throughout your life in spite of the failures, misjudgments and imperfections. You’re the most important person to value, encourage and forgive in your own life. Yours are the most important standards to raise and to strive to meet. Your values are the road map for success in your own life.

Since you know yourself best, the first step is making a commitment to be your own best friend. This means treating yourself with the same kindness, generosity, loyalty and forgiveness that you would expect of a best friend. It means actively creating a new relationship with yourself that lays the groundwork for you to becoming your best you (you know, that superhero version of yourself that you have waiting inside you!).

2) Become acutely aware of your self-talk

Most of us don’t pay much attention to the conversations we have with ourselves in our own minds. That secret dialogue can easily remain unexamined because no one else hears it, and we rarely consider it. But the truth is, even though they can’t hear it exactly, others CAN tell what our self-talk is like through our energy, behaviour and habits. When we see someone who struggles, who seems beaten down or who is negative, it is easy to guess that their inner world is tainted with negativity, self torment and judgment.

Often we speak to ourselves so cruelly. Most of us would never speak to another person with the negativity or judgment that we fill our own minds with.

On the other hand, some people shine with an inner light and positivity that seems superhuman. When we meet a person who radiates kindness and light, it is clear that their inner life is filled with positivity, encouragement and self awareness. The disciplined habits of positivity are strong in these people.

So here’s your wake up call – if you’re not radiating love, kindness and positivity wherever you go, you have room for improvement in your friendship skills. In reality, most of us are downright crummy friends to ourselves.

If you were to rate your friendship skills only based on the kinds of friend you are to yourself, what kind of score would you give yourself on a scale of 1-10?  My guess is that most of us (myself included) would not give ourselves a 10.

Would you like to become kinder and more loving to yourself?

Make an alert in your life. Set a timer and take one minute and give yourself a positive pep talk first thing in the morning every day. Next increase to twice a day. Then three times. Continue to increase this until you become so aware of your self talk that you can break the habits of negativity and judgment and replace them with positivity and encouragement.

3) See your inner child (and be generous with encouragement and love)

Now that you have decided to eliminate negative and critical self talk, you can add a new step.

See yourself as you were as a child.  Pick an age where you feel compassion, excitement and love for the young person you were. Talk to yourself as if you are that younger version of yourself and commit to absolute kindness to yourself – that younger version of you is still in there. Approach your conversations with yourself with the belief that you are doing your best and that your best is good enough. Give yourself permission to learn, grow and move imperfectly through this life.

This strategy is even more powerful when you see others as a childlike version of themselves. Commit to being loving to yourself and others. Be generous with encouragement and love. This will take practice and will not be an overnight process. Stick with it and strive to get better at it every day.

4) Value your friendship with yourself

At night when I tuck my kiddos into bed, I used to have this nagging feeling that saying “I love you” just wasn’t quite enough. I realized that I wanted express myself at a higher level. I began to say, “I love you, I like you, I love me, I like me!”

The first time I said it, it felt a little strange to me to be telling someone else that I like and love myself. And I could see that our kiddos thought it was strange too. So we had a funny little talk about it. I explained how important it is to love and like yourself and to love and like others too. I had them repeat it after me and now we regularly say “I love you, I like you, I love me, I like me!”

I love seeing them begin to understand that love has to be directed inwards as well as outwards, and that liking and loving ourselves and others is not just a feeling that happens, but rather an action that we choose to take.

All right, my friends, now that you know what to do, your task is to execute the plan!

1. Commit to becoming your own best friend.
2. Become acutely aware of your self – talk.
3. See your inner child (and be generous with encouragement and love).
4. Value your friendship with yourself.

I can’t wait until you give this a try so that you become your wonderful new best friend. (And guess what? I’m looking forward to meeting your new best friend too!)

Post a comment below to let us know if there are ways that you could become a better best friend to yourself!

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