Are you one of those lucky bastards? Born accepting yourself? Never struggled with inadequacy, never worried if you were good enough? Maybe no one ever gave you a reason to doubt your self-worth. I’m jealous, to be honest. Very jealous. Well, this post isn’t for you. Move along.

Maybe you don’t accept yourself, and you think it’s a strength of yours: “Self-hatred is healthy because we reject the weak parts of ourselves, blah blah blah.” This post isn’t for you either. You’ve decided it’s okay to hate yourself and there’s nothing I can do for you. Best of luck with that, it didn’t work for me.

If you’re not one of those two groups, then you probably hate yourself but you’d rather not. You’d like to feel worthy. You’re tired of trying to prove you’re good enough or fix yourself. You are tired of seeing only scars when you look in the mirror. Maybe you’ve even decided self-acceptance is the right path, you’re just not sure how to get there yet.

This post is for you.

I’m not a Jedi master of self-acceptance, but I know its value and I’ve been working on it for a long time. I realized that trying to “fix yourself” or earn the right to be good enough is a finish line that always moves as soon as you reach it. Once you put qualifiers on when you are “good enough,” it’s never good enough. As I got older and my hair got greyer I realized that I’d never get to enjoy my life unless I gave myself permission, and my conditional self-acceptance had to stop.

But accepting yourself isn’t a light switch moment – your mind is a large ship that takes time to turn. I read Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach and Self Compassion by Kristin Neff and those are great books, but knowing the theory didn’t change my psychology overnight. I want to point people towards the approach that taught me self-acceptance because it’s not easy to find – even when you’re looking for it.

In a few words, self-acceptance clicked for me when I gave myself the chance to fail, then I saw failing was never as bad as I expected it to be. It was exposure therapy to failures that were never enough to break me, and it’s easier to accept something when you realize it’s not broken. Getting out of my comfort zone corrected my perfectionist misconceptions and taught me these three things:

1. Most setbacks are reversible.
2. All setbacks are lessons.
3. Most successes are behind doors that take more than one try to open.

Self-rejection is a story you tell yourself about how any failure is permanent and proves you’re not good enough. To stop this madness we need to get out of our comfort zone and fall off the bike a few times. Pay attention when your worst-case scenarios don’t happen. Then do it again. And keep doing it until you realize your best is good enough and even your biggest screw up is not the end of the world. 

Step one is giving yourself permission to go outside your comfort zone. Once you see most failures aren’t fatal, you don’t really have a reason to reject yourself anymore. And once the self-rejection stops, that’s where self-acceptance begins.