He grew up without any knowledge of a father’s love.
His mom was too busy fending for his survival. So how would you expect her to pick him up, cuddle and show him some deep loving.
Ola grew up among a collection of siblings who didn’t even believe in themselves, talk about believing in him.
It was a terrible time back in the family of 9. He was there but not really there. Because to him so many times he felt no one knew he existed.
Life wasn’t what he expected. But what would he even expect when this is what he’s seen all through his life.
There was no one to even love him. So all through his life, he believed he doesn’t deserve love.
With this erroneous belief, he grew up into a young man.
He decided he will give his best to every thing he did so that at least if he succeeded people will get to love him for his brilliance.
He succeeded in a lot of things. He became a toast of the class. Even at that, deep inside him, he always felt incomplete.
The day he failed his almighty WAEC exams, everything changed.
From the smiling faced rotund guy he was, Ola became a ghost of himself.
Downcast without too much hope, he met his mentor after weeks of depression.
After listening to his sad tales, Mentor asked him, Ola do you really love yourself?
That’s the same question i want to ask you dear reader.
Do you really love yourself?
Do you love yourself to the point where you can actually trust yourself to rise up to success after a devastating failure?
Do you love yourself to the point that you will give yourself a chance to pursue it’s most cherished aspirations even when you’ve failed again and again.
This is where it all lies. This is where we miss it most of the times.
Yes you could have done better. You could have studied more. You should have sacrificed so much more.
But hey, it has happened so stop the blame. Take a look at it this way…
If someone you love experienced failure and told you about it, what exactly would you say to them?
Would you tell them how you’ve always known them to be a failure. Or would you put your hands around them, tell them everything will be fine. And give them every support you can until they get to succeed?
I’m sure the latter is what you’d do. You’ll want to inspire and support them to succeed.
So if you’d do this to others, why then would you only get mad and angry at yourself?
Or are you expecting others to come do that for you? Of course they should.
But sometimes it doesn’t happen. That’s where self love comes in. And you feel in the gap.
I want you to get this right. It’s time to accept the fact that you’ve messed up. Yet this doesn’t change the truth that you deserve success.
Show yourself compassion and get up to work again. This is self love.
When you love yourself enough, you’ll understand that failure is just a general experience. It’s not a part of you.
And then you will allow yourself to try things again even when you’re afraid of falling.
You’ll give yourself a chance to go for what you really want because the first thing you’ll realize will be the fact that you deserve success.
When you fall in love with you, you will allow yourself to try things you’re not really confident about because self confident people understand that real confidence is gained over time from doing courageous things even when we don’t feel courageous at all.
There’s such a great connection between self love and living a happy and successful life.
Real success starts with falling in love with your self first. It will help you stay with you even when others leave.
The next step is accepting that you deserve every good thing life can offer and then taking a step forward to accomplish your biggest aspirations.
Indeed you don’t have to wait to be loved by anyone before you start loving yourself…
But the way you love and regard yourself will to a large extent determine how others will love and regard you.
This brings us to the end of this episode on self love. And i want you to understand that even if you grew up like Ola, you owe yourself some sweet loving. Give it to you.