The key to any relationship starts with learning to love yourself. Your relationships are what hold you back or propel you forward. Your greatest pleasure can also become your greatest pain. As much as relationships are essential for life’s success, they could also be limiting if it’s not the right ones. But understanding how to improve relationships is challenging, and it all starts with you. You have to learn to love yourself before you can truly love others or accept the love of others. 

The path often traveled is not always the best path.

Most people must be influenced by others before they can chart their course in any direction. Decision-making can be tricky when there is no template to follow; people often move towards a path that someone has charted, and only a few are willing to chart a relatively new way for themselves. This is where associations and relationships are essential. Relationships often influence our life course and how our life eventually turns out.

Understanding the right relationships and avoiding the toxic ones.

Knowing how to select your relationships helps you avoid mistakes that come with negative influences. One of the critical factors influencing how you choose your connections and how you relate with them is your relationship with yourself. How you see yourself affects how you see and connect with the world around you. Before you can see what you want in the world, you must learn to love yourself.

Why learning to love yourself is critical to improving your relationships with others.

Your relationship with yourself shapes everything. But you are in complete control. Once you know your relationship is crucial to your overall success, you can begin working on it. 

How to learn to love yourself:

• Increase your self-awareness and become aware of your needs.
• Understand what makes you tick.
• Love and appreciate your uniqueness.
• Learn what brings you happiness and strive to achieve it. 

How to improve relationships outside of yourself. 

Grasping life’s trajectory helps you relate better with yourself. This sense of awareness then helps you make better choices in the type of people you need in your life. It also enables you to understand the kind of people you should avoid. Bringing in people who align with your purpose will inspire and motivate you to continue to grow. When surrounded by people who bring us down, we hold on to negative energy and lose our sense of purpose. 

If your relationship with yourself is disjointed, it will be challenging to practice relationships with others. Your relationship with yourself determines how you relate to others. Connection alone is not enough. Your contacts will only grow into supportive relationships if you love yourself first. 

The Takeaway: Why learning to love yourself is the first step to building better relationships. 

Living a good life requires having excellent relationships with yourself and others. The first step in answering how to improve relationships is learning to love yourself. This gives a balanced life about life and helps shape your view into reality and not fantasy or negativities.

There is no solo in success, so relationships are essential. To make the right decision on who you relate with, you must have a perfect understanding of who you are. Personal relationships precede relationships with others and determine who you get to connect with and how you relate with them. So ask yourself, do you know who you are? Do you love and appreciate yourself fully? If not, learning to love yourself should become a top goal in 2023.