41. Why You Still Don’t Love Yourself (Even After Achieving Goals)

Learning to Love Yourself Before You ‘Arrive’

Do you ever achieve a goal and still feel like… something’s missing? Like no matter what you accomplish, you can’t seem to love yourself fully? In this episode, I dive deep into why self-hate and chasing achievements from a place of self-disappointment never get us to self-love—and what actually does.

I share the shift that changed everything for me: learning to propel yourself forward with self-love instead of self-hate, seeing your current self as enough, and using that energy to reach the goals, dreams, and future versions of yourself that you deserve.

This episode is for anyone who’s tired of clawing, proving, or striving to be “worthy” and is ready to explore what it really looks like to motivate yourself from a place of love, belief, and enoughness.

Tune in to discover:

•  Why achieving goals doesn’t automatically create self-love 
•  The trap of using self-hate as motivation 
•  How to see your current self as the vehicle to your future self 
•  The simple (but life-changing) practice of moving forward with self-love 

It’s time to stop waiting to arrive and start loving yourself right now.

Transcript

 I had some thoughts back at the beginning of January that I wrote down, and I want to share them with you and then expand upon them. The first thought is, what do you believe you need to achieve to finally be deserving of your own love? Like at what point will you have achieved, become, attained something, reached this goal, and then finally, you deserve to love yourself? Or finally, you decide to love yourself?

We think that if we work towards something and we achieve that something, that finally we will love ourselves because of the achievement. But what we find is when we arrive at these achievements or these milestones that we still don't love ourselves.

And that's because oftentimes, and if not oftentimes, almost always, our wanting to achieve these goals is driven from a place of self-hate or self-loathing, or self disgust or self disappointment.

So we are reaching to these goals like we are beneath these goals. We feel like we're clawing to them to try to prove our worth and try to reach some sort of mountaintop in which we finally love ourselves.

But what happens is when we are moving towards a goal or achievement or attaining something from a place of self disappointment or hate or loathing... is that we reach and we claw to this goal and we might achieve it, but then when we get there, we don't love ourselves because loving ourselves was actually not the goal.

The goal was the goal, and we thought the byproduct of that would be this self-fulfillment, inner peace. But then we used self disappointment, self-hate to try to motivate us there. So when a goal and a future version of us is motivated by disgust and hate of the current self, that disgust and hate continues through the journey of self-growth.

And then we get to that point and we don't love ourselves when we get there. In contrast, if we have the same goal, the same future vision of ourselves, and we say, "this is what I want for myself because I love myself, because I deserve it, because I deserve to show up for myself, because I deserve to hold myself accountable, because I know I can."

It's such a different energy. And so we begin the climb propelled by self love. And know you may not love yourself perfectly, you probably won't. I know that I can be really hard on myself at times, but being hard on myself doesn't get me to move forward in a way that I can continue forward. Being hard on myself means I start forward, and I make some progress, and then the second I fail or I'm not perfect, that being- hard- on- myself version of me, the version of me that is picking at everything... She comes back out and tells me why I'm not good enough.

But imagine that same journey because I know I want something better for me. I love myself and I want to have a life that feels good, and I propel myself forward with that energy, and then I struggle or mess up, or I didn't stick to my goal exactly how I wanted to... well, that's okay because self level say, "Hey, you're human. Let's go. Keep going."

We don't let the shame and blame and self-hate bring us back down to where we started. That is a lesson of life, when we are motivated by self hate or self disgust it is a powerful motivator. But as we start on that journey, eventually we're going to not be perfect.

That's just the name of the game and when we're not perfect, that self-hate and disgust comes back around and reminds us what a loser we are. Reminds us why we're not good enough, reminds us of why we maybe don't deserve that future version of us in the first place. Makes us feel like that future version of us is separate than current us because current us sucks, and future us is amazing.

We take that same journey and we say, "I see this for myself, I envision it for me, and current me is going to get me there. Current me is the vehicle in which I will travel to get to future me. And she's enough and she is amazing and she deserves that future version." How can you not love current you when she is the reason you will get to the next version of you?

And she is also the reason you have gotten through every past version of yourself and every hard thing. Current you did that and current you will propel you forward. I'll ask the question again... what do you believe you need to achieve to finally be deserving of your own love? And the answer is: there is nothing that you will ever achieve that will make you feel deserving.

You just are deserving of that right now. And as you embrace that you deserve to love yourself right now... that self love propel you forward to the achievements, the goals, the dreams you have, the future versions of you that you can't even fully comprehend or imagine.

Now we can learn this the hard way or the easy way.

But a good example of this is, and this is the lesson I learned along the way, is that no amount of self-hate will get you to a body you love because when you arrive at a body that you feel is more quote unquote acceptable, you won't love that version of you, you will still hate you. It will still not be good enough because the narrator inside your head continues to narrate the process of your growth.

And if that narrator doesn't ever become kind and loving, then you will achieve your goal with the mean narrator, with the mean inner voice. And that mean inner voice is going to still be there once you've achieved whatever you set out to achieve. Most of us know this is true because we've experienced it.

Most of us have learned this the hard way. We've achieved a goal and we still don't like ourselves. So what if we changed and tried something different? At the very least, you're just gonna try something different and maybe the end result will feel better.

Cultivate a kind inner voice. Be your own biggest cheerleader.

Call yourself out on your BS, but cheer yourself on as you move forward.

Another question I wrote is, why do you think your self hate and self disgust will cause you to become someone you love? How much self-hate do you think it will take for you to realize that self-hate does not create self love?

So the first question, why do you think your self hate or self disgust will cause you to become someone you love? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't compute when we actually slow down and think about it. We've been taught to motivate ourselves with this fuel of anger and ick and not liking ourselves.

You may have learned this from other adults when you were a child, these adults that told you how you were failing so that you could be better. That told you how bad you were now to try to motivate you to be better. We've had coaches do this, teachers do this, possibly parents, leaders tell us how much they're dissatisfied with how we are and that we should be better.

And now we've taken this messaging and put it in our lives... that if I just don't like myself, then that will motivate me forward because that is the pattern we have seen and experienced. But self hate and self disgust does not equal self-love.

I'm a math girly. Some of you know I tutor math. I love math and don't like math. I mean, it's fine. But if we were to take the equation, self-hate + moving towards goals = self-love. No. Does not compute. But we believe it because we experienced this, especially during our younger growth years, and we carry that into adulthood.

If we don't stop the narrative and the story that that is the way to grow, then we'll just keep trying to grow that way.

The second question in those two questions I asked back to back is, how much self-hate do you think it will take for you to realize that self-hate does not create self-love?

Self-hate does not create self-love. In fact, they're opposites. You're on the wrong end of where you want to be if you're motivating yourself with self-hate. You have self-hate plus the journey to get through the goals and then hoping you'll get to self-love?? What a long journey.

Self-love, self-belief, feeling like you're enough as you are, and calling yourself forward... that's the magic recipe to get yourself to go forward. It's this energy that lights you up. This, I'm enough, I love myself. This next version of me is exciting. The dreams I have are compelling AND I deserve to go on the journey to get them. And I love myself now, and that's why I'm going to go on the journey.

We don't give things to people we don't like, right? Like we're not buying birthday presents for our greatest enemies. We're not going out of our way to take care of people we despise. Same thing for us. If we don't like ourselves, we don't take care of ourselves. If we despise ourselves, we don't think we deserve good things.

We don't go out of our way to achieve our dreams. We don't go out of our way to achieve our goals. We move towards our dreams and goals best when we feel like we are deserving of those dreams and goals. And we may not see the path and we may not know clearly how we deserve them or why, but we know that we are just as deserving as others that may have those same dreams and aspirations.

We are not less than. We don't have to know all the hows and the whys. We can just know that by motivating ourselves forward with love, with belief in ourselves versus hatred for ourselves, that that will propel us towards our goals. Self love is the secret sauce.

When I'm in a season of being really hard on myself, it is so hard for me to be motivated or move forward towards my goals. It can even be hard for me to just do the dishes when I'm in a state or a spiral of self-loathing or disappointment. And it is so much easier, exponentially easier to move towards my goals, my dreams, do the dishes when I'm doing it from a place of love or deserving, or belief or hope for the future.

You are deserving of living a life you love and you are deserving of loving yourself while you are building that, creating that, experiencing that, living that, you deserve that. Future you deserves that, the people you love would love nothing more than for you to love yourself just like you would want nothing more for the people you love than for them to just love themselves.

Can this year be a journey led with self-love? Can this year be the year you experiment with: how does it feel to motivate myself with self-love? How does that feel? How does the journey feel? How does the possible destination feel? How does goal setting feel? How does my day-to-day life feel?

I share this because I've lived this. I've lived years of self hate, and there are times still where I get so down on myself and find it really hard to get some traction, get the wheels moving, get myself to go forward, and it's almost always because of a lack of self love, because of a lack of showing care for myself and respect for myself, and patience for myself.

All the things we give everybody else. Once we start getting that to ourself, our lives change.

I invite 2026 to be the year of self-love, the year of enoughness, the year of seeing what it would be like to motivate yourself from such a powerful place. You deserve to live a life you love. And you deserve to love yourself now in the exact version of you that you are in.