Focus on YOURSELF

Nipuni Prasadani
7 min readDec 25, 2019

Hey Socials! How are you all doing? It’s been a long time since I talked to you guys through my blog posts. Life has not been any easier, but I still take the blame for it. Well, today I want to talk about a very important topic and a buzz phrase “Focus on YOURSELF”. Actually, you can word this phrase in any way but at the end of the day, it is about loving yourself and treating yourself in a better way. After reading a lot of self-help books I finally found out how to treat myself better. Haha, just kidding, someone else’s noise won’t really help you to figure out how to treat yourself better. It’s basically a life experiment. Sooner the better. I must admit the fact that self-help books really did play a role in the journey of disciplining myself to focus on myself more, plus that’s lots of real-life experiences we are talking about. I’m going to note down some tips which I believe are generic for everyone. But always remembers whatever I say here is just noise, take what is important and rest you will have to work on yourself. Without further ado let’s dig into the post. Happy reading.

TAKE THE DAMN RESPONSIBILITY

Yeah, you read it right. Now you may go like, what do you mean. Listen, if you are feeling sad right now, it’s all because of what you did. Basically, whatever the emotion you are having right now is all because of something you have done. Well, for example, let’s say that you are sad because your significant other broke your heart. And you think it’s their fault that you feel sad. My darling, it’s all your fault. Why did you expect them to not to break your heart? If you didn’t expect that you wouldn’t feel sad, would you? Got the idea? Learn how to take responsibility for everything you feel. It makes your life thousands of times easier. The more you learn how to take responsibility for your feelings the more you stop doing things that hurt yourself.

TAKE CARE OF HOW YOU LOOK

By definition, focus on yourself means taking care of yourself. Based on my personal experiences, an easy way to move on from any hard time you are going through is focusing on how you look. HIT THE DAMN GYM! What I learned was that when when you focus on taking care of yourself, you tend to forget every other thing which makes you sad. All you want to focus on is how to build your body or how to be healthier. When you see the progression, it satisfies you more than you could have ever imagined. If you are already hitting the gym, you know the pain you are going through just to get that perfect figure. That’s all you want. If you don’t take care of yourself, how can another person expect you to take care of them?

Well, it’s not only about hitting the gym, but you can also focus on your eating behaviors, the way you dress, your hygiene and many more. Discipline yourself to take care of how you look. TBH that’s something very attractive.

NO IS A FULL SENTENCE

Well if you want to make everyone happy be a tequila shot. This is a famous phrase that I’m pretty sure you may have heard before. You need to learn how to say NO. Trust me the only thing that matters is you and yourself nothing else. So, if you feel like something is not making you happy then say NO to it. Don’t think about how another person may feel if you say NO. On the other hand, when you are tempted to buy something because of good marketing strategies that the vendor is following and if you don’t really want that then say NO. This way you can save lots of money too. Saying no is not only applicable when someone asks you to do something, but it is also applicable when you want to buy something unnecessary as well. You can apply this in any way that helps you and it’s healthy. Make sure to use NO wisely.

READ MORE

There’s nothing sexier than a well-read person. Train yourself to read a lot and gather information. By reading I didn’t mean only the books. That could be articles too. Do research about things. “How to eat healthy”, “How to reduce my abdominal fat” anything you like, read about it. More you read more it helps you to avoid doing toxic things. Life is too short to learn only from the mistakes that we are making, so read and learn from others’ mistakes too. When reading something always detach yourself from the rest of the world. Even if your phone buzzes, don’t pay attention to it. If you are reading for like 10 mins per day, give that 10 mins only for reading. This a good way of learning how to discipline yourself as well.

HAVE SOME PRINCIPLES

Having principles. Well, this is a tough one. In life when coming to things it’s better if you have some principles. I’ll put it in this way, let’s say “I just don’t go late to places and that’s one of my principles.” And someone might say “ I always attend to meetings 5 mins before and that’s one of my principles.” I think you quite got the idea. Be someone who lives by your own principles. When you have principles when comes to certain things, it helps you to avoid getting into trouble. As well, it disciplines yourself.

DON’T EXPECT

Life can go wrong in many ways when you expect things. Especially when you expect things from others. Based on what I have been through I always believe that if you are to be happy then you should expect nothing from others. What you should know is everyone is going through something and they are not there to help you with things. Expect things only from yourself and always remember you only have yourself. Others being there for you is not something that you can always count on. Trust me, this is something really hard to master. Human nature is always expecting things from others. But once you find the peace of not expecting things from others, you will never want to let that go. Always expect the worst thing to happen, then when something good happens you can be happy and if something bad happens it won’t really make you upset either.

DETACH FROM YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media aka Facebook (Well when I say Facebook it pretty much covers Instagram and WhatsApp if you know what I mean) drains your energy. It drains your creativity. How do I know you ask? I know that because I myself am a victim of social media. Social media follows this great marketing strategy to keep you hooked on them. Which clearly works on many of us. I’m not asking you to deactivate all your social media. That’s crazy. I’m asking you to detach from it for a certain number of hours per day. Switch off data on your mobile phone and read a book. Or read something on the internet. When you start doing this, you get more time to focus on yourself. We, of course, don’t have enough time for everything and why waste that time on social media? Well, I’m not that successful in detaching myself from social media. But I do take small steps. I try to keep my phone away and switch off data for a certain amount of time per day. And use that time to focus on myself or do something I love.

If you can control yourself even with the data on, then alright. But if you can’t control yourself try switching off data and it works like a charm.

YOU MATTER

As I always tell you, YOU MATTER THE MOST. This is something we always forget. We always forget to give ourselves a priority. Remember, whatever happens, you should think about yourself first. Don’t do anything that doesn’t make you feel happy. Just because you don’t want to hurt others’ feelings, you don’t have to do things you don’t like. Before doing anything ask yourself if it makes you happy if it doesn’t then don’t do it. But make sure what makes you happy doesn’t harm someone else physically. Know that there’s a fine line between making you happy and making you happy by harming others. Always give time to yourself. Have the courage to leave the table if respect is no longer served. Don’t let people treat you less. Don’t let people take advantage of you. Just know that you matter the most, nothing else.

I’m glad you made it to this point which means you read the tips above. All I want to tell you guys is to focus on yourself because nothing else matters. Whomever you meet in your life should come after you. Don’t you ever give less priority to you. If you are not happy and are not loving yourself, then, of course, you can’t love someone else. So, don’t think this is only if you are single, even if you are in a relationship, yourself should be the priority. Loving yourself makes you stronger. It helps you to survive when no one is around. It teaches you how to stay alone. It shows you how to enjoy your own company. Once you see the peace of it, you won’t want any escape from it. Always remember that at the end of the day, it’s only you who has got your back. Everyone has lots of things on their plates so don’t expect them to clear your plate as well. Be strong enough to take care of your things by yourself. Now that the new year is around the corner, this is something you to think about. With that note, I’m gonna end today’s blog post and hope to see you soon in another blog post like this. Till then live the life you love.

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Nipuni Prasadani

Business Analyst | Former Software Engineer | Graduated from SLIIT | Tech Blogger | Life Hack Blogger