Topics: How to Love Yourself, Self Esteem, Self Love Habits, Self Belief, Emotional Healing

How to Love Yourself, it doesn’t always feel easy…

You don’t need to fix yourself and you’re NOT broken…

You just need to stop ghosting your needs.

In this episode, we go beyond affirmations and surface-level positivity to explore the real, embodied foundation of how to love yourself—especially when your mind says you’re behind or broken.

If you’ve been tying your worth to how much you do or how good you look, this one’s for you.

You’ll hear the powerful story of how one five-minute ritual shifted everything, and how letting go of self-critique can be the start of your emotional healing and body image healing.

TIMESTAMPS

00:45 — Why Affirmations Aren’t Enough for Self-Love
03:15 — The 5-Minute Ritual That Rebuilt My Self-Worth
06:55 — Touch Without Critique: Healing Body Image Through Connection
12:20 — Opt Out of Numbers, Opt Into Emotional Healing
16:35 — Stop Over-Apologizing, Start Reclaiming Your Voice

Listen in and discover:

• Start Before You Perform: Learn the 5-minute ritual that says I matter—before the world decides your worth.
• Reclaim Your Body: Use touch as connection, not criticism, and begin a new relationship with your skin.
• The No-Sorry Challenge: How over-apologizing drains your confidence and what to say instead.

This is self-belief in action—and it starts with the tiniest shifts. No perfection needed. No extra time required. Just you and a few moments a day.

🎧 Listen now to feel grounded and rebuild your self-belief.

LISTEN TO NEXT
Episode: Find Your Inner Calm (ep #301)

RESOURCES

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CONNECT
Instagram: @itschardet

MORE ON THIS SELF-HELP PODCAST EPISODE

“Your worth isn’t something you earn, it’s something you return to.” — Chardét Ryel

• Start Before You Perform
• Feel Your Skin, Not Your Flaws
• Let Go of the Numbers
• Romanticize Your Quiet Moments
• Say Less Sorry

Most of us are taught from a young age that our value is transactional. That being liked means being pleasing. That being enough means being productive. That being beautiful means being worthy.

But what if loving yourself had absolutely nothing to do with performance, appearance, or how others react to you?

What if how to love yourself was actually much simpler—and much deeper?

In this episode of Feel Good Nakd, we go beyond mirror mantras and Pinterest-worthy quotes. It’s about unlearning the rules that taught you to ghost your needs and constantly compare. It’s about shifting from critique to care, from chasing to choosing.

Here’s what we explored—five self-love habits that look quiet on the outside, but radically shift what’s going on inside.

Self Love Habits: Start Before You Perform

Ever notice how easy it is to lose yourself in your roles—worker, partner, parent, friend? Before the day even begins, you’re already running through the to-do list, scrolling your phone, reacting to what the world needs from you.

But the practice of self-love begins before you give anything away.

When you start your morning with a small, sacred ritual—no matter how short—you tell yourself: “I matter. Not because of what I produce or how I look, but because I exist.”

It’s a habit that builds self belief in real-time. Not by hyping yourself up, but by showing up for yourself.

Body Image Healing…Feel Your Skin, Not Your Flaws

There’s a softness we lose when we’re always measuring. Body image becomes a battleground instead of a bridge. And yet, your skin is not a flaw to fix—it’s a home to return to.

This episode shares one surprisingly simple way to begin body image healing: use touch not to check for flaws, but to reconnect. No mirror needed. No judgment required.

The act of placing your hand over your heart or belly and simply being there is more powerful than any external validation. It reclaims your body as yours, not a performance.

“We cannot build self-love from critique.”

These tiny acts create a felt sense of presence—an embodied kind of emotional healing that shifts the way you relate to yourself without needing permission from anyone else.

Let Go of the Numbers Because they DON’T = Self-Love

They seem objective, they can quietly anchor our worth to things that were never meant to define us.

When you let go of one number—just one—for even a few days, space opens up. Space where self belief can breathe. Where success is no longer about comparison, but connection.

“Real self-love is when you opt out of metrics that are not made for you to be whole.”

If you’ve ever felt like your confidence depends on the last compliment, the last like, or the last accomplishment—this is your permission slip to stop performing.

The metrics were never the point. You are.

The overlooked self love habit: Romanticize the Quiet

In a world addicted to productivity, pleasure feels rebellious.

But stillness isn’t laziness—it’s medicine. It’s how you recalibrate, how you stop ghosting your needs, how you begin to feel again.

One of the most overlooked acts of emotional healing is simply making your quiet moments intentional. Not background noise. Not guilt-ridden rest. But sacred space to be with yourself. To sip your tea, stretch your arms, stand in a sunbeam, and breathe.

Your nervous system needs this. Your heart needs this. You deserve this.

“If we can’t have a moment just to be, we’re completely disconnected from ourselves.”

Be More Confident by Saying Sorry Less (only when it’s really needed)

This one might be the most uncomfortable—and the most liberating.

We’ve been conditioned to apologize for taking up space. For saying no. For needing time. For not responding fast enough. But every unnecessary apology chips away at your confidence, your voice, your worth.

What if you replaced “I’m sorry” with “Thank you for your patience”?
What if you chose your words from a place of worth, not guilt?

“Every apology that isn’t actually needed is a withdrawal from your confidence account.”

Learning how to love yourself means treating your time and presence as valuable. And language matters. You don’t have to be rude to be rooted. You just have to stop asking permission to exist.

Self-Love That Sticks…DEEPLY

The biggest myth about self-love? That it looks like confidence 24/7. That it’s loud, always glowing, and totally unshakable.

In reality, self-love is often quiet. It’s sitting with your discomfort instead of distracting from it. It’s responding to your needs instead of ghosting them. It’s choosing yourself in micro-moments that no one else sees—but you feel in your bones.

“Your worth isn’t something you earn, it’s something you return to.”

These five habits aren’t glamorous. They’re not trending. But they are transformational.

They offer a pathway back to yourself. Not through force, but through gentleness. Not through perfection, but through presence.

Ready for more emotional healing?

If this stirred something in you, that’s not random. That’s your body remembering what it feels like to be honored—not hustled.

Start with one habit. One moment. One pause before you reach for your phone or say “sorry” again. You don’t need a full plan. You just need one moment of self-respect, repeated.

Your emotional healing starts there. Your self belief strengthens there. And your body image healing deepens there too—not in a mirror, but in how you choose to be with yourself.

🎧 Want the full experience?

Listen to the episode 5 Surprising Habits That Boost Self-Love on Feel Good Nakd for the full story, a guided practice, and the invitation to begin.

Full Transcript on How to Love Yourself with Chardét Ryel

Chardet Ryel (00:00.419)
Self-love isn’t just something that you say or you post, it’s a practice. And a lot of the times when we’re told to boost your self-love and find how to do it here, it’s really simple things like affirmations, which while they can be helpful, are not necessarily going to the very roots of the problem, which is deep into our self-worth and also just the way that we measure ourselves in terms of our worth.

whether we’re performing, quote unquote, all of this comes into it. And so I want to share with you five surprising habits that boost self-love, things that are really simple to do and might feel like they don’t make a difference. But when you do them every day, you see this huge shift. It’s wildly powerful. So I’m going to share all five with you in this episode.

Chardet Ryel (00:57.494)
Get ready to feel good naked. I’m your host, Chardét, and if you’re here right now, means that you are ready to strip away all the crap, all the rules holding you back from feeling good in your body, in your mind, and in your life. Let’s get into it.

This first habit is the biggest one. It is the one that will shift the way you see yourself if you continue to do it. And that is to start for you, not for the world. Meaning that every single day you begin with a self-led ritual, something just for you. The idea behind this is I matter before I perform.

before I go to work or to be a parent or whatever my role is in the world where I have to show up and I have to perform and how I do determines how people see me before all of that. You focus on you and so many of us, we jump straight into performing mode, whether it be for other people in our lives physically or whether it be online. This shifted for me quite a bit when I first started to do this, it wasn’t from a perspective of self-love.

If I’m being honest, it was because I was really depressed, that kind of aching depression that you don’t want to get out of bed. I wasn’t caring for myself and I was putting a lot of emphasis on others, people that were friends, partners, family, and also work. And I didn’t have a morning for myself. I didn’t do anything for myself. And so I started after a conversation with my sister where she said, I think you need

to do something for you. And so I started small. I started with just a little five minutes of trying to just be quiet, you know, not really even meditation, just kind of sitting there. And it was the most uncomfortable five minutes of my day, but for some reason I kept doing it. And now this is, I wanna say seven or eight years later, it is an integral part of my day. I start every single day, even if it means I have to get up.

Chardet Ryel (03:07.915)
at dawn because I have an early flight or something to do, I will do it to have that one thing for me. And the more roles you have, the more important this is. Because self-love, psychologically speaking, when we think about where does it come from, it comes from self-respect. For your body, for you, for your time, for your dreams, for your essence. And you build that by creating moments for you.

When you prioritize the very first thing you do, even in a tiny microwave, you know, these five minutes where I sat alone, you send the signal again, I matter before I perform, before I’m there for everyone else. No matter what I achieve in this day, I matter. And it takes self-love away from being dependent on other people or you hitting the numbers or looking a certain way to you respecting yourself and your time.

For about 10 years, I was a coach to a lot of people, mostly women, and showing them how to care for themselves again. Now, it took the form of wellness and fitness, but it was always with the intention of how do we bring things back to you? Not get you to look a certain way, but how do we bring stuff back to you? And the ones that really did well with this, that were able to shift their lifestyle and to shift their body image views.

were the ones that really prioritized this idea of building self-respect and some of the habits that I’m going to teach you besides this first one. What is the very first thing you do when you wake up? Very first thing. It could even be a thought that enters your mind. Is it for you or is it for someone else or for the world? I have to do all these things. You know, running through your to-do list, checking your phone.

talked about here how I lost my voice for three months, couldn’t speak. And one of the blessings of that time was waking up and not being able to say, I’m so tired. In some ways, refreshing beyond even coffee. I don’t drink coffee anymore, but beyond tea and stuff, was extremely helpful. And so I want you to think about what is the first thing you do? Your action is going to be a tiny, tiny

Chardet Ryel (05:29.427)
mini ritual for you. Something simple but sacred in the way that it is just for you. It could be stretching. It could be the lemon warm water, whatever. It could be standing in a patch of sunlight like a cat. It really doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just the purpose and the message that you’re sending to yourself. I often think why so many people promote this idea of warm water with lemon in the morning.

as a way to help their gut and feel better in the rest of the day is that that is actually an excuse for them to take a moment to start their day with a regulated nervous system and calm. And I wonder if that really is the reason why the rest of the day is better. So it’s the same thing for you is one moment, one thing. Start your day on your terms, not someone else’s. Self-love habit number two that most people don’t think about.

Feel your skin, not your flaws. So you’re going to use touch to rewire how you see your body because for women, a lot of our self hate, the loss of self love comes from how we see our body, not measuring up to the standards of what beauty is, what’s needed to be accepted, desirable, loved. All of that is very deeply intertwined. And again, when I was working with people for 10 years to get them into these healthy habits, movement,

be it food, whatever it was, often it came with reconnecting them to their bodies, starting to not see it as a project, not see it as a problem, but actually a part of you. So deep if you think about it, because a lot of our self-esteem, it’s deeply conditioned from the time you are young. I mean, imagine when you’re a little girl and you dressed up pretty one day and the kind of feedback that you got.

on that day versus when the days you rolled in the mud is totally different. And so we want to find a way to shift that. And so you can start to remove the way your body looks from the worth you feel and leave space for this self-love to grow. A lot of what I think is super helpful to do is if we go through a somatic type of meditation, and I know this is a little woo-woo, but bear with me. It does.

Chardet Ryel (07:51.439)
help here because we want to get you away from every time you touch your body, you’re checking fat or you’re glimpsing in a mirror and seeing a flaw. We want to shift that to touching it to connect. This is why dance feels amazing. This is why when we are compassionate with ourselves, we feel our best. So I want you, if you’re able to close your eyes, if you can’t close your eyes, just get into nice little meditative.

feel here if you’re driving, keep your eyes on the road, but you can kind of just listen in the background. You want to place one hand over your belly, your heart, or your cheek. We want to inhale and exhale. Again, inhale and exhale. And what you want to say in your mind, we’ll say this three times. Try not to judge it or think about it. This body is home.

This body is home, not a performance for others.

This body is home, not a performance for others or their acceptance. And just feel this for a moment. I’m going to be finishing this episode with a longer meditation to get deeper in, but I want you to just feel this for a moment. And as you open your eyes, think about what it was like to actually just have a moment where you touched your skin without judgment. You weren’t touching it.

because you didn’t like it or because you noticed a new wrinkle or a new flaw. You’re just touching it to connect. And if you can bring in a moment like this into your day, it can be so helpful for reconnecting to your body. This is why movement, which is not for losing weight or calories to lose, can be so helpful. Things like yoga, things like dance, but even something small. The reason why this works so well again is because you are physically feeling your body.

Chardet Ryel (09:54.809)
creating a new relationship with it that isn’t based on the decades, I’m guessing decades, but at least a few years of self-hatred and judgment because we cannot build self-love from critique. And imagine, think about if you’ve ever been in a relationship with anyone, how important it can be to have some form of contact, how that makes you feel closer and the same goes for yourself.

Self-love habit number three, stop keeping score with your worth. The habit is let go of numbers and comparison. In the world of fitness, in the world of wellness, we are often taught that if you shift the way you look, you can shift the way you feel, which builds your confidence, builds your power. The interesting thing about this is that while many people will swear that they became more confident,

as they lost weight, as they changed their shape. The reality is if you look at what actually shifted is the way that they relate to themselves. And one of the most empowering things you can do is slightly counterintuitive, but you listen to this podcast, so it’s not gonna surprise you here, is for you to remove measurements, to remove any metric related to the way your body looks especially.

that makes you compare, but it can be anything. So any sort of numbers you have in your mind of how you should perform, I get it, when we work in an office, sometimes you have metrics to hit. I’m talking about the metrics you can control, the ones you don’t need to have. If it’s anything from how much food you eat to how much you weigh to you having a personal goal of what age you should achieve something. All of these metrics, these measurements keep you in performative.

meaning that as long as you perform at the level which is as good or better as whoever you’re comparing with, you feel happy and confident. The minute that’s stripped away, you no longer have that. Real self-love doesn’t depend on that. Real self-love is when you opt out of metrics that are not made for you to be whole, that actually hold you back.

Chardet Ryel (12:12.397)
But I remember when I was really deep in the diet phase and I had a friend who stopped dieting and she was saying that I feel so much better now, I don’t know how to explain it. If you are constantly putting numbers on yourself that really require you to restrict and require you to constantly be on and burnt out, then you are never gonna have space to grow with inner acceptance. How? You’re constantly competing.

And when it’s one goal weight, then it’s maintaining the goal weight, then it’s the next goal weight. When it’s this age, get this, then it’s this age, get this, and it never ends. So asking you here, what’s one number, one number that is stealing your joy? Be it weight, likes, your bank balance. What is the number that is taking away space for you?

to just be. Whatever number you’ve said, here’s the action for you. Is you’re going to take a seven day, one week break from the metric you’re most obsessed with. So that means if it is your bank balance, seven days, not obsessing. If it’s your weight, seven days, not weighing yourself, not obsessing. If it’s likes on your Instagram.

seven days not looking and instead just seeing what it feels like when you have that experience. It’s not saying you never have to go back. I’m just inviting you to feel what it’s like when you make space for you to just be. Now self-love habit number four, romanticize your quiet moments is kind of related to starting your day for you but this is something that could be at any part of your day.

A lot of the time we are working for productivity, not for pleasure. So we have a goal. The moments of pleasure that we often take are mindless. They’re not intentional. They’re sitting down and binging Netflix. We don’t intentionally choose them. I’m not saying that that doesn’t have a place because I do it too. It’s almost like, if you think about it, it’s almost like a nervous system nourishment.

Chardet Ryel (14:25.677)
So think about your nervous system always being on, always chasing, always comparing, always trying to help other people and not having a moment to reset. This is kind of like your nervous system reset. And that’s important because if we can’t have a moment just to be, then we’re completely disconnected from ourselves. And how can you possibly create a relationship of self-love if you have constant disconnection? So…

I will be again at the end of this episode going into a slightly longer meditation that will take you into this. But just thinking about now how you bring your own energy into your life, how you expend it. If you have a moment intentionally in your day that you can just do this instead of ghosting your needs and pretending that they’re not there.

Self-love habit number five. This one is surprising and it’s something that I didn’t think that much about until the more and more people that I spoke with which seemed as if they had a lot of inner confidence and this was something they all said so it made me think say less sorry and reserve your apologies for real repair. Genuinely, I messed up. We heard this before that as women we apologize a lot.

We apologize for taking up space, for asking, for anything that avoids conflict. It’s easier sometimes for us to just say, I’m sorry. And if you’re wondering how this connects to self-love, it’s this. You don’t need to apologize when you haven’t truly messed up. Over-apologizing comes from the belief that I’m a burden.

Self-love means choosing words that reflect your inherent worth and time for you. So here are some ideas of what you can say instead of I’m sorry because I know situations come up where we feel like we need to say it. Let’s say that someone arrives earlier than you. Thank you for waiting. Someone didn’t get an email back from you as soon as they wanted. I appreciate your patience. Let’s say that you don’t have the time and energy to do something and you need to reschedule.

Chardet Ryel (16:37.881)
Can we revisit this? All of these are kind and compassionate responses to something that don’t involve saying, I’m sorry. So your action, and this is probably the hardest one if I think about it, is for one week as well here to have the no sorry challenge. Meaning, unless real harm occurred, you actually messed up, you actually said something hurtful, you actually…

created a huge error that destroyed something at the business, see what else you can do. Because every apology that isn’t actually needed is a withdrawal from your confidence account, from your self-love account. They are not necessary and you might think it’s just words, it’s easier, it’s the kind, polite thing to do, but I’ve given you alternatives that are equally polite that also work.

Try this and see how it feels. know especially for some listeners in certain countries like the UK, this is gonna be very challenging. For others, it might be a little easier, but really think about it. Now I wanna give one bonus self-love habit because this is something that I think we often confuse. When you have self-love, it doesn’t mean you never have an inner critic. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have this inner voice telling you you can’t do it or you’re not good enough.

Just because that voice pops up doesn’t mean you don’t have self-love. The difference is for someone who has built self-love and someone who’s struggling and not finding it is the person with it can have a conversation with the critic and silence it. And the person who is still trying to build self-love falls down a spiral where the critic takes over. That is the difference. So I want you to think about something where your inner critic pops up a lot.

And something that you would say back, something that would make you just have a conversation instead of falling into it. So for example, something that I always got stuck in is if I was learning something new in my business and I wasn’t getting it as fast as someone else, I would always say, well, you’re not good enough. You’re not learning fast enough. And for me now, the dialogue is I’m going to get it in my time. I have to just keep doing this simple thing. It sounds very small.

Chardet Ryel (18:55.445)
It sounds like it won’t make a difference. However, the moment and probably today, because we always have, you know, these kind of critical thoughts almost every day, you’re going to have something come up where the inner voice in your mind is going to criticize you or the way you did something. And you are going to remember this episode and you are going to open up a conversation for a moment instead of listening to what it says and allowing yourself to go down that spiral.

Five self-love habits aren’t glamorous. They’re not necessarily the most radical thing you’ve ever heard, but they are surprising in the way that they change how you show up for yourself. And they help you unlearn the belief that love, love for yourself, must be earned through beauty, performance, or people-pleasing. And every time you say no to what drains you and yes to what grounds you, what helps you get ahead,

in your own journey, not get ahead in comparison to other people. You are rebuilding trust with yourself that so many of us have been taught to break and to ignore. Now I’m going to leave you with this quick self-love meditation. And before you go away, I encourage you to listen, even if you are the most anti-woo-woo person there, because there is no way that you won’t shift a little bit just from hearing these words. So take a moment.

Wherever you are, again, gently placing that one hand over your heart and with the other hand, whatever your body feels like it needs to be held, wherever it naturally falls, the other hand. Close your eyes if it feels safe. Roll back your shoulders and let them drop. Soften your jaw, releasing all the tension, everything you hold back in the jaw, it just drip away.

Unclench those muscles. Release the breath you’re holding. And then inhale deeply through your nose. Exhale slowly through your mouth. And you’re going to quietly think this to yourself, or you can say it out loud, or just feel the words in your body, your choice. I am here. I am enough.

Chardet Ryel (21:18.479)
I am allowed to take up space just as I am.

My worth isn’t something I earn, it’s something I return to. It’s in me. Now you’re gonna inhale again gently. And as you exhale, release any thought that you’re behind, you’re broken, or you’re not measuring up. Take one more breath. One more moment just for you.

Hold it, feel it, let it fill your body. And then you can open your eyes. Anytime you need this, you come back to it. And if this is helpful, I encourage you to share it because you’d be surprised how many people who seemingly seem confident are struggling with self-worth and self-love. I especially encourage you to share it with really young people.

because I know that when I was a teenager, especially preteen, these are tools and thoughts I didn’t know to have. And we’re so lucky these days that these are so accessible. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here and know that these small shifts are what is going to shift the way you feel, sending you lots of self-love, lots of self-worth. You deserve to be here and I will see you in the next one.

Follow Feel Good Naked in your favorite listening app. And if you’ve enjoyed the lessons that you have found here, check out my book, Seven Steps to Feel Good Naked, Health and Body Confidence Without Dieting. I guide you through how to create gentle nutrition, movement that works for you, self-care you can do even when you’re busy. This is how you make a roadmap to health without all the struggle.

Chardet Ryel (23:15.155)
You can find a link to the book in the show notes, or you can go to feelgoodnaked.com, Naked Without the E.