Between demanding schedules and personal obligations, sometimes it can be easy to forget about the work we need to put into nurturing our relationships. Especially during this difficult moment, when our lives feel overwhelmed by stress related to COVID, we’re still working from home, we’re upset by all the inequities we’re observing, and more, the simple gestures or compliments we usually dish out to our loved ones can easily fall by the wayside.

But as we know, human connection is what brings meaning to our lives, and investing energy to improve our relationships will ultimately make us happier.

One of the tools that I’ve used to help me to improve my relationships — romantic and otherwise — is a tool called the 5 Love Languages. If you’re not familiar with the 5 Love Languages, you gotta check them out! Basically, there are five main ways that we speak and understand emotional love: words of affirmation, physical touch, receiving gifts, quality times, and acts of service.

Everyone’s love language is different, and everyone has a unique preference for how they want to show their love and care for others — and how they want to receive love and care back. I personally have found this knowledge to be so helpful in improving the quality of my relationships, including how I deal with conflict.

In this video, I share why I adore the 5 Love Languages and how learning your loved ones’ love language can improve your relationships.

Watch now!

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She told me that love is like a flower. Flowers are beautiful, bring joy, and can instantly brighten up your day, but they are also delicate. They need water to grow, nourishment from the soil to flourish, and light from the sun to thrive. Flowers can’t just be thrown around; we must handle them with care. If we don’t give them what they need to survive, they can wilt, become bruised and damaged permanently, and they can die.

My sister summed up her thoughts by saying that, just like tending to a delicate flower, we need to care for the love we share with others in the same way.

How great is this analogy?!

Love and Relationships Take Work

In our society, there’s an entrenched belief that love should be easy — that when you build a loving relationship with someone, things should just “work out”. But this simply isn’t true!

Relationships require work in order to thrive, the same way flowers need tending to in order to flourish. Our word and actions — what we say and do — impact others, and they can bring joy, but they can also hurt. If we do not take the time to nurture a bond we have with someone, especially after it’s been hurt, it will suffer over time.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t fight or experience tension with your loved ones. Arguments and conflict are normal and healthy aspects of a relationship. As you’ll have heard me say in previous blogs, the issue isn’t that you fight because, of course, you’ll have disagreements. What matters is how you fight and address the tension you experience in relationships. (And if you’re not already doing this, you might want to carve out the time to think about what you can do to heal the hurt your actions or comments may have caused.)

And here’s what’s so interesting: sometimes it’s in the greatest of turmoil that love can become even more beautiful. When I first told my boo that my sister called love a delicate flower, he said, “Yes! It’s like a lotus flower that grows in a shitty swamp!”

How to Nurture Love and Relationships

Every meaningful relationship you have is special in its own way. Like the many species of flowers that need varying amounts of water, fertilizer, and sunlight to flourish, your relationships may need to be cared for differently in order for them to grow or heal. To help you out with your relationship “gardening” (ha, couldn’t resist!), here are a few things you can do to help nurture your bonds with others:

Know Your (and Your Loved Ones’) Love Language

Have you heard of love languages? The Five Love Languages is a book by Gary Chapman that outlines the ways we express and experience love. Simply put, our love language is how we show others that we love them and how we like to receive love from others. For example, my dominant love language is words of affirmation — I love showering my beloveds with words of admiration, appreciation, and encouragement. Knowing your loved ones’ love languages is important as you’ll uncover what means the most to them and how to heal any hurt you cause. You can do the Love Language test online for free here.

Learn to Fight Better

As I’ve already mentioned, conflict is a very normal part of relationships, and it can actually bring people closer together. The important thing to note is how you fight. For example, one of the most useful things I do whenever I feel stressed in a heated discussion is to take a pause. This simple act can stop potentially harmful words from flying out of your mouth — all you need to do is literally pause! When you slow down and check in with yourself, chances are that your response will be more thoughtful and deliberate.

Going forward, choose to work hard at nurturing your relationships through proper care and attention, so that the love you have in your life can thrive, feel beautiful, and be lasting.

Reflect on your most important relationships. Are there any that need a little TLC? What will you do going forward to nurture and cultivate that bond?

Remember that it may take time, and some relationships may require more nourishing than others. But all of this is worth the sweet smell of roses (cheesy, I know, but true)!

The post Love is Like a Flower — We Need to Nurture It appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

When I was writing my book, The Authenticity Principle, I knew that I wanted to include self-love as part of what I was teaching, because self-love is at the core of living authentically. But because I was worried that some people wouldn’t accept this “mushy” topic alongside the neuroscience, leadership, and self-development topics that I discuss in the book, I wasn’t sure to what extent I should talk about it directly.

But the further I got into the process of writing, the more I realized that I simply can’t teach people how to live better — or how to build a more empowered and inclusive world — without discussing self-love. Here are three reasons why I think you should focus on self-love on Valentine’s Day and every day.

1. Self-Love is the Key to Loving Others Better

When I talk about self-love, I’m talking about unconditional acceptance of the self. I’m talking about knowing and embracing who you truly are as much as possible, and that means, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And this can be really hard work!

Learning to accept and love yourself unconditionally requires doing deep self-reflection work to reveal the “tough stuff”, including the wounds, pain, shame, and other vulnerabilities that you’ve experienced and internalized along your life’s journey. This “tough stuff” is exactly what gets in the way of you loving others and inviting them to love you back, because when you’re hurting, you’re more likely to put up walls that prevent you from giving and receiving love. (And let’s be real — when we hurt, love is exactly what we need.)

Acknowledging and facing the “tough stuff” isn’t easy, but doing this work will enable you to work on healing these areas. So whether it’s your lover, children, family, or friends, you must start with loving yourself in order to identify and heal the hurt that’s preventing you from giving love and receiving it from others.

2. Self-Love is the Foundation of an Inclusive World

In my work as a global diversity, equity, and inclusion speaker and consultant, one of the questions I’m always asked is: How can we build a society that’s more accepting of differences?

The answer lies in self-love.

So many of us have been taught to hate and fear differences in others, which is often motivated by discomfort with our own differences. This fear often stems from the fact that we don’t love and accept ourselves for who we are. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that many of us have received repeated negative messages about who we are throughout our lives.

When we experience discomfort with someone who is not like us, what’s essentially happening is that we’re engaging in bias, whether consciously or unconsciously. We do so because we’re afraid of differences and of being hurt, and we have been taught that sameness is safer and makes us less vulnerable. But favoring sameness ultimately pushes fear, intolerance, and hate.

Cultivating self-love will lead you not only to embrace who you are (especially what makes you different), but it will also enable you to feel more comfortable with others’ differences. In short, loving yourself can have a huge impact on creating a more inclusive world as you’ll be more willing to recognize and celebrate authenticity in yourself and others.

(Also, self-love is a radical act (shout out to Audre Lorde!), but for especially people of color, for women (cisgender and trans), and for women of color. Loving ourselves is a way of disrupting the harmful messages of White male supremacy that tell us we are unworthy.)

3. Self-Love is the Secret to Living Your Best

Cultivating self-love is the starting point to having the life you want — a life where you feel empowered, confident, happy, loved, inspired, and so much more. And although it takes work — self-love is a practice where you choose to love yourself even when you’re feeling tired, weak, broken, insecure, like an impostor, and more — the end result is worth it.

Self-love is about the belief that you are worth the emotional and physical investment it takes to nurture and heal yourself. And when you make that investment in yourself, amazing things are possible!

Developing self-love and self-acceptance is a journey, and for many of us, it’s a lifelong one. Wherever you are now, the key is to start!

The post Why You Should Think About Self-Love This Valentine’s Day appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

Just about everyone is looking for deep, meaningful, soulful love — but very few of us know how to find it.

My journey to find meaningful love was not an easy one. I spent many years dating men who weren’t right for me, who didn’t share my values, and who may have looked good on paper but something was off. Unfortunately, some of these relationships ended in heartbreak, which led me to being single for a long time.

It was during an extended period of being single that I cracked the code on what I needed to help me to find the person who I really needed, deserved, and desired. In this video, I share what I believe is essential for unlocking meaningful love and how to make this happen.

Watch now!

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Many years ago, I was in the middle of a painful breakup, and I was devastated. I was hurting so much, and because I was hurting, I wanted my ex-boyfriend to be hurting too. I was obsessed with wanting him to feel as bad as I was feeling. I couldn’t see it at the time, but this way of thinking was actually making me feel worse.

When I shared my feelings with my bestie Nicole, she gave me some great advice. She said, “The best revenge is living well.”

This advice became my mantra for getting over my breakup. It helped me realize that focusing on myself and how I was living was a better way to move on than continuing to focus on a ghost relationship — one where the person is no longer there, but all of your energy is still being directed towards them.

It also became a philosophy for life in general and a way to help me stay focused on my personal power during hard times.

In this video, I share how focusing on living well can help you move on from any broken relationship, whether it’s a romantic relationship, a friendship, or a professional relationship, and why prioritizing self-care and self-love is ultimately what will help you to heal.

Watch now!

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As someone who has had her heart broken more than most (I know, I know, hard to believe!), and who has spent a lot of time solo feeling heartbroken, I have a theory about what happens to us when we’re going through heartbreak. I call it the “Bookend Theory of Heartache”.

I came up with this theory after noticing a pattern of what was happening to me as I was dealing with feeling unhappy in a relationship and then again while being single. It hit me that there’s a heartache cycle that I was moving through. The key to surviving the cycle requires us to see the pattern and then address it!

So in this video I share what the key is for dealing with heartbreak and finding your sweet spot of joy along the way.

Watch now!

The post How to Get Over Heartbreak appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

He said something to the effect of this:

We expect to find the love we want in the packages we want it to be in. But instead God sends us the love we need, often in packages we might not expect — and, most importantly, God loves us through the people he sends into our lives.

At the time, I was single, having ended a relationship that I’d deeply wanted to work. When it didn’t work out, I felt so cheated by the Universe. I was desperately seeking to fill the void with new love, but it just wasn’t happening. I felt bad about myself — unworthy of love and sometimes downright unlovable. So when I heard Bishop Jakes’s words, I broke down. The essence of this lesson pushed me to see my situation and myself in a new light.

Firstly, his words forced me to take stock of the fact that I was “checklisting” in my romantic relationships. As so many of us do, I was focused on finding a mate that ticked all of the boxes on my checklist — not realizing that I was limiting myself, and that this checklist was actually quite disconnected from how love could look for me. (And, let’s be honest, my checklist wasn’t working out for me!)

Bishop Jakes’s words also forced me to acknowledge the love already present in my life that I was taking for granted. I may have been struggling in romance, but I was surrounded by amazing, incredible, loyal, loving friends and family who adored me. My friends and family had no obligation to me — they could choose to devote themselves to whomever they wanted — and yet they were choosing to love me.

In acknowledging this, I felt incredibly blessed. But most importantly, I realized that if I was attracting such amazing people into my life, it must be because I was worthy of love after all.

Essentially, Bishop Jakes’s words triggered a powerful reframe of how I saw my life and how I saw love. I was able to shift my focus from seeking love and mourning the love I’d lost to experiencing the love that was already in my life.

I already had the love that I needed, and I rediscovered it in a completely unexpected place.

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