Meet Alie Frankel

It’s easy to love the parts of yourself that are easy to love. The kind, generous, beautiful, fun-loving, and high-achieving parts of your personality are usually the parts that you easily and gladly bring into your heart and hold true as a part of your identity. The parts that are less savory, the selfish, judgemental, manipulative, sometimes mean parts of you, are where things get a little more difficult. It’s hard to look at yourself and say “Yes, sometimes I am terribly judgemental of others and of myself.” And then it can be even harder to really accept that that’s true and still open your heart and let that part of you in. The truth is that we are all of it. And self-love comes from slowly looking at all the parts of ourselves, first allowing them to be there and then choosing to bring them into our hearts.

It starts with self-awareness. Through our interactions with the world, others, and ourselves, we get these “exposures” all the time- glimpses into parts of ourselves we’ve previously kept in the shadows. We know we’ve found an exposure if we feel triggered, particularly overcome by emotion that feels oddly disproportionate to the circumstance, unable to stop thinking about something, confused or unsure about how to act, or observe ourselves behave in a way that doesn’t feel aligned with who we “really are.” Pema Chodron puts it simply when she suggests that we must “lean in into the sharp points” in order to grow.

I now see every “sharp point” as an opportunity to go deeper into myself and expand my capacity for love.

We can all use these exposures as opportunities to turn inward and see what inner wisdom is waiting to be heard. We can bring these parts of ourselves we don’t want to look at into the light and finally allow them to be present and true. We feel what that feels like, which can sometimes be incredibly challenging and uncomfortable but can also be overwhelmingly beautiful, and then eventually, we can choose to welcome these parts of ourselves into our hearts with the rest of it. Repeating this process over time with each exposure, we get to see (and love) more and more of ourselves until, eventually, loving all of you becomes a palatable endeavor, and the parts of ourselves we’re less proud of spend less time being exiled and shunned, hiding in the shadows, and more time in the light and as a part of the whole.

This is the hard “work” that people talk about and that I refer to when talking about the work I do with my clients. It’s allowing that thing that you really, really don’t want to be true… to be true. Sometimes it’s about yourself, and sometimes it’s about something else in your life or the world.

Take a moment right now to think. Is there something in your life you kind of know is true, but you really don’t want it to be true, so you’ve pretty much just avoided thinking about it instead of facing it head-on? Like maybe you really need to stop watching TV late at night. Or call that friend back. Or address how you really feel about your job. Yea, I thought so. These “truths” that we avoid looking at are actually the path to self-love and actualization.

There are many ways to do this work and infinite paths that bring people here. In my experience, I’ve found it invaluable to have a personal teacher guide me along the way, so I have dedicated my career to doing the same for others. In my opinion, doing this inner work under the guidance of a loving and nonjudgmental teacher who can show you your blind spots and hold you through the process of allowance and, ultimately, unconditional love is much more enjoyable than figuring it all out on your own.

I have been fortunate enough to work with a teacher for over a decade who has helped me turn my life into a curriculum. I’ve learned that my outer world is a reflection of my inner world and that if I choose to engage in this way, every single thing that happens, every interaction, every relationship, and every seemingly good or bad circumstance and event is there to teach and guide me deeper toward my own truth and the full expression of myself.

So to answer your question, this is the process I’ve used to build self-love, which is the foundation of confidence and self-esteem. This form of confidence and self-esteem is often quiet and soft. It’s something that can be felt by others in your presence, even if you don’t speak a word. It is not to be confused with cockiness, which is often loud, in your face and compensating for insecurities somewhere else.

Remember that our primary relationship is the one with ourselves, and yet somehow, this is often the most overlooked relationship of all. We tend to look outside of ourselves first for what we need- safety, validation, acknowledgment, love, etc.

So the question I recommend you ask is: To what degree do you give those things to yourself?

You want your partner to put the phone away and slow down to be present with you. Do you put the phone away and make time to be with yourself?

If you want to build confidence and self-esteem, start dating yourself and see what kind of partner you are. Remember that as you do this, you might find some parts of yourself you are surprised or disappointed to see, and that’s when you get to really slow down, allow, and choose love.