How To: Be Your Own Biggest Fan

“You Are Your Own Biggest Fan” is a part mantra, part activity that came out of nowhere. I have been trying to turn it into a daily philosophy because it is so simple and playful, yet has a great message to promote optimism, enthusiasm and self love.

The idea that 'you are your own biggest fan' emerged from feelings of loneliness and general unease with the fact that it was Christmas time and I had no one to spend it with. This is not true in a physical sense, I have some family nearby that I am grateful for, but is an unease that was based on my feelings that there is no-one in my life whom my existence is contingent upon (nor anyone that I could be equally meaningful to). This fact isn’t a failure, some would call this kind of blessing ‘freedom,’ or at least one of the freeing steps towards enlightenment. However, the fact that this manifests in feelings of unease, or dis-ease, made me question the underlying cause.

I realize that these feelings are part of a tendency (one that is not unique to me) to seek validation and meaning through our relationships with others. A social condition, certainly, insists that the self is contingent upon others and their vociferous presence in our lives.

But basing our self worth, self judgment, and relative merit upon the relative abundance or lack of loving people in one’s life is a dangerous game. The fact remains that people leave us, we break up, we move on, we even die. There is a flow of contingencies that effect the amount of people who remain meaningful to us and very few of these contingencies are directly linked to any inherent loss of our own value. Being your own biggest fan is about reclaiming the right to determine our own worth, rather than through the judgment, or often misjudgment, of partners, family, friends, colleagues and strangers. After all, there is a serious imbalance if their estimations of ourselves are placed upon a pedestal as being more important than our own.

A friend recently reminded me of the simplest psychological fact: Our relationship with ourselves is the primary relationship that defines our lives. There is no use thinking that a new partner or better friends will change our lives in any fundamental way, it’s our relationship with ourselves that we have to get right and put the most effort into. This isn’t a novel idea by any stretch, but it is one that is readily forgotten amid social pressures and the quick-fix validation and love we can glean from others.

In response, being your own biggest fan could sit happily under the banner of many self-love or self-esteem building techniques, but it is somehow more playful. It is a simple way to start thinking about improving your relationship with yourself and the way you talk to yourself, without the weight or pressure of serious analysis (which, lets face it, is more than we can often handle when feeling less that ourselves).

The Idea:

The idea is simple. Become a genuine fan of yourself! It works through the law of attraction, where like attracts like, and works on an axiom that the proportion of love you receive from others can be no greater than the love you are willing show yourself. As such, we cannot expect anyone else to be a fan of ourselves, and hence participate positively in our lives, unless we can appreciate ourselves in the same way.

Becoming your own biggest fan is undeniable because of the following facts:

• You are, and always will be, your own biggest fan
  
• You are your own biggest fan because you know yourself better than anyone else
• And you cannot expect anyone to be a fan of you, if you are not a fan of yourself

Being your own biggest fan is expansive in quality, the biggest is descriptive: it describes an opening of self and self perception to greater love and acceptance. Changing your self perception is the first step, and requires a reorientation that moves away from negative scripts to positive experiences.

Negative scripts are those critical judgments that we allow to mediate our experiences of the world. The simplest in this case is “I’m unloved.” If you decide to be a real fan of yourself, guess what, feeling unloved is no longer possible, instead you must be loved because fans are loving!

Being your own biggest fan, then, is about changing your self perception. Part of this is realizing that negative scripts are often not our own, but come from non-fans, that we adopt as ways to judge our experiences

• The fact is, no- one else’s praise or criticism will change anything about you
• It is your choice to experience negative judgments: when you accept them they just build or reconfirm beliefs that you already have about yourself.
• The good news is: You can improve the things that you do not like about yourself (whereas no one else’s opinion can change a thing!)

Because our experience is governed by what we allow ourselves to feel – by the way we positively or negatively narrate our experiences - someone who feels fundamentally unloved is unlikely to accept love from anyone. The best news is this:

• Being a fan is also forgiving!
• This is because fans are fanatical in nature and overlook any flaws in their idol
• We need to feel this way about ourselves: we must love ourselves enough so that any of our failings are overwhelmed by this love.
• We can forgive and accept ourselves in genuine ways because our relationship to ourselves is directed by love, not by judgment, failure and negativity

Again, being your own biggest fan is expansive and it supports the law of attraction (where like-attracts-like). If we can replace our negative scripts with a forgiving fandom, we open ourselves to positive experiences at all times.

• As we open our person to loving ourselves our capacity to receive love is increased
• Our capacity to give love is also increased

• This means that the relationships that we develop become genuine and reciprocal on an emotional and spiritual level
• And that, no matter how many people are in our lives, we experience love
• Remember the law of attraction? Our chances to experience love and positivity expand exponentially, all by being greater fans of ourselves!

The Practice:

While so far I have tried to outline some of the ideas that seem to organically flow out of the idea of being your own biggest fan, practicing this concept is less multifaceted. Because being your own biggest fan is a matter of re-orientating ones attitude to self, use it to replace some of the negative scripts that exist in your mental chatter, by saying as a mantra:

I Am My Own Biggest Fan!

Say it to yourself when you start the day, write it on a piece of paper and stick it where it can’t be ignored, say it to yourself when you need a pick me up. Say it to reinforce good experiences and say it to counter the bad. It is a mantra that is playful, but that will motivate you towards greater love, towards change, towards openness, towards confidence, and most importantly, towards forgiveness.

You can elaborate this mantra into a stream of consciousness exercise by saying these variations out loud until you have exhausted all your options. It can be done by talking out loud or through writing, but either way can be very cathartic because it can release our built up anxieties and replace them with a positive concept. For example;

Even though I … (negative quality)… I am my own biggest fan.

Even though I don’t have a boyfriend, I am my own biggest fan

Even though I don’t like my body, I am my own biggest fan

Even though I’m feeling unloved, I am my own biggest fan

As a follow up, it might be good to reinforce yourself as someone worth idolizing through the following variation:

I am my own biggest fan because… (positive quality)

I am my own biggest fan because I love my dress sense

I am my own biggest fan because I finished a school project

I am my own biggest fan because I have successful children

If you keep up with it, I’m sure that the second list will one day be the longer one!

In conclusion, while I will continue longing for the true presence of meaningful people in my life everyday (whether or not it is Christmas), I think that being my own biggest fan is possibly the best strategy to feel better about myself and to stop unconsciously seeking validation from others. So far it has eased my unease, but I’m sure that it that will also encourage me to allow more love in my life.