Choosing Yourself Is a Practice, Not a Moment — Here’s What It Actually Looks Like

This content is shared for storytelling, educational, and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for professional counseling or therapy.

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‘Choose yourself’ shows up on mugs, on Pinterest boards, in captions under sunset photos. It has been said so many times that it risks meaning nothing at all. But somewhere underneath the overuse is a real, practical discipline — and it looks nothing like the aesthetic version of it that circulates online.

We first raised this in Steps to Choose Yourself Beyond Side Relationships: choosing yourself is not one dramatic decision. It is a hundred small, unglamorous choices made consistently over time. This post breaks down exactly what those choices look like, hour by hour, so the phrase stops being a slogan and starts being something you can actually do.

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Why the Slogan Version Fails Women

The slogan version of ‘choose yourself’ implies a single cinematic moment — the dramatic walk-away, the deleted number, the door closed for good. Real life rarely hands you that kind of clean moment. More often, choosing yourself has to happen in the boring middle: the eleventh time he reaches out after the ninth time you told yourself this was the last time.

Self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff’s work offers a useful frame here. Her research indicates that people who treat themselves with kindness rather than harsh self-criticism when they fail or feel inadequate experience greater overall well-being than those who repeatedly judge themselves (self-compassion.org). The woman who slips back into an old pattern once does not need a lecture from herself. She needs the same grace she would extend to a friend in the same spot — and then the next right decision, made again.

Takeaway: Choosing yourself is not a single dramatic moment. It is a discipline you return to, including after the moments you fall short of it.

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What It Actually Sounds Like at 11pm

The version of choosing yourself that matters most rarely happens in daylight, in front of an audience, with your resolve fully intact. It happens late, alone, when the version of you that wants what is familiar is louder than the version that knows better.

• Not responding to the 11pm text, even though part of you genuinely wants to.
• Putting the phone in another room instead of leaving it face-up as an open invitation.
• Calling a friend instead of him, on the night it would be easiest to call him.
• Going to bed with the discomfort unresolved rather than resolving it in a way that costs you ground you have already gained.

None of these choices feel triumphant in the moment. They rarely do. That is exactly why they count — because a choice only made when it is easy is not really a practice. It is a preference.

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What It Sounds Like on a Random Tuesday

Choosing yourself also has a daytime version, quieter and less dramatic than the late-night kind, but just as important.

• Booking the therapy session you have been postponing because you keep insisting you are fine.
• Telling one trusted person the actual truth about your situation instead of the edited version that sounds less messy.
• Saying no to a plan that only exists because you are afraid of disappointing someone.
• Spending money on something that supports your growth instead of something that numbs the discomfort of growth.

The Gottman Institute frames this well in the context of relationships generally: setting a boundary is an act of self-love, and daring to hold one, even when it risks disappointing someone else, takes real courage (The Gottman Institute). Choosing yourself and holding a boundary are, in practice, the same muscle.

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The Grief That Comes With It

Here is what rarely gets said about choosing yourself: it involves real loss, and you are allowed to feel that loss fully. Leaving something that gave you even a fraction of what you wanted is a legitimate grief, not a sign you made the wrong call. Saying Goodbye to Being the Side Chick covers the questions that get you to the decision. This is about what happens after the decision, in the stretch where missing someone and knowing you were right to leave exist in the same body at the same time.

Takeaway: You can grieve what a relationship gave you and still know, clearly, that choosing yourself was the right call. Both things are true at once.

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Both Sides of the Same Coin

Choosing yourself is often framed as a solo act, and in the moment it is. But understanding why the other person behaved the way they did also matters, because it changes how you carry what happened. In the Real Talk Series, Sherley and her husband Kalief talk from both sides of relationship dynamics — including what it looks like when one partner is not fully available, and why. Find those conversations at sherleysshow.com/category/podcast/realtalkseries.

Listen: Real Talk Series on Sherley’s Show  My husband and I talk candidly about relationship dynamics and emotional availability from both sides. Find it at: sherleysshow.com/category/podcast/realtalkseries

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Protecting the Practice

A practice only survives if you protect the conditions that let it exist. That means guarding your time, your energy, and increasingly, who has access to you — a discipline covered more fully in The Importance of Self-Preservation in Relationships. Choosing yourself once is a decision. Choosing yourself repeatedly, in the face of people who benefited from the old version of you, requires ongoing protection of the choice itself.

This is where a lot of women lose momentum. They make the big decision, feel proud of it for a week, and then slowly let the old access back in because nobody warned them the practice required continued maintenance. Expect that. Plan for it. It does not mean you failed — it means you are human, and this is a skill under construction, not a switch that stays flipped once you flip it.

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The Compound Effect

Here is the part that makes all the small, unglamorous choices worth it: they compound. The woman who has said no to the 11pm text forty times is not the same woman who said no once. Her nervous system has actually started to recalibrate around a new normal. What felt like white-knuckling in month one starts to feel, by month six, like simply who she is now.

This is not motivational language. It is how habit formation actually works. Every choice you make either reinforces the old pattern or builds the new one. There is no neutral option. Which means every random Tuesday is doing more work than it feels like it is doing in the moment.

Takeaway: The choices that feel smallest are doing the most work. They compound into an identity, not just a decision you made once.

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When It Does Not Feel Like Progress

There will be stretches where this practice feels like it is not working. You will have a weak night. You will respond to a text you meant to ignore. This is where the difference between choosing yourself as a moment and choosing yourself as a practice becomes most important — a moment that fails once is a failure. A practice that includes a stumble is still a practice, as long as you return to it the next day.

Self-compassion research backs this up directly: self-compassion functions as a better long-term motivator than self-criticism, because it allows people to learn from setbacks instead of spiraling into shame that makes giving up more likely (self-compassion.org). Beating yourself up for the stumble does not make the next right choice easier. It usually makes it harder.

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Why This Feels Harder for Women Specifically

There is a reason this practice can feel unusually difficult for women who were raised to be agreeable, easy, and low-maintenance. Choosing yourself often gets read, by others, as selfishness — even when it is simply self-respect wearing an unfamiliar outfit.

Women have often been taught that saying no, setting limits, or declining a request is impolite, or worse, unkind (The Gottman Institute). Unlearning that requires more than willpower. It requires being willing to disappoint people who benefited from the version of you that never chose herself, and sitting with their reaction without immediately reversing course to manage their comfort.

That discomfort is not a sign you are doing something wrong. It is often a sign you are doing something new. New things feel wrong to a nervous system that has been trained on the old pattern for years. Give it time to recalibrate instead of treating the discomfort as proof you should go back.

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A Practice, Not a Personality Transplant

One misconception worth correcting: choosing yourself does not require becoming a different, harder, less warm version of who you already are. You do not have to stop being generous, soft, or open to build a real standard. The goal is not less warmth. It is warmth with a floor underneath it — generosity that is a choice you make from strength, not a default you fall into from fear of what happens if you stop giving.

The women who do this well are often still deeply kind people. The difference is that their kindness now has boundaries around it, and those boundaries do not make the kindness smaller. They make it sustainable, because it is no longer running on empty just to keep someone else comfortable.

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Key Takeaways

• Choosing yourself is not one cinematic moment — it is a hundred small, repeated choices, most of them invisible to anyone but you.
• The choices that count most often happen at 11pm, alone, when nobody would know if you made the easier one instead.
• You are allowed to grieve what a relationship gave you while still knowing that choosing yourself was correct.
• The practice requires ongoing protection — old access has a way of creeping back in if you are not intentional.
• A stumble does not end the practice. Self-compassion, not self-criticism, is what gets you back to it faster.

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Go Deeper With Sherley’s Show

• Real Talk Series — Sherley and her husband on relationship dynamics from both sides. sherleysshow.com/category/podcast/realtalkseries
• Conversations — Sherley and Kira on patterns, healing, and heartbreak. sherleysshow.com/category/podcast/conversation

Subscribe to Sherley’s Show  wherever you stream podcasts, and leave a review — it helps more women find the conversations they need.

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Tracking the Practice

If you need a way to see the progress you cannot always feel, try keeping a short, honest log — not of every perfect day, but of the specific moments you chose yourself when it would have been easier not to. Reread it on the nights the practice feels invisible. Evidence is a more reliable motivator than a feeling, especially on the days the feeling is not cooperating.

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Final Word

Choosing yourself was never supposed to be a single grand gesture. It is closer to brushing your teeth than to a wedding vow — small, daily, unremarkable in the moment, and devastatingly effective over time. The version of you that gets built through a hundred quiet choices is sturdier than the version that was built through one dramatic one, because she has proof, over and over, that she can be trusted to choose herself again.

We are rooting for you. We always are.

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Sherley’s Show is learning and growing every single day. We aim to uplift all marginalized voices both on this podcast and in real life. Please note that we are always striving to change the problematic language that society has internalized in us. Thank you for your patience as we aim to strip certain phrases from our vocabulary.

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