what 2025 taught me about self-love in my 30s

this episode is a reflection, a pause, and a thank you- to myself and to you.

as i close out 2025, i’m sharing the self-love lessons this year taught me in my 30s: about trusting myself, slowing down, choosing what feels aligned, and continuing to love myself even when it’s messy. if you’re craving a gentle reminder that growth doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful, this one’s for you.

connect with julia on instagram @beautybyjulia + tik tok @juliasalvia

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Transcript

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Can you believe that we're at the end of 2025? What? What in the world time really does fly? And I think that 2025 went by in a flash in like five seconds. All, all I knew, all I know is that it was just February, it was just January of 2025 and now we are barely. A week away from January of 2026. I think the craziest thing to compare it to is thinking back of like COVID times, like we're going on six years. What time is such a wild thing? As it was reflecting on. My 2025, if I initially think about how 2025 went, I would say that I'm not like 100% happy or proud of what I have accomplished. And I wonder if any of you feel that way too. But then I challenge you to do what I challenge myself. How could I have made it to the end of the year and not feel proud of number one existing? A whole nother 365 days, and how could I not be proud that I am still standing here in front of you, in front of my friends, in front of my family, and I feel as though I'm okay. I know our minds have this tendency to go in a million different directions and think about, well, I wish I had that and I didn't complete that goal, and I could have been here, I could have done that. Should have coulda, woulda, you could go around in circles doing that all day, but I want you to take a moment and really look at what you did. This whole entire year go month by month. Something that helps me jog my memory of the things that have happened and the things that I've accomplished or the things that I did, is I take a lot of photos and videos. As one does, and I just look back at all of my photos and videos and sometimes I scroll through, sometimes I really watch them. I look at them and it helps me remember all of the things that I actually did, all of the places that I went to see, all of the people that I got to meet and got to spend time with all of the things that I did. And when I take a moment to. Jog my memory of all the things that I had done and all the places that I had been in 2025 throughout the year. It allows me to have a little bit more grace for myself, especially if I didn't meet specific goals that I wrote down. There are so many goals that I had wrote down for myself that I didn't meet this year, but there are also so many things that were not on my bingo board that I accomplished, that I completed that happened. That's something to write down. That's something to also be proud of. Part of our mental health and our love for ourselves is also acknowledging, right? It's acknowledging all of the things that we did do. I think we get stuck in our heads about all of the things that we didn't do because they seem to carry so much more weight than the things that we did. I challenge you. Write it all down. Give yourself like an audit of the entire year. Go through every single month, every single week if you really want to, and retell yourself the story that you wrote that you were a part of for 2025. Welcome back to the Self Love Archives podcast. I am your host, Julia Salvia, your self love bestie. Welcome to the very last episode of 2025. Woo. Yay. I know you noticed. We actually have continued to do podcasts every single week. Hmm. So we completed 2025 together with the self-love 100, a 100 day journey of loving yourself more. If you have not yet gotten your hands on the very, very, very free downloadable checklist for all of the 100 days of the Self-Love 100, you can do so at the self-love archives.com. I'm too excited to tell you these things. Too excited to wait till the end of the episode to tell you these things, but in 2026, we are starting two brand new things. The first thing is that there will be a podcast episode every single weekend. We have worked so tirelessly and so hard at so many different things in 2025 that I should be so proud of, of myself and my team. At the self flow of archives, we have worked tirelessly to, first of all, to be very consistent. But second of all, to get to a place where I can confidently say that we can bring you an episode every single weekend. I wanted to feel more confident in being able to say that to you guys, which is why I think since we started the podcast, we've gone back and forth about doing every other week, every single week, and I wanna bring you shorter episodes that have so much more meaning and so much more value to them. 10, 15 minutes, 20, maybe 25 if they're really juicy, with lots to learn and lots to love in it. But I wanna bring you episodes that are shorter, that you can listen to on your drive to work or, um, as you're walking on the treadmill, on your walks, whatever it is. Whenever you listen, I want these episodes to be a lot more enjoyable in a shorter amount of time and provide so much more value. So going into 2026, we're gonna be bringing you episodes every single Sunday at 12 o'clock Eastern time. Yay. And the second thing that I am so excited to share with you is we are adding a Self-Love book club to our self-Love collective, which is our community here at the Self-Love Archives. I'm so ecstatic. I'm so excited. Self-Love Book Club is not just going to be in person at a book club meeting. Locally in New Jersey. It's going to be here on the podcast. So the last episode of every single month. We are going to review and go over and chat about the book of the month together every single month. We'll be announcing the book club book of the month on our socials and via email and let you guys know what book we are gonna be reading for the month. We will read it together. And meet at the end of the month locally. But we'll also be here on the podcast to talk about it with you and maybe we should start a community group where we can actually like talk about the book. As well. Let me know what your favorite platforms are for that so that we can figure out where we can chat together and connect more deeply on the book and all the things that we've gained and learned and took from it by the end of the month. So I think that's gonna be really fun, really exciting, and such a good way to actually. Bring in some of these really meaningful books into our lives. I know that I feel so incredibly inspired after reading a book, and sometimes I just need that like longer length of time to read a little bit at a time and not feel so bombarded by. Too many books at once or reading something too quickly. So I love the month timeframe and us at the end of 2026, we get to say that we have read 12 books together. That's so exciting. So I'm super excited to let you guys know those two things. We're gonna have the podcast every single weekend, and we have officially now added a book club to our self-love collective. Okay. Enough of all the exciting things. I wanna get into the episode because I have some really, really amazing lessons that I learned in 2025 about self-love, most especially about self-love. In my thirties between our self love expo, bloom, launching the Love Yourself more card deck, and between just life, there have been so many ways that. I believe I've grown in loving myself, but I think that we've all grown in ways that we have loved ourselves. But there's one really big misconception that a lot of people have when it comes to self-love, and that's that self-love is a feeling and self-love, I believe, is not a feeling. Self-love is not a feeling. Self-love is a practice. It's something that you choose to do every single day to be the person that you wanna be, to love the person that you are today, tomorrow, the next day. And there on self-love is so much bigger than just a feeling. If self-love was a feeling, we would constantly chase. Everything we would be in this circle of never ending. Like I want that. I want that. It's like happiness. Happiness isn't actually a feeling. It's something that you choose to be. Because if we kept chasing happiness, if we kept chasing the feeling of happiness, I don't think that we would ever be happy if we didn't feel all of the feelings, anger, sadness. We wouldn't know what happy feels like if we didn't feel what it feels like to change and to live. We wouldn't know what loving ourselves feels like. Self-love is a choice, one that you make for yourself every single day by. Simply saying that you choose to love yourself simply by doing the things that you know you need to do simply by giving to you filling your cup. That's how we choose ourselves. That's how we love ourselves. That is self-love. And to that same point. Number two, loving your body does not mean changing it. It's about building trust with yourself, about trusting what your body is telling you it needs. It's about trusting that what you are physically feeling, what you are mentally understanding is true. Trusting in your intuition that something is right and something is wrong for you. Loving your body isn't about changing it. It's about trusting who you are. It's about trusting the physical and the non-physical body that you inhabit in this life. I think we spend so much time comparing ourselves to others comparison beyond just physically and non physically, like what we look like and what we have. But even more so when we see someone that looks a certain way and we yearn to look like that, or wish that we had this or wish that we had that. You've heard it a million times. Comparison is a thief of joy. We are not them. They are not us. We need to look at ourselves in the mirror, look at who we are in this moment right now and say, I'm going to love her. It's about trusting that your intuition actually knows your body knows everything already. Because it really does. It's actually kind of insane when you start listening to yourself. It's actually kind of insane how incredibly smart she is, truly. So we're not comparing ourselves to anyone. We are not doing anything that our intuition is telling us not to do. We are trusting ourselves. Loving our bodies inside and out in all of the ways you already know you deserve. Number three, you can be ambitious and successful while also being soft. I think there's this like very toxic mindset of needing to be mean or that you're a bitch or that. There's this certain way to be, if you wanna be successful and you wanna be ambitious and you want to, you want to get all of these things and have all of these things and make tons of money and have all of this success, when in actuality you can still be within your feminine and and be soft while obtaining all of the goals that you could ever dream of. This mindset that we're supposed to go, go, go and do it all. Leads to burnout, which then brings us into this cycle of not doing anything because we are so incredibly burnt out that we don't have the energy to do anything. Our mind is turned off, our body is done, and we are just physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. You don't have to get there in order to have everything that you want. In order to love who you are, you don't need to do it all and be it all and be a certain kind of way in order to be successful. In order to have ambition, you can do all of that while still remaining soft, remaining calm and just ticking off one thing. Each and every single day. This next one, number four, you do not have to be healed in order to love yourself. Let me say it again. You do not have to be healed in order to love yourself. There's something about the word healed that I have a love and hate relationship with because what is healed? Do we ever reach? A point of feeling healed? Being healed. I think just like self-love healing is something that we constantly are doing for ourselves. We're constantly trying to become a better version of ourselves, and that could be essentially considered healing and. If we're looking at healing or looking at self-love as this destination that we're trying to get to, we're going to be forever on a road trip to these destinations because life is going to change. Things around you are going to change, you are going to change. You are going to reinvent yourself. So many times you're going to become a new version of yourself. So much. You don't need to wait until you become a certain version of yourself or reach a certain place, or have a certain thing to decide today that you're gonna love yourself. I really believe that the only way that you're going to actually get there to these quote unquote destinations is that if you choose to reach the destination today. There isn't this long path. There isn't this long feet. There isn't all of these obstacles. You can look at yourself, whether you believe it or not, in the mirror and say, I love myself today. I am healed today. I am good enough, worthy enough to be loved today. You don't need to be healed to love yourself. You don't need to be healed to be confident in yourself. You don't need to be healed to live a meaningful life. You don't need to love yourself. You can be all of those things today, in this moment right now, and I want you to take that with you into 2026. When you wake up or next time you see yourself in the mirror, I want you to tell yourself that you are choosing her today. You are going to choose her tomorrow, and you are going to love her every single day forward. It doesn't matter what you still have on your to-do list. The goals that you haven't reached yet, the things that you've done and the things that you haven't done, all that matters is that you are choosing yourself today in this very moment. And last but not least, number five, build routines that support you, not punish you. If you've been here, you know this, we have our self-love 100, 100 days of loving yourself more, and it is all about building routines and habits that support you, not punish you. We get in this place with these challenges and these motivational things and these diets and all these, all of these different tactics. Right to become a better version of ourselves. And a lot of the reasons why they don't stick and they don't work is because we are not tweaking them to make sense for our lifestyle, for the way that we need to fuel our bodies with the way that we need to have energy throughout the day. We're not changing them so that they make sense for us. One of the biggest things with the self-love 100 and anything that I'm ever gonna tell you to do is that you need to make it make sense for you. If it does not make sense for you, you're not gonna stick to it. You're not gonna do it, and it's not gonna be exciting. Yeah, of course there's gonna be things that you need to do for you that are maybe gonna be tough at first. Maybe going to feel a little. Tough to do. A little challenging and a challenge is okay, that is okay, but it's when we've tried over and over and over again the same thing, and it still doesn't work where we need to ask ourselves, okay, well why? It's that one thing that you keep trying to do to fit into your lifestyle, to fit into your routines and habits that just does not click. It's time to ask yourself, well, why? It's kind of like clothing, clothes should fit you. You should not fit clothes. All of your habits and routines should fit you. You should not fit the habit and routine. So make them fit for you. Make them align with your lifestyle with what you need. We are all so different from each other, so to go into any sort of challenge or habit or new routine that someone else is doing, and to think that it's going to work exactly the same for you as it does for them is already setting yourself up for failure. I am giving you permission if you needed it. I'm giving you the permission to love yourself more as we move into 2026. One of my proudest accomplishments of 2025 is that we finally, finally, finally launched something that I have been working so hard on over the past couple of years, and that is my card deck. It's called the Love Yourself More Card Deck. There are 100 questions to discover who you are and love yourself deeper. I truly believe that if we know ourselves, we can love ourselves more. So much easier than if we didn't know who we are. As we get to know other people, we start to fall in love with who they are, their quirks, their qualities, their flaws, the things that make them them. So why are we not doing that? Also for ourselves? This card deck is my pride and joy. You will 100% be hearing so, so, so, so, so much about it. And I would love for you to get your hands on this and use these questions to learn more about yourself. AI is not going to answer these questions for you. Your friends and your family aren't gonna answer these questions for you. These are meant for you to dig deeper into who you are. Become more self-aware and to make it so much easier for you to love yourself more. You can grab your Love Yourself More card deck on the self-love archives.com. All of the info is in the description below, and we are also offering free shipping over a hundred dollars until the end of the year, so make sure to take advantage of it and get one of these for your friends as gifts. This would be so cute. For a vision board party giving one of these to all of your friends, this would make such a cute bridesmaids bag gift. I keep reminding myself, I keep looking at it. I'm like, Julia, every time you think that you did nothing in 2025, please just look at what you did. Please look at what you created. I have a physical thing in my hand. So if you would like one, they're available on my website. But you guys, thank you so much for being here, all of 2025 and hanging out with me joining the Self-Love 100. Coming to our self-love expo, bloom, being a part of the self-love collective and just being here, being present, existing, and choosing to love yourself more. That is all I want at the end of the day. And if you have done even just a little bit of that. In 2025, I am so proud of you and I absolutely cannot wait to see how much we love ourselves More in 2026. Have an amazing, amazing, happy New Year. Happy holidays, and I'll see you in the brand new year. Bye.