How to Heal and Thrive by Learning to Love Yourself

How to Heal and Thrive by Learning to Love Yourself

Tessa Richter/Executive Coach, Author & Artist. Switzerland/iCN Contributor

When a serious illness stopped executive coach, musician, and artist Tessa Richter in her tracks in 2013, the answer she received from her deepest inner wisdom was not what she expected. It wasn’t a diet, a treatment plan, or a new routine. It was this: you have learned to love others unconditionally — but not yourself.

What followed was not a quick fix. It was — and still is — a practice. A daily, evolving, surprisingly demanding practice of self-love that Richter credits not only with her physical healing, but with the opening of entirely new chapters of her life: an unexpected career as an executive coach, a richer understanding of her own giftedness, and a deepening trust in the creative life force she believes shaped her.

This is not a story about self-improvement. It is a story about self-acceptance — and the profound difference between the two. In a world saturated with advice on how to become more productive, more visible, more optimised, Richter offers something quieter and more radical: the suggestion that the most transformative thing any of us can do is stop trying to become something other than what we already are.

“You have learned to love others unconditionally — but not yourself.”— The inner answer that changed everything, as received by Tessa Richter

Loving herself, she is clear, meant first and foremost listening to herself — including, in 2013, the decision not to follow the path of interventions that conventional medicine prescribed. It was a deeply personal choice, one she is careful not to present as a recommendation for others. Each person’s truth, she believes, is their own. That is, in fact, the whole point. Self-love is not a universal prescription. It is the practice of knowing what is right for you — and having the courage to honour it.

Over time, that practice revealed something she had long been told but never fully explored: that she is highly gifted and highly creative. A diagnosis she had received three times and largely set aside. But through the lens of self-love — through taking herself seriously enough to investigate — she began to understand it not as a label but as a doorway. Research from NASA confirms that we are all born highly creative; it is a capacity that is systematically eroded by the time we reach adulthood. Richter’s mission, now, is to help people reclaim it.

This analogy — one of the most vivid in Richter’s writing — captures something essential. The goal of self-love is not to become a better version of someone else’s ideal. It is to understand the specific nature of what you actually are, and to build a life that honours it. The apples you produce from that place of alignment, she argues, will be of genuine value to the world around you. Not because you forced them, but because they were always yours to give.

Healing, Richter reminds us, shares its etymology with wholeness. It is not a destination — it is a continuous process of returning to yourself. Each challenge, each change, each unexpected turn in the road becomes navigable not through greater willpower or better strategy, but through a deepening relationship with who you actually are. The creative potential to meet what life puts in front of you already exists inside you. Self-love is not the soft option. It is the access point.

And she offers one practice above all others — ancient in origin, startlingly simple, and as powerful as any technique she has encountered across decades of meditation, art, music, and spiritual inquiry. Close your eyes. Use your own name. And say it like you mean it:

This is the greatest gift we can offer ourselves — and, Tessa Richter believes, our troubled world. One human being at a time.

Source: iCN Issue 53  (Wellness & Holistic Coaching: Well-Being & Balance); page 28

About Tessa Richter

Tessa Richter is an expert on high creativity and neurodivergence. In her own highly creative life she has had several successful careers: as an internationally  performing classical musician, visual artist, spiritual coach, CEO of her own in-house training business, and coach for business executives. She has also healed creatively from minor and major illnesses.

Tessa has published 3 books, the latest one ‘Being highly creative – our superpower at the dawn of a new era’.  She hosts workshops to help channel the creative energy, coaches and composes her own music. Currently she is creating a musical system based on voice analysis, medical astrology, colours and her won music to support clients in developing their full potential.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessa-i-richter/

Website: www.oursecretpotential.com