“He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.” - Marcus Aurelius
Self-love determines the quality of your life. Not controversial.
More interestingly, how do you achieve self-love? Your thoughts and your actions. By themselves, useless. Together, the secret to happiness. Clear the mental roadblocks that hold you back, and then go out and prove to yourself that you are capable of greatness.
Thinking
Step one: think your way out of roadblocks. Before you can really love yourself, you have to rid yourself of negative self beliefs. You cannot actualize until you really, truly believe that you are enough. That your flaws are a part of your story and an integral part of your character. That you can’t be the best everything to everyone, but you sure as hell can be the best you. Sit with that and be honest - do you believe it in your bones? If not, you need to retrain your mind until you believe it. There’s two fundamental steps to do so:
Identify negative beliefs
Replace negative beliefs with empowering ones
For example, you don’t believe you are a smart person because you weren’t good at math in grade school. As an adult, every objective reality will be viewed through that lens. The promotion you got? That must have been because the worthier person quit the company recently. How you see yourself is how you see the world.
Instead, a more empowering belief is that you worked extremely hard to overcome not being naturally gifted in math. Your will and resilience to learn will allow you to achieve anything that you set your mind to. The world is your oyster. Again, how you see yourself is how you see the world.
You can win this mental battle with the help of therapy, psychedelics, or a plethora of other solutions, but you must do it one way or another. You must love the person you are becoming before any amount of self-discovery is useful. By winning the battle against your own limiting beliefs, you remove the roadblocks. Once you’ve addressed these mental blocks, you can move on to step two: taking action.
Doing
Step two: take action. Imagine you’ve always wanted to run a marathon, but you always come up with some excuse why the timing is not right. The biggest shame in this is you aren’t even giving yourself a chance to discover your greatness. You must take action, however small. You must start training. If you really want something, you must push past the point where you want to stop (I wrote more about this in It's you against you). Just when you want to quit, that is the exact moment when you must continue. Prove to yourself you have more in you. With each day that you lace up your running shoes and take steps toward your goal, you build discipline which translates into evidence that strengthens your new empowering beliefs.
Thinking and doing
To illustrate why you need thinking and doing, let’s use an analogy. Your dream is to become a NASCAR driver. You have a top-tier racecar, but it has a governor limiting the speed to 100 mph. That governor is like your limiting beliefs. No matter how much potential you have, you won’t be able to perform at your best until you remove it. In the same way, your self-doubt and negative thoughts create a ceiling on your happiness. Once you’ve removed those mental limits, you can finally test your skills. Now, it’s not about what was holding you back—it’s about how hard you’re willing to push yourself forward. Self-love comes from this self-discovery. Every day that you drive faster or accomplish more, you prove to yourself what you’re capable of. That’s where true confidence and self-love emerge.
We get into trouble when we think OR act, not think AND act. I’m sure you know a few people who fall into both extremes. On one side, you have the therapy enjoooyers who can’t make a decision without consulting their therapist. They have been in therapy for years and still don’t seem very happy. On the other side, you have the bro-science influencers who tell you to deadlift your way out of depression. They may have impressive resumes, accomplishments, and stories, but they aren’t happy either.
Both extremes are limiting. There is real value in both thinking and acting, and there is also real danger in getting addicted to one without the other. Thinking without action creates self-doubt - you eventually run out of real roadblocks so your mind makes up fake ones. Action without thinking also creates self-doubt - you have achievements, but don’t understand the negative beliefs that still make you unhappy with yourself.
In the end, self-love is not a destination, but a journey that requires both mental clarity and deliberate action. In this journey, only by freeing your mind and pushing to discover how powerful you are can you experience the inner harmony that you deserve. So everyday you have an option: one step closer or one step further from self-love. What is your choice today?