I’ve read too many self-improvement articles that professes something like, “The Solution to _______ is to Love Yourself.” Most of the time they’re probably right, but they skip over how to love yourself and I’ve struggled to figure that out on my own. Until recently.

The simple answer: you have to recognize that sometimes you treat yourself like an enemy — you have to stop doing the things that make your life harder later:

- Leaving tasks to the last minute

- Cheating on your diet or exercise plan

- Never making time to do the things you want to do

Maybe that’s obvious, you know what you have to do and why… the real question is, how?

Just like a relationship with someone else, loving yourself takes time and effort, it’s not something you can just do in your mind and you’re done; you have to work at it. Better yet, to fall in love with yourself…

You have to court your future self.

I discovered this accidentally, I wasn’t trying to love myself. I was just trying to lower my stress and make my life easier, which meant I was starting to treat my future self with more dignity and respect — my future self really loved that about my past self!

Back when my wife and I were dating, I would do a lot of helpful things for her that made her life easier and brought a smile to her face. I don’t know if any of those things helped my wife fall in love with me, nor does it matter — I still enjoy doing them because I love her. Now you have to do the same for yourself, because you love you… or at least you will soon.

If you don’t love yourself right now, your analysis of yourself is imbalanced. That is, you have more attributes about yourself that you want to change rather than keep the same. You’re never going to be perfect, nobody is (don’t try to be) but when you start to balance the scale, even a little bit, you’ll be so much happier.

Practically speaking, look at the tasks you can do now that will make your future self appreciate your current self more. In other words, what can you do now that will make your life easier later or maybe even bring a smile to your own face?

Make a list, keep notes, send yourself emails, whatever you need to do to recognize the things you want to change. That list might seem daunting or depressing at first, but it’s actually enlightening and exciting because this is not a list of your flaws, this is a list of solutions. Use that as a list of action items that you will turn into things you love about yourself! My example list from above becomes this:

- Instead of leaving something to the last minute: do a task right now that you normally leave to the last minute (wash the dishes, make your lunch for tomorrow, etc)

- Instead of getting into a position where it’s easy to cheat on your diet or exercise plan, put yourself in a position where it’s easy to stick to your diet or exercise plan: plan your groceries today, do meal prep tomorrow so you can stick to your diet

- Instead of running out of time to do the things you want to do: block time on your calendar with a reminder so you have the time reserved to keep exercise “dates” with yourself (or others)

Instead of doing your taxes the night before tax day, pick up your phone right now and set a reminder for 1 month before tax day. In the meantime, keep a box in a drawer and a folder in your email where you will put all of the papers and emails you receive that you’ll need for your taxes. Then, when everyone else is stressing at the last minute, you can take a moment to appreciate yourself because your taxes are already done… then go do something you really want to do, because now you have the time.

This will eventually become a love cycle that snowballs. You will love that you packed your suitcase a few days early; which means you now have time to workout; and then you love yourself for sticking to your exercise regimen.

It also takes discipline, but the accidental brilliance of it is that you’ve created a feedback loop that generates its own reward for staying the course, which makes the discipline easy.

It’s so easy it feels like cheating, and that’s why it works.