There is nothing, nothing more important for your love life than truly, at the deepest level, having love and respect for yourself. And when you learn to honestly value what you have to offer, and tap into your own unique, passionate energy, the ability to get yourself noticed (romantically or otherwise) is easier than you could ever imagine.

Here’s how to start knowing your value…

Did you ever have a friend where it felt like wherever they were, that was the place to be?

I had a friend like this at school, and I just remember always feeling like the party was where he was. In fact, this felt so true that we could even be at a party together, think it was a great party, but if he turned around and said to me, “Do you wanna get out of here? And just go and sit on a park bench and chat?”I’d have thought that was the best thing for us to do right now.

What this comes down to for me is a sense of certainty.Well where does that sense of certainty come from?In a strange way I don’t think it comes from anywhere other than deciding to be certain.

I always remember my cousin, Billy. A very confident man, wearing a baseball cap that he bought at Universal Studios, and it was a Kwik-E-Mart cap from The Simpsons.

I remember him completely unironically one day wearing his cap, and I said, I like your cap.

And he said, “I just know that no one has a better cap than this.It’s the best cap in any room I go into.” Even though he was being playful, he meant it, and I thought what makes that cap cool is that Billy has such certainty about it.That’s what makes it work. It’s a cap anyone could have bought from Universal Studios, but he makes it work, because he’s the one who feels certain about it.

Imagine we had that towards ourselves, instead of always thinking that the party was elsewhere with somebody else.What if it was with us?We could crudely say that life gets divided up into these two groups of people.The people who intrinsically derive value, who believe in the value of themselves, and then the people who look for value outside of themselves, and I see everywhere, people looking for value outside of themselves.

In dating especially. People are looking at that beautiful person over there.That charismatic, successful person over there, and they’re thinking that, ‘God, if I could just get that person to like me, then I would be enough. ‘ Being around that person…It’s almost like, I think that would rub off on me, or people would look at that person, and see me next to them and think, ‘Wow, that person’s worth something as well.’

The scary part about that is even if you get that person, when you lose them, you panic, because your value leaves with them, but we have got this all wrong.

We are looking for this secret access to a world that we don’t have, to a value that we didn’t come into this world with that somebody else is going to give us, and what’s crazy is it’s literally the opposite.It’s the story we tell people about our value that changes their perception of us, but in order to tell that story to someone else we have to believe in that story first.

I created a retreat program ten years ago that has become renowned for transforming people’s confidence, and you know why it works?

We do a hundred different things that help people on that program, but the fundamental reason that people transform their confidence on that program is that they have a different story about themselves.They tell themselves a different story about their value, and they believe it, and when they believe it they’re able to tell that story authentically, and congruently to the rest of the world, and then the rest of the world starts to believe it too.

So how is it that suddenly they leave the retreat, and people react differently to them, they get more attraction, they get more commitment, they get a different level of respect from people?

Because other people believe in their value.Not because they leave the retreat, and suddenly they’ve achieved something more, but because they leave the retreat with a different story.

Tell a different story about your value with a different level of certainty, and the world will change around you.

If you haven’t applied to the retreat yet, please don’t go another day without doing it.

The link is here. Apply now, and I will see you next week.