The following is an excerpt from the "7 Weeks to Self-Love" on-line course. If you would like to enroll in the course, click here.

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening--wherever you are in this world. My name is Chris Armstrong.

Today, we will be focusing on what it means to love yourself fully and why we often struggle with it.

While it may be a cliché phrase, millions of relationship coaches and counselors all agree--if you are going to be in a happy, equal, and authentic relationship, you must love yourself first.

If you do not love yourself, you will accept less than what you deserve in a relationship.

If you do not love yourself, you will settle.

These are neither bold, nor controversial statements. They are truths self-evident to the millions of people that live with low self-esteem every day.

But what does it mean to love yourself, what are the impacts, and why do we struggle with it? These are the questions we will ask and answer in today's lesson and throughout this course.

What does it mean to love yourself? To love yourself means to accept yourself as you are and to come to terms with those aspects of yourself that you cannot change. It means to have self-respect, a positive self-image, and unconditional self-acceptance.

In dating and relationships, the importance of loving yourself, of being truly confident, cannot be overstated. There are real world relationship and dating impacts of not being confident, not loving yourself.

What are the impacts? Let's look at the impacts of not loving yourself as it applies to dating.
* If you are not confident, it will affect your level of comfort on a date. This is because you will have little confidence that your date will like you, and you will try to be someone else.
* If you are not confident, you will assume the worst possible outcome for the date before it even starts.
* If you are not confident, people will notice, and the right people will move on, while the wrong people will take advantage of it.
* Alternatively, when you love yourself, some truly amazing things begin to happen in the relationship space.
* You are comfortable playing an active role in decision making.
* You stop settling.
* You do not stay in unhealthy or uneven relationships.
* You are happy and people can see it in your face, hear it in your words, and feel it in your vibes.
* You stop chasing.

You deserve to have an authentic and equal relationship.
You deserve to love yourself.