Credit: English/Pixababy

Valentine’s Day is approaching and whether we are in a relationship or not, this holiday is designed to remind us about love. Love is not just an emotion, it’s an ability. Celebrate you and that you have the ability to love. After all, finding the right one is the hardest decision you make in your life. What other decision takes decades to get right?

1. Celebrate Galentine’s Day!

Plan an evening with your single friends and spend the holiday doing something you all enjoy. The point of this day is to celebrate that you have love and support in your life. Your friends have cheered you on in life and will cheer you on when you go down the aisle. For many people, their friendships are models for what their future partners are like.

2. Turn Valentine’s Day into Christmas!

Do Secret Santa for Valentine’s Day! Purchase flowers, plan a dinner, and/or buy chocolates and give them to the friend you get assigned. Reclaim the dreaded Single’s Awareness Day by surrounding yourself with those that have been there for you. Why not have gift on top of that gift?

3. Celebrate you!

The restaurants are all packed and serving pre-fixe dinners. Curl up with a glass of your favorite adult beverage and work on you. Improve your dating approach, create a list of how much you have achieved and what direction 2019 should be for you or take a break from online dating and try dating IRL.

4. Write yourself a love note.

It’s very easy to see this holiday as something that represents a loss in your own life. That starts a path of examining all your failed relationships, all the suboptimal relationships you’ve endured, or your frustration with being amazing and finding all of the wrong types. I always advise my clients to focus on their strengths and how much they’ve gained through each of their romantic experiences. Celebrate you and that you have the ability to love. Even people that weren’t compatible with you or that were suboptimal experiences. Writing yourself a love note and documenting all the things you love about yourself helps increase your self-esteem and self-worth. Which starts the journey to love.

5. Do something for yourself that the future you would thank you for.

Maybe that’s a new exercise routine or working on you actualizing your dream job. As long as you begin implementing a plan to act on it, your chances of accomplishing it increases. If it’s the love of your life you are looking for, challenge yourself to do something different that you haven’t tried before. In my practice, the majority of my client’s found the right one by making incremental changes and challenging their former ideologies and practices. To date, my program has 97% efficacy.