I Love Me More

You know the feeling. You’re in a dressing room, under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights, trying on an outfit that looked amazing on the mannequin. But on you? The fabric pulls in the wrong places, the color seems to wash you out, and a familiar, sinking feeling settles in. Your friend, who is the same size and has a similar shape, tries on the exact same outfit. On her, it’s perfect. It drapes beautifully, the color makes her glow, and she looks effortlessly confident. It’s the same garment, the same objective reality, yet the experience is completely different. The problem is the internal story you’re telling yourself while you’re in it.

This gap between what is and what we feel is the space where Jenna Banks lived for years. As a successful entrepreneur and coach, she looked like a picture of success from the outside. But internally, she was running on a deficit, constantly seeking external validation that never quite filled the void. Her journey to write “I Love Me More” began with the quiet, exhausting realization that no amount of achievement could fix a broken sense of self-worth. The book is the culmination of her personal and professional struggle to dismantle the internal narratives that keep us from fitting comfortably into our own lives, offering the lessons she learned when she finally decided to stop trying on other people’s definitions of success and tailor one for herself.

Module 1: Self-Love Is Not Selfishness—It's Survival

Many of us, especially women, are conditioned to believe that prioritizing our own needs is selfish. The book argues this is a dangerous misconception. Selfishness is ignoring others' needs. Self-love is prioritizing your own so you have the capacity to genuinely give to others. Banks frames self-love as a foundational, learnable skill. It's the vitamin for your life.

This begins with a radical re-evaluation of where your power comes from. Banks introduces the idea that your personal energy is a finite resource that you must consciously manage. Think of it like a battery. Every interaction, every decision, either charges or drains it. For much of her life, Banks let others control her energy. People took her power until she learned how to love herself. The entire practice of self-love, she argues, is learning to harness this energy for your own benefit. You stop letting others dictate your emotional state. You stop giving your power away.

This leads to a crucial distinction. You must learn to operate from self-referral. Self-referral means your sense of worth comes from your own internal values and spirit. It's stable. It's yours. Object-referral, on the other hand, is when you base your value on external things. Your job title, your partner's approval, the car you drive, or the likes on a social media post. This is a fear-based state. It makes you insecure and needy for control, because the external sources of validation can disappear at any moment. The author shares the story of her friend Tara. She was accomplished and attractive, but her deep need for external validation made her controlling in relationships. This neediness ultimately drove people away, creating a vicious cycle. The lesson is clear. When you ground your worth in yourself, you become immune to the turbulence of external opinions.

Building on that idea, the book insists that self-love requires courage to trust your instincts, even when it's painful. Banks’s central story is ending her relationship with Dave. She was in love, but she felt drained and unseen. Her intuition screamed, "Get out. Figure it out later." She acted on that gut feeling, breaking her own heart because she knew she had to love herself more. The book advises that if you have the courage to act on the energy speaking to you, the words and logic will follow. Sometimes, the most loving thing you can do for yourself is to make a decision that feels like a short-term loss to secure a long-term gain for your spirit.