What the World Needs Now (Why We're All Failing Love 1A)

"What the world needs now is love, sweet loveIt's the only thing that there's just too little of."

Burt Bacharach's 1965 classic floats through our Valentine's week like a wistful prayer. But what if he had it backwards? What if there's not too little love in the world, but too little literacy and expertise in it?

The Class That Changed Everything

In 1969, a USC professor named Leo Buscaglia (later, a hero of mine) was devastated. A student he knew: one with what he called "kind eyeballs," someone whose presence in class told him people were actually listening, had taken her own life.

He found himself asking: What good is all our learning if no one teaches us the value of life? Our uniqueness? Our dignity? And how to love.

So he did something radical. He created Love 1A.

Not about love. Not love theory. Just: Love.

No grades. (How could you fail someone in love?) No prerequisites. No textbooks. Just twenty students sitting in a circle, learning to be students of something we all desperately need but rarely study.

Within months, the class had 200 students. Then a waiting list of 600. Registration filled in 20 minutes. It became one of the most popular courses in USC's history—not because people were starving for love (although that might have been part of it), but because they were starving to learn how to love.

Buscaglia always said he didn't teach the class. He learned in it.

So here we are, another Valentine's Day. Another round of chocolates and roses and pink-wrapped packages. Another week of treating love like something we consume rather than something we practice.

What if Gandhi was right? (Well, sort of. He didn't actually say "be the change you wish to see in the world", but he did write something better: "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.")

What if the love shortage isn't out there, it's in here?

What if we don't need to find love, we need to become students of it, become love?

Love as Practice (Not Poetry)

Here's where it gets interesting. Carl Rogers, the psychologist who influenced Buscaglia, gave us three ingredients that aren't just therapy conditions. They're foundational to love itself, translated into practice:

• Unconditional Positive Regard: An attitude of "I'll accept you as you are." Not approval of every action, but acceptance of the whole person. No prerequisites. No conditions. Just: you exist; therefore you matter.

• Empathy: Not sympathy. Not fixing. Understanding the client's experience and feelings from their point of view, sometimes referred to as 'walking in someone else's shoes.' Actually, standing in someone's experience long enough to feel the shape of their world.

• Congruence: Being genuine. Being real. Being open and authentic: no masks, no performance, just the messy, beautiful truth of showing up as yourself.

If you're a coach, you already know these aren't just therapy techniques. They're how transformation happens. They're how people feel seen. They're how we create the conditions for growth.

They're love, expressed as a profession.

But here's the part that makes Valentine's uncomfortable:

Real love, the kind Buscaglia taught, the kind Rogers practiced, the kind Gandhi pointed toward, starts with loving yourself well enough to look inward.

It means becoming curious about your own layers. Your own complexity. Your own tangled questions and half-felt feelings.

It means offering yourself the same unconditional positive regard you'd offer a client. The same empathy you'd extend to a friend. The same congruence, the same willingness to be real, you'd ask of your team.

Because how can we give what we haven't learned to receive?

Here's the thing about love: it's as innate as breath. We can't live without it for long. It's already in us, woven into the fabric of being human.

But here's the paradox that breaks consumerism's heart:

Love isn't meant to be consumed. It's activated. It grows when it's given away.

The more you hoard it, the smaller it becomes. The more you offer it, the more it multiplies. It's the only resource in the universe that expands through generosity and withers through scarcity thinking.

Opposite of everything capitalism taught us. Opposite of Valentine's Inc.

You can't get out of yourself if you don't know what "yourself" even is. But once you do? Once you've turned that unconditional positive regard inward, felt your own experience with empathy, shown up with congruence to your own messy humanity?

Then you have something real to give away. And in the giving, it multiplies.

This Valentine's: Enroll

So what if this Valentine's week, instead of a consuming love, we studied it?

What if we enrolled in Love 1A- the class that lives in how we show up, how we listen, how we hold space for the beautiful mess of being human?

What if we asked ourselves:

• Where am I withholding unconditional positive regard—from others, yes, but also from myself?

• Where am I defaulting to fixing instead of truly understanding?

• Where am I performing instead of being real?

Love, it turns out, isn't a feeling to chase or a gift to purchase.

It's a skill to develop.

A practice to deepen.

A literacy to build.

Buscaglia became famous as "Dr. Love" not because he wrote bestselling books (though he did, five on the New York Times list simultaneously). But because he lived it. He stayed after lectures for hours, hugging thousands of people who lined up. He showed up warm, passionate, genuine, and dedicated to building a safe space to explore this all important human dimension. 

He believed that by using the core conditions of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard, people would feel safe enough to access their own potential, to move toward what Maslow called self-actualization. To become the fullest version of themselves. While these insight draw from the 1970s and we have learned much since then, one thing hasn’t changed…

Love is What The World Actually Needs

So maybe Bacharach was right about one thing: the world does need love.

But not more of it.

Better at it.

Not love as a noun: something to get, to have, to hold.

But love as a verb: something to practice, to embody, to become.

Be the love the world needs.

Not by waiting to receive it.

But by learning to give it, starting with the person staring back at you in the mirror.