Why does dating feel so difficult today? It can often seem like it’s a competition to see who can be more “aloof,” who can care less, who can try the least. And when you put in actual effort, it can feel like it even turns people off! 

Everyone seems to be looking for someone “rare and special,” but there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach this. In today’s video, I explore the #1 way to approach dating, advice for texting, and small-but-effective ways to move things forward.

Why is it that dating today can feel nearly impossible for so many people? Much has been said on the topic of how hard dating is today. I am probably in the camp of people that accepts that there are some very challenging things about it, but I choose not to live in this idea that it is impossible. Instead, I look at why it is that, for so many people, it’s so difficult, and what we can do to have a very different experience of it ourselves.

If you’re new to this channel, I am Matthew Hussey, the author of the brand-new New York Times bestselling book, Love Life, and for the last 17 years of my life, I have been helping people find the love they want while increasing their confidence and their love for themselves along the way.

Today is an important topic because I believe so many of us have been going about dating all wrong. And one of the things that I think is going on culturally for so many people right now is that there’s this kind of race to the bottom in terms of effort. It feels like there’s so much competition. It feels like everyone is at this buffet online and we all want to come across like we’re cool and in control. We’re not going to make ourselves vulnerable too quickly because God forbid, I give more than you do, or I show you that I like you more than you like me.

For a lot of people, there’s that fear of, “If I’m too available, if I don’t look like I’ve got a really busy life with things going on all the time and I’m never really available and you’re going to have to chase me, then you’re not going to be interested.”

So it has us all playing this game of “who can be the most aloof”? And that the grand prize of love is going to be given to the #1 most aloof. But the worst way to make ourselves valuable is to be aloof. On some level, we know that we’re all looking for something that feels rare. We’re looking for someone who’s a wonderful person to be with, a wonderful partner, attractive, intelligent, and we believe that to get someone’s attention—someone who is like that, someone who is rare—we ourselves have to be rare.

But the way we’re going about being rare is actually hurting us. There are two very different and very distinct camps when it comes to trying to come across as rare. There are people who try to come across as rare by being aloof and distant and unavailable, and there are people who show that they are rare by being awesome. And the two different schools couldn’t have more different results in terms of what happens.

If you are rare by being aloof and by not trying very hard and by never showing much and always waiting for that person to make the move or for that person to show that they’re into you before you show you’re into them . . . for them to try before you try . . . by doing that, you essentially become invisible in so many ways. 

We become like everybody else who is playing the same cheap game, because it’s such an easy game to play. Anyone can send one-word messages. Anyone can take six hours or two days to text someone back. If that’s how we’re trying to create a sense of significance around ourselves, then we are putting ourselves in an extremely large pool of people who are doing the exact same thing.

But the people who are being rare by being awesome, and I would define awesome as the ability to truly express yourself, express your personality, show a sense of humor, be playful, be fun, be flirtatious, be curious about someone . . . the people who show that they are rare in that way are actually creating value for somebody else.

Now, I actually believe that there is a drawback of this. The danger of bringing that really awesome energy to someone is that it can be mistaken for availability. It can be mistaken for us already being completely sold on that person. So, they no longer feel they have to try if they’re the kind of person who takes for granted someone who’s really great, or someone who simply feels entitled to that greatness and that attention because they’ve started getting it.

In other words, the kind of generosity of spirit that we go into dating with, giving people the benefit of the doubt, can be mistaken for a kind of weakness. But that person will be corrected when they learn that our awesomeness, our greatness, whatever you want to call it, is like the sunshine, and it’s a sunshine we control, and that we can point in a different direction any time we choose. And the time we choose to is when we realize that we are being taken for granted when we no longer feel that someone is really interested or invested, when we feel their inconsistency, or when we no longer feel good around them or in their absence.

When that’s the case, they will learn that what they perceived as this availability that they could take for granted, this wonderful energy in their life that they were simply entitled to, is actually like a light switch that can get turned off.

 You go from being this person with an incredible energy to a very powerful individual, because I now realize, “Oh, my God. I thought that was just free. I thought that was just because they liked me so much. It’s actually because they’re an awesome person. And I’m at risk of losing this awesome person.”

I don’t want to have this idea simply live in the abstract. I want us to talk about how valuable this is when the rubber actually meets the road in our love lives, in interacting with people. 

And I want to start just by inviting you into a particular concept that I have found really powerful in my own life. And that is the principle of reciprocity. It is the idea that if we give first, we are much more likely to receive that same thing from somebody else. And most of us, I believe, the reason that we’re finding dating so hard is because we’re actually doing the complete opposite. We are doing it backward. We are going into dating expecting someone to evoke our playfulness by making us comfortable, expecting someone to evoke our vulnerability by making us feel entirely safe before we ever speak something that could be used against us or that we could be made fun of for, or that could get us rejected.

And as a result, we’re not creating the kind of energy that would necessarily make that person feel like they can give those things. And this is a very follower mindset when it comes to dating. We think that by waiting constantly for somebody else to give us something before we give it to them, that we’re putting ourselves in a good position. But what we’re actually doing is just following. We’ve turned ourselves into a sheep in dating, waiting for someone else to come along and lead with the kind of energy that we want to have.

And I think what’s missing from dating today is leadership. And I’m not just talking about men, because it’s a cliché that men need to step up and lead. I’m talking about personal leadership for men and women—the ability to go into a room and focus on creating an impact.

What a lot of people do is they’re watching the other person to see what they do, so that they can then base their thing, their move, their energy, on what the other person is doing. 

But you can’t have an impact when you’re constantly watching the other person. An impact is stepping into a room and not saying “How’s everyone else being?” but “How do I want to be?” And then by being that, you invite that energy. You’re actually in a place where you affect the energy of the room. You affect the energy of the date. You affect the energy of the text exchange instead of constantly living in a state of being affected by the energy in the room. That’s following.

And think about this with people in your life. We need go no further than our friends. Is there someone in your life that you are more affectionate with? My guess is one of the major reasons that you’re more affectionate with that person is that they’re affectionate with you in a way that brings out your most affectionate side.

Are there people in your life that you feel funnier around? My guess is that that’s because that person brings a sense of humor, a level of laughter, to you that makes you feel like you want to bring out your funny side. It makes you tell more jokes. It makes you get more playful, more silly, more goofy.

I do a Retreat program every year, and part of the culture of my organization is that we’re huggers. We don’t hug people who don’t want to be hugged, but for the people who are receptive, we’ll hug people on the way in. And there are some people that you can tell on the way in are a little—they’re standoffish, they’ve not been used to that affection in their lives in general. They’ve not given that affection for a long time or maybe ever.

You would think that these people would stay the same over the course of that week, but actually, what happens is, many of them, by the time they leave on the sixth day, are racing up to my staff and hugging them and going, “I wasn’t hugging people at the beginning of this program and I didn’t even think I was a hugger, and it turns out I am!” And they’re hugging people.

Why is that? Because someone came along with an energy that brought that out of them. I don’t want us to think about this as changing people. It’s about creating an energy, having a level of leadership, that actually brings more of who people really are to the table with you. And remember, this is always in the context of you having a standard that says, “I’m going to bring a certain energy, a certain way about me, to people. And if they can’t meet me there, then I’m going to keep moving. I’m not going to keep giving energy to people who don’t reciprocate. But what I’m not going to do is go into my love life as a follower, as a sheep, who is waiting for someone to come along and trigger that in me.”

There are people who are actually capable of being many of the things that we’ll be attracted to, that we simply write off when we’re in follower mode. There are people who will say, “I was texting this person, but they were really boring. I didn’t know what to do because I just felt like it was really boring. They just asked me the same questions all the time. It was always just ‘How are you?’ ‘What are you up to?’ And I was like, oh my God, like, put in some more effort or say something more interesting.”

But in these situations, if we observe ourselves, if we get really self-aware, we’ll often find that we’re not creating an energy with them that makes it more likely they’ll bring that to the table. 

I said in a recent video, there was a line that Shakespeare wrote of his character, Falstaff: “Falstaff was not just a wit, but a cause of wit in others.”

And the reason I love that line is because that, to me, is leadership: You aren’t just something. You create more of that thing in another person. 

So, for example, let’s say you’re texting someone and they keep texting you boring things like: “How are you?” “How’s your day?” and “What are you up to?”

And you’re thinking, “Oh, God, this just doesn’t feel like there’s any tension here. This doesn’t feel like we’re really flirting. It doesn’t feel like anything’s really getting off the ground.”

Maybe instead of just writing that person off, actually say, “Let me see what happens if I bring more of this dynamic to this person.”

So now, when that person says to you, “How are you?” Instead of answering literally, which is what many people do, you do this, and this is my advice to people all the time. If someone says, “How are you?” or “What are you up to?” don’t answer literally. Ask yourself, “What’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to me this week? What’s something I’ve been thinking about today or in the last three days that is an interesting thought?”

In other words, “What are the highlights of my brain this week or of what I’m doing this week?” And when someone says, “How are you?” I don’t have to take that so literally. I have to come back with something that’s true, but something that is a highlight of my week.

Let me give you an example of how you might respond to a “How are you?” or “What are you up to?” message with someone that you worry is just boring you or not putting in a lot of effort but you want to see if you could send a bolt of electricity through it, and see what that would do.

So you might say, “I’m in a coffee shop working right now, or at least I’m trying to. I keep getting distracted by pointless things.” But then you say right after that: “You texting me, however, is a welcome distraction.”

And all of a sudden, you’ve just sent a little bolt of electricity through the exchange. Now, what they choose to do with it, well, that’s up to them. Now it’s time for them to step up. If they can’t do anything with that, or they don’t play on that, or flirt back, then you go, “Okay, maybe this person is just not for me. Maybe they can’t handle that level of fun or playfulness, and therefore, they’re not going to be right for me.”

But what you’ll find in a lot of cases is people who previously weren’t doing it for another reason—maybe they’re shy, maybe they’re just a bit awkward as many of us are in dating . . . we worry about what we can and can’t say, we worry about things being misconstrued . . . maybe someone suddenly feels permission to be more of themselves in that way. And by leading, you actually bring that out of them.

That’s the thing that we have to start being prepared to do. It’s leaving a date and a few hours later, saying, “Still smiling after that date we had.” Or it might be the day after the date you had with someone where you send them a message and you say, “Had so much fun with you last night. Still smiling.”

Now that’s warm, there’s a little vulnerability to it, it’s affectionate, it’s kind of exciting. What does someone do with that message that will tell you what you need to know? That moment is either the red light or the green light: They give me nothing back, they kinda took my message for granted, they gave me a lame response, they gave me an entitled response. Okay. But by giving that energy, what we’re really doing with someone is saying, “Hey, in case you were in any doubt, I find you attractive. I had a great time.”

How many dates is this true of? Two people go on a date, they both like each other, they’re both feeling their way around what’s appropriate, or feeling a bit awkward about it. They actually kind of like each other. But at the end of the date, neither of them really knows whether the other one finds them attractive or not, right? There was no kiss at the end of the date. It seemed like a great date. Those two people are left wondering: “Does this person see me as a friend? Did they just have a nice time with me? Is this a romantic thing?”

 A day later, you get that message. “Oh, they’re attracted to me. Okay.” And now, you bring a different energy yourself.

So these little moments of communication, of not focusing on being rare by being aloof, but focusing on being rare by being awesome, can change the game on what somebody else brings to the table.

By the way, that message I just gave you for the day after the date, I literally asked that question of Matthew AI. For everyone who’s already been using it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And that was a Matthew AI-generated message from things I’ve said before that I had forgotten. When I heard Matthew AI say that message, I was like, “Oh, I did give that message once and I really liked it.”

So, I’m giving it to you today. It’s technically my message, but it’s a message that I had long since forgotten about. And then when Matthew AI said it to me, I was like, “That’s gold.”

If you haven’t already tried Matthew AI, I urge you to go and try it. If you have a question on your mind right now about what something means, what you should say, what you should do, you can go to AskMH.com and ask Matthew AI your question right now.

It is blowing people’s minds. You can literally text Matthew AI your question, you can upload your messages, and ask Matthew AI what things mean or what you should say next. You can literally call Matthew AI and speak your question out loud as if you were on a phone call with me, and you will hear my voice give you my answer.

Anyway, back to the video. I’m sorry, I am just very excited about this right now. Though, by the way, here’s another thing I was thinking of the other day because Audrey and I went to see the new Alien film and I thought: “What text would be a fun text to receive if Audrey and I were dating and she had been to see this movie without me?” And I wrote this text down. Audrey is actually here right now so we’ll see what she thinks of this:

“I just went to see the new Alien film. I could have used your big shoulders to hide in lol.”

AUDREY HUSSEY

That’s good.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

You like it? 

AUDREY HUSSEY

Yeah.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

You’re not just saying that. You really like it?

AUDREY HUSSEY

That’s really good.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

I think it’s really good too. So, this is something everyone can do, but again, how many people out there are going, “Oh, I would never say that” or “someone would have to make me feel really comfortable to say that”?

Then you’re following again. Remember, truly being vulnerable in the negative sense, in the sense that I’m exposed and I could get hurt, only occurs if you keep giving energy to someone who is not giving you that energy back. We should be more of ourselves up front—more playful, more goofy, a little bit more sexy, a little bit more of a wink, a little bit more flirtation, a little more complimentary or sweet or warm. 

That’s not a dangerous level of vulnerability. It’s just a little bit of bravery.

And if you make other people feel brave around you, you will benefit, because you’ll actually get more of other people than they express to everyone else. So you’ll actually increase the pool of people you’re attracted to. You will be the maker of a bigger pool of attractive people for yourself. But more than that, you will become attractive to more people, because it’s really enjoyable to be around someone who makes you feel like a better version of yourself. If I’m funnier around you, if I’m sexier around you, if I’m more flirtatious around you, then there’s every chance that I will want to be around you more. 

So, leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought of this video. I’m excited to read them. Dating does not have to be impossible, but we do have to get out of follower mode and we have to start leading.

Don’t forget, before you leave, to go to askmh.com and give Matthew AI a try. Literally, think of a question that you want to ask right now if I were sitting next to you. You’ve just finished this video, you’re like, “Well, I want to know the answer to this now.” Go and ask that question to Matthew AI right now and get ready to be blown away, because everyone I’ve shown this to is blown away. So askmh.com is the link. Go try it out now and thank you for watching. Be well and love life and I will see you soon.

The post Is Dating Today Really “Impossible”? appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

So you like someone but they’re really bad at texting. Or they ONLY want to text and you can’t get them to have a real conversation when you’re apart. Is there anything you can do to move things forward?

In today’s video, I do something a little different. I break down a TikTok video where a woman gets increasingly frustrated with the “bare minimum” guy she’s dating as she reads through their texts. Then I share some different responses she could send to show more of her standards . . . to finally get out of texting limbo. Be sure to let me know your thoughts once you watch it!

Matthew Hussey: 

Have you experienced someone who gives you so little effort in text messages that you wonder why on earth you are continuing to engage with them, and yet you can’t help but feel this irresistible urge to keep going with them? This is the bare minimum texting, and I want to talk about how you can get out of it today. What does it look like to show up in a way that is actually going to make someone put in more effort? 

Now, I went through a little scroll through TikTok, and I found this video of a woman breaking down with her friends a text exchange that she had with a guy who’s driving her crazy. 

All right. Well, watch it together.

Speaker 1:

So today was giving bare f****** minimum,

“Good morning.” 

“Good morning.” 

I didn’t reply with an emoji, because, like, why would I? 

Speaker 2:

Yeah

Speaker 3:

Why? 

Speaker 1:

“How are we feeling?”

I called him. He doesn’t pick up. I say, “Call me.” He goes, “Hold up baby girl, talking to my man. He’s telling me something.” I’m like, “Okay.” Very dry. 11:58. 

He responds 1:38: “Was a long combo.” 

I didn’t want to respond.

Speaker 2:

Still doesn’t call you back, 

Speaker 1: 

Still doesn’t call me back. So then I said, “Call me.” And then like “You never called me back. It’s so annoying.”  2:44. 

Responds at 8:20, “Nice. What are you doing?” 

What am I doing right now?

Speaker 2: 

Nothing. You’re not responding. 

Speaker 1:

No?

Speaker 2:

It’s done. 

Speaker 1: 

No, let’s respond. 

Matthew Hussey: 

I love the moment at the end where she’s just so forlorn that her friend thinks she shouldn’t send a message back at all. 

I really feel like this video just epitomizes this internal schism we feel where one part of us wants to rage about someone and complain about them and talk about how awful they are, and the other part of us desperately wants to text them and talk about our feelings with them. 

This is a very, very common scenario of—I mean, firstly, have you ever done this? Have you ever sat around with your friends and decoded text messages? I think that’s a very common thing as well, isn’t it? You get a text message, you wonder what it means, what you should say back. You have a tribunal with your friends to try and figure it out. This person wouldn’t even be having this conversation with her friends if he was putting in an amount of effort that was enjoyable to her. It would be a very different conversation, at least. But he’s giving so little. You may remember this kind of guy from one of my previous videos. 

YouTube Video:

This is the man who comes in strong, shows lots of interest, and then disappears. Except he doesn’t quite disappear. He still pops up now and again with an intermittent text at random intervals to make sure that you cannot forget him. 

Matthew Hussey:

The MPI guy is the person who puts in the minimum possible investment to keep your attention while giving as little as they can get away with. So let’s talk about this. I want to break this down step by step because I always find practical examples to be the thing that’s most educational. 

I want to take this woman’s text exchange and look at where she might have done something different than she did.

Speaker 1: 

So today was giving bare f****** minimum.

Matthew Hussey:

She’s really likable, this woman, isn’t she? 

Speaker 1: 

“Good morning.” 

“Good morning.” 

I didn’t reply with an emoji. Because why would I?

Matthew Hussey:

All right, I want to stop there for a moment. The idea of “I didn’t want to reply with an emoji, because why would I?” He has sent, I can’t tell what emoji he has put in his message, but he sent a good morning with an emoji. She, in a sense, is falling into a common trap of, even in response to his dry text, what she sends is a one-word response. 

So again, in that response, there’s like a degree of protectionism, like, I don’t want to show too much, I don’t want to show that I really care. And the challenge of that is, when we’re protecting ourselves by being aloof, we aren’t demanding the things we really want from someone. We’re not communicating our needs. We’re not communicating a standard. In a way we’re actually dropping to the level of their standard, right? We’re giving them permission to keep talking to us like this, because that’s how we’re talking to them, while never voicing our needs about how we want them to talk to us. And we’re not modeling the kind of communication or behavior that we would like to see from them. And that word is really important, modeling, because somewhere along the way, we have to model the kind of energy we want to see from somebody else to see if they can rise to meet us there. 

There was a great thing Shakespeare said of Falstaff: “He said he wasn’t just a wit, but a cause of wit. In others.” Very, very interesting line, “Not just a wit, but a cause of wit in others.” Now think about that. That’s leadership, that we can be something, but by being it, be a cause of it in someone else. By being flirtatious, we can elicit a more flirtatious energy from someone else. By being human, we might be able to cause more humanity in another person. By being authentic, we can cause more authenticity in another person, but that requires leadership. It means not waiting around for someone to be something first, but to model it and to see if they can meet us there. 

So I said I liked when she called him, right? I thought that was proactive. It was bold, it was confident. But when he didn’t pick up, she then sent a message saying, “Call me,” and that then to me, almost veers into the kind of communication that she doesn’t want from him. Sort of terse, lacking in any warmth. So what could she have said instead? She could have said, “Hey, I just tried you and couldn’t get through. Give me a call when you have a moment.” This is modeling the kind of mature communication that she wants to receive from him. 

And by the way, everything I’m doing right now is just warm up, because the main message that is going to make the difference is the one that’s going to come at the end. Let’s keep going with this video for now.

Speaker 1:

He responds 1:38, “It was a long combo.”

Matthew Hussey:

I totally get her annoyance because he’s annoying me as I’m listening to it. Maybe he’s annoying you too. 

Speaker 1:

I didn’t want to respond.

Speaker 2:    

Still didn’t call you back. 

Speaker 1:

Still doesn’t call me back. So then I said, “Call me.” And then like “You never called me back. It’s so annoying.” 

Matthew Hussey:

Now again, when she says, “Call me,” it’s kind of like, you know, barking something someone, but without actually really expressing your standard or that you’re not interested in continuing to text. Obviously, there’s a right way to do that and a wrong way to do that, but simply barking at someone “Call me” again isn’t necessarily the best way to go about it. 

She then says, “You never called me back. It’s so annoying.” Now we know why she’s saying that she’s being— in a way she’s being authentic, like “This is really annoying.” It is really annoying. We’re all annoyed for her watching this. But, when she says that, it actually has the opposite effect of what she wants. She wants him to call her. But by saying “You never called me back, it’s so annoying.” She’s actually just giving him more attention for the thing that she doesn’t want. In a way, she’s rewarding the behavior. 

By saying to a person, “It’s so annoying.” You’re really saying, “I like you so much. I really want you to call me and you’re not calling me, and that’s annoying because I like you and I want you to call me.” It’s just another form of attention for someone who doesn’t deserve the attention. 

And the other thing about this sentence is that, it has no power to it, right? It’s not a standard. Because, in a way, this sentence is saying it’s annoying that you haven’t called me back, but I’m not going to do anything about it, right? It’s a disempowered statement. 

Now, let’s imagine that none of what I’ve suggested happened and that the communication had kept going exactly the way it did. Let’s find another moment where she could have intercepted this pattern. And by the way, that’s the beauty of communication. There’s so many different moments that even if we’ve been stuck in a certain way of being with someone for a long time, we can take the off-ramp and do something different. 

By the way, before we continue, if you enjoy this style of advice from me, if you’re thinking, “God, I would love to be in the hot seat getting very specific advice for my scenario, getting a play-by-play for what I’m going through right now”, go and try Matthew AI, we just released this last week, people’s minds have already been blown by it. People have given it thousands and thousands of specific scenarios and got their questions answered. So go over to AskMH.com you can literally call it and speak your question, you don’t even have to type it, and you will hear my voice giving you an answer. You can give as much detail as you want. You can be as specific as you want. It will take all of your situation into account before giving you an answer. And it’s been trained on 17 years of my content so that what you hear is not some generic internet answer. It’s my answer, exclusively from me and my content. 

So go check it out. AskMH.com is the link. Ask your question for free right now. I can’t wait to hear your feedback, because, like I said, this has been blowing people’s minds, and I can’t wait to hear the same from you. 

All right, back to this text exchange. 

Speaker 1:

“Nice. What are you doing?” 

What am I doing right now?

Speaker 2:

Nothing. You’re not responding. 

Speaker 1:

No?

Speaker 2: 

It’s done.

Matthew Hussey:

You even see there the encouragement from her friends to say, “Do nothing.” You know, “You just don’t respond,” which is another version of having one’s guard up and wanting to look aloof instead of actually communicating. 

So again, all this does is enable his behavior, because when he comes back three days from now or the next day and texts her, and she texts back, what she’s really communicated is “I’m just going to disappear on you at random moments. Not say why, not say that your behavior isn’t enough for me, but instead, just look like I’m indifferent and I don’t care that much, even though, right now, I have your text messages projected onto a screen in front of all my friends.” 

Now let’s say that she does send that last message that she’s around if he wants to give her a call, and it would be great to catch up properly. And let’s say that he says, in reply, “I’m out with my boys tonight. How’s your evening?” So he still dismisses the phone call, albeit, because he’s busy. We don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that when she replies to that, she shows that she’s not interested in carrying on this text exchange. 

So she would then say, “No worries. Have a great evening. Catch up tomorrow when you can talk.” So she’s not entertaining his question, not out of rudeness, but out of the fact that she’s given him different opportunities to get on the phone and have a conversation with her today, he’s made it impossible at every turn. And so now she’s not being cold, she’s saying, “Have a great night, but let’s catch up tomorrow when you can call,” which is also a standard, right? I’m basically saying, don’t contact me tomorrow, unless it’s a phone call. 

Now let’s put a cap on this, because I know what you’re thinking. What if he sends her a text tomorrow instead of calling? What if he reaches out to her and says, “How’s your day going?” Right? Which starts to feel like a form of gaslighting that I keep saying the same thing, and you keep acting like I haven’t said it like you have amnesia for me asking for a phone call. Here’s what she could say. 

And so far, what we’ve been communicating with these amended texts is an indirect standard. Here’s where you can get more direct. And I love this message that I’m about to give you. I want you to be brave enough to send it if you ever find yourself in a situation like this. 

Here’s what you write. “I don’t know if I’m going crazy, but it feels like way too much effort to get you on the phone for a real conversation. I don’t mind texting in general, but these short exchanges just aren’t all that rewarding. Lol, are you only interested in texting?” 

I like the “I don’t know if I’m going crazy,” because it allows you to kind of almost point out that, you know, maybe you’ve judged him too soon. Maybe there is a legitimate reason why, yesterday, last night, and the first half of today, he couldn’t do the simple thing that you had mentioned and kept pretending like you weren’t mentioning it. So I like that start. 

I love the idea of, “It feels like way too much effort to get you on the phone for a real conversation,” because what you’re really saying there is “This isn’t sustainable. I’m not going to keep putting in this amount of effort.  I’m not going to ignore the elephant in the room, that I’m trying harder than you are to have a real conversation.” I’m pointing out that I am trying to get a phone call with you, and that it’s too much work, so I’m not going to keep putting in that much effort. 

And then you’re saying that you don’t mind texting in general, it’s not that you have a problem with texting. It’s simply that this style of communication, especially his style, which is really dry and short, is not rewarding. It might be different if he was sending amazing text messages, which he’s not, but what she’s getting isn’t rewarding, and she’s pointing that out, “Hey, I have a higher standard for being entertained in conversation than this. This isn’t enough for me. This isn’t worth my time. Are you only interested in texting?” 

So this is a very empowered response. It gives someone nowhere to go. They can’t exactly keep texting you and pretend that it’s all okay after you’ve said that, can they? 

Now I want to point out that I don’t know this person’s situation. I don’t know the conversations that have preceded this text exchange. So while I’m having some fun talking about what she could have said, for all I know, this lovely human being had a massive fight with this person right before this text exchange, and that’s why she’s being so short in her replies. But the principles of this video still stand. 

And, you know, it’s always fun when I get more context, I’m often like, “Ah, well, if that’s the case, then I would send this instead,” which, you know if you’ve ever been coached by me or worked with me in my love life club, you know that more context helps. It’s why, by the way, Matthew AI is such a cool thing for you to be able to use, because you can give it all the context in the world. You can tell Matthew AI everything that you’re going through, how the last exchange was, that you want it to be a bit more like this, or to take account of that, and it will help you figure out what something means, what you can do about it and what you can say next. 

So before you leave this video, do me a favor. Go over to AskMH.com and ask your question of Matthew AI. You can even if you want to do a version of what we just did in this video. Upload your text exchange or your conversation, and it will help you understand it and know what to say and do next. 

So go check it out. AskMH.com  is that link again. And I can’t wait to know what you think. I’ll see you next week. Be well, love life, and thanks for watching you.

The post How to Respond to “Bare Minimum” Texting appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

Ever been dating someone who suddenly goes cold when they go on a trip out of town? What happened? And how should you respond to this behavior?

Today’s video is all about what happens when we invest too soon, and how someone’s “radio silence” can trigger our insecurity. I even provide two text messages you can send: one for if they reach back out to you when they’re back in town, and one for when they don’t.

BTW, don’t miss our HUGE announcement in this one (it’s right after Audrey’s cheeky cameo). ;) You’ll be one of the first people in the world to try this thing out . . . it’s crazy!

MATTHEW HUSSEY

One of the most common things that happen to us in early dating is we can find ourselves getting over-invested and too obsessed with this person we have started seeing, especially if we find them attractive, especially if they like us back, all of a sudden, our mind explodes with the possibilities of what this could become. All of this makes it particularly hurtful and anxiety-inducing when the person we feel this way about starts going cold after things were going so well.

In this video, I’m going to give you some principles for what you can do if you feel you’ve become over-invested to the point of overthinking and anxiety and two text messages you can send if someone has gone cold to re-engage.

If you’re new to this channel, I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. I’m also the author of the brand new book, the New York Times bestselling Love Life, and for the last 17 years of my life, I’ve been helping people find the love they want, heal from the heartbreak of the past, and discover the confidence they have always wanted to have.

Now, before I get into the content of this video, I want to ask you something a little unique today. I want you to think of a question that if I was sat beside you right now, you would be dying to ask me for your love life. What dating question would you ask me about your current situation if you could ask me anything in the world? Hold that in your mind because at the end of this video, believe it or not, I am going to give you a way that you can actually ask me that question and I will give you a personalized answer designed just for you.

So, I want to talk about the scenario that inspired this video. One of my Love Life members came to me and asked a question about a guy that she had been seeing for about three to four weeks, and then he went on a trip with his kids for about two weeks. Now, things have been going well, the communication had been good, she was having a great time with him, but once he left, she sparsely heard from him. She got a couple of messages when he sent some pictures of the trip on a Saturday, but then she didn’t hear from him for another five days. She sent a message saying, “Thinking of you.” He sent a heart back but that was it. And it was at this point she came to me and said, “I really don’t feel comfortable messaging him anymore. It felt like we were in a great spot but now, he’s pretty unresponsive save for a couple of pictures he sent me. And I’m a bit embarrassed that I said thinking of you and all he sent back was a heart, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

So, let’s start with the question so many people want to know to begin with. What does it mean? When he was trying hard in the beginning and now, on this trip, he’s no longer very responsive. What does that mean?

Look. The truth is we don’t know what it means without being in his head. But I’ll tell you what it means for sure. It means that he is not intent on making sure that the connection is sustained or progressed while he is away. That’s it. And the truth is, we don’t need to know any more than that. That’s all the information that’s necessary for her to know what to do about it.

So, what should she do about it?

Well, let’s start with the fact that from the way that she was asking me this question, it had been very clear that she had become over-invested and that she was now over-thinking and over-analyzing, and that was causing her a lot of pain. The over-investing is what has to stop now.

And by the way, this situation is hard because you have to hold two truths simultaneously. One truth that, this person shouldn’t matter to me this much right now, but the other truth that, I also don’t want to kill the romantic in me that can see potential for something, and can still come alive if this person starts showing the right things. That’s tricky. It’s far easier to either go all in and fall head over heels for someone, or if you’re feeling scared because they’re backing off to say, “I’m done with them. They are dead to me.”

Those two extremes are easier than living in this very nuanced middle point. But we can start to live in that more measured place if we have some rational thinking around it.

The starting point for this is to stop valuing someone based on how we feel about them and start valuing them based on how they make us feel. There’s a subtle but profound difference between those two things. How she felt about him was that he was amazing, attractive, she really liked him. She felt all of these wonderful things towards him. But how he made her feel in this moment was unwanted, anxious, and unsure of where she stood with him. That is the most important part, not how she feels about him. Clearly, she’s not getting what she needs from him in this moment. She’s not getting enough communication.

Now, at this stage, it’s still very early on. They’ve only known each other for a few weeks. So, as much as, if you know me, you know that I love talking about standards, this is probably not the right moment to have a standards conversation because if she sends a text about what her standard is at this stage with someone she’s only been seeing for a few weeks, he might think, “This is a little bit premature and over the top for where we actually are.” At this point, only a few weeks in, he may still be deciding how much he likes this person and how much he wants to invest. So, this isn’t really a “This guy sucks” conversation. It’s a, “She’s made him way too important at this stage” conversation.

So, the question is, how do you start making someone less important?

Well, we can start by giving more focus back to other areas of our lives, things that matter to us whether it’s our friends, our hobbies, the things we like to do. We take the light of our attention and we point it in a different direction.

And by the way, this can mean opening yourself up to dating other people. It’s not like his behavior suggests that he wants to take her off the market and make sure she knows that he’s the only person he wants her to see. His behavior suggests that right now, he’s not in that place. So, if she wants to date other people, that’s okay. That doesn’t mean she has to. But at the very least, the attention has to come off of this person. The expectation has to come off of this person.

On top of doing that, what’s key is when he does get home, she shouldn’t jump to see him at the first opportunity or even now be planning to be free for the weekend that he’s home just in case he asks her to do something. If they do ask you to do something, they will have to wait if you’ve made other plans. If they do start speaking to you, don’t suddenly pick up right where you left off before they went on vacation. That’s not appropriate. You’ve lost some momentum.

In some sense, this person should have to resell themselves a little bit to you, not in any sense where you’re very cold and playing hard to get. That’s a game. But in the sense that there genuinely has been a loss of closeness during the time that they’ve been away. That’s actually important to be authentic with when you’re communicating with them. If you were very physical with them the last time you saw them but you’ve barely spoken since they left, it’s not necessarily appropriate or authentic to go straight back to being that physically close to them. Be authentic to the level of closeness that you actually feel. Don’t let your excitement take you right back to picking up where you left off when they were communicating well.

Okay. So, let’s get on to the part that people always want to ask. So, all that being said, we now have a sense of what it definitely means that he’s not reaching out. We have a sense of what to do about it. But now, you may be asking, what should she say?

Well, I’ve put together two distinct messages for you that you can text, one for the situation where he gets home and reaches out, and the second for the situation where he gets home and doesn’t reach out.

Let’s say he gets home and within a couple of days, he sends you a text that says, “Hey, I want to see you. Are you free this week?”

Now, a common mistake when we get a message like this is to think, “Yes, they’re back, and they’re thinking of me.”

We get excited, we get a rush of blood to the head, and in that excitement, we send them a message back that says something like, “Oh my God, hi. Yes, I’d love to see you. I can’t wait to hear all about your trip.”

But that’s an inappropriate level of excitement for someone who’s not reached out to you almost at all in the last two weeks while they’ve been away. It’s fine to hope that they had a nice trip, but to suddenly gush and ask them for all of the details just because they sent a message to you on their terms right now is too much.

Instead, here’s what you might say. “Hey, it’s nice to hear from you. Did you have a nice vacation? It would be great to catch up but I’m not free this week. How about next Thursday?”

This message is measured, there’s a little bit of a tongue-in-cheekness about saying “It’s nice to hear from you after having not heard from you.” And it shows that you weren’t waiting around, keeping your week open to see them. You have made plans and yes, you’ll see them, but you’ll see them after you engage with those plans. And if you haven’t got any plans this week, then you weren’t listening to the things I said earlier in this video.

Now, I was going to give you another text for if he came home and didn’t reach out, what could you text him? But I don’t even really want to give you that message because why would you want to text someone who has not been proactive the entire time that they have been away?

AUDREY HUSSEY

Give them a text.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

I’m sorry, what?

AUDREY HUSSEY

Give them a text.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

You can’t just come in here and compel me to give everyone a text that I don’t want to give. No. All right. What are you doing? Okay. That is not a magic wand. That’s a wooden spoon.

AUDREY HUSSEY

Oh, stupid. I was holding it the wrong way around.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Now, the second text that I am super excited to tell you about is the one that you can send when he comes back and doesn’t text you first. This isn’t a text that has to be revolutionary. It’s just something that has to be, once again, measured, but also, it can be a little playful. So, you could send, “Look what I just saw.” And then you can add an in-joke, like for example, if you’d had a joke about some penguins at some point, then you can send a picture of a hilarious penguin that you saw. And then you follow that message up immediately with, “We haven’t seen each other in ages. When are we catching up?”

What I like about this is it’s playful, it’s chill, it’s a little bit assumptive. It points out the elephant in the room, which is that we haven’t seen each other in ages. But it also is very confident and bold about how it handles that. When are we catching up? So, this is a nice way for you to be proactive but in a way that maintains your value in this situation.

Now, it’s kind of fun making this video because in some sense, even though my work has evolved massively, and those of you that have followed me for a long time, you will have seen that we’ve evolved into mental health content, content that’s about deep emotional patterns, trauma, dealing with abusive relationships and how to heal from them. The DNA that I started with on this YouTube channel was really helping people with very specific scenarios in their dating lives that related to them, scenarios where what people wanted to ask me were always some version of what does it mean, what do I do, and what should I say or text. And I’ve enjoyed making videos for all different scenarios, scenarios like the one we’re talking about today where I help people with what to do when someone has gone cold.

YOUTUBE VIDEO

“Now, this is where my friend came to me. So, I said, give me the phone.”

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Or the scenario of what to do when someone flakes on a date. Videos on decoding what it means on a date when a person said certain things.

YOUTUBE VIDEO

“How does a girl like you stay single?”

“Look. I’m attracted to you but I’m insecure. So, do other guys like you or is there something wrong with you I should know about?”

MATTHEW HUSSEY

And videos on what to say when someone tells you they’re not ready for a relationship.

But the inherent challenge of my life in making all of these videos has been two things. One, context. Whenever I make a video like the one I’ve done today, there’s always someone watching who says, “The thing is, Matt, in my situation, it’s slightly different. We haven’t known each other and been dating for four weeks. We’ve been seeing each other for four months.”

People have contexts and details that change the answer I would give. And that person is left wishing that they had a video that was specific for their very personal situation. And the other challenge is that even when I give someone something they can do or say as a next step, there’s always another step after that.

Every dating scenario is an evolving story. It’s not static. So, when we take an action, even when that action is positive and different from the action we have been taking, it gives rise to a new scenario, to a different stage in the story. And then we have questions about that.

So, the bottom line is that as much as I have worked around the clock for 17 years doing this for you, I’m never able to cater to every specific scenario there is, and to answer every question in your evolving story with someone.

Now, this all may seem like a strange thing for me to be saying, given that at the beginning of this video, I asked you to come up with a very specific question you wanted to ask me that I was going to answer. But it’s true and I’m so excited to tell you about this.

We have been developing in the background a revolutionary new tool that allows you to ask me a question and get my answer. It is mind-blowing. And the only people who have had access to this tool so far are my Love Life Club members. So, rather than tell you about this, I want to just show you what I showed them.

This is a demo that me and my wife, Audrey, did for them.

DEMO VIDEO

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Literally, my voice answering the question and your specific, nuanced question. Believe it or not, that’s what we have. And it is called Matthew AI. Guys, you’re genuinely not going to believe this.

AUDREY HUSSEY

Should I ask it a question?

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Yes.

AUDREY HUSSEY

Okay.

MATTHEW AI

Hey, it’s Matthew AI. How can I help?

AUDREY HUSSEY

Hi, Matthew AI. I’m in the bathroom on a date and he’s just asked me to come home with him. But this is only date 2 and I feel a little bit uncomfortable about it. But I also don’t want to turn him off by not going home with him and for him to think that I’m not interested. What should I say and how should I handle this situation?

MATTHEW AI

It’s completely okay to feel uncomfortable about going to someone’s home so early in the dating process. It’s important to listen to your feelings and communicate them honestly. You can express your interest in him and suggest an alternative that makes you feel more comfortable. For example, you might say, “I’m really enjoying getting to know you and I’m interested in spending more time together. But I’m not ready to go to your house just yet. Can we plan another date soon?” This way, you’re clearly communicating your boundaries while also showing your interest in continuing to get to know him. 

Remember, setting boundaries is a healthy part of any relationship and how someone responds to your boundaries can tell you a lot about their respect for their feelings. It’s also a good opportunity to see how he handles your comfort levels which is crucial for building a trusting relationship.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

So, okay. I’m going to go and do that right now. When I get home is there a message I could send by text tomorrow? Like, what would be an example text that I could send tomorrow?

MATTHEW AI

Absolutely, sending a follow-up text that maintains a fun and enjoyable tone is a great way to keep the positive momentum going. You could say something like, “I had a really great time with you last night. Your stories were hilarious. Let’s plan another fun outing soon.” This keeps the communication light, expresses your enjoyment, and opens the door for future plans. It’s always good to be genuine and let them know specifically what you enjoyed about your time together.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

What if I want to be a little, you know, just a hint of sexiness but not too much? I don’t want it to be too sexual but I just want to create a bit of fun, sexual tension.

MATTHEW AI

Absolutely, creating just a hint of fun, sexual tension without going overboard is all about subtlety and playfulness. You might consider sending a text like, “Last night was a blast. Still smiling.” This message is light and flirty, suggesting you’re still thinking about the night in a positive and somewhat playful way. It invites curiosity and a bit of mystery which can gently hint at  a sexual tension you’re looking to create.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Well, that is crazy.

AUDREY HUSSEY

That’s really fun.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

That’s a good message.

AUDREY HUSSEY

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Still smiling. It’s so simple.

AUDREY HUSSEY

Still smiling.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

But it works.

So, here’s the incredible thing. So far, what you just saw, Matthew AI, has only ever been available to my Love Life members. I released it to them a few months ago. Since then, they have asked it over 200,000 questions. So, they are using it all the time. But it’s never been available to the wider world. In fact, the wider world didn’t even know it existed. But now, you do, and it’s your turn.

I want you to go and ask Matthew AI your question. I want it to help you now. There is a link I want you to go to right now. It is AskMHFirst.com and that gets you on an early bird list, so that when this launches on September the 4th, you are the first to have access and ask your question. Or if you’re watching this and it’s already September the 4th, then you’ll just be able to get access and use it immediately.

Think of it as me being your personal wingman in your pocket any time you need, helping you understand what something means, what you can do about it, and even what you can say. You can even upload your text conversations and it will help you decode them and understand what to do next, what to send next. It can give you exact responses or ways of having conversations.

So, it’s that practical. It’s crazy. It’s going to blow your mind. Go check it out. I can’t wait to hear what you think. I wish I had footage of you reacting to it in real time because it really is going to blow you away what this thing can do.

I can’t be everywhere at once and well, for the first time, this actually gives me a shot at doing that and gives you a unique advantage by having access to me whenever you need me.

Check it out, AskMHFirst.com is the link. I will see you there.

AUDREY HUSSEY

It’s also just amazing to have such a cooperative and obedient version of Matthew who does what you ask of him. It’s a dream.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

How did you get there?

AUDREY HUSSEY

I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Matthew AI.

The post Feel Them Pulling Away? DO NOT Chase; Do THIS Instead! appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

“I’m always the person they date right before they find the person they marry . . .”

Sound familiar? It can be shocking to find out that someone who always held out on commitment suddenly decides they want marriage and children . . . but only after you break up. 

At that point, you might be thinking: “Oh, so they were able to change . . . they just didn’t want to change with me.” So how can you recover from this feeling of not being chosen? In today’s video, I share 3 things you MUST know when you find yourself in this situation and can’t move on.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

This is one of the most painful experiences you can go through in your love life. So, leave me a comment if this has happened to you.

You and another person ended up parting ways because of changes that they couldn’t make. And then once you were broken up, they ended up making those changes for someone else. The pain of this is profound and exquisite. When we were with that person, we consoled ourselves on the idea that, “Well, we just wanted different things,” or “This person is incapable of being what I need.” But then that one comfort that we have, the one thing that allowed us to sleep at night once we had left that person or been left by that person disintegrates in the light of this new information that they were capable of that change and that they did make that change. They just did it for someone else. And this cuts to the core of our self-worth because suddenly, the attention gets turned on us. What’s wrong with me?

I am Matthew Hussey. Welcome back to the channel or welcome to the channel for everyone who is new. I’m the author of the New York Times bestselling new book, Love Life. And for the last 17 years, I’ve been doing what it says on this book—helping people to raise their standards, find their person, and live happily no matter what.

So, let’s talk about this phenomenon—they changed. They just didn’t change for us. And I want to talk about it using a question that came to me from one of my Love Life members in one of our live sessions. So, I’ll read this question and then we will get into the answer in three parts.

By the way, if you’re enjoying me answering these Love Life member questions in these videos, but you want to go a step further and get coached by me yourself, the Love Life Club is where I do that. As part of Love Life, you essentially make me your coach in your love life for the next year. We have masterclasses, live Q&As, meet-ups, an entire suite of incredible resources that are designed to holistically help you make the progress you’re seeking this year in your love life. So, go to LoveLifeClub.com if you’d like to learn more, and I hope you become a part of the community with us.

Okay. So, this question. This is from Susan who says, “What do I do when I have always told myself that this man won’t change and that I have to accept that he doesn’t want to commit? But after he ended contact with me, he did change. He got into a relationship even though he always said he didn’t want one anymore. And on top of that, he had a baby with his new girlfriend just a few months ago. I find it very hard not to think that he could change, just not with me. I would be very happy to get some ideas on how to deal with this.”

So, this is the hard part, isn’t it? Those horrible thoughts of, “I could have said something different, it turns out. Maybe I could have done something different. What did they say and do that I failed to say and do?” Or, “What do they have that I don’t?”

These issues cut to the core of our self-worth. They make us doubt our fundamental value and they can erode our self-esteem going into the next relationship we find.

So, there are three things I want to say about this today. The first is we have to be very careful of not assuming that the change is real. 

It’s very easy from a distance to watch someone in what seems like them flourishing in a new relationship. Often, the only information we have from that is what friends tell us or mutual contacts, or what we see them posting online. And we get that snapshot and it triggers us in all of the worst ways. But that snapshot, that little piece of gossip that we heard, or that picture that we just saw of them with their new partner on Instagram is not a true reflection of their relationship. Remind yourself. You know no more about their relationship than anyone else did about yours the week before you broke up. No one knows what’s going on behind the curtain of a relationship.

So, don’t assume that change just came easily to this person. What we may be seeing is a superficial form of progress. We might be seeing someone racing ahead. But it’s likely that their fundamental nature hasn’t changed. The things that bothered us haven’t necessarily changed. It’s likely that they carry those into the next relationship. And that whatever deeper work they need to do is still very much a work in progress.

The way I think about this is don’t measure too quickly. And in a sense, we shouldn’t be measuring at all because it’s not our life anymore. You have to look at it like this. Their story is no more relevant to yours now than the story of a random barista in a coffee shop in a town that you’ll never visit.

But what if what they’ve now found is great? What if they do stand the test of time? Let’s be very clear. We don’t want to sit around wasting our lives, hoping that someone else’s relationship fails because they hurt us. That would be a tremendous waste of our life. And it would be a really internally toxic mindset to have toward somebody else. So, what if they succeed? What if that relationship they found actually turns out to be a lifelong relationship that works? That’s what brings me on to point number two.

If the change they’ve made was real and if the relationship does last, then don’t sweat it because they weren’t your audience. This person wasn’t for you. They were for someone else. Your audience is still out there. Instead of getting caught up in, “But that must mean someone is better than me,” recognize it’s not about who’s better. It’s about who your voice lands with.

I think about that all the time when I make YouTube videos. Someone might pass by my video, they might watch it for five minutes, and go, “Not for me.” And they might find another coach, another speaker, who they really resonate with. Does that make that person better than me? Not necessarily. It might just be that there’s something about that other person’s voice that really lands with that person. For reasons I may never know and probably won’t. And that’s okay.

My job is to refine my voice, to lean into my strengths, and make what I do as good as it can possibly be, and as true to me as it can possibly be. Because if I do that, what people will experience when they watch my videos is an essence that can’t just be replaced by someone else.

So, when they go and experience a different video, that video might be more right for them, it might land better on their ear, they might resonate more with that person, that personality, or the things they’re saying, but the audience that remains, the audience that does stick on my content, they’re the ones who get it, they’re the ones who resonate with me, and that’s my audience. Those are my people. That’s the thing to focus on. Be the you-est you. Don’t worry about what anyone else is doing or thinking that they’re better than you. Realize that your job is to find your audience. And the best way to do that is to lean into all of your own strengths.

Now, what if you’re listening to this and you can’t shake the thought that all of this sounds nice but in reality, it’s not just that in this particular case someone didn’t change for you but they did change for somebody else because they found something that for whatever reason, it’s not personal to me, it was more right for them, and I am still going to go on to find my audience. What if, when you look back through your life, you feel like this is always true for you? What if you feel like every time you’re the person before the person that they changed for? And I hear that sometimes. “I’m always the person before the person they marry.” What do you do when you feel like the story of your life is that people don’t change for you, they change for other people?

Well, that’s when we come on to point number three.

Is there something we are doing in our love lives, a way that we’re showing up with other people, that is distracting them from our intrinsic value?

What do I mean by this? I believe that we all have this incredible value and that value wants to emerge. And one of our big jobs is to get out of the way so that other people can experience how amazing we are. They can feel that value. But we all, at some point or another, have had some kind of behavior that has distracted people from our true value. It’s made us frustrating to be around, it’s made us abrasive, it’s made us difficult to have a relationship with. It’s gotten the way of the kind of connection we create on our best day.

And I think it’s worth exploring for all of us what that thing is because that thing can consistently get in the way of us finding love, if we’re not careful, for our entire lives. And a lot of people walk around completely unconscious when it comes to whatever that fatal flaw is. They never explore it. And that’s understandable. It’s terrifying to explore it. “What could I be doing that is contributing to why consistently in my life, people are not choosing me?” It’s an extremely brave question to ask. And I commend anybody who is able to ask this question.

I just did a getaway with the smallest group of people that I work with, my Club 320 Program. And one of the people in the room asked me a question. She said, “Matthew, you’ve been working with me for the last eight months. What do you see as my biggest weakness?” And then I thought my God, is that a brave question, to ask that, and truly sit and be present with the answer? And I said to her at the time, I said, “Do you really want me to be honest?” And she said, “Yes.” And I was so bawled over by how she sat there, absorbing what I was saying, which by the way, doesn’t mean I’m right. I might not be totally right. I might be wrong. She might choose to disregard what I’m saying, but she listened. And that is so powerful.

And one of the things that I’d love to encourage all of us to do is to be inspired by that because I was, and to say, “Who do I trust that I could ask for some genuine feedback, so that I could learn what behavior, what thing I’m doing, what way that I’m showing up, is distracting people from my value?” Value that is already there, by the way. Who could you go to and ask that question? Who could you ask, “Hey, I know you care about me. The most caring thing you can do for me right now is answer this question honestly. Is there a way you see me showing up that you think could be hurting me in my love life or the way that people are with me or whether they choose me?” And say to them, “I want you to be really brave in the way that you answer me because I know you may want to sugarcoat it or you may just want to tell me what I want to hear. You may think I’m going to get mad at you if you’re really honest, but I actually want you to be really honest.”

And you don’t just have to ask this of one person. You could ask this of three people really close to you or people who really know you. They don’t have to be super close but they have to be close enough to know you, your habits, your behaviors, and certainly, the way you show up with people romantically. When they speak, listen to what they say. Really be brave in taking in what they say and look at whether there’s a pattern in the things they’re saying because that pattern might be the information that you need to address that fatal flaw. And when we discover it, rather than thinking, “Oh, my God. This is awful. I have something that is holding me back. I have something I’m doing that’s screwing everything up,” we can actually say, “You know what? This is really positive. I’m learning something that can actually make a difference. I’m being conscious now about the thing that’s getting in my way, that’s been distracting people from how great I really am.”

And by the way, you’re not alone in this because this is a question I, in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be asking of a small group of people that I trust in my life. What do you think is the biggest weakness that holds me back? And I’m not going to like the answers, I’m sure, but they’re going to be so valuable to me, and they are the key to me becoming an even better version of myself a year from now than I am today.

I guarantee. None of the things I hear will be easy for me to work on. They’ll probably be hard because when get these things pointed out, what you realize is, “Oh, this is deep stuff for me. This is not easy to change.” But that’s okay. We can start doing the work of giving focus to those areas.

And if you’ve got this far in the video, I commend you because this is not some frivolous video on, “They changed for someone else, not for you. Well, screw them. They were the wrong person for you. You deserve better.” This isn’t that video. If you’ve made it this far, then you really value real progress and the things that could really help you in your love life.

Remember, don’t assume that the changes they’ve made are real, that the relationship will last, or that it’s everything you think it is behind the scenes. If it does last and it is real, then you know for sure that the person wasn’t right for you because you weren’t their audience. But guess what? If you lean into your voice, you will find your audience and that will be the relationship that sticks for you.

And lastly, never be afraid to explore the things that could be holding you back. If you do that, you’ll become so powerful because it’s what 99% of people are never brave enough to do but we are.

What this video is about, at its essence, is being the hero of your own story. As long as we’re focused on an ex or on the person that our ex is now dating, we’re making someone else the hero of our story. To quote the old man in the movie, The Holiday, we are making somebody else the leading role in a movie that is about us. So, I want to put the focus back on us. No one can stop us from having an amazing life. No one can stop us from experiencing amazing love because it’s all up to us. We can be the ones who go out there and create more opportunities, who create so many opportunities and so many wonderful things in our lives that we never look back on that thing that we one day thought we could never lose. We’ll realize we could lose it because we are the authors of our own happiness.

And for those of you who are joining me in a couple of weeks in Florida on my Retreat, I can’t wait to walk you through six days of everything I know about how to do this. And for anyone who still wants to join, there is still time. But we are right there now at the finish line. So, if you want to get on board before it’s too late, go to MHRetreat.com. I hope to see you there. I really, really do. And well, I look forward to seeing you, all of you, in next week’s video. Be well and love life.

The post “Turns Out He COULD Change…Just Not for Me…” appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

Do you have the heartbreaking feeling that you lost “The One”? Maybe you’re haunted by a mistake you made, or something you said, or just a feeling that you could have done something differently to save the relationship.

Here’s the good news: There is a path out of this pain. In today’s video, I’ll show you 5 ways you can recover after (what you feel was) a love life mistake. Whether you’re mentally beating yourself up or just can’t seem to move on, I’ll show you how to feel better instantly, and what you can do when you see that person again.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Do you feel like recently, you made a mistake, or in a past dating situation or relationship, you made a mistake that screwed things up, and you can’t get it off of your mind because there is this feeling you have that the relationship could have been so great. This maybe could have even been your person and that this mistake, whatever it was you did, really messed it up, and you’ve been ruminating over that, beating yourself up for it, wondering, “Is there anything I can do to remedy the situation? Is there anything I can do still to get that person back?”

So today, I’m going to give you five keys to feeling better if you are beating yourself up for a mistake you made that’s cost you, especially in the realm of dating. And the fifth point is going to be about what you can do if this has happened. Is there a way to re-engage someone, and if you do re-engage them, and I’ll give you a specific text that you can send that for, what do you do when you actually see them?

So, that’s Point number 5, but it’s very important that you watch Points 1 to 4 because those are going to help you feel better instantly.

And by the way, I’m going to illustrate this video with a question around this subject that came in from one of my Love Life members. Before we get into that question, I have something free that can help you if you’re out there looking for love right now, wanting to meet someone. It is a guide I created around practical things that you can say to spark up a conversation and connect with someone new. It’s called Spark and Connect. Go over to WhatToSayNext.com to download that guide for free right now. If you’re out there dating right now, if you’re looking for love, this is a very easy and quick way to start getting more results.

And if you like this video, don’t forget to like it, subscribe to the channel, so that you never miss a video, and don’t forget to hit the notification bell. I get so many comments from people saying, “Oh, my god. I wish I got this video three weeks ago. It would have saved me from making this mistake or doing this wrong.” To make sure that never happens to you, hit that notification bell, and when I release a video, you will get it immediately.

Okay, so I want to read you this question from one of my members. To keep things anonymous, I will call her Dana, and Dana says, “I was dating this amazing guy for about four months. And unfortunately, I pushed him away with my insecurities. I’m aware of my attachment style and issues, and I’ve done a lot of work in that department, including therapy and studying relationships. Everything was smooth and consistent until we were about to get into an actual relationship. For some reason, I freaked out and instead of expressing my concerns and communicating in a healthy way, I just lashed out and bombarded him with assumptions. I’m 99% sure these were just my fears talking. I ended things and blocked him without even giving him a chance to reply. I know that that was a huge red flag to him and extremely immature. It even feels irreparable.”

“That’s not me. I had this one moment and it ruined everything. The next day, I approached him, expressed how sorry I was, and tried a healthy communication I should have done initially. Needless to say, he didn’t want to hear from me as any healthy and mature person would.”

“Matthew always teaches us not to waste time on the wrong person. And that’s exactly what he’s doing. But I’m the one on the other end and I want to repair and do better. So, my question is, can this be fixed? How do I get the possibility to repair things with him?”

I have a lot to say about this. Firstly, if you can relate to this in any way, if you feel like you screwed something up, and to Dana, who wrote this, let’s all just start by taking a deep breath. And as you do that, know that all the opportunities you could ever need in your life are still ahead of you. When we go through a situation like this, it gets to the heart of our anxieties and triggers a lot of self-loathing. “I could have had a shot with this person. I did have a shot with this person and I screwed it up.” And then our brain goes to the story of, “And because I screwed it up, I’m never going to find anything that great again. And it’s all my fault.”

I want you to notice some of the language before I even get into the five keys. She says, “I ended things and blocked him without even giving him a chance to reply. I know that was a huge red flag and extremely immature.”

I’m all for ownership and I think it’s really important. I love the fact that Dana was owning what she sees as a mistake but there’s very extreme language in this and it’s very down on herself.

“That’s not me. I had this one moment and it ruined everything.” Now, comes the catastrophizing. “I had this one moment and then I ruined everything.”

She says, “Needless to say, he didn’t want to hear from me as any healthy and mature person would.”

So now, it’s again, this person is being painted as this paragon of maturity and health and she is the extremely immature one who messed it all up. And, “I don’t even blame him for not wanting to talk to me anymore, for wanting to cut me off.” There’s a real self-admonishment that’s happening here and she goes on to say, “Matthew always teaches us not to waste time on the wrong person and that’s what he is doing.” In other words, “I’m the wrong person and he’s only following Matthew’s advice to not give any time and attention to the wrong person which is me because at this moment, I made that mistake.”

So, I just want you to notice all of this and notice if in looking at any of this language, you maybe see yourself and some of the things that you tell yourself in moments like this, some of the ways that you speak to yourself the extremes, the catastrophizing, the very vicious language towards yourself, and the way you paint yourself.

Let’s dive into these five things that can help. 

Number one, instead of shaming yourself for the mistake, give love to the part of you that created the mistake.

This is a moment where we deserve to give ourselves self-compassion. We made a mistake. Who hasn’t? Who hasn’t been in a relationship or been dating someone and said or done something that they regret in a moment of jealousy, insecurity, in a moment of anxiety, in a moment where our past entered our mind and merged with the present we accused someone of something that they hadn’t done? These moments can produce immense amounts of shame. But we deserve self-compassion because we’re only doing what people do. We mess up.

So, instead of making this so personal towards yourself, recognize that these kinds of mistakes are something that everyone makes at some point.

I would argue that if you haven’t made that mistake then, then you probably just would have made it on another occasion. We have this idea that if we could go back and change history, we would go back and not make that mistake in that moment. And if we haven’t made that mistake in that moment, it doesn’t mean that the thing that triggered that way that you acted out wouldn’t have triggered you a month later or six months later or a year later. There was something that got activated in you. And that may have been dormant for a lot of those four months that you were together, but something happened in month four that awoke that part of you. That trauma, that fear, that insecurity, and you then acted out. If it hadn’t triggered you that day, it would have been a different day.

We have this idea that so much of our history rests on these moments where we could have gone right but instead, we went left. But in reality, maybe, okay, if we go back and do something different, we go right, then maybe we just take the same left but a few hours later or a day later or a week later. Don’t create a version of history where if you just remove that one moment, everything changes. Because whatever was in you that came out in that moment was there and was probably going to come out some other time.

So, instead of shaming ourselves for the moment that it came out, let’s give ourselves compassion and love for the part of ourselves that was laying dormant, that was already wounded, that was already in pain or feeling not good enough, or feeling insecure and unsafe that was just waiting to be activated. Give that part of you love. You didn’t choose for it to be there. It’s just pain, a wound, that was there. Stop shaming the mistake and start giving love to the part of you that gave rise to the mistake.

The second key to feeling better is not to simplify life. In the story that Dana is telling, there are two eventualities. There’s the one where she blew it all and there’s the one where she didn’t, and as a result, they lived happily ever after.

We have to remind ourselves that that is an absurd representation of life. Because life is so much more complex than that. There are seemingly infinite possibilities of what happens next if Dana didn’t make that mistake. Maybe a month later, he decided he didn’t want to continue anyway. Maybe six months later, she realized that there was a lot about the relationship she didn’t like. Maybe they get married and get divorced in three years. Or maybe they get married and he cheats on her in seven years. Or maybe they never get married because in year two, he starts showing issues around commitment and strings her along for the next ten years of her life, always saying he’s not quite ready. Or maybe that he’s not ready for kids and she ends up spending many years with him, suffering because she wants a family, and he doesn’t but not knowing what to do.

There are so many different eventualities. Even what I just said is an oversimplification because I just gave four or five, right? The possibilities are endless. Our anxiety is responsible for the story that if we hadn’t made that mistake, it would have kept going and getting better and better forever and ever and becoming everything we wanted it to become. And then we die, happy.

That’s our anxiety talking. Our anxiety and especially when our anxiety latches on to self-loathing, to self-criticism, that’s when we invent the story that “You’re an idiot who ruined your life. Because if you hadn’t done that, this would have been the great love of our lives, this would have been the great relationship of our lives, and you blew it.” In other words, the grandiosity of the story about what it all would have been actually becomes the rod for your own back. That becomes the way that you punish yourself. Notice that. Notice the way in which you’re looking for a way to punish yourself, you’re looking for a way to be down on yourself, and the way to punish ourselves even more is to create a whole story about how amazing it almost certainly would have been. Don’t allow your anxiety and your self-criticism to simplify life.

Key number 3, don’t glorify the person you made the mistake with. Again, our anxiety and our self-criticism looks at this person, and in order to be negative towards ourselves, and in order to really punish ourselves, we start telling a story of how amazing that person is, in order to create this contrast between how awful we are. “I was so immature. I was so in the wrong. Of course, he didn’t want to waste any more time with someone like me who is clearly the wrong person.”

But all the language is also serving to highlight how righteous and wonderful and perfect this person is. That they are extremely healthy and put together and weren’t making any mistakes and were doing everything right, and we’re the one who came along and screwed it up.

Just remember no matter what your anxiety tells you, no matter what your moments of low self-esteem tell you, everyone’s not better than you. People make mistakes. We all do. And the person that you’re putting on this pedestal as this angel has made their own mistakes. They have done things that are less than admirable, not righteous, and they will make more of those mistakes in their life. Just because you don’t know about them after four months, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It doesn’t mean that person has a perfect record. Yes, you made a mistake. But don’t allow that mistake to make you think you’re worse than everybody else, especially this person that you’ve now used your mistake to elevate to this angel-like status. Don’t use your mistake to glorify the person. Remember, after four months, you don’t know someone that well. You don’t know what they would be like after ten years deep into a relationship. You don’t know all of their flaws. You don’t know all of their vulnerabilities. You don’t know the things that make them difficult to do life with. Don’t use this mistake to demonize yourself and turn them into a perfect angel.

Oh, and by the way, in Dana’s case, she actually owned the mistake. She said that the next day, she recognized that how she was wasn’t okay, and she went back to him and explained that she was sorry, and that that was out of character. She even took accountability for it.

That’s a sign of character. That could be a very beautiful moment in a relationship. I mean, think about it, how many people have experienced someone doing something negative and then never owning it? When all of a sudden, someone comes along and says, “Hey, that thing I did yesterday, I know that wasn’t okay. I’ll do better,” that can be a breath of fresh air for someone who’s had nothing but relationships with people who don’t take ownership, who don’t take accountability. So, in that case, Dana actually immediately self-corrected. He didn’t want to know. And that’s fair enough. He’s entitled to say, “You know what? No. I’m not interested in going any further.” But there will be other people in life who, when you make a mistake and then own it in that way, see that as a very beautiful thing and could actually extend compassion to it because they can say, “Wow. I’ve done that before. I’ve screwed up or acted insecure or been jealous and said something I shouldn’t and felt awful about it afterwards. The fact that person is admitting that and taking ownership of it, you know? Okay. As long as they don’t keep doing it, I’m going to give them another chance.”

There would be plenty of people who would say that in that situation. So, Dana, this is, in my mind, another way that you’re being extremely harsh on yourself because you did self-correct, and that took guts and character.

Number four, yay, you paid the pain tax and there are prizes coming for that. I believe that most of the lessons we learn in life come with some kind of pain tax. We screw up, we make a mistake, we wreck something, we lose something, we hurt ourselves, we hurt someone else, and we feel awful about it. We do something that causes pain, and that pain becomes the tax for the learning. If this didn’t make you feel any pain, you wouldn’t change any of the things that you’ve changed since then. You wouldn’t have that feeling of, “Oh, the next time this part of me gets awakened, I’m not going to react in that way that I did before because in that moment, it drove someone away. It hurt me. So, I’m not going to do that again.”

Tell me, Dana, how do you get to that realization without feeling some kind of loss? How do you get there for free?

I don’t think you do. You out there who’s watching this, think about the changes you’ve made in your life. Were they free or was there a pain tax you had to pay in order to get that realization? Ways that you are sophisticated in relationships now, ways that you argue better, ways that you show up in a more evolved way, ways that you do life better. Wasn’t there a mistake in your past, something that caused you pain, that gave way to that listen? That was your pain tax.

There is actually a way to get grateful for this loss. And by the way, this is not me validating the idea that a) this person was as amazing as we may be making them out to be and all of our catastrophizing of what we’ve lost, and b) if we haven’t made that mistake, it would have all turned out perfectly, which I don’t think is true. It’s a huge assumption at the very least. But it is me saying that perceiving something as a loss, seeing that we’ve cost ourselves something can actually be the most valuable thing about a mistake. That if we felt no pain, we’d make no change.

And Dana, haven’t you learned things from this mistake about what you would do differently next time? What if what you would do differently next time is not just responsible in part for why it will work next time or why someone will decide to keep going with you next time? But what if it’s responsible for why the relationship itself ends up being so great? And by the way, in that next relationship, here’s the spoiler, you’re going to make mistakes there too, and so will they.

A relationship is two people evolving together through their mistakes.

The wish for a clean slate is a folly. We are evolving creatures and ultimately, we need someone we can evolve with, not someone we arrive as the finished package to.

Number five, now, this is the part where I’m going to answer the specific question that Dana asked. “Can this be fixed? How do I get the possibility to repair things with him?

This is the part that I don’t want you to overthink “What’s the exact strategy for me to reconnect with this person and the perfect way to do it?”

I want you to get all of that out of your mind. That’s just another example of the perfectionist mindset at work, trying to tell you that you now need to do this perfect tap dance to make it work this time around. That thought by the way is responsible for all the pain you’re causing yourself right now over anxiously worrying you messed up the best thing ever.

So, instead, I want you to take a deep breath again and say, let me keep this really simple. If I want to send this person a message, I can simply say, “Hey, I hope life is amazing for you right now. I was thinking of you and I’d love to reconnect if you’d be open to it.” Put a little smiley face at the end of whatever you want, something warm.

That’s as complicated as it needs to get. You don’t need to send a big message because I know what our anxiety is doing is saying, “I need to send a message and I need to acknowledge the way I was in the past. I’m just so sorry. I feel like back then—”

Now look, if you never felt like you addressed any of that, then you can say something like that. It shouldn’t be an essay necessarily. But you can say, “I’ve taken time to reflect on the way I showed up in that relationship or when we were dating. And you know, I’ve made some important changes because that’s not how I want to show up in any relationship. So, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that and to let you know I’d love to reconnect if you’d be open to it.”

In Dana’s case, she doesn’t actually need to say that because she already said it the day after she made the mistake. But simply sending a message like this can be the gateway to another meeting. And when you have that meeting, I want you to remember this, and this is really my title for point number 5, the strongest message you can send is who you’ve become.

When you do meet up, it’s not about groveling or over-apologizing, which isn’t to say if you feel like you haven’t said your piece that you can’t. Of course, you can, just like we did in that message just then. You can explain that you aren’t proud of the way you were back then or how you showed up, and you’ve made a lot of changes since, or you’ve made some key changes since.

You can say those things and that you’re sorry for any pain you caused. If you feel you haven’t got that off your chest, you can. But after that, what’s really important is that you show up with an energy that is attractive, that allows someone to have a great time with you, an energy that shows that you have forgiven yourself in the time you’ve been apart, that you’ve given yourself self-compassion in that time, that while you’re able to look at that and say, “I wouldn’t do that again,” or, “I’m certainly going to do better than that in the future,” you’re not dwelling there.

Remember what attracted this person to you in the first place. It wasn’t you coming from a place of looking up and groveling and trying to please them. It was you and your beautiful energy, the way you showed up when you were at your best.

So, focus on showing up at your best. Conduct yourself as a happy person looking to attract good things into your life because you are a good thing. The best message, the strongest message that you can send someone is who you’ve become since that mistake, since that moment. Let them see, let them feel the evolution in you.

We can sense it, can’t we, without someone even saying it when we meet up with an old friend or someone that maybe we had a tumultuous relationship with in some way. And we sense that there’s a peace within them, that there’s a presence there that something in them has shifted. They don’t need to tell us, “I’ve done all this work on myself.” They don’t need to tell us, “I’ve come to all these realizations.” We just feel that there’s something different about them. Maybe there’s a glow to them. Maybe there’s a lightness to them. Maybe there’s a happiness to them. Maybe there’s a generosity to the way that they are complimenting us or asking us questions and not making it about them. Maybe there’s just a sense of calm about them. But you sense something has shifted. And with that shift comes a curiosity from our side. We want to know what changed, what happened, how did they become this powerful person that sits in front of us. There’s something, a degree of mystery there, isn’t there? There’s a new curiosity.

When we’ve made mistakes, we’re often so preoccupied with the way that we conducted ourselves back then. We spend our whole time with someone trying to reclaim some kind of identity we had before that mistake happened, trying to get back to before the mistake, instead of realizing that actually, the power of the relationship going forward can be the in the new energy and the new curiosity that someone feels in feeling and witnessing a change in you.

Dana, I would argue that the greatest power you can have now is not in your constant berating of yourself for how immature you acted then and how you showed yourself to be the wrong person for someone to invest time in. I would say all of your power actually lies in the self-compassion that I’m talking about in this video. In the shift to a place of peace and calm that I’m talking about in this video.

When we’re kinder to ourselves and we’re able to love that part of us, that was responsible for the mistake and take our focus away from shaming the mistake itself, when we can stop putting this person on a pedestal, or the future of this person in simple terms, like “The only inevitable outcome if I never made this mistake was that we’d up together.” And instead, realize that nobody is perfect, that no future is certain, either way, and that there are many, many opportunities for you to be happy in love and 99.99999999% of them have nothing to do with this person you’re fretting about and you start to breathe differently. And when you breathe differently, you show up differently. And when you show up differently, someone starts to pay attention. And if you never get a chance for another meet with this person, go back and watch everything I have said in this video, and you’ll realize that doesn’t actually matter because all of the opportunities you’ll ever need are ahead of you.

Thank you so much for watching. I want to say to anyone out there who enjoys me as a coach, who wants to work with me more closely as a coach, that in September, I am running my Retreat from the 9th until the 15th in Florida. It’s going to be in-person. We’re all going to be in a room together for six days. It is the deepest work that I do with people. The work that I do on YouTube is something I’m very, very proud of. But no matter how hard I try, it cannot compare to six days together in the most immersive coaching setting. And if you’d like to experience that with me, we still have a handful of spots left. So, feel free to go learn more if you’re interested at MHRetreat.com.

I can’t stress enough that this event is a live event, so there are literally only a certain number of seats in the room. Once those seats are gone, they’re gone, and you’ll be waiting a very long time for another Retreat. So, if you know that this is something that feels right for you, do jump on board while those seats are available.

And if you liked this video and you want a video that would go well with this video to watch next, then check this one out because we have hand-picked this video for you to watch as a sequel to the video you’ve just seen.

Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you being here. Be well and love life. And leave me a comment because I like reading. And I will see you in the next video.

The post “I Messed It Up! How Can I Get Them Back?” appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

Maybe this will sound familiar: After a few bad dating experiences, you say to yourself, “My life is pretty awesome as it is, so why do I even want someone else disturbing my peace?”

The thought of not having to deal with the dating process may feel like a huge relief in that moment . . . but what actually happens when you decide not to put yourself out there anymore (when deep down, you still want to find love)? 

In today’s new video, I share 5 ways you can get back into dating that won’t lead to burnout. You’ll see how to maintain your peace while also giving yourself permission to take small (or even big) swings in love. Don’t miss it!

MATTHEW HUSSEY:

One of you wrote under one of my most recent videos, “Who’s here watching Matthew’s dating tips and not dating at all?” That was from cookwithyuyu2024. That was the most liked comment on the video with 546 likes at the time of making this video and 63 replies, many of them concurring with cookwithyuyu’s comment about watching the videos and dare I say loving them—she didn’t add that detail, but I’m going to assume that that’s what she meant—but not out there dating.

I wanted to talk about this. I have heard it said many times by people. They feel like actually going out there and dating is going to mess up their peace in some way, that they have found this nice, cozy, comfortable way of living. They have found their equilibrium between their work, their hobbies, their friends, the things they’re doing. And the idea of inviting in the Wild West of dating where anything can happen, any flake, player, user, manipulator can come through the door and ruin that piece is anathema.

And it might not just be someone who’s got bad intentions. Sometimes it could be someone who’s got good intentions, who we like, but then they decide they don’t like us back or they just don’t text us back for a day. And our life as we knew it, all of the peaceful, serene, calm that we had found, gives way to this agonizing, obsessing, churning, gut-wrenching anxiety of “Why aren’t they texting me back.” 

Who wants to sign up for that? I get it. I get it. Far easier to stay under the blankets in our bed and just live life and go, “Screw all of you people that I could be attracted to. I don’t need you in my life. I’m fine.” 

But here’s the problem—the very watching of these videos, assuming you don’t just like the sound of my voice or the way that I say things, for many of you the deeper desire in watching these videos is because you would like to find love, you would like that companionship in your life. In fact, you would like it very, very, very much. And it’s a desire that’s not about to go away. So, you can lock that desire up in the cupboard and decide to try to go to sleep, but eventually, it’s going to start banging on the door; and over time the banging gets louder, and our peaceful life that we’re protecting doesn’t feel nearly as peaceful as we’ve tried to convince ourselves it is because the banging is now actually starting to keep us up at night.

Hiding away isn’t always the best solution to something that we feel could threaten our peace. What I prefer is the idea of knowing how to defend your peace so that you can go out there and look for what you want, but you become masterful in your ability to guard that peace. So, let’s talk about how to do that. I have five ways, my friends, my fellow love monks.

For those of you that are new to the channel, I’m Matthew Hussey, author of the new New York Times best-selling book Love Life: How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person and Live Happily (No Matter What). And for the last 17 years of my life, I have been known for helping people on their journey to find love. For those of you that have been enjoying the book, by the way, every single Friday, I have a new written piece that goes out to my private mailing list that I’m really proud of. It’s free. It’s super practical. I have strategies for finding love in there, strategies for communicating standards, ways of becoming more confident, and just generally, advice every week written in the same style as the book that can help you that I don’t publish anywhere else. So, go join that list if you haven’t already. I’ll leave a link below The3Relationships.com and I look forward to sending your first email to you this Friday. 

Number one—let’s talk about comfort and risk.

The way I see life is that it’s always a negotiation between comfort and risk. Imagine a coin, and comfort and risk are two different sides of the same coin. The comforts that we have in our life, which there’s nothing wrong with, right? We can have some really lovely comforts in our life. There’s nothing inherently wrong with comfort. The comforts we already have in our life most of them have likely come from us having taken a risk at some point, right?

If you ever had a relationship or have one right now, you probably had to take a risk to get that relationship. You had to go on an app and risk rejection, you had to approach someone and risk rejection, you had a first kiss that could have gone badly, you had all these little moments along the way that represented risk. Someone could have rejected you, but you ended up with a relationship, a form of comfort because you took a risk. If you have a job right now that you’re proud of, you probably took a risk to get that job. You went into an environment where you could have been rejected at the job interview stage, or you could have been fired in the trial period. Anything could have happened.

So, when you went for your job, you took a risk. If you’re now secure in that job, comfort arose out of that risk. The same is true of things we get good at in life. Anything you’re competent at as a skill right now you’re competent at because you risked sucking at it. You probably did suck at it in the beginning and you got better. And eventually, it became something you were very comfortable with because you’re competent in it, but that came from going through a period of risk.

The things that create comfort in life often start with a degree of risk.

Now, my question to you is, are you wanting a relationship because there is some high-level comfort that could come from that? In other words, there might be the comfort of intimate connection, the comfort of sharing your life with someone, the comfort of having genuine love in your life, of being accepted. These are beautiful forms of comfort. And they’re the kind of comfort that can be found in a great relationship.

Now, if we want a higher level of comfort in some area, then we usually have to take some risk to get to that higher level of comfort. What we have to be honest with ourselves about is whether the level of comfort I am at now is genuinely everything I want or whether there is a higher value version of comfort that I’d like to have in my life. It doesn’t mean I need to have it, but that I’d like to have in my life that will necessitate me taking some risks. Risk and comfort—two sides of the same coin. To get to higher levels of comfort, we have to be willing to take a risk again.

Now, here’s the really encouraging thing about this. If you take a risk, if you’re going out there and taking swings in your love life to make things happen, and it doesn’t happen, I truly believe that there is a greater degree of peace in that, i.e. in knowing that you’re doing what you can towards that goal, than there is in trying to pretend that the goal is not important to you and doing nothing to contribute to it. Because I believe if we get to the end of our lives and look back and say, you know what, I gave love a shot, I opened myself up to it, I put myself in situations where it could happen, I took a few risks, I was brave, I was courageous, and it didn’t happen for me, I believe that we’ll still be able to sleep at night. We’ll still have a level of peace that says I tried.

But if we shut love and relationships and people out because we’re too afraid of some of the disturbances to our peace that could occur if we actually started to go out there and meet them, then I think we’ll have a deeper form of unrest, which is there’s something that was important to me and I didn’t do what I could to make that happen.

When I talk about comfort and risk, I’m not suggesting that if you never get to that level of comfort, you will never be happy. What I am saying is that in order to get to that comfort, you have to take risk; and by taking the risk, you’ll feel a greater level of peace, even if you never achieve it because you’ll know you’re doing what you can.

Bruce Springsteen had a song lyric that I can’t get off my mind when I’m making this point. It’s from Dancing in the Dark. He says, “You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart.” Well, we build our little comfortable worlds, don’t we, our cozy little worlds; and we do want to protect them. It’s natural to want to do that. There are times in our lives where we also want to start a fire, and love is one of those areas. We want to start a fire. We want to go and find someone amazing. We want to go and have this incredible relationship, but we can’t go and get that if we’re spending our lives worried about these worlds we’ve constructed falling apart.

The second—and dare I say counterintuitive—way that we defend our peace is by building it. And when I say building our peace, I mean that, when we go out into the world to date, to risk heartbreak, to put ourselves out there, to take a run at things, like to give something a go, take a swing, we are building robustness. And robustness is a very important word. It’s all about our ability to go and meet the world and survive the encounter to be able to come home again.

Real confidence isn’t the ability to stay inside the four walls of our house metaphorically or literally. Real confidence is knowing that even if some of the time you stay in your house for the quiet, for the comfort, for the ease that it brings, which, don’t get me wrong, is delightful, you know that you can go out and confront the world and its forces and come back home in one piece, or in several pieces sometimes. And yet here you are, still okay—a fractured broken vessel that somehow still works.

I want to read you a few lines from a book that I love. This is a book by David White, a British poet, called “Consolations,” and he takes words and breaks them down in these little mini-essays that are designed to restore life to everyday words that have lost their meaning through overuse. And he talks about the word robustness. He writes an entire little essay on robustness, said some things that I couldn’t put better myself. So, his robustness in David White’s words. And as I read this, I want you to see your own dating life or your own desire for love and your resistance to go out there and take the knocks that might be necessary in order to find it.

“Robustness is a word denoting health—psychological or physical; the ability to meet the world with vigor and impact. To be robust is to be physically or imaginatively present in the very firm presence of something or someone else. Being robust means we acknowledge the living current in something other than ourselves.”

Okay, so that idea that being robust is a sign of health, whether it’s physical or psychological; the ability to go out there and be in the world in the presence of something or someone else.

He goes on to say, “Robustness and vulnerability belong together. To be robust is to show a willingness to take collateral damage.”

Are you willing to take collateral damage in this part of your life? Or are you afraid that you cannot handle it? Might you be wrong about the fact that you can’t handle it?

“To be robust is to show a willingness to take collateral damage, to put up with temporary pain.”

They won’t text me back, noise, chaos. I don’t understand this person. They are confusing me. Or our systems being temporarily undone. My life doesn’t make sense today. I was happy yesterday. Today, I’m in a bad place. I don’t feel like I’m anchored to the things that make me feel good anymore. I feel like this person has disrupted my peace, my equilibrium.

“A robust response always entertains the possibility of humiliation. It is also a kind of faith, a sense that we will somehow survive the impact of a vigorous meeting.” 

Could we have the faith that we will survive this encounter, that we can go out there and meet someone and it not go well and them not respond to us or them not like us as much as we like them or them not turn out to be the person we thought they were and survive the encounter, survive the impact of a vigorous meeting? 

“A lack of robustness denotes ill health, psychological or physical. It can feed on itself.”

Listen to this—this is really important: “The less contact we have with anything other than our own body, our own rhythm, or the way we have arranged our life, the more afraid we can become of the frontier where actual noise, meetings, and changes occur. To come out and meet the world again is to heal from isolation, from grief, from illness, from the powers and traumas that first robbed us of that meeting.”

In other words, the things we have been through in our life that have made us afraid in the first place, that have made us afraid that we can’t go out there and survive another encounter with life, with love, with heartbreak, with any of these things that have hurt us in the past.

Finally, White says, “Robustness is not an option in most human lives. To choose its opposite is to become invisible.”

So, for point number two, I just want to summarize that peace—a much more powerful form of peace is knowing that you can get out there in the world, that you can have your scrapes, you can have things go wrong, you can have things not go your way, and you can live to tell the tale. When you know that, the peace you feel is the peace of being bulletproof, not the peace of hiding in your shelter.

So, now, let’s imagine that you’ve realized, “Okay, I want to get out there because (a) I want to create this new form of comfort in my life where I have somebody, and I want the peace that comes from knowing that I’m doing all I can, and I also acknowledge that just the act of me going out there and meeting the world head-on is going to build my robustness, which is also a form of peace because I’m showing myself that I am strong enough to survive these encounters.”

So, you want to go out there and date as a result. You’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna go and do this.” Well, now, the third way of defending your peace is really important. You have to go at a pace when you’re dating that you can sustain. This is deeply important. And the reason is this: you don’t know if you’re going to meet the love of your life tomorrow, next month, or three years from now, even if you’re doing the right things. There’s only so much you can control, and you can’t guarantee when the right person is going to come into your life. Knowing that, it’s no good if we date in a way that is unsustainable, where we go into a flurry of activity in our love lives to try to find love; and after three months, we burn out and throw in the towel and say never again.

And I am seeing this a lot right now with people who are using dating apps, who are burning out. They are sick and tired of it. Or in some people who are over-dating. They’re dating so many people. They are going numb to the process, and they’re like this is just taking up too much of my time, too much of my life. I can’t do this. I can’t make my whole life about this and it not go anywhere.

So, none of these are a way of approaching finding love that is sustainable. It being sustainable is key to success, because you don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen. If you quit before you get to that point, then it won’t happen.

There is a concept of finite and infinite games. Finite games are games you play to win. There are winners and losers. The game has an endpoint. If you play a game of tennis with someone, there is an endpoint, right? There’s a winner and a loser. But infinite games are games that you want to continue. They’re games that can go on forever, right? For me, coaching, sharing ideas is an infinite game. It’s not a game I want to win, because it’s something that I actually want to do my whole life. My friend Ali Abdaal talks about this in his videos—the idea that YouTube is what he loves and therefore it’s something that he doesn’t want to stop doing. I feel like that about sharing ideas in general.

So, if it’s a game I want to keep doing for a long time, then I have to go about it in a way that I actually enjoy. If I’m always making videos, I hate or doing it in a way that is killing me because it’s too much work and it’s burning me out, then this isn’t going to be an infinite game for me. I’ll make YouTube videos for another six months to a year or two years, and then I’ll burn out. But if I want to be helping people, and coaching people and sharing ideas for a very long time, I need to do it in a way that allows me to enjoy it for a very long time.

Well, I would put to you that your love life is no different. I’m not saying that you want to date for the rest of your life. But if you knew that love could happen at any point, but you don’t know if it’s going to happen this year or next year or the year after, but that it definitely won’t happen if you’re not in the game, then how would you answer this question: how do I need to do this if I wanted to make sure I could do it for a long time? And you might say, “Well, okay, as far as dating apps are concerned, I’ll limit myself to an hour a day, or even half an hour a day. I am not going to allow myself any more time than that because then I just start facing burnout again, so I’m going to give myself a cut-off point.” Maybe you say “I’m going to — I’m not going to try to go on a date every night of the week. Instead, I’m just going to go on a handful of dates per month.” It might be that I say “A big part of me meeting someone is going to be joining new communities, but those communities are going to be things that are going to benefit my life regardless.” You know, if they’re health communities, there’s going to get me fit and healthy by being in that community; or by being in this community, I’m going to make new friends and I’m going to expand my circle or I’m going to expand my mind because this community is teaching me something. I’m learning something new. These activities that I want to do are things I’d like to do anyway or they’re things that will just be additive to my life. If the worst that comes of it is that I get good at new things, I meet new people, I develop new friendships, and I expand my mind and I have a sense of community, that’s awesome. The bonus is that it could also bring me love.

So, you might say that’s part of playing the infinite game of keeping myself open to the possibility of finding love. You will have your own personal answer to this. But it’s an important question to answer. If I wanted to do the things that made it more likely I would find love for a long time, how would I do them? Go at a pace you can sustain. And if you do that, you will defend your peace because you won’t be burning out and doing things that you really don’t want to do. Instead, everything you do to find love will benefit you in one way or another outside of the world of finding love.

And, by the way, this is just as important when it comes to actually finding love. One of the reasons a lot of people struggle in dating someone is they meet someone they really like and everything they were doing to find love comes to a crashing halt. They no longer care about those hobbies they were doing or the ways that they were showing up in the world, their activities, the things they were doing to expand their network. All of a sudden, everything becomes about this one person. And now they put so much pressure on it, they sabotage it. So, if you’ve ever heard of that idea of running through the target, sprinting through the finish line, you can actually see that as part of the infinite game. A lot of what I do to find love shouldn’t be things that I just abruptly stop when I found love. And if they are things I don’t want to stop just because I found love, then I’ll know I was playing the infinite game during the dating process.

And, by the way, for anyone who is watching this thinking “I’d really like someone to help me design my life in such a way that I can find love sustainably, along with everything else going on in my life,” that is exactly what we do for people in the Love Life Club. This is a private exclusive community of people that I work with year-round to help them find the love they’re looking for. And it’s an amazing community with so many resources that can help you. So, I’ll leave a link below if you want to find out more about that and come join us and make me your coach for the year. 

The fourth way to defend your peace when you want to find love without sacrificing finding love is to know how to hit the reset button. What I mean by this is, it’s very easy for us to go on a date and for it to be a disappointing date, a demoralizing date, maybe you are dating someone who just came across as very, very strange and you were like, “Really, this? This is what’s available to me, this is what’s out there?” Or maybe you get rocked because someone you had a great date with didn’t text you after the date and never asked you out again or someone you slept with suddenly goes cold. These are all things that have the potential to take away our peace.

And so, we have to have a way of hitting the reset button. And one of the things that I do to hit the reset button after anything that can rock my peace, whether it’s, you know, in the past my love life or in the present it could be a business opportunity or an appearance where I didn’t come off well or I don’t like myself in that appearance on TV or whatever it was, I have to have a way of coming out of that and reconnecting to all of the things in my life that are important to me and that this thing does not affect.

I want you to consider for a moment what those parts of your life are. And in some ways what’s ironic is those things that are separate from and bigger than whatever your latest disappointment is in your love life, those were the very things that you were trying to protect in the first place when you were doing this with your life and going, “I don’t know if I want to invite in the unknown, unpredictable forces of love. I have my friends, I have my hobbies, I have my job, I have my family, I have my dog or my cat, or whatever it is that makes me feel stable and comfortable and safe. I have all of these things already.”

Remember that those are all the things that you’re taking with you into whatever risk you’re taking, whatever swings you’re taking in your love life. They don’t go away. What happens is when we get into a relationship that destabilizes us, we disconnect from these things. So, the problem isn’t that the things that make you feel safe today are going anywhere. The danger is that we stop connecting to them.

So, what I want to encourage you to do is to have a process, a ritual, a practice that reconnects you to these things and that tells you “These things are bigger, they’re bigger than anything happening over here. They’re separate, they’re their own entities, their own parts of my life that are sacred and contained and can’t be touched.” You reconnect with that truth. And it might be as simple and practical as you get off of a date, you go home, and you have on your computer or your phone you have a list of all of these parts of your life that you’re incredibly grateful for, that make your life rich in meaning and love and opportunity or just depth in other ways, and you really—you read each one and you connect to it.

You say “I have my mom. She’s amazing, she takes care of me, she loves me, she sees me, she knows who I am, and she accepts me; and that relationship is one that I’m so lucky to have. My best friends, you know, those people in my life and I have such a laugh with them and going through life with them is just the best. I love it. You know, my hobbies, whatever I do, my painting. I love it. It’s a world I lose myself in and it means so much to me and it’s always had so much richness. It’s a whole universe just on its own, it’s my painting.”

You know, you connect to those—deeply connect—and the more you connect to those universes that are your family, your friends, your hobbies, your work, the thing, nature, whatever gives you a sense of purpose or transcendence, the more you connect to those things, the more you realize that these things are sacred and they can’t be touched. Know that you can hit the reset button every single day and if necessary many times a day. And that will shrink the effects of any disappointments over here in your love life to their appropriate size.

And, by the way, when you do this list, recognize that there are probably things in your life that are incredible that you haven’t even chosen to spotlight in this way, to recognize in this way, and shine a light on those. Tell yourself, “Oh my goodness, there’s this other thing in my life that’s amazing that I haven’t even been grateful for.” You know, for me, it’s like, oh, living in America, I’m living out my dream of living in America. When was the last time I actually stopped to appreciate that, to appreciate the fact that this country that when I was a teenager I was so excited at the idea, it was a dream, beyond a dream, that I would ever live here. And I’m living here. When was the last time I stopped to actually appreciate that, right?

So, what’s that thing for you? Not just the obvious things but the less obvious things that maybe you’ve taken for granted and if you shine a light on them can make you realize that your world is so big and that you can minimize the importance of your love life at any time you need just by consciously reconnecting or connecting for the first time to other amazing worlds in your life.

Number five, our final one, the fifth way to defend your peace when you’re out there trying to find love is to recognize that you can already be happy enough exactly where you are, even if nothing in your love life changes. Some people will say “That’s exactly where I started, is saying that I am happy enough with my life the way it is. I don’t even want to find love.” But I think that that is a little bit of a cop-out, maybe not for everyone but for a lot of people, because in my experience happy enough doesn’t make us say, “You know what, that thing that’s really important to me, I’m going to leave it.” It makes us say, “You know what, I can take some big swings because I know that I can always come back to my life just as it is and be okay. So, I don’t actually need to worry about the rejection. The rejection isn’t catastrophic for me because my life as it is is already enough.”

And I want to read you a very small part of my book Love Life and I called the last chapter Happy Enough. I write, “But when something as important to our happiness as romantic love is missing, how do we get by? By learning to be happy enough. I like happy enough. I’ve liked it for years now. Some will see that emotional state as settling by another name, a way of copping out on what we really wanted. For me, happy enough has not only served as an essential way of surviving life’s inevitable disappointments and losses, it has also formed the basis for a deep sense of peace. The kind of peace that has served as the foundation for taking more risks, getting more involved with greater results. Happy enough begins with us first radically accepting where we are now and then concluding that if nothing changed we’d actually be okay. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things we want to strive for, it just means we aren’t starting from a place of scarcity but a place of peace. This right now is enough. It’s amazing how much this allows you to attempt more because, all of a sudden, you have nothing to lose. If the thing we’re trying to get doesn’t happen, we haven’t risked or lost our happiness by not getting it. When we think of someone with nothing to lose, we often think of it in a negative sense, as in someone who has nothing. But when we are happy enough, we have nothing to lose because we can look at our life today and recognize that it is already enough.”

That is the truest kind of peace—this feeling of being connected to our lives and the way our lives are today and saying “This right here is enough for me. Does it mean I won’t strive for more? Does it mean I won’t stay curious about the possibilities? Does it mean I won’t take some swings? Be brave? Put myself out there? Of course not. It’s the reason I can do that, because I know if none of those swings come off, I can still come back to my life, which is more than enough for me.”

So, my friends, do not allow your desire to maintain the peace you have right now to rob you of the ability to go out there and take big swings, knowing that just taking them is going to make you feel like you’re doing what you can, that there is a robustness that we develop when we go out there and take big swings, whether they go well or not. And the truth that your life being awesome as it is right now is not a reason not to be open to other possibilities. It’s actually every reason you should feel safe and secure in knowing that you can try and fail, knowing that you have a safe home to come back to in the life you already have.

For everyone who has watched this video, who is now going to go and venture out into the world of love, there is something you will absolutely need—and that is bold standards, because there is a lot of nonsense out there right now that you need to make sure you don’t entertain or engage with. I have created a free guide showing you exactly how you can have bold standards and what they look like in practice by giving you very specific things that you can say to uphold your standards. You can download this free guide at BoldStandards.com. This is from a series of practical written guides that I created for my Love Life members that I am releasing this one to all of you for free. So, I urge you not to go out there and date without this guide. You can get it for free right now at BoldStandards.com.

Thank you so much for watching this video. Leave me a comment, let me know what you thought. And if you enjoyed this video, I think you’ll also enjoy this one. We have picked it especially to be a good pairing, good wine pairing. It’s not quite a taster menu, but it is like a one good pairing that you can get between this video and this one. Check it out.

The post My Honest Advice to Someone Scared Of Dating Again appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

You may be about to go on a date and think to yourself, “Oof, I feel so nervous.” Or you get invited to a party and wince at the social anxiety of having to start conversations. 

I get that this can feel scary—I’ve been there. 

But it wasn’t until I was able to step out of my old mindset that I realized how much my shyness was holding me back. In today’s video, I share the #1 thing that helped me overcome my shyness . . . something that continues to give me confidence, and allows me to make a big impact in any room despite any nervousness. (Plus it’s something you can start doing today!)

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Whether it’s shyness or social anxiety or some combination of the two that is affecting you, I know how painful it can be to find that you don’t get excited about events or times when you’re going to be in a room with other people especially when there’s going to be a lot of people—how it can make you unable to be present and actually enjoy whatever situation you’re in because you’re spending too much time in your head, feeling uneasy, not feeling present at all, having no sense of calm. I know how it can ruin dates, how it can ruin parties, how it can just make everything feel like a really big deal.

So, my aim with this video is to give you something practical that you can use that helped me overcome my shyness and my sense of social anxiety that once I had it worked every single time I stepped into a situation that made me feel anxious. And when you’re able to do that, we start to make a bigger impact on the world and the results we get in the world start to change. That might mean more dates, it might mean attracting love, it might mean being more powerful at work, in a meeting, in a presentation, or it might mean that you’re much more fluid and confident working the room in a social engagement.

So, I’m excited to share this with you. Have a pen and paper ready. If anything speaks to you in this video, make notes.

So, I was a shy kid. And I have also, for much of my life, identified with having some form of social anxiety. That is surprising to a lot of people who see me as a very extroverted and confident person, at least on the surface. But anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a natural life-of-the-party kind of person. I identify with Stephen Fry’s notion that there is nothing he hates more than a party. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had some amazing parties. I’ve had an amazing time at some parties. But if you ask me to come to a party tonight, my initial reaction is, “Ugh.” And there’s a good chance, over the course of my life, that on my way there, I will feel uneasy or even anxious.

In fact, when I was a kid, and I used to go to birthday parties of other kids, they used to give out party bags to all of the kids at the end of the parties—slime you could throw at a wall or something, which was always the thing I wanted. If there was ever a party bag, the only thing I really cared about was something I could eat and some slime that I could throw at a wall.

But I was too shy at the end of the party to go and collect my bag. The kids would all run to the area where all the—there was a scrum of kids who are fighting over party bags, and my cousin, Kasey, who is my same age, who is my best friend in the world, she would go and get her party bag and mine, amidst the scrum, and bring them back because she was a lot more confident in those days than I was. I’ve played a little catch-up since, but she was much more outgoing and confident than me.

I remember growing up being at New Year’s Eve parties. That was always the memory in my head. It’s like going to a New Year’s Eve party with family, seeing everyone dancing, and people in my family coming over to me and telling me to go dance, like, “Come on, dance.”

It was like, you know when it turns into like almost an aggressive thing. Like, “What are you doing standing over there? What are you doing? Lighten up. Dance.”

And, it took my shyness and it kicked it into overdrive because now I felt like there was a spotlight on me. I resented the way I was being cajoled into doing something that I already felt apprehensive about and felt self-conscious about. And so, all it did was make me retreat more into my shell. 

The only time I do remember dancing with utter abandon was in front of the TV screen as a kid, watching Mary Poppins, the original, when all the Chimney Sweeps do Step in Time, which was either my cockney roots coming out and just, sort of, there was something in my blood that reacted to a bunch of chimney sweeps or dancing to Step in Time with Dick Van Dyke, or it was maybe my grandma who was sat with me who loved my moves. I mean, she really thought they were incredible. So, maybe it was a willing audience that I really wanted.

But there’s something in that, isn’t there? Because it’s not that I didn’t like dancing. I did like dancing. But the idea of dancing with my nana on the sofa and just having a crazy time in front of the TV screen was a different thing than being at a New Year’s party with lots of people and being told I should go and dance in order to be normal like everybody else.

By the way, if this video is resonating with you already and you have felt plagued by social anxiety or shyness in your life but you really do want to get out there and meet new people whether it’s to find love or to find new friendships and expand your social circle, I have a brand new free guide that shows you some very specific things you can say to connect and spark up a conversation with a new person. When you’re feeling shy or socially anxious, it can help to go on autopilot instead of having to think too hard and question everything that comes out of your mouth. This guide helps you with that. You can use them as they are or you can make them your own. Either way, they are free, they are super practical, and they’re there at your disposal anytime you need them. It is called Spark and Connect, our new free guide, and it’s available at WhatToSayNext.com.

Shyness is often portrayed as something— it could almost be cute or endearing. And sometimes those labels—although I’m a huge proponent of giving love to the parts of ourselves that are responsible for us being shy, responsible for us being socially anxious. I think that’s a very, very important approach, is to find a way to love those parts of ourselves. But I think sometimes we frame it in too much of a noble way that actually can have us clinging to that identity as a shy or socially anxious person.

I’m not going as far as to say that it feels like there’s something noble in it. But sometimes we can almost start to wear it as part of our identity, like “I am just an incredibly shy person,” like it’s an endearing thing about us, or it’s, sort of, almost some kind of affliction that we have that we struggle with. And I actually think that one of the really powerful things we can do, and bear with me as I say this because this is—for some people, this is like almost an idea that can make them recoil at first, but like I said, this has made a huge impact on my life, is recognizing that shyness or social anxiety is inherently inward-looking.

When we are shy, when we’re socially anxious, we are thinking of ourselves. We’re thinking of how to protect ourselves, how to keep ourselves safe in some way. Like I said, we should give love to the part of ourselves that is trying to keep us safe and thinks the best way of doing that is to avoid social situations or not to speak too loudly, not to say anything stupid or embarrassing. We should give love to the part of us that’s behind that.

This is actually a part of me that’s just trying to keep me safe. But it may be misguided in how it’s trying to keep me safe. And it might be especially misguided in what it perceives as danger. Because the things that it thinks are danger are actually not real danger. But maybe there was a time in our life where it felt like those things were real danger, or maybe it’s just part of our personality that we’ve taken with us from a very young age.

Either way, giving love to those parts of ourselves is important. But what if we started to see that the effect of that, which is, okay, let’s call it shyness and social anxiety. But what’s the effect of those two things? We stay quiet. We hold back. We censor ourselves. We’re extremely cautious about talking to people or putting ourselves out there or bringing our authentic vulnerable selves to the table. And it can often be, from the outside, seen as a real lack of warmth because people can’t read our minds. People only know what we tell them.

So, people can’t necessarily look at us and ascertain that, “Oh, that person is incredibly shy. That person is incredibly socially anxious.”

People don’t necessarily register that. What they register is a standoffishness, a coldness, and unapproachability.

And so, what I started to realize is that there is something very inward-looking about this fear that I have, and because it’s inward-looking, it can ironically amount to a kind of selfishness, or to put it another way, a lack of generosity.

Now, allow me to explain this. Every single person wants to exist and operate in environments that make them feel safe however they achieve that. People achieve that in very different ways. But everyone wants to achieve a feeling of safety. Anytime we go into a room, there are other people like us who are trying to achieve that feeling of safety, of feeling at home in an environment that feels strange, feels different, sometimes feels alien to them.

Our shyness actually contributes to the opposite kind of environment for those people. Through our shyness and through our lack of willingness to go out and connect and put ourselves out there authentically and warmly, we are sending a quiet message to other people in the room that it’s not safe for them to do that either.

Now, we all know that there are some people who come in very loudly and brashly no matter what, right? Because that’s their nature or that’s their style or it’s what they’ve learned as a way to feel safe. But there are other people in that room who are just like you and me, who are looking for a way to feel accepted and at home in this environment. And in our shyness, in our inward-looking, our fear of rejection is preventing us from making someone else feel less alone.

In a sense, that should be comforting because it also says to us that our shyness, our social anxiety is, in a sense, not special or unique. It’s not our badge of honor to wear on our own. We are not the sole victim of these kinds of thoughts and feelings, that they are actually extremely common. And that by recognizing that they are extremely common, we stop personalizing these feelings as there’s something wrong with me, and we can start looking at it as there is just something about being human that can make these kinds of situations scary or difficult or feel threatening, especially if certain things in my past have helped to create that association for me that’s also happened for many, many, many other people.

So, in a sense, that’s a leveler. I don’t have to see myself as beneath everyone else. I can see myself as like everyone else, in that these are extremely common feelings.

So, if there is there is this kind of communal feeling of, “It’s not easy,” then we have a choice to make—do I, in my shyness or in my anxiety, make it the responsibility of everyone else to do all of the work or do I step into a kind of generous leadership where I go and make other people feel the things that I know I would love to feel in this situation?

Quick news update for everybody out there who wants to come and join me for six days this year in September from the 9th to the 15th, my Live Retreat is happening once and once only this year. So, if you want to come and be with me on the beach and do six days of immersive coaching, this is where we do it together, and we will work through the deepest issues that are holding you back whether it’s holding you back from finding the love you want or whether it’s holding you back from loving the life you have.

It’s going to be an amazing event. Go to MHRetreat.com to apply. We have very limited spaces at this point. So, if some part of this speaks to your soul, if you are like, “I love this content, I love following this channel, and I want to take it to a new level,” this is where you can do it—MHRetreat.com.

Now, I know none of these ideas of I’m being selfish or I’m not being generous, I’m letting everyone else do all of the work, consciously go through our mind when we’re being shy, when we’re being socially anxious, but that’s actually my point, is that if we do consciously bring those ideas to the forefront of our mind, instead of saying, “I feel really shy right now,” we might say to ourselves, “Wow, I’m really lacking in generosity right now. Wow. There’s something almost selfish about what I’m doing right now. There are other people who feel this too, and I’m making it all about me, and in doing that, I’m actually depriving someone of the kind of warmth and love and authenticity of the feeling of being at home in a room with other people that I myself am craving.”

This requires a transition away from this idea that my kindness, my warmth, my authenticity, is something that someone has to come along and unlock within me, which is kind of a transactional relationship, in a sense, right? “You have to come and unlock these things, and when you do, I will give them to you.”

But if we take ourselves away from the transaction of that and simply say, “No, I am warm. I am kind. I am authentic,” notice I’m not saying, “I am confident. I am bold. I am outgoing.”

You don’t need to be any of those things. You don’t need to be anything you’re not. But if you are kind, if you are warm, if you are authentic, if you are caring, then these are things that we should offer out more freely without this constant regard for ourselves that says, “I have to get mine first.”

So, remember, number 1—other people want to feel just as at home as you do. And number 2—you actually have the power to make them feel at home by the way that you approach or treat or engage with them.

What I’m trying to say in all of this is, when you go into a room and you’re anxious, and you’re afraid, and you feel shy, and you go into self-protection mode, if you feel like, “Oh, my god. I need saving,” allow that to become a new trigger to go and save somebody else. Any time you go into a situation—and this takes seconds. Remember, this isn’t years of therapy or psychoanalyst. This is seconds. Where you go into a room and you say, “I feel like I need saving right now. Great. Then let me go save somebody else.”

And it puts us in such a generous state. It puts us in such a state of leadership where we say, “Oh, I’m the one that can make other people feel better and I am perfectly placed to do that because I, in my own shyness and in my own social anxiety, understand exactly how this feels. I have this mainline to empathy of how people feel in this situation because of what I have experienced my whole life. Let me use that, let me make it my superpower, let me make it this artery of generosity any time I’m in a situation where other people are present.”

Turn shyness into generosity and let your generosity be this strange backdoor to confidence.

Now, I don’t say that as some kind of a one-size-fits-all truth about shyness or about social anxiety. Of course, I know that there are many times where we’re crippled and certain people, on an ongoing basis, are crippled by social anxiety and the idea that I’m constantly hoarding my generosity or I’m being a selfish person any time I’m being socially anxious, for some people, would be an offensive one.

So, I understand that. What I’m offering is a frame of reference that can actually be incredibly helpful as a way to take us from a very disempowered state to an empowered one.

One of the greatest ways to get ourselves out of inward-thinking where we’re constantly thinking about how to protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe is to think about what someone else needs or how we can show up for somebody else who is in need, somebody else who might be having a hard time, or how we can take all of the pain we felt and help someone else not feel it. And the great irony, the thing I’m talking about here in this video, is that by doing that, we actually take our anxiety and our shyness and we convert it into its opposite, which is a very, very powerful thing.

While we’re at it, how can we make other people feel comfortable from this state of empowered leadership and generosity that I’m talking about here?

I want to tell you a quick story in contrast to that idea of me being a kid on New Year’s Eve, being dragged to the dance floor, and feeling like I would do anything to get out of it because I felt dragged and shamed for being shy and being the way I was.

I remember a school disco. It’s a funny word, isn’t it? Disco. I must have been around 13 at the time, 12, 13. There was a friend of mine who I looked up to, and I thought he was quite cool, and I remember him saying to me, “Shall we go dance?” And it wasn’t like “I’m dragging you to go dance.” He just said, “Shall we go dance?”

And without even really thinking about it, I went, “Yeah, okay.”

I remember us laughing and being a bit silly. I remember I did a little spin. And he looked at me and he went, “That was really good.” He’s like, “Let me try.”

And then he tried to do it. And we were laughing, and he looked at me, and he went, “You’re fun, you.”

And I remember having this moment when he said that, where I went, “I’m fun. I’m fun.” And it felt so good and it felt so non-judgmental. It wasn’t like anyone was trying to look cool. It was just this idea that we were both having a good time together and someone had suddenly given me this label, this identity, that I hadn’t thought of myself as previously. It’s a very powerful thing when someone gives you an identity like that. And all of a sudden, you stop questioning what you know about yourself and how you think about yourself.

I tell you this story to illustrate that when you see someone else who’s maybe standing on the sidelines, who’s shy, who maybe would like to be more involved, or someone who just wants to feel more at home, one of the great ways to do it is just to bring them a non-judgmental loving energy that invites them into the room or ask them to teach you something, “How do you do that? You have to teach me that.” Because that puts them in a position of leadership and empowerment. All of a sudden, you’re not saying, “You should be doing this.” You’re saying, “That was really cool what you just did. How do you do that? Teach me how to do that.”

Now, you’ve made them braver by putting them in a role where they’re teaching you something. And when they do, do something that maybe is a little out of character for them, at least publicly, but probably isn’t out of character for them, they’re just finally doing something publicly that they normally do privately in the shower or in the car, when they do that, let’s not make the mistake of pointing at the thing they’re doing and being like, “You’re doing it. Look. You’re doing it. You’re dancing. You’re singing. You’re being brave.”

That is the thing that all of a sudden, makes someone focus on themselves again. And that’s the root cause anyway. Now, what you’ve done is you made me aware of myself. And in making me aware of myself, I start going inward-looking again. And when we go inward-looking, we start to close down because I start to go into protection mode.

So, when someone is engaging, when someone is coming to life, instead of pointing it out in a way that shines a light on them, just be in the energy with them. Be the energy that they are. Be beside them, with them in that energy. When in doubt, go back in a loving way to that childhood version of yourself. When you were scared, when you were shy, when you were anxious, when you were in your own head, when you were inward-looking, and find out what does that you need? What did they need back then? What kind of support or love or encouragement or teammate could they have used back then that would have helped them to feel comfortable expressing themselves more?

Once you know what that is, ask yourself who could I go out and give that to today?

And as a last point, one of the most beautiful things you can ever do that can take away your own shyness, your social anxiety, or not even take them away, just make you realize that you can still go and express yourself in spite of them, is when you recognize what they child needed, you can actually give it to yourself today. You can give yourself the very warmth and love and encouragement and the teammate, the dance partner that you’re craving on the outside because you can actually be that friend to yourself in any room. And when you do that, you will realize that you never went to any party alone. You never went to any event alone. You are always taking this incredible ally, this incredible teammate and cheerleader. And that is you.

Key takeaways from this video—number one, shyness is inward-looking. Focusing on our own fear of rejection prevents us from making someone else feel less alone in a room. Focusing outward is the cure. Generosity of spirit is the antidote to shyness. Two, our kindness shouldn’t be a transaction that depends on someone else unlocking it within us. And number three, we will worry less about our own image and our own self-preservation if instead, we think about being an expression of the love, compassion, and vulnerability that somebody else needs. And we know they need it because it’s something we ourselves are wishing for.

I know that so many people who watch this channel are simultaneously on a journey to find love, to build stronger relationships in their life in general, and to build a better relationship with themselves. And I have a place you can do all of that over the next few months and year. It is the Love Life Club where we have an incredible community of people. I answer your questions live every month, along with my wife, Audrey, my brother, Stephen Hussey. You share your experiences with other members in the community and connect with this global network of amazing people who are on the same path. And we even have some brand new live events coming up, they’re exclusive for members, this year in different parts of the world.

So, if you want to come and join this thriving and beautiful, loving community of people who are all on this path to becoming more confident, loving life more, and finding the love of their life, then come join us in that experience. And I will see you in the next video. 

By the way, if you liked this video, I think you will also really enjoy this one right here. So, if you’re in need of something else to do for the next few minutes, go check this one out.

The post If I Wanted to Overcome My Shyness in Dating, I’d Do This appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

Do you attract emotionally unavailable people? Or maybe you have a pattern of meeting good people and pushing them away because “something doesn’t feel right.”

If this sounds familiar, you may struggle to trust your own decisions when it comes to love. This often leads to us looking to others to validate our choices and tell us we’re doing the right thing (which can be dangerous for many reasons).

So how can you get out of this cycle? In today’s new video, I share 7 simple steps you can take to make better decisions in love and start building self-trust again.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

What weird reason could be responsible for us continuing in our lives to attract emotionally unavailable people? And what does going out to dinner and asking everyone else what they want from the menu before deciding ourselves what to get have in common with the phenomenon of attracting emotionally unavailable people? In this video, we’re going to find out.

Before I go any further, have you liked this video yet? Have you subscribed to this channel? Have you hit the notification bell? The one that means that the next time I release a video, you get notified first. If you haven’t, well, I would very much appreciate you doing all three of those things right now.

I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. For the last 17 years of my life, I’ve been helping people all over the world find love. I am the author of this, The New York Times best-selling book, Love Life. If you haven’t got a copy, go to LoveLifeBook.com and grab yours either on hardback or audio narrated by the author.

Today, we are talking about emotional unavailability, specifically the weird reason why a lot of us might be continuing to attract emotionally unavailable people in our lives. So, I got a question recently from one of my members saying that she was struggling to trust herself, that her whole life she had struggled with indecision over small things like what to order for dinner. She said she would literally have to go around the table and find out what her friends would get first before she ordered her own dinner. She talked about how all her life she had picked men who were wrong for her, men who were players, men who were time-wasters, men who had no intention of ever taking anything through to a long-term relationship; and that this pattern of attracting emotionally unavailable people is something she had had for a very long time.

In fact, when she dated someone she described as a good guy, she said her friends would point out that she always found a way to sabotage it. Like, anytime there was a guy actually treating her well, there was something about it that felt inherently uncomfortable or unsafe, she said she would always find something wrong with these guys. So, she came to me and said that she wanted to disrupt this pattern once and for all, because she felt like if she didn’t, she would never, ever find happiness, not just in her love life but in any part of her life where this lack of self-trust plagued her.

So, I said at the beginning of the video that there was a real link between not knowing what to order for dinner and needing everyone else’s opinions first and our propensity to keep attracting emotionally unavailable people. What is that link?

Well, it all stems from a lack of self-trust. If we don’t trust our own decisions, then we look for other external sources to decide for us what is valuable. If someone is deemed to be popular by everyone else, it feels like, “Oh, everyone’s decided that this person is popular so I don’t have to think about it. I just have to go for this person because their value has been pre-determined by their popularity.”

Another way we feel this is if a friend is telling us this person is amazing, this guy is amazing, or we hear people at work talking about how attractive someone is. We then feel like we have a green light to find them attractive because other people have said they are so. The same phenomenon takes place when someone is hard to get, because even if no one else in our world knows this person that is being hard to get with us, our brain makes a connection that if they are hard to get, they must be valuable. In other words, they’re not choosing me, they’re off somewhere else doing something else. They are rare, they are valuable, they have a status, and that’s why they’re hard to get.

Very dangerous connection to make, by the way, that someone being hard to get is an indicator of their value.

But when we’re not trusting ourselves, when we’re only looking for external validation for our decisions when someone is hard to get, we instantly think they must be valuable and we start chasing them. Meanwhile, someone who is actually choosing us is scary because we’re not choosing ourselves. So, what is wrong with you that you’re choosing me? I’m not a thing to be chosen. I don’t have an inherent value. I attach myself to the value of things on the outside. I am a gray, amorphous matter that chameleonizes itself to everything else. Why are you choosing me? I’m nothing.

If you choose someone who chooses you, you have to trust your own opinion, not who the world tells you is valuable. And that is the biggest struggle for those of us who don’t trust our own opinions, who have learned not to trust our own intuition or not even to trust our own needs.

Now, look, many of us suffer from this indecision, from this lack of self-trust. And I think a lot of us feel almost ashamed or find this difficult to speak about, because if you don’t necessarily know where that comes from, especially if you associate it with having been loved in your life, then you don’t really know where does this lack of self-esteem even comes from. And it could have come from anywhere. It doesn’t have to have come from abuse. It could come from someone constantly invalidating your decisions or someone bringing you up to think that they were always the smartest person in the room and that you had to go to them for their help, you couldn’t just trust your own judgment. Maybe you weren’t empowered enough growing up. It’s not essential that you go and do an excavation of your past to learn where these things come from for you. What’s important is to know that progress can be made by training a new muscle–the self-trust muscle. So, how do you do that?

I’m going to show you how to do this in seven specific ways.

Number one: Stop giving everyone else so much credit. When we have struggled to trust ourselves—and I know this because I’ve fallen into this trap many times in my life—we start to put everyone else and their opinions on a pedestal as if they are all-knowing about what is right and wrong instead of realizing that everyone else is kind of just making it up as they go along as well. Some of them may appear to be more sure of themselves than others, but ultimately, we are all just pioneering in our own lives. None of us have all the answers. None of us have all the answers for our own lives, let alone for somebody else’s. So, be very wary anytime you think greater wisdom lies outside of yourself than inside yourself for what you should do next in your life, especially when it’s in an area as personal as your love life. The core belief here that we have to dismantle is that everyone else knows what they’re doing but me. Instead, we have to replace it with, we’re all just trying to figure it out. So, how do I train the muscle that makes me better at making decisions for myself, especially if my decisions for myself aren’t going to be inherently worse than anyone else’s choices for me.

To follow on from that point, number two, do not let a committee of your friends tell you what to think about someone you are dating. Look, I’m an advocate in situations that are potentially abusive or disrespectful—one where you really don’t feel like you’re being treated right or you’re experiencing really negative emotions because of someone. I’m all for in that situation going to your friends and family and people you trust for an objective opinion. But if you are just experiencing good feelings with a person and you’re seeing where it goes, you do not need to go to your friends and look at every text they have sent, every conversation you have had, allowing them to break it down and project their stuff on to it. You know, he texted back a little quickly there. That’s a little bit much. Is it? Is that too much? Or is that just, he likes you so he sent a message back faster than someone who doesn’t care?

Don’t let everybody else project their stuff onto your situation. Only you need to like this person. And the way that you know whether you like this person is to connect with how this person actually makes you feel. Do they make you feel safe? Do they make you feel peaceful? Do they make you feel more like yourself? Do you laugh around them? Do you feel you could be more vulnerable around them? Do you like the version of yourself that you are when you’re in their company or speaking to this person? You don’t need everyone else’s opinion on that, so do not allow your love life to be decided by committee.

Now, obviously, if you feel like someone is behaving in an abusive or disrespectful way, that’s a different thing. And sometimes the objective opinions of friends and family can matter in those situations when we’re too close to it. But if someone is making you feel good, if someone’s making you feel safe or more peaceful and you’re having a great time, don’t feel that you need everyone around you to also think that this person is hot and sexy and awesome in order for you to continue liking them.

Number three: Know what you’re optimizing for. What is actually important to you? You know, we just talked about some of these things, whether it’s peace, safety, feeling that you’re really understood by someone, feeling that you have this very deep connection with the person, feeling like you can be everything you truly are around someone or feeling like you’re growing around someone. What is it you need in order to be happy? If we’re not careful, we just follow what everyone else on the outside thinks is valuable, which are often the most superficial qualities—charisma, charm, how much someone lights up every room they walk into, can dazzle a crowd, can tell a great story at a dinner table, how they dress, what their job is, how well-regarded they are in the world. We look to these things instead of the things that are actually going to make us happy. We must not allow our ego to drive because our ego often wants to impress other people or to go after and get what other people find impressive. Our soul is going to be driven by what actually makes us happy. So, connect to what you, you, you are optimizing for in your love life.

Now, look, I’m not saying that some of these things aren’t important to us or that we don’t need a baseline level of attraction with someone. I’m not denying chemistry as a crucial factor. But how you end up feeling chemistry or the way someone looks that might turn you on or the sexual connection between you may not come in the form that will naturally impress the people around you. That may be something that’s very unique to you.

Everyone has been attracted at some point in their life to someone that wasn’t their type or someone that on paper they feel like they shouldn’t be or wouldn’t be attracted to, and yet here I am feeling this incredible chemistry or sexual connection with someone I never would have thought. People have that experience all the time, but then they get thrown off because their friend says something like, “Have you seen the trousers they’re wearing? Have you seen the shoes? I mean, their hair is a little bit crazy, isn’t it?” We start hearing these things going, “Oh, maybe I don’t find them as attractive as I thought I did, maybe I don’t have the sexual chemistry that I’ve been feeling.” We start second-guessing ourselves.

So, those things are important, but it matters that they’re derived from within, not from without.

Number four: Give yourself permission to make wrong decisions because we do that all the time. Anytime you’re out there aggressively making things happen in life, making decisions, you have to make peace with the fact that you’re going to make some wrong decisions. Now, people who have a story that says “I can’t trust myself” will, anytime they make a wrong decision, attribute that to their own poor decision-making. They will say, “Here I go again, I never get it right. I can’t trust myself.” Whereas people who don’t have that story will make a wrong decision and they’ll say, “Well, that’s just one of the hazards of living a life of action. That’s one of the hazards of making progress in life, of being aggressive about living is you’re going to make bad decisions or you’re going to make decisions that are wrong.”

What people with that more empowering story do is just self-correct. They realize that the price of success in any area, including our love life, is being able to make decisions and then correct course along the way if we’re wrong. Now, that might mean that we commit another two weeks to seeing someone; and if it ends up not making us feel the way we want to feel, if it doesn’t feel right, if it doesn’t progress in the ways that we want, then we correct course and put our energy into someone else or being single again. We don’t stay the course indefinitely if it’s wrong.

But we recognize that good leadership is not making the right decisions all the time. Good leadership is the ability to make a decision, and that’s no less true in our own love lives. Good personal leadership in our love lives is making decisions knowing that we’re not always going to get it right but also knowing that we reserve the right to correct course and change direction any time.

And, by the way, know that since you’re gonna make some wrong decisions, it’s important not to bet the house, metaphorically speaking, with every decision. That’s why we don’t quit our jobs, sell our house, and move across the country for someone we met a month ago. We make decisions, but because we know we’re going to make some wrong decisions, we make calculated bets where the losses or losses we can afford.

Number five: If you want to build self-trust in big ways, like, who you decide as your life partner, start building the muscle in small ways like deciding what you’re going to eat on the menu for dinner. So, if you go out with your friends, maybe you’re the one who picks the restaurant tonight instead of asking everyone else what they want to eat. When the menu comes, you decide what you want to order without having to ask everyone else what they’re ordering. Or maybe you’re planning a vacation this year, decide where is piquing your interest and book the tickets instead of having to get the validation from everybody else about where you’re deciding to go. If we train ourselves to make empowered decisions, knowing that our decision is not inherently more wrong or worse than anybody else’s, then we’re starting to send a very clear message to our brain that we can make good decisions, and, maybe most importantly, that there is no such thing as an ultimate right decision, which brings me on to point number six.

Leaning into something or someone is very often the thing that makes it great. When we actually start to apply our energy to something instead of being divided by indecision, we start to see what the potential for that thing really is. It’s, like I said, if you pick a vacation spot for this year, and then between now and leaving, you spend the entire six months deliberating about whether that was the right place to go on vacation, you’re not going to have a good vacation, you’re not going to bring great energy to it. But if instead you say that’s where I’m going, now, let me just make the best of this vacation, then it can be as good as any vacation you have ever been on.

What we have to recognize is that something being revealed to be a good decision is something we actually have agency over. We are empowered to make something a good decision by how much we throw ourselves into it with a beautiful energy, with an aggressive attitude of I’m going to make the best of this.

Now, the same is true of our love lives. Have you ever known anyone who spends their whole time debating whether the person that they’re dating is the right person or not, instead of actually being really present with that situation, going 100% in, and allowing that situation to either become great or reveal itself to not be capable of that greatness. I know that there are times in my life where I never even knew how good something could be because I spent my whole time living in this state of paralysis about whether it was right or not. And, as a result, I never even threw myself into it. I never even tried. Can you relate to that? Standing on the sidelines and just questioning it instead of actually going all in and seeing what it could become?

The best relationships are actually co-created. They are the result of two people giving their best energy to the relationship and seeing what it becomes when they do that. That’s the true one plus one equals three of any relationship. Best relationships don’t just come ready-made, they come from two people actually leaning into them and giving them their all.

And sometimes we’re afraid to lean into something because we think, “Well, I don’t want to give more to something if it’s not right.” But very often we find out more by leaning into something than we do by standing on the sidelines deliberating. Have you ever had a relationship where it felt like you wasted months and years, with half of you in, half of you out, never really getting any answers? Well, when we lean into something, we do get answers, right? They either succeed, in which case the argument is put to bed and we go, “Oh my god, this is amazing;” or they fail faster. They reveal themselves by us throwing ourselves into them.

That’s true of relationships, it’s true of business decisions. How many times do businesses go, well, should we do this? Should we not do this? Should we try this new product? Should we try this new service? Will the customers like it? And we learn more by just getting it out there in some way and getting the information so that we can then make another decision. This is just as true in our love lives. This doesn’t mean that leaning in is about going all in for the next year, right? We haven’t got that amount of time to waste. But it might mean I’m gonna give this my all for the next 30 days and see what it could be. And at the end of that, I might have more clarity either way than constantly debating within myself whether this is right.

You’re not going to get all the answers about someone right away, you’re not going to know exactly how you feel on every level in the very beginning. This idea of love at first sight and when you just know, you know I think can be quite a destructive one. I think what’s more true, for most people, is that you have to give an amount of energy and investment and curiosity to a situation to get to the next stage, at which point you can decide whether to continue or not. But if you never get to that next stage because you never invest appropriately, you never actually lean into something, then you’ll just spend your life in deliberation, waiting for a feeling of certainty that is actually earned through investment and trying and two people co-creating not from the sidelines.

And, by the way, remember, you reserve the right to change your mind at any time. If you lean into something and it doesn’t become great by leaning into it, you can leave. That’s also data. But I think we learn more by investing in something and seeing if it can become great. And, by the way, seeing if it just reveals itself to not be able to be that, because that’s information too, then we do by standing on the sidelines, debating it with no information.

Lastly, number seven, remember that people take their cues from us. When you are dating someone, if you have decided someone is amazing and awesome and you go and communicate with that energy to the people in your life, that is going to be infectious. That’s going to do more to determine what they feel about this person than any casual observation they make of this person in watching how they are around you or what they’re like in their life. Because, remember, they don’t really know this person, but you do. So, they are looking to you to tell them how great this person is.

Think about it when someone comes to us and does the reverse and keeps complaining about their partner and keeps saying that, “Oh, I’m dating this person and I’m not really sure because they keep texting me and they’re suffocating me or they’re being really annoying and they did this thing the other night that I didn’t like.” Eventually, your friends don’t know this person at all, but they’ll hate them. They’ll be like, I can’t stand this person. They’re so annoying. But really all they’re feeding off of is your energy about the person.

I know couples who everyone thinks are the greatest couple in the world. But the reason they think they’re the greatest couple in the world is because of how that couple speaks about each other. They’re constantly singing each other’s praises; they’re constantly talking about how the other one is the best person in the world. And so, everyone on the outside of that relationship. Of course, no one knows what that relationship is like on the inside behind closed doors, but everyone on the outside is like they’re the greatest couple because of how they speak about each other. People take their cues from us. 

When you lean into something, you make that thing the best it can be and you communicate to the outside world that that thing is right now the best thing you could be choosing. And when we do that, it has the effect of making more things great. It has the effect of colouring positively the perception of everyone else for what we have chosen so we have agency.

And we have to get out of this mindset that is the disease of lacking self-trust. That is that, there is one true right answer in life, whether it’s for what to have to eat tonight, where to go on vacation this year, or what partner to choose to spend our lives with and that other people have more information on what that right answer is than we do and instead realize the truth that there is no one answer, that there are many great vacation spots in the world, that there is no one right cuisine to eat tonight, and that there is no one partner that could make us happy, and that we have the best information to make these decisions, because we know what we need and value for our own happiness, and that once we’ve chosen if we lean into the decision and if we give it all we’ve got and if we talk about it with excitement, that that decision will be the one that people look at and go, “Wow, you chose really, really well.”

But we will have orchestrated the success of our decision. It won’t be that we objectively made the best decision in the world and know that, at any time, if you make what is clearly the wrong decision, which you and I will many more times in our life, we can correct course. And the ultimate self-trust is not built in having a perfect record of making great decisions, it’s in the knowledge that you make decisions and when you get them wrong, you’re able to correct course any time you need. And guess what? When you remove all of this power from everybody else about knowing what’s right for you, or even in determining objectively what is valuable in the world, you will stop valuing people simply because they’re the most popular person in the room, because other people tell you that they’re eligible, or because they are hard to get when you try to reach them. You’ll start to see that those are at best subjective markers of value and at worse than more dangerously fake markers of value, and that the real value is in what’s going to make you happy. You will no longer choose someone because they’re unavailable, you’ll choose the person you feel the best around. And I can tell you who that will never be—the person who is not available to you.

Before you go anywhere, I have a brand-new free guide called Spark and Connect that shows you nine effortless ways to start up a conversation and connect with someone new. It is at WhatToSayNext.com. It’s easy, it’s practical, and you can use it today to go out there and meet someone new. So, go create some great options for yourself—WhatToSayNext.com is the link. And if you want to continue your video journey with me, right here, right now, then go check out this video because we have picked a recommended video for you to watch after this one. So, check this one out and enjoy. I’ll see you soon. Don’t forget to leave me a comment on this one as well. I will be reading them. And I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much. Be well, my friends, and love life.

The post The WEIRD Reason You’re Attracting Emotionally Unavailable People appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

What is a relationship with a narcissist really like? 

If you’re an empathetic person, it can make you feel crazy: You doubt yourself constantly. You’re always second-guessing. Your boundaries and sense of self are slowly broken down by emotional manipulation and gaslighting.

Whether you’re still feeling the wounds from a past narcissistic relationship, or are trying to figure out if you’re in a relationship with a narcissist right now, today’s video is your next step. I walk you through the 7 signs you’re dating a narcissist, and show you how to spot these traits faster in your next relationship.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

What are the signs that you are with, are dating, or have fallen for, or been married to a narcissist? 

There are certain types of people in this world that will never make sense to the rest of us. Those are the narcissists. And I don’t mean that word in the kind of generic way that it gets thrown around a lot these days, where anyone seems to be able to be construed a narcissist based on one or two things that they’ve done. I am talking about someone who truly fits the bill. And you know one, if you have been with one because they don’t just tick the box on one count, they tick the box in almost every diagnosable criteria of a narcissist. 

If you have been with one in the past, I think this is going to be a very cathartic and healing video. It’s going to help a lot of people feel a lot more sane. If you are with one right now, it’s going to help instruct how much information you have about the person you are with. If you have just come out of a situation like this and you’re still in the devastation of it, I think it’s going to help you understand a lot about what’s just happened to you. 

Thank you, by the way, for watching my YouTube channel. I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence, and for the last 17 years of my life, I’ve been helping people all over the world find love. Don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to this channel, and hit the notification bell, so that the next time I release a video, you are the first to be notified. 

All right, let’s do this. 

Number one, they can be great sometimes. 

Despite all of your suffering, despite all of the ways that they cause you pain, all of the betrayals, all of the ways that they invalidate your feelings or gaslight you, one evening, they come home and they’re amazing. They’re kind. They’re sweet. They have great conversations with you. They’re playful, they are loving. They are everything that you always hope that they would be. And when this happens, it’s so maddening, because we think “This is it. They are capable of being this. It’s not that they’re never capable of being what I want. They are being exactly what I always want, right now.” And we then start playing the game of, “If I can just keep this going, this is the relationship I always wanted with this person.”

What we have to remember is that a narcissist might actually come across as a delightful person once all their needs have been met. That’s not always the case, but for some, if all of their needs have been met, if they have their supply, as it’s known. If they feel validated and adored and there’s nothing they want for, then they might see you in the evening, they might see you at some point, and be wonderful to be around. But what you’re really experiencing is them being great because every box is being ticked for them right now. The danger is who they are when they’re trying to get their needs met. 

I like to think about it like a broken watch. A broken watch is right twice a day. It’s wrong most of the time, but for two brief moments a day, a broken clock is correct. Don’t mistake a relationship that works a couple of moments a day, a week, or a month, with a working relationship, you have every right to be loved, considered, and seen in every other minute of the day too. 

Number two, your empathy for them gets you worse treatment, not better treatment.

The very quality that can make us so special, our empathy, our compassion with people, our ability to truly see behind what’s going on with the person, or to understand, to see them at their core, not to just blame or judge on the surface, can actually be the thing that gets weaponized against us. 

Think about in a relationship like this how often you end up forgiving someone, or empathy is often the horse that forgiveness rides in on. Right? Empathy is the thing that ushers in forgiveness. When we understand someone. When we know their story. When we are able to see the hardships that they’ve endured in their life, the things that they’ve been through, that maybe it feels like uniquely predisposed them to this bad behavior, to treating us this way. It breeds a kind of sympathy, maybe even a kind of pity. “They’ve had it hard. They’ve been through a lot, they can’t help themselves.” And that empathy is what allows us to keep forgiving someone, to keep making allowances for their terrible behavior in the present. 

And of course, when we finally say enough is enough, that person will often shame us. Shame the part of us that wants to feel compassionate by saying, “How could you? How could you leave me? How could you judge me? How could you not forgive me? You know me. You know what I’ve been through. You, of all people I thought would understand.” In those moments, their story, and all of the reasons that we should see them as sympathetic can get weaponized against us using our empathy, which is something we pride ourselves on. So we have to be extremely careful of that. 

But the real insidious part of this is that one would think that the person who lives on this island with the narcissist who gives them the most sacrifice, the most compassion, the most empathy, would be the person that they treat the best. Sadly, the person living on that island with them is usually the person they treat the worst. 

For a narcissist, our empathy isn’t seen as some beautiful quality that signifies our value. Our empathy is seen as their ticket to doing whatever they want. It is seen as their perpetual Get Out of Jail Free card anytime they want to get their needs met in any disrespectful or terrible way, and they know at the end of any terrible behavior they can always rely on and—because of their entitlement—expect forgiveness. 

Number three, they are able to move on impossibly quickly after something terrible they have done to hurt someone they love, which may mean you. 

I want you to think about the things that this person has done to hurt you. And as a thought experiment, I want you to now imagine that you had done any of those things to them. That you had caused that kind of hurt to someone you love. How long would it take you to move on from that? You, not them. How long would it take you to move on from that? How hard would it be? How much work would it take for you to forgive yourself, for you to let go of any shame that you felt? Any guilt that you felt at having done that? Any anxiety that you felt at having been what you might think of as a bad person. How long would it take you? How hard would it be for you to move on from that? Then consider how easy it was for them to move on from that. 

Many narcissists will never apologize and expect you to move on. But even the ones that can apologize will often expect that once the apology has been issued, the situation is over. And if you continue to have any feelings about the betrayal that you’ve been through, the pain they’ve put you through, the hurt they’ve caused, they will start to become incredibly impatient or even angry at the fact that you are still making a big deal out of it. “Why are we still talking about this? I thought it was over.” Their response is devoid of compassion. 

And by the way, that doesn’t mean that they won’t grovel in the beginning or perform grandiose gestures in order to win back your good graces, in order to prevent from losing you. They’re only doing that in order to get back to the status quo so that they can get back to getting their needs met. So that they can get their supply again. 

They’re not doing it because they fundamentally feel bad, because what they have done has gone against some fundamental moral compass that they have that they now are finding it challenging to reconcile or forgive themselves for. What they want is for you to move on as quickly as possible, because they moved on the moment they did it. In fact, for them, there was nothing to move on from. 

By the way, never let someone else’s ease of moving on gaslight you into believing that what they did wasn’t so bad after all in a situation like this. Their ease of moving on has nothing to do with the scale of what they did. It has everything to do with the absence of empathy and compassion that they feel when they do bad things.

What’s up, everybody? Sorry. To interrupt my own video. I just wanted to let you know that we only have 35 spaces left for my Live Retreat in Florida this September from the 9th to the 15th. If you want to spend six days with me, getting to know more about your story, helping you through some of the deepest things that you want to work on. This is the place we do it. It’s only happening once this year, and this is your chance to get on board. So, go to MHRetreat.com, grab one of those 35 places before they’re gone, and I hope I will get to see you there. 

Back to the video. 

The fourth sign that you’re with a narcissist. When caught red-handed, they will make excuses that are almost unbelievable. Which, by the way, we might still believe. 

You might have clear as-day proof that someone is cheating on you. “I literally found the messages on your phone,” and they will say something like, “What are you doing on my phone?” And come to think of it, “That’s my private life, and has nothing to do with you.” Inside you’re thinking, “But we’re in a relationship.” Before you know it, you are on a different planet to the one you thought you were on, having to defend yourself for not being a good partner to this person who, three minutes ago, you found out was cheating on you. 

You ever heard the law Occam’s Razor? Occam’s Razor is essentially the idea that the simplest explanation is the most likely one. “I found evidence of you cheating. That’s the most likely thing that has happened, is that you have cheated.” What they are telling you is the complete opposite of Occam’s Razor. It is the most complex, ridiculous, insane version of events that somehow leads to them being innocent or being the victim. And, ideally, you being the perpetrator. Though you just found that part out. 

It’s almost like the excuses version of Murphy’s Law. David, what’s Murphy’s Law is kind of anything that can go wrong will go wrong, right? Or anything that can happen will happen. In this case it’s any excuse that can be made will be made, and even the ones that you think couldn’t be made will be made. Remember, if the excuse sounds wild, then it’s more likely an indicator of the person you are dealing with than just how fantastical the reality really is. 

You didn’t think I’d be able to fit Occam’s Razor and Murphy’s Law into one point? Did you? 

If they’re deeply uncomfortable with the contents of this video, they’re a narcissist. And that, my friends, is Matthew’s Law. 

The fifth sign you’re with a narcissist, even when you are at your worst, in a moment when you are sinking and you think they wouldn’t let you drown. They do.

This, I think, is one of the most earth-shattering, reality-bending realizations that people come to when dealing with true narcissism. They may have seen bad behavior over time. They may have seen it consistently, reliably, predictably. But, there’s something in the back of their mind that tells them, “Yes, but if I was truly in trouble if I was really on my worst day, this person would be there for me. Of course they would. We’ve been together all this time. We have history. I’ve sacrificed so much for them. I’ve always been there for them. We are lovers. We love each other. At the end of the day, we are like this.  Despite all of the chaos on the surface and all of the friction in our relationship and all of the challenges we’ve had, at the end of the day, we are there for each other.” 

And in a sense, it may feel like we never truly put that to the ultimate test, until something dreadful happens in our life, until something goes truly wrong. It might be a point of financial devastation. It might be at the point of a health diagnosis. It might be a time when your life falls apart in some very real way with your family or your mental health. You believe that in that moment when the chips are down, they’ll throw you a life raft, they’ll be there for you. And in that moment, you watch as you’re going underwater, and they’re not there. They stand by, either with indifference or with excuses. 

In short, you cannot know the extent to which a person like this will abandon you in the key moments until those devastating moments actually happen. And for a lot of people, that moment is a moment of true realization. It’s almost for a lot of people, a moment that they can never go back from. They will never forget that in that moment when they were drowning, the other person did not save them. And you can’t unknow that. 

It’s almost like we can’t bring ourselves to believe that we’re in a relationship or married to an alien. And some people are watching this, and it applies for them with a family member or a parent. But it’s hard to believe that this person that you have been wed to in one way or another, is actually an alien to you who does not operate by the same set of laws in life. 

So we still identify with them, and we say “No, no. When it really goes wrong, they’ll behave like I would behave.” And that’s the mistake. Is that right up until total devastation, we still believe that they will behave like us, but they will never behave like us because they don’t operate according to the same set of laws. 

By the way, don’t ever shame yourself for feeling like a fool when it comes to this. It is one of the most mind-blowing, reality-shattering realizations that you will have about a person, and long after it’s happened, you can still fail to understand how the hell that person was happy to let you drown. 

Don’t shame yourself for finding it hard to wrap your head around that reality. The fact that you can’t really wrap your head around that reality is a sign of who you are and your character and just how different you are from them. 

Sign number six, they show emotion, but their emotion doesn’t come from the same place as our emotion comes from. 

So it’s very tempting when we threaten to leave someone to see their tears, to see them cry, to see them get upset. And to think, “Oh, they do have the same emotional register as me. Look, I keep talking about them like they’re this cold, calculated, unemotional narcissist. But, look how much pain they’re feeling right now. Look how many tears they’re shedding. Maybe they are like me after all.”

Now it’s not that their tears aren’t real, it’s not that their tears are an act. That’s just another falsehood. Their tears may well be real, but their tears aren’t for you. Their tears are for them. They are feeling a loss, and that is what they’re upset about. 

In other words, when someone hurts you and they risk losing you, they’re not hurting because you’re hurting. They’re hurting because they’re hurting, and their pain is the most important thing in the world to them. So they are capable of feeling immense pain, but we mustn’t mistake it as having the underlying foundation that our pain has. 

When we feel pain, it’s often from a place of having caused someone else pain. Our pain is our guilt, our pain is our self-loathing. Our pain is our self-admonishment that we could have done something like that to someone. Their pain is that whatever has happened has cost them something. And that’s where their sadness or their hurt is coming from. Don’t confuse tears that are over you for tears that are for you. 

The seventh sign that you are with or have been with a narcissist, is how quickly and seemingly easily they can discard you once it’s over. 

It is another shocking realization. I feel like every narcissistic relationship is sort of a series of shocking realizations to wrap your head around. And, in many ways, the final shocking realization that people have is that this person that they thought once they finally left the narcissist, or once they finally stopped giving in to them, would continue to hurt, or would in some way, continue to do the right thing afterwards, or continue some strand of connection, how easily that person severs all connection with you. How they can seemingly just move on, as if you never existed. And any communication with them from that point is tantamount to an inconvenience to them. Unless it still represents some kind of supply. Right? 

If the narcissists can continue to get supply from you, in some way, then there may still be some passing interest. In other words, if they can still get validation from you, adoration from you, if they can still get their needs met in some way, then maybe they’ll hang on to that connection. But the moment you refuse to be their supply anymore, which means having boundaries, having standards for yourself, going forward, the moment you are no longer supply they discard you as if you never existed. 

And for people who have so much history with someone, in many cases, have built a life with someone, or been raised by someone, or raised someone the idea that that person could just cut them off and move on to another life at lightning speed is the most disorienting, bewildering thing. But that’s exactly the experience so many people have when it comes to narcissism. 

This can have the effect of being almost this kind of “exit gaslighting” that happens on the way out. This feeling that this situation that has gaslit us all along, on one level or another, this is like the final gaslighting. Is that “I made the whole thing up. I thought we were soulmates. I thought we were this couple that looked out for each other. I thought we had a marriage that meant something at the end of the day, after years or decades of being together. And, seemingly, it counted for nothing. It is like it was all just a hallucination of my own.”

Whatever they thought of the relationship, or how different it was in their mind to how it was in yours, your love was real. The relationship may not have been in the way that you thought, but the way you loved, and the ability you had to love them, your feelings for them, were real. And the beautiful thing is you can now take all of that that you still have, because it’s yours, no one can take that from you, and you can point it in a direction that deserves it this time around. And I don’t care how late in the day, you have told yourself it is for you in life. I don’t care what season you are in, it is never too late, while you are still breathing, to take all of that love that you have and to point it in a direction where it will do good and blossom into something beautiful for you and for somebody else. 

If you enjoyed this video, leave me a comment, let me know what it meant to you. The feedback on these videos means a lot to me and helps me direct future videos. It also is encouraging to me to know that people are out there and that you heard it and that it made a difference to you. 

I wanted to give you something as a gift from me today. I have created a free and very practical guide for communicating bold standards. In many cases, standards you may have never communicated before, and when we’ve never communicated them before, we need to learn the language of them. What does it actually look like to communicate these new standards that I want to have in my life? And this guide is designed to help you do exactly that. 

Remember, if you have gone a long time without communicating standards, or you’ve never had them, and you’ve never known how to set boundaries, then it’s like learning to walk for the first time, and that’s okay. When we’re starting out learning a language, we need to know the basics. 

So I put together a guide for you to be able to create bold new standards going forward. And it’s really going to show you what they look like, literal sentences that you can say to people to have the kinds of standards that are going to create a better life, a better relationship for you in the future, and protect you from the kinds of relationships you may have had in the past. 

Go to BoldStandards.com and you can download that guide for free right now, and let me know what you think. I think you’re really gonna love it. 

And thank you for watching this video. I’m so happy to have you here and let’s keep working on our standards together.

I’ll see you next week. Be well, my friends, and love life.

The post 7 Things Narcissists Do That’ll Never Make Sense to You appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

Have you felt the heartbreak of losing the “love of your life,” and now you want them back? Or perhaps you feel trapped in sadness after a breakup and don’t know how to move on. 

Either way, this is the first aid you need right now.

In today’s video, I explain the #1 thing that defines our reality during a breakup, and show how the obsession we might feel during a breakup can have its roots in the early days of dating someone. And if you’re on the fence about getting back with your ex, the 3 steps I share today can help you make that decision.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

If you’re in pain right now because the love of your life ended things with you, and you want them back, this video is for you. Because in this video, I am going to talk about what it might take to get someone back and how we can use this advice to also move on from a person.

For those of you that don’t know, I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. And for the last 17 years of my life, I have been helping people find love.

So, welcome back to the channel, friends. Don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to this channel if you haven’t already, and hit the notification bell, so that the next time I release a video, you get notified.

Now, I don’t normally talk about this subject for obvious reasons. It’s an extremely sticky subject and questionable as to whether we should ever want someone back especially if that person didn’t treat us right. But there are relationships where someone didn’t treat us badly and the relationship ended for reasons that perhaps could shift. But the beautiful thing about it is everything I’m going to tell you is also going to be the thing that actually helps you get over them.

I have divided this video into three separate parts. Before I get into these three parts, allow me to tell you a quick story. A person that I coached, a man, had someone that he broke up with, that he had been with for many years, but no longer felt was right for him. He had a couple of big issues with the relationship that weren’t anything to do with this person’s character. But just things that he was really struggling with. And he got to the point where he felt like he needed to make a clean break and go back out into the world to see what else was out there.

In the wake of this break-up, both of them suffered. She suffered from feeling like she lost the love of her life. He suffered from losing someone that he had broken up with and was feeling the pain of missing constantly. But despite them missing each other and despite him being in pain, he never went back to re-initiate the relationship.

That is, until one day, ten months later, when the two of them met up, and he saw something that made him reconsider everything.

Part 1, what happens in a break-up?

Okay. So, someone breaks up with us. It is devastating when we loved that person. It feels like we have lost the one thing in the world that we need for our happiness. It feels like we can’t breathe, we can’t eat, we can’t sleep. Our world is falling apart. And in that state of obsession, which in some ways is not entirely unlike the obsession that we can feel in early dating when we like someone, that obsession that we feel when we go on a few dates with someone and we’ve decided, “Oh, my god. I think this is it. I think this is my person. I see the potential. I see where this can go. I see everything that this could be.” And then they don’t call us back. That obsession that we feel in a break-up is actually very connected to that early dating obsession because it has its roots in the same thing.

“This person holds the keys to my happiness and my future.”

When someone breaks up with us, we had pictured a future with that person. We had pictured a life with them, a reality where both of us existed together. And now, that reality is shattered. The only difference in early dating is that we have a lot less evidence for that reality. There’s far more projection involved than is involved in a multi-month or multi-year relationship where we’ve had a lot more evidence for the fact that this is going to be a big part of my life or this is going to be my whole life.

So, there’s a kind of obsession that takes over. And that’s what turns into that obsessive rumination that we feel in a break-up. For many of you, you’re there right now in that obsessive rumination. And for those of you that are there, I am sorry. It is the absolute worst. It is a terrible place to be. And it does feel when you’re in that place like nothing is going to make us feel better. And part of the reason that it feels like nothing is going to make us feel better, part of the reason that it feels like this is catastrophic for us, is to do with our focus and what we are connected to right now.

In a breakup, we become connected to one thing and one thing only—the loss that we have experienced.

Imagine that you have this giant spotlight and where you shine this spotlight determines your reality, the story you’re telling yourself, and how you feel.

And so, this giant spotlight that you have, which is the most powerful thing, imagine that this spotlight is the bringer of all emotions. It’s the most powerful thing you have. And you take this, the most powerful thing you have, and you shine it on this area of your life where you have experienced this loss, this person who no longer wants to be with you. And as long as you’re shining the spotlight on that loss, which isn’t just a present-day loss, it’s also you’re shining it on what feels like the loss of your entire future. So, there’s the story there. The reality is I’ve lost this person. The story is I’ve lost my whole future. And all the emotions that come with that are the pain, the desperation, the obsession, the grief. All of that is coming from shining a spotlight on this break-up.

Now, that may not even be a new thing. It might be that you’ve been shining that spotlight on the relationship for the entire time you were in the relationship, saying, “My reality is this relationship. And that the story is that this relationship is the best, maybe the only really good thing in my life, but it’s certainly the best thing in my life.” And all of your emotions are coming from that relationship which, by the way, might have been good at times. “I’m elated. I’m excited. I feel fulfilled. I feel loved.” But it also might have been the reason why in the relationship, you felt terrible a lot of the time because any time that relationship wasn’t perfect, any time you didn’t get a text back, any time you didn’t feel loved, you felt desperate with anxiety. You couldn’t get through the day. You felt like you couldn’t focus on anything else until you had resolved that argument with that person, until you had got their confirmation for the third time that day or that week that they really love you.

That spotlight was on the relationship then. So, it might be that now, this is just a graduation of where the spotlight already was.

Why am I saying all of this? Why such emphasis on this spotlight?

Well, because where that spotlight goes determines our reality, our story, our emotions. So, what happens in a break-up is the spotlight gets shone on one place when, in fact, our life is much bigger than that. Our life is made up of many things, many components. We have our friends. We have our family. We have ourselves and our inner world and our inner growth that is just ours. It doesn’t belong to anyone else or isn’t in relation to anyone else’s. It’s just ours. And it’s very common to become disconnected from everything else in our world. And the key to starting to feel better is to get connected to other things in our world, to really lose ourselves in the friendships we have, in the family that we hold dear, in something we’re learning about right now that we’re curious about that we have a powerful curiosity about.

Every single one of these things is a universe of its own. There is so much depth to all of them. You could lose yourself in all of them. And all of them tell their own story and have their own emotions attached.

We can take that spotlight and shine it on any other part of our world we want at any time. And it feels like the most unnatural thing to do when we are obsessively ruminating over this one area that we have lit up right now. But it’s actually the answer. We have to get connected to everything else in our world.

And I say this to people not just in a break-up, but in the beginning of dating. In the beginning of dating, it’s really important when we like someone that we get connected to everything else in our world that’s important to us, and that we stay connected to it. Because what happens is, we’re experiencing a lot of joy from different parts of our life and things that gave us meaning. And then we meet someone that knocks us over with their charisma, the way they light up a room or how big their life is. And we suddenly forget everything that’s important to us in our lives, everything that makes our lives special, everything we love, everything that gives us a deep sense of meaning. We lose connection with those things. And this person becomes the only thing that matters.

The moment we decide we like someone is the most dangerous moment in attraction because we lose focus on all those other things. Whether it’s in a break-up or in early dating, never ever let anyone make you feel like your world is small without them. That your world doesn’t matter. Stay connected to what’s rich in your world.

And by the way, if someone comes along in your life, and it feels like, “Oh, they’re big, and they’re exciting, and they’re shiny, and they have such an amazing life, and they’re so impressive,” don’t ever let that person distract you from what’s magical and what’s important in your world. You might be a nurse who works with five dementia patients. And outside of that very difficult and long days, you go and see your friends who you love. And you have a hobby on the side that you really enjoy and that gives you a lot of meaning. And between those three things, you have a big life. Just because someone comes along and it looks like they have a bigger life or somewhat something that’s outwardly splashier and more impressive. Don’t ever let that distract you from the rich meaning that is in your own life. But you have to connect to how big and rich your life is. Okay?

And that’s something that we often lose in a break-up. It’s often something we lose while we’re in a relationship especially when we’re spending so much of our time pleasing someone else, trying to be what we think they want us to be, trying to show up for them and their needs, and never tending to our own garden, never looking at our own life and the richness in it and connecting to it. So, we can be forgiven in a break-up for forgetting just how big and rich and important our own life is.

There is a wonderful quote in the movie, A Man for All Seasons, that I included in my book, Love Life, for anyone who doesn’t know. It’s a moment where Sir Thomas More is giving advice to an ambitious Richard Rich who feels that he won’t be worth anything unless he achieves his grand ambitions. More wants him to know that there are more profound ways to achieve a sense of significance than the kind of superficial goals that Richard Rich is trying to attain.

More says to him, “Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher. Perhaps a great one.” Richard Rich, “If I was, who would know it?” Thomas More, “You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public that.”

That is a beautiful exchange that shows one person who thinks that the richness of his life is going to come from this big thing, this big achievement, or in some cases, in our love lives, we think it’s going to come from this person that we date and what they add to our lives. And another person who sees that the richness of this man’s life could come in far more subtle ways if he really connected to it.

Now, in the story I told you about, the danger for the woman in that scenario is that she would now spend months and months, maybe even years, shining the spotlight on him and how he was her world, and she had lost her world.

Did she do that? We’ll find out.

Part 2, the Matrix.

Those of you who have read my book know that there is a chapter called The Identity Matrix. And in this chapter, I described a certain kind of confidence that comes from having multiple sources of validation and significance in your life. I draw a square, and inside that square, I draw smaller squares that represent these different sources of significance, and validation, and identity in your life.

Now, for some of us, our matrix, I call it the identity matrix, is dominated by one very large square that makes up the majority of our sense of significance and our identity where we get our validation. And for a lot of people, that’s their relationship. Not for everyone, for some people who don’t have a relationship, it’s their career. For other people, it’s their kids. For other people, it’s their looks.

People can have a very dominant square in their matrix and the danger of a very dominant square in your matrix is that it’s responsible for too much of our identity, our significance, what we think makes us attractive, or worthy. That means that when that square goes away, we don’t just feel like we lost that thing—that career, that relationship, our looks as we age. We feel like we have lost our entire identity and sense of worth.

And in a way, what I’m talking about with the spotlight is that over time, when we spotlight one area of our matrix, that thing can grow and grow and grow. But it often grows to the detriment of the other parts of our life.

So, if our relationship ends up being how we identify ourselves, we put so much pressure on that relationship working and never going away, that we start to suffocate that relationship or we start to become too anxious in that relationship or we start to contort ourselves to whatever we think someone else wants us to be in order to keep that relationship going, and we lose ourselves in the process, maybe we even lose the respect of the person we’re with.

Ironically, in our identity matrix, the key to keeping a square strong is knowing that we have other squares that can support us if that square were to ever go away.

I think about this matrix like a tabletop. And the tabletop is our confidence. And underneath it are the legs that support that tabletop. Well, if you only have one leg supporting your confidence, and that’s in the case of this particular video, your relationship, the relationship you’ve just lost, then when that relationship goes away, it feels like your entire confidence is shattered.

But if we build up other squares in our matrix, we’re putting other sturdy legs under the table. So now, that one thing is no longer a crutch supporting the table. It’s just one of several strong and sturdy legs. That means that when we lose it, it can still hurt. We can still grieve. It can still be a tremendous loss and a tremendous disappointment. But it’s no longer catastrophic to our confidence or our sense of self.

So, what we need to do with this matrix is have a very honest look at how much of our pain right now is coming from simply the grief of losing someone important to us and how much of it is not just that grief but a whole other level of suffering that is coming from the fact that our entire identity and worth was built around this relationship, their desire for us, and our ability to retain it.

So, the important takeaway for all of this is that our identity matrix is a huge part of what is making us so unhappy in a break-up and what prolongs heartbreak for so long. But that we, actually, have full control over our identity matrix. It is malleable. We can change it.

And the woman in the story I’ve been telling you about changed her identity matrix in crucial ways that made a huge impact.

What’s up, everybody? Sorry to interrupt my own video. I just wanted to let you know that we only have 35 spaces left for my Live Retreat in Florida this September from the 9th to the 15th. If you want to spend six days with me, getting to know more about your story, helping you through some of the deepest things that you want to work on, this is the place we do it. It’s only happening once this year and this is your chance to get on board.

So go to MHRetreat.com, grab one of those 35 places before they’re gone, and I hope I will get to see you there. Back to the video.

Part 3, My Challenge to You.

So, we have talked about the fact that during a break-up, losing someone that was really important to us, one of the things that makes it so hard is we take this powerful spotlight we have and we shine it only on that, and we lose connection with all of the other sources of richness and beauty and confidence and meaning in our world. And the identity matrix is a very visual illustration of how we may have done that over time both inside the relationship and now, in losing it.

So, if we want to start to feel better, it stands to reason that we should find a way to diversify our identity matrix away from that one square, so that there are other areas of our life that can bring us a new reality, a different story, and better emotions when we shine the spotlight on them.

My challenge to you is to do this in one of three ways, if not all three. The first way is to take a square that already exists in your matrix but has started to shrivel and atrophy over time because this other giant square that perhaps was the relationship got so much of your focus. What in your life has withered that if you started to invest more time and energy into it would start to grow and blossom and flourish again into a deep source of meaning and richness in your life?

We value what we invest in. So, if you’re thinking right now, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t really value that part of my life,” know that there’s a very strong chance that’s because you haven’t been investing in it. When we start investing in something again, we start to value it more. And when we value it more, we can find that, magically, this other thing that held so much value for us starts to feel a little less important because other areas become more important.

So, one part of this challenge is to diversify your squares in your identity matrix by focusing more time, energy, and investment in one that already exists but has atrophied over time.

The second way is to create a brand-new square in your matrix, one that never existed before. As a thought experiment, just think of something that you’ve always said you wanted to do, maybe it’s dancing and taking a dance class, maybe it’s a new skillset or qualification that you wanted to get, something that you wanted to go back to school for, or it could be something that you wanted to do for the first time.

It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that this didn’t exist before in your matrix but could begin to exist as a new source of validation, significance, meaning, identity.

By the way, it doesn’t make sense for all of your self-worth to come from any of these things. But it can help us to add something that starts to allow there to be more sources of confidence in our life because having too few makes us vulnerable. So, adding a new square. What could that be for you? Maybe leave a comment and let me know. What’s a new square that you would like to add to your matrix? Something that you think could be a new source of confidence for you if you actually started to do it.

And by the way, that doesn’t mean you have to get good at that thing. It doesn’t need to be something you get good at to become a source of confidence. It just has to be a new interest, something that you derive richness from, something that you derive meaning from, something you enjoy that takes focus away from certain other things that you thought were your world.

The third part of this challenge is to take something that is already something you have in your life that you could be grateful for if you shone that spotlight on it but maybe until now or for a very long time, you have taken for granted. Because our identity matrix is only made up of things that we actually put focus on. That doesn’t mean it’s made up of everything that exists in our life.

So, I’m going to give you an example from my life. For a long time, I have been speaking, focusing on my ability to public speak, to make videos, and I’ve also been writing. I wrote my first book over ten years ago. I’ve written many articles. I just wrote a new book. But my writing and my speaking were things that for a long time, I kind of took for granted. These days, I don’t do that. I remind myself that if I lost everything, if I no longer had a cent to my name, if for whatever reason, my whole life imploded, what I would still have is my ability to speak well, to have a facility with language, and to write well, hopefully. 

My ability in those two areas is something I am now intensely grateful for. I appreciate it. I’m shining the spotlight on it. And in doing that, even though I’ve been doing them for a long time, they weren’t necessarily part of my matrix. But now, they are because I am shining a spotlight on those things.

So now, they are powerful sources of confidence and security for me. I know that everything else in my matrix could go away, and I’d still have those skills, and those skills would give me a sense of courage and security in knowing that I’ll be okay because I’ve got these skills.

What could those things be for you? It doesn’t have to be skills. It could be the love of certain people in your life whether they’re family or friends. Maybe you’ve taken for granted the love that you have around you and actually, that’s one of the greatest forms of security there is.

George Bailey, at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, he gets called the richest man in town not because he has the most money but because he has the most friends and support, the most people who are willing to show up for him. Are you already the richest man or woman in town because of the love you have? Have you taken that for granted? If you started to actually shine a spotlight on that, could that become a whole new giant square in your identity matrix? That doesn’t even need more effort, just more recognition. And that by recognizing it, you’d realize that this story you’re telling yourself that everything in your life is bad, that your life is over because you lost this one square, is actually not true at all.

So, those are my three challenges to you. You could do one of them or you could do all of them. Put more effort and investment into a square that has atrophied to make it bigger and stronger again, create a new square out of something you’ve wanted to do for a while, and lastly, put focus, shine a spotlight on something you already have but maybe has gone underappreciated and undervalued.

Now, earlier in this video, I told you a story of a guy I coached who broke up with someone he had been in a long-term relationship with because he no longer felt it was right.

What happened the day those two met up again ten months later?

He noticed something profoundly different in what he was seeing.

Now, what I didn’t tell you earlier is that in those ten months, she had changed her identity matrix. In the relationship, he had often felt like she didn’t have her own sense of purpose outside of him. In those ten months, she went and got a job. Not just any job, but a job that made her really happy, a job that gave her meaning, a job that made her feel fulfilled, a job that allowed her to feel like she was getting better at something. And that made her proud.

What the job also did was it gave her a brand new circle of friends, an entire new community that she was starting to connect with, and get closer to, that was becoming a source of connection in her life, outside of anything she had previously.

And that just so happened to be another one of the challenges he felt back when they were in a relationship. That he was her only source of connection. That she didn’t have friendships of her own. That she didn’t have her own world socially outside of him.

When the two of them met back up again, as she began to talk about her life, the things that were going on in her life, the things she was excited about, the things she was proud of, as her phone lit up from messages, from people that were excited to see her this weekend, as she talked about what she’d been doing this week in her new job, he started to see a very different picture of the person she was and her identity matrix.

That began a brand new relationship between them. In the weeks that followed, they started talking, reconnecting, and became exclusive again, in a brand new relationship.

And new is the important word there. It wasn’t the same relationship. They didn’t restart their relationship. They began a new one on new terms, on new attraction, on a new way of looking at each other.

What’s so important about all of this is that she didn’t do these things for him. She did them for her. They were an authentic indication of her intention to move on with her life and strengthen her own identity matrix. But when he saw that new identity matrix, he found it incredibly compelling, so compelling, in fact, that it took his spotlight and shone it on her. And in doing so, he saw a new reality with her, a new story of what the two of them could be, appeared, and he experienced new and powerful emotions towards her.

And let me issue you a warning. When you do these things for yourself, there is a very good chance the side effect will be that these things that draw this person back to you will be the very same things that make you no longer need them. And when you no longer need them, if they’re wanting you back, you’ll be able to now objectively assess whether you want them. Now, instead of needing them back, you’ll no longer need them back and you’ll be able to assess whether you want them back.

And for many people that I do this work with and get to this point, they find that they no longer want the person. They needed them before because of the way that their identity matrix was set up. But now that their identity matrix is structured differently, they’re able to see that, “Now that I no longer need them, do I want them? Actually, I’m not sure I do. They’re not nearly as impressive as I was telling myself. This isn’t a good partner. This isn’t someone I want in my future.”

So, be prepared for that. If you actually take this advice in this video, six months from now, you may find yourself in a place where the thing, the person, you thought you needed to breathe, now that you’ve learned to breathe on your own, is someone you realize you don’t actually want.

And if you realize that’s true, and you want to go out and meet someone new, I have something really cool for you.

I have just created a brand-new, free guide. So many of you have been asking for this for a very long time because it’s been years since I created a new free guide in this kind of a practical, written format. I’ve just created a new free guide called Spark and Connect where I give you nine things that you can say to spark up a connection with a brand new person.

So, if you want to go out there and create more opportunities with new people, and why wouldn’t you? Why limit yourself to the possibility of someone from your past coming back to you? Even if there’s some part of you that would like that, don’t ever limit yourself to that. This is a way that you can go out and expand your options, and dare I say, find someone even better for you.

To download this guide for free, go to WhatToSayNext.com and it would take you ten seconds. And like I said, this literally spells out nine different ways that you can connect with new people in life.

Thank you so much for watching this video. I have really enjoyed making it for you. And I look forward to reading your comments. Don’t forget to go to WhatToSayNext.com and download the guide before you forget. And I will see you next week. Be well and love life.

The post My Best Advice on How to Get Over Someone… (Or Get Them Back!) appeared first on Matthew Hussey.