Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 206: Your BIGGEST Fears In Life (And How To Overcome Them)

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

We asked you what your biggest fears for the future were, and you answered! No matter how confident we feel, we all have worries about what lies ahead. The future is unknown. And many of us can’t help but occasionally let our biggest anxieties and worries about where our life is going get the better of us. It could be about your career, your relationships, or anything that keeps you up at night. In this new episode, Matt, Stephen, Audrey, and Jameson talk about what it takes to either overcome these fears, or at least how to not let them paralyze or overwhelm you. --- If you want to spend 3 days with me creating the conditions for your own happiness, then my next Virtual Retreat of 2023 is coming up fast! Head to MHVirtualRetreat.com to book your complimentary call with my Retreat Specialists who are on hand to hear your story (Special offer! $100 off the price if you get your spot booked before March 12th!)

There's no point beating myself up. There's a lot that's happened in my life that has helped to create that wiring, but I do not have to be beholden to it, and it does not have to be my future. Welcome everybody to the Love Life Podcast. We've got the whole Jams crew here today. We've got Jameson, we've got Audrey, we've got Stephen. Hello friends. We've even got Jeremy in the background. We've got Jay Jams today.

It's good to speak to you all. We put a question on Instagram recently and it got so many responses. We thought, you know what, let's do an episode on this. The question that we put up there was what is your biggest fear for your future? The one that worries you the most. And Audrey has been pulling responses from what has been over 2000 responses to this post and some really interesting ones that didn't just resonate with us, but resonated with thousands of people who read the post, who liked those comments. So Audrey is going to take us through these. And I thought it'd be a good chance for us to just talk them through because

when something is worrying us and we're living in that future or the future where that happens, or we don't get that thing, it can really destroy our experience in the present. And we can waste an enormous amount of our lives and our energy just living in this ending that hasn't necessarily even happened, but it's ruining our experience of life today. So it might be nice to let the air out of some of these things a little bit so that we can get back to the present. Audrey, what's the first one? I haven't, there's only one of these where I've, I already know what you're going to say. And I think that's

going to be perhaps the last one we do. And we're saving it for last because we know that this particular worry is going to relate to so many people, or I should say so many people who are listening to this will relate to that worry. But we'll start on some that I don't know you're going to say. Yeah. So one of the ones that came through, which I thought was really, really interesting is my biggest worry for the future is that I will continue to hold myself back because of my paralyzing fear of judgment oh wow and just a warning obviously uh a lot of these we got some very emotionally uh very emotional responses to this and so I was actually quite sad reading through some of them and also

they're so relatable to me personally so many of them but um yeah this is probably going to be a little bit of a sad episode in some parts because it is difficult to to feel those things but yeah that's the first one so can you read it to us again first one is my biggest worry for the future is that i will continue to hold myself back because of my paralyzing fear of judgment so what is that fear i suppose it's it's really a fear of latent potential it's you know it's a weird fear really when you think about it because it suggests that we do think we have a lot of potential like you if you truly think that you have no potential that's not really a fear you have it's just your reality that fear is a fear that I will not become all that I can become I will not do in my life all

the things that I am capable of doing so it's kind of interesting because embedded in that there is actually some belief there's letting yourself down and there's also letting uh people that care about you down i can just imagine like you know this person could have gotten could have been a student you know and the parents were like so confident my parents were so confident that i was gonna like get a really high score in the sats and like go to a really good college turns out i was just good at doing homework and like doing all that stuff wasn't that smart but that fear that latent potential and you nailed it I mean that's exactly what it what it is and there's letting other people down and that's just terrible but letting yourself down that can keep you up at

night I also think it's a fear of rejection right when you think about it because if what's holding her back is a fear of judgment from other people, she feels that if she expresses her true self and her true potential, she will be rejected for it. Or somebody will say, you're ridiculous, you know, you're not good enough. Why do you think you can do that? And so that is the sort of criticism and rejection from other people is probably the emotion it feels like judgment but it's actually a fear of not being accepted well you you can it's this this idea of like the unhatched egg if you if you keep telling yourself there is something special in this egg that can hatch but you never hatch the egg. You can keep telling yourself there is

something special when this hatches, there's something special there. But if it, if you break the egg open and there's nothing there, then you don't just lose the ending that you thought you could have. You also lose the hope. And a lot of people that there's a this terrifying fear of the rejection because it at least if i'm not trying i can live with this idea that if i did try i could be really successful if i did try i could make the team i I could build that business. I could find love. But, and it's the same is true when you go out and you see someone you're attracted to. If you never speak to them, you can go home with this fantasy in your mind that remains intact. That had you spoken to them, something could have come from that. But the closure of going over to that person and

saying something, and then that person's not interested, that's a kind of closure that most people don't want. Because now they have to relinquish the fantasy. They can't go home and say, if I spoke to that person, you never know what could have happened. No, no, no. You found out. The sad part about it is in preserving the fantasy, we kind of missed the point about what actually gives us potential. The thing that gives us potential is experience and competence, which comes from actually doing something enough times and getting in the reps. It's like going to the gym. The thing that gives you the body is the reps. And you, you can't, if you stay at home and dream about the body you could have you're not getting in the reps that are actually going to create that body in a business if you keep wondering whether your idea is a good one instead of going out there and actually exposing it to the light of day and and people's opinions you're not actually getting the feedback you need to turn what is probably an average idea into a good and maybe even a great idea.

My jujitsu trainer said last week, said something really cool. He said the difference between the good and the great is that people who are great are willing to stay good for longer. And it's such a mindset shift from greatness being something inspired and something that you keep in your head as this kind of like latent potential fantasy of one day being great. No, greatness is much more boring than that. Greatness is just you're willing to remain good for long enough that eventually you're the last one in the room and you end up being great because you stayed in the room long enough. And for that person, my biggest non-insight would be that that fear of rejection is making you miss the point entirely of where your potential actually comes from. Your potential comes from going and iterating over and over and over again. And if you can be the

kind of person that can ignore to a large extent, the short to medium term results of that iterating and those reps, and instead just see the trajectory that you're on as a result of doing those reps, that allows you to kind of almost circumvent all of those short-term fears of being rejected and instead just focus on creating a trajectory in your life that makes interesting results inevitable. There was a wonderful line. I was reading Haruki Murakami, the novelist's book about writing the other day. And he talked about how he's always been inspired

by this quote from another writer who said, I approached a desk every day without hope and without despair. And both of those, he says, are dangerous. He says, your hope is damaging in itself in that it leads you to grandiosity and despair that you think you're terrible, you're useless. But he says more like a craftsman, I'm coming to chop wood every day without hope and without despair. And I think that it's the expectations, it's the dreaming, it's the idealizing that makes you feel so paralyzed what if it

doesn't live up to that what if everyone sees it and judges me as this but a woodcutter doesn't need to think like that if you're chopping wood that's so good and you can almost see it through the lens of arrogance like what special right do you have to show up and do great work just by being you? Like it's not, it doesn't work like that. It's much more boring than that. And I think we've learned that lesson from doing videos over the years. You know, we've just, Jameson, you and I met what, 10 years ago? And pretty much since that point,

we've made a video every week since. And there are for sure videos we've liked more than others. And there's ones that we look back on and we go, that stands the test of time. And there's others we look back on and it's like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't put that out again. But those are reps. Every week was a rep. And if you get too precious about the reps, you're really actually missing the thing that's going to lead to your potential. So it's a very relatable fear. Hopefully, we've made it much more pedestrian

for people to just go and do things instead of being so analytical about the results of what they do the last thing i want to add to this um as somebody who absolutely suffers with a fear of rejection and judgment and not being liked um working on it but definitely suffer with it i think remembering that um what's that quote which is like you would worry less about how much people thought about you if you realize how seldom they do. And your fear of judgment only comes from a place

of you focusing on yourself to a degree that nobody else ever will. And if you surround yourself with loving people who accept you, there's actually a lot of room for you to just be yourself and explore and play and make mistakes. And people will not care about your mistakes and they will not feel your embarrassment 5% as much as you do. And sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that it's just as big in our heads as it is in other people's and it stops us from doing things but and and even the person that says that you know even the person that points out i don't like that thing you did this week wasn't that good that that piece of writing

that speech that whatever that piece of work anything someone says, I don't like that video you just did. Okay, fine. It's not my, it's, it's not going to be my best. Like my best is coming. My best is always coming. You're not, you're commenting on something that's already history to me. I'm already better than yesterday. So it's, we get so hung up on what someone thinks of our practice run. I don't like at a certain point, I don't give a shit what you think about my practice. Like every, even you make every time you make something it's practice for the next thing you make. So when you're judging it, the next thing you make so when you're judging it that's fine you're you're judging a piece of practice that my best is always coming so it is

as even the critics you have to look at your critics as judging a practice not judging the best of what you'll ever do yeah very very well, very well put. The next one, next comment that was left, which made me a bit sad to read, I have to say, but I thought was probably something that a lot of people feel and relate to. This is from a lovely woman called Karina. And she said, I am worried that life remains a battle for me. And I will never figure out how to make it lighter. I'm tired of my health issues. I lack a positive outlook and on most days I also lack hope. You know something that keeps me going makes me want to keep going. I lack connection and I am deeply afraid all of this is my fault. I guess in a way i'm afraid i will never change and i will remain

miserable i felt that i've i've been exactly there before i i don't take that uh lightly karina because i know exactly what you're talking about and i know exactly the kind of darkness that you're experiencing when you're in that place it's all-consuming you lose hope because you you wake up you've woken up enough days in a row where nothing has changed and it feels as though nothing ever does change. You don't feel capable of changing the things that would need to change in order for life to feel joyful and happy and even normal. When you feel like that, you would give anything, and even normal, you know, when you, when you feel like that,

you would give anything just to feel normal, not even great. You know, you don't even, you don't even really relate to the tone of self-development that focuses on living an extraordinary life and being great and being your best self. You're not, you're not able to connect with the idea of being your best self when you can't even, you don't even know anymore what it would feel like just to feel normal. It's a bit like being sick all the time. And you said you've got some health issues, so you may really be here, but when you're sick all the time, you pray just to feel well, just to feel okay, not to feel happy, just to not be in pain would be a miracle.

And when we live long enough not in that place, life seems untenable. And when life seems untenable, we become we become somewhat nihilistic and it can be hard to be around people not you know i know when i've been in that place it was very very isolating because i didn't i felt almost like I couldn't trust myself to be around people and not be found out that I was so unhappy or bring them down or find their experience completely unrelatable. And if I were actually honest about my experience, I felt that they would find it completely unrelatable and they would kind of almost just not know how to handle it you know god well i didn't i just met up with you for coffee matt i didn't realize that

you were in this dark dark abyss that you don't know how to crawl out of you know i i i thought i don't know how to be around people anymore and And I just, I would want to just be by myself because it felt like that was in a way the only place I could really trust. I could be in pain on my own without company and not have to worry about anyone needing anything from me or worry about entertaining anyone or pretending I was better than I was. I could just exist in the state I was in and I would shrink my life. And that's one of the cycles that we can get into is when we feel like that, we start saying no to things and we start rejecting life and we don't want to meet up with that friend. We don't want to go and do that gym session. We don't want to leave the house.

It tends to just narrow our life more and more and more until we've cornered ourself into one room. I've found that there are some simple ideas that can be life-saving in a place like this. One of them is to understand that there are other people like you who are really great, I mean really great, terrific people who are going through the same thing and that you're not it really does feel like you're alone you really do feel like in your because when you when you feel like that you sort of oscillate between a kind of resigned nihilism and sheer panic. The sheer panic being that I can't live like this. I don't know what to do. I don't, I'm so alone.

No one can understand what I'm going through. It's all going through inside. It's all happening inside my mind in a way that other people can't relate to or don't know. And you feel trapped. You'd feel trapped inside yourself. When you feel trapped, you'd feel trapped inside yourself. When you experience that, that panic, when it takes over, it becomes, it then feeds on itself. And the panic or the anxiety or the depression that you feel about feeling bad starts to exacerbate it. And it can take feeling bad from a nine out of 10 to, uh, to a 15. Uh, because now all of a sudden you're, you are, you're feeling anxious and scared about

feeling awful in life and you develop a really bad relationship with feeling bad. And then you're into a cycle. So number one, recognize that other great people, great, great people, people we love and admire and think the world of, many of them are going through something like what you're going through right now. And when I, when I, the more I talk to people, the more I realize that there are people who experienced what I experienced back then in that moment of my life. So you're not alone and shared pain is,

makes pain lighter without even the pain going away. It just makes it lighter. It just makes you feel like you're in company. Two, understand that you don't know what you'll feel about this in five years. You really don't. You know how you feel now. You know how you felt for a long time. Although I will say that pain is a very, it's very centralizing. So you do kind of, your experience of pain is that you don't

remember, you don't necessarily, we don't have a good memory around pain. It's almost just this kind of atmosphere of it's been really bad for all this time. But there are moments in your day where you don't feel so much pain. There are moments where you do feel a little lighter or where you're distracted from it. And those moments are really, really important. They're kind of a key because if you feel okay for five minutes, that's a real, that's not just hope, that's a data point. You then know that you can, you might be able to move the needle enough to feel good for 10 minutes. And if you understand that formula of what made me feel okay for five minutes, I might be able to replicate that many times a week or even a day. Eventually you might be able to get a pain-free

hour. And that's really powerful. And it gives you a new reference point that you can actually have some impact on this. And, and over time, that impact can get bigger and bigger because you really learn your way around it and you start to learn your formula. One of the things I'll say to you, Karina, is on the virtual retreat, one of the key things that I teach people is that we all have a formula that if we follow it, it makes us feel good. It makes us feel better. It resets our pain. It connects us with what is good in our life. It connects us with what's important to us. It connects us with our why, with what's driving us. And if you learn that formula for yourself, and if you join us on the virtual retreat, I'll teach you this myself because I use it every day. I've used it to get over the worst moments of my life. And not just the worst moments, the worst periods of my life. And I've had some bad periods that have lasted years and I, and I did start to lose hope,

but I've been able to use that formula to genuinely change my life to a point where now I'm not actually as afraid of pain because I know my way out of it. I know that it's not forever when it happens. I know that my relationship with it can massively decrease my pain. So even if something is very painful, either physically or psychologically, I know that my relationship with that thing can massively increase or decrease that pain. And so I've learned how to manage my relationship with those things. Anyone close to me will tell you that I still have my moments, but you know, I mean, Audrey will tell you this, my recovery time is pretty, pretty damn good. I think it's one of the, that's one of the things I'm most proud of.

That's what you always say say which I think is a really valid point for this is when I when I get upset which also happens you know it's all about the recovery time right it's about how quickly you can feel better um it's okay to feel sad it's okay to feel despair it's okay to feel depressed it's okay to feel all of these things but how quickly do you are you able to kind of pull yourself out of it and move on and dust yourself off versus how much do you wallow and kind of ruminate I suppose on the negativity which I definitely think I'm guilty of doing and I suspect with you know what karina is saying the way that she her outlook on life is as such as she feels all those things she probably does the same thing

where she's focusing on all of the ways in which she's not happy right but those the things you're be legitimate they may be very real but if we connect with an idea or a driving force behind you know you you can believe we're all screwed like you you can believe that something's going to happen in the world and we're all screwed and and and if you really believe that and by the way who knows you might be right. Like maybe the apocalypse is around the corner. I don't know. But if you're right, that's a real reason to be unhappy. It's like, that's not like, you know, I understand what you're saying about wallowing, but that's not like in a sense, wallowing, it's just like, you're just very connected to this really bad thing, but you can also be connected to even that you can say, well, you know what my reason for living

is going to be then it's going to be this, you know, I, I am going to show up for the people in my life right now because my God, this time is precious or you know i'm i really believe in you can believe you for a while when i was at my lowest i believed that that my reason for being was just helping alleviate other people's suffering i was like you know what if i suffer this bad other people can suffer this bad and if that's true true, then I want to help. I want to be able to be of service in some way. Even if it's just me talking about this, then maybe I can serve somebody. If I can hurt this badly, other people can hurt this badly. And if they can hurt this badly, I might actually be able to be a gift in someone's life by showing up for them and giving

them what they need because I know what I need and I can give that. So it's, and that doesn't have to be a reason, but I'm saying connect, even when your pain is real, you can connect to something that's equally real that makes life so meaningful for you. And the more you connect to that purpose and that meaning, the more your life starts to gain a kind of momentum. And one day, Karina, the thing I'll just finish by saying is one day you may look back on this and be able to smile about how difficult you found it then and how much easier you find it today. And I really believe that not as positive talk. I really believe that there are, there are things that you can learn and things that you can do that don't even involve, the virtual retreat is happening from the second to the fourth. Um, I didn't plan on talking about this right now in this moment, but, uh, my God, if you're experiencing any of what I'm talking about here, I've got a wealth of things

that have helped me that I will share with you over three days on the virtual retreat. Um, the link for that is mhvirtualretreat.com. And at the end, when I was planning on mentioning the virtual retreat at the end of this podcast, I'll tell you why it's a great time to go and check that out right now. What was our next comment? That was beautiful. So the next, um, comment we had was, I'm afraid that I will be alone struggling for life and have no power the reason I picked this one out is because it was written by a woman and I think that this idea of being left and having no power and struggling and not having any value and kind of being somehow left behind I'm not saying that men don't feel this I'm sure they do but I definitely think there's something

about it that really resonated with me and I been conditioned to have a kind of helplessness about them. There's a learned helplessness that happens, but there's also a kind of forced helplessness that happens where women have been brought up by people who teach them that they can't do things or they can't do things as well as men or that they're less important than their brother because they're a woman and their brother goes to the good school and they don't. And their brother gets all the opportunity and they don't because your job is not to be able to be competent and do all of these things. Your job is to, you know, go and marry someone. Then there's, there's, you know, women who are with men as adults who teach them a kind of helplessness, who don't let them do things or control them or tell them that they're not good enough. And even if it's not over in subtle ways, they kind of seed this idea that

they're not as capable or that they're silly or that they're, oh my God, you didn't know that. Oh my God, you don't know how to do that. Okay, I'll do it for you. It's a kind of this idea that's planted in someone's head that they can't do it by themselves and they can't trust themselves and their own decisions. And they need to go to someone to get them validated. And you see it everywhere. You see it from people in relationships where they're always asking their partner, do you think this is okay? Do you like this? They do it in businesses where they're always, it's like they're not comfortable without a boss of some kind. People are like that in life.

Amy Porterfield, who we interviewed recently on the podcast and for the love life club she talked about this concept of unbossing yourself of coming to realize that you don't need a boss to be telling you what's good and what's not good or what's right and not what's not right and that you, that comes from a learned distrust of our own intuition, of our own, uh, of our own decisions. And it, like I said, on the first answer in this podcast, the only way you strengthen that muscle is by actually going and exercising it. You have to actually go and realize, okay, you know what's happened? I've learned a kind of indecisiveness. I've learned a kind of helplessness. I've learned a kind of distrust of my own decisions and ideas and thoughts about have to do is go through a process of rewiring myself. I'm not going to sit here and blame myself for feeling this kind of powerlessness. I'm going to train my way out of that wiring. There's no point beating myself up. There's a lot that's happened in my life that

has helped to create that wiring, but I do not have to be beholden to it. And it does not have to be my future. It doesn't have to be my reality, doesn't have to be my reality but i have to earn my way out of that reality it sucks that some people get given this bad wiring and other people don't right that's how life's not fair is that there are people that there's certain people who are successful and they're like i did it all myself and you're like no you didn't do it all yourself there's wiring that helped you you had some wiring that was really useful to you and other people got shitty wiring and that's not their fault that they did, but you can change it. And that person who works that muscle and says, you know what? I'm going to start making decisions. And if they're the,

if they turn out to be not the best decisions in the world, then I'll make another decision. But that's, what's going to make me make a better decision the third time is because I made a bad decision the second time. That's what's going to give me that insight. So I'm going to make, I'm going to be prepared to make bad decisions in the short term. I'm going to be prepared to suck at things in the short term, but I'm going to have a mindset of resourcefulness where I say, let me go and learn. Let me go and decide. Let me, and start on small things. I, you know, deciding what you're going to have for dinner tonight or deciding what you're going to do with the next hour. Start with small things and build up that muscle to the point where you actually start trusting yourself again. And even before that,

it's like, if you want to get into that mindset of, well, how do I even get myself to a place where I can make a decision? Go to the gym, go train for an hour, get it in your body, go do something that moves you because you move differently. You think differently. And then you come home from the gym and anyone ever come home from the gym and been like, oh, I'm going to tidy the house now. That's because you have a momentum when you come home from training your body in some way or going for a run. So now you tidy the house and that allows you to go and do the next thing. So it feeds on lack of momentum. Bring momentum back into your life in small ways that build and make decisions and call the shots in your life in small ways that start to give you the confidence to do it in bigger ways. And you will eventually learn that everyone else does not have a superpower that you do not have.

Men do not have a superpower that you do not have. They do not just have a confidence that you don't have access to. No one's better than you. You just learned a story over time that there's something about you that's deficient. It's not true. But you need to learn that it's not true by building that muscle. That's not true, but you need to learn that it's not true by building that muscle. That's all I have to say about that for now. Oh, that's all. That's an amazing, amazing response. Um, I love that. Absolutely love that. Um, right. Well, we're onto our final comment that I've selected for this episode and this one um was actually the most upvoted comment on Instagram when I last checked I think it had as an individual comment

it had 1500 likes so it's obviously spoken to a lot of people and it really spoke to me when I read it so uh here it goes it's from Danny Danny, I'm afraid that I'll stay single for the rest of my life. I know that might sound so superficial or some people might think that there are worse things. I know they'll say I need to love myself first. And I do. I do love myself. But I also have a lot of love to give. And I love love. I have a fulfilling life with a great job, wonderful friends, and every day I live life for me. So my life isn't

on pause waiting for the one. But my biggest fear is that I will never find my person. People can say what they want, but romantic love fills spaces in our hearts that other love just doesn't. So I'm going to throw to you first on this, Stephen. What are your thoughts on this? I think you'd be surprised how many people fear that but i would say it's not even a fear that's only limited to single people right now that there can be people with the love of their life who could lose the love of their life either through accident or sabotage or things happen things change so i think we don't need to demarcate even, oh, I'm single. So that means I'm going to be like forever alone or relationship people have it. I think we really have to lose that distinction as

though those people have found it and I'm not going to. Life is very long and a lot of things change. And, you know, it's easy to say, but I think with these things you have to believe that it's possible to find love because it's almost like if you if you go into anything thinking you're gonna lose you kind of probably are like you have to go in being open and accepting like love is available for me it is out there in the world and you can't get into every love going is this the one is this gonna last for the rest of my life is it till i die you kind of have to go and give your heart and go for it when you find it in this world you know when when opportunities come you have to just grab them and take them but the kind of the onus is also on us the onus is on us to be active, to be seeking, to show up. What is that Charlie Munger

phrase as well? The best way to attract a great partner into your life is to deserve them. You know, to be the kind of person who can attract a great person in your life. And I think in a way, in a way people, this is not flippant, I think in a way people overrate how difficult that is to find love. Like if you are a loving, caring, warm, genuine person and you are out there living your life and you are passionate, it is very likely you will meet someone special you will meet someone who excites you so and you know but but life has vicissitudes stuff happens people don't always turn out to be who we thought things get messy but that that kind of is also part of it as well that is part of what you're signing up for no one is signing up for i will grab this person they i will be complete that will be it tick that that isn't anyone's experience everyone's experiences now i've found love there's a whole host of new

things that that come up and are challenging so so yeah i i think we have to not see it as you know this is so rare it's so impossible it's so difficult but we also have to treat it with respect that we have to show up and keep trying even when it's hard difficult but we also have to treat it with respect that we have to show up and keep trying even when it's hard even when we get setbacks even when we get rejected or hurt we do have to still come out again ready to find it have you had moments of doubt steve along the way have you had moments where you were like you kind of doubted am i ever going to find this yeah i've had those kind of issues where I've wondered to myself, you know, I think everyone does where you, if you break up with someone, you wonder like, am I ever going to find that person who I feel that way about?

Like, it's very normal to feel that. And you think, will it ever be the perfect way I envision it in my head? Will it ever be like that? But again, I do, I know I, or I have a capacity to love. I already know that. So when I've gone through those periods, I'm like, I am lovable and I have a capacity to love. So I know that if I'm out there enough, if I'm proactive enough, love is going to come into my life. It might be in many different forms than you think, or the unicorn form in your head might, it might not be that, but it will be something special and meaningful. And you kind of have to be where your feet are. That phrase you say, you have to be where you are right now, not in your head, imagining maybe this perfect love.

It will be, it's like, like no what's in front of you right now what opportunities are in front of you and how can you love like how can you find that love now and i think you can't then worry about 50 years from now you know all that sort of thing and i want to say be with be where your feet are as jesse it's this phrase i just want to make sure i'm not taking credit for that what she has written i have felt viscerally in my life before and i think although what you're saying steven is absolutely right and that attitude is integral to finding love um i think when you're in that place where you it's not happening and you really really want it and you know that you have a lot of love to give and there's no home for all of that love and it becomes it's actually like you you want that more

than anything you don't you want it more than your career you want it more than your friendships you want it more than travel you just want to find the person to spend the rest of your life with I have been in that place and you feel it's it's a scary place to be so I I totally agree with you Steve I I really do I do want to say though that I think maybe there are just different kinds of people in terms of what they want more than anything and I definitely relate to what she has said and I think when you're like us in that way you you yeah yeah, it's just, it's scary because you don't feel like you have control. You have control over most things in your life. You know, you work hard, you'll get a promotion.

You save up, you can buy a house. You, you know, invest time in your friendships. You can get great friends. You can do all those things. But love is not a guarantee. It's alchemy and it's complicated and it's that's why it's so scary and i'm happy that you said that audrey and i think i'm happy that she wrote this comment and then it got 1500 people agreeing with it because it's just very honest right and it's

like we're in a culture that just sells us that we kind of oversells us on freedom because freedom is great right so the freedom to good be independent with your with your job be by the house by whatever but when you check back in honestly with what you really want that is a big thing and i i do think it's a pressure valve to just know that like yeah 1500 people agreed with her and everything Steve says I think is still valid too you know it's like you it's really easy to build that up so much in your head that's going to be impossible to live up to it because if you're going out and you're trying to find the one that's going to fill in all of that potential that you know is there to be had that's going to be a pretty impossible thing. So just my one

quick piece of advice before I throw it to Matt is just like, remember that you're just looking for the person to build with. You're not looking for the person that's the one. You're just looking for the one that can build with you. Yeah. Which is, I think is so, so so so important and hard to connect to when we're looking for the feelings we've always been sold on that we're supposed to feel and those feelings can be very they can feel almost impossible to live up to i think they they do become actually impossible for anything to really live up to. Even the things that do live up to it don't live up to it forever. The honeymoons that we can feel with someone don't sustain themselves. They change.

So there's a danger in looking for a feeling and never evolving the idea of what it is we're actually looking for. But you're right jameson it's it's there's this moment in the crown where margaret is talking to the queen she's so upset with the queen and she has so much resentment towards her because the queen earlier in their life uh forbade him her from uh being with someone she deemed to be the love of her life and she missed out on that love as a result of the queen telling her no you can't be with that person and she calls out queen victor Queen Elizabeth, I should say. She calls out Queen Elizabeth on the fact that she takes for granted how many things in her life have been made easier

by having Philip in her life. All of the ways that when she needed someone at the end of the day philip was there when she needed to be lifted philip was there when she needed an opinion philip was there and margaret didn't get to have that didn't get to experience that and it is so wounding for margaret that she never had that And she sees how much harder her life was for not having had that companionship in her life. And that is what so many people on an instinctive level feel, is that there is something they are,

that is absent in their life, that other people have, or at least it looks like a lot of other people have. And the pain from that is chronic. It's a chronic pain. It's a pain that comes about any time you're not actively busy doing something. At the end of the evening, when your friends go home, there it is. And it's not just a pain that's there when we're inactive, it's a pain that's there when we're with our friends, if we are finding it hard to be present,

or if our friend is getting married and, oh god I'm so happy for her but at the same time it just reminds me of what I don't have that pain is there even in those comparisons that we make even if we're a good person and we're a loving person and we're supportive of our friends it's a pain that is there when we can be in our best moments. I can recall a particular trip I was on where I arrived at this hotel on my own and it was amazing. The hotel was incredible and we were by the, I was by the beach. I wasn't there with anyone, but it was by the beach. And I remember seeing this gorgeous place and hearing the waves and seeing the lobby and I had this instant rush of excitement and and then this instinct to turn to my left and say isn't this

amazing only there was no one to say isn't this amazing too and and so even the peaks the peak moments can be terribly difficult when we think about how they would be magnified by sharing them with somebody else. I was in my mid-twenties and I remember having to leave this person because I knew this person wasn't right. But also the kind of grieving you do when you leave a relationship and you know that you're walking away from all of the comfort of that relationship and all of the companionship that it brought you, even with the wrong person. And I remember sitting with someone that I worked with at the time, an older guy had been married for some time. And I remember him saying to me, I, I'm sorry, Matthew. I just, I don't think it gets you, you, you came to LA, you met someone and you got into a relationship and, and it fine. It lasted 18 months, but he said, I don't think it gets to be that easy for you.

And I was mad at him at the time in a way, because I was like, but why doesn't it get to be that easy for me? You know? And he said, there's just, there's things that I know are going to be important to you that you're just, it's not going to be that easy to just find them. And in a way he was right. It wasn't just that easy for me to find those things. And, and I think that the great challenge in life is to, to try to figure out what's actually important to us and what's, and what's less important than perhaps we once realized. What are the things we genuinely can't live without?

You know, I know I can't live without someone who's kind. I know I can't, I could never have been with a person who wasn't kind at their core. It would have been a problem. And of course, that's not my only requirement of a relationship, but it was a big one. And I think the more of those things that you can look at and go, what's, what are those things that really, really matter to me? And let me spend my life worrying about whether someone has those and perhaps along the way, what things might I let go of that aren't as important to me and and then over time practicing leaning into those things

and and seeing how it feels and and practicing even even i think the practice of sometimes letting go of a couple of things that we thought were important to us can be a really valuable practice um it it's because it's not easy because there's a child in us. There's a teenager in us. There's a 21 year old in us that says, no, no, no. I, I'm supposed to have all of these things. These are the qualities. These are the things I've been sold on. These are the things that are important. These are, and I think that the practice, it is a practice. The practice of letting go of some of those things is like strengthening a muscle I think and that muscle gets stronger the more you use it and the more you lean into well if if someone is the right stuff and I really lean into investing in the right stuff, then I'm going to start caring about the

right stuff more because that's where my energy and that's where my focus is going. And as a, I suppose, a way to temper all of this, remember so many of the people that you are comparing yourself to actually haven't found that either. They themselves have not found a relationship where they lent into the right qualities and the things that make for a peaceful, happy, long-term relationship. They haven't done that. And they're fighting in ways you don't even know behind the scenes and there's tension and there's misery and there's frustration and there's fear that you don't see on the stage when they're out there in life it's happening behind the curtain and and you have to be very careful not to just look at people in a relationship and take up face value that they have done the thing that I am talking about.

And I know that, I know that what brings me a sense of peace and brought me a sense of peace when I was single is this idea that, you know, it's like if you're, if you're, if you're 40 and you're thinking, is it ever going to happen for me? I want you to know that if someone came to me at 60 and they'd just been through a divorce, I wouldn't be worried about them. I'd, I'd be like, oh, we're going to, you're going to find love again. Like it's, if you're, if you actually want it, I'm not saying that if you're 60 and you come out and you're bitter and you hate the opposite sex and you're like, never again, I'm never going to ever be in a relationship again because I hate them. And, and because that happens to a lot of people, they come out and they just, they put up a road, a barrier to everyone now because they've decided, I just, I hate, you know,

I hate men. You know, I just never, I never want to open myself up to a man again. I'm done with men. That's okay. And, and, and that's fine. But as long as you have that mindset, of course, it's going to be terrifically difficult to ever find love. But for the, for the person at 60 who comes to me and they're like, I just went through a divorce and they're, they're an open person and they're open to possibilities in life. And they're willing to put themselves out there in life and to live and to, to be open to people and warm. I know. I'm like, oh, I'm not worried about you. There is love out there and you can have it. Can you have your love in exactly the way that you always told yourself you would have it? Probably not. But that's a childish version of love anyway.

That's not like a love of a real person. Because to me, real love is someone comes into your life and they're not everything that the 21-year-old or 25-year-old or maybe even the 30-year-old version of you said they wanted. But it's irrelevant because there's something about this person and the way that they are or the way that they love you or the connection you have with them that makes that stuff seem silly, that makes that stuff not feel important anymore. And now what you've done is you've fallen in love with a person, not a blueprint that you had made up at some point in your life. Because people aren't blueprints, they're people. You're going to come along and you're not going to be everything that someone wanted.

Like you're just not. You're going to be some of what they wanted, some of what they didn't want, but the core of you is going to make you their person. And so that's the mandate. That's what we should be going for is I'm going through life and I'm going to find my person. And my person is not going to be necessarily someone that I today can dream up. Because they're much more complex than that. And if I understand that that can happen for me at any age, at any time in my life. And at that point, I'm going to be ready to meet it with presence,

with curiosity, with a generous lens for who that person is and what they have to offer. And I'm going to be brave enough to let go of some things that don't matter. Then that's when I loop back, Stephen, to what you're saying. Because at that point, I end up in a place where I go,

oh, it's there for you. It's there for you. It's going to happen. It is there for you if you take that approach to it. Lots more I could say on this subject, but I think that that brings us to a nice close for this episode. And I think that, you know, I'd love now to hear from our listeners to tell us what you thought of this episode and what it brings up for you. And we look forward to reading those letters. Remember you can email podcast at Matthew Hussey.com and let us know what you thought. You made me cry. I don't know if you saw,

but you made me cry halfway through your speech. I did. Yeah. I didn't. Well, well up. I didn't cry. Got a bit teary.

Were you kicking her under the table? Cry. No, i just think i just think it's yeah it's it's a it's real it's a chronic fear and just feeling like there is a way around avoiding it is such a pressure valve i hope i hope it's such a pressure valve for people but it was so beautifully put agreed thank you uh well thank you to to all of you for your contribution as always and thank you for listening if you want to join us in june for the virtual retreat we would so love to have you it's it's real stuff we're doing together over those days it's three days of immersive coaching it's live, it's virtual. So you can do it from anywhere in the world. And if you've got to the end of this

episode, whether you're brand new to us or you've followed us for a while, you know that what we do is about far more than finding a person. It's about finding a deep, deep love for life because the marriage that we're all in is a marriage with life itself. And of course, with ourselves and getting those marriages right, getting the marriage with ourself right and getting the marriage with life right. I believe if we do that, the rest actually does fall into place. And that's what we do on the virtual retreat together. So right now we have a self-care special ticket that ends very, very soon. And that's a hundred dollars off the main ticket, plus a couple of other special bonuses that are only available as long as that self-care special ticket is available.

So now is a fantastic time to go and get your ticket. If you know you're going to come, now is the best time to do it. And you can find it over at mhvirtualretreat.com. Other than that, we will see you or speak to you at the very least in the next episode of Love Life. Thank you all for listening to this podcast that we cannot believe how many people listen now. It's growing every month. And that must be because of the word of mouth and how many of you are spreading it to people that you love, that you think it can help. So it really does mean a lot to us when you share these episodes. If there's something in this episode you think can help someone that you care about, please share it with them. It means the world to

us and we love doing this with you. We'll see you next time.