Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 5 Mindsets for a Successful Love Life | Rewind

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

We often tell ourselves we’ll focus on love “when things calm down”… when we have more time, more energy, or a fresh start.But what if that moment never comes?In this episode, Matthew shares five powerful mindsets to help you stop waiting and start making progress in your love life now. From understanding how overwhelm quietly keeps us stuck, to letting go of the illusion of the “perfect time,” this conversation is about learning how to take action in the middle of a busy, imperfect life.If you’ve been putting your love life on hold or feeling like there’s never enough time or space to focus on it, this episode will help you start moving forward.---►► Matthew Hussey’s free Three Relationships newsletter isn’t just about dating—it’s about creating a life you love. Get practical advice and heartfelt wisdom delivered to your inbox every Friday. Sign up for free at TheThreeRelationships.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this video, I want to give you five mindsets for a successful love life starting today. And the nice thing about the mindsets I'm going to give you today is that they can apply to progress in any area of your life. So whether you watch this channel because you come to me for advice in your love life or whether you're here just because you like the ways of thinking in general that you get on this channel, You're going to be able to apply this to anything you want to achieve this year. Number one, life has to be lived in the middle. When I was overwhelmed, one of the things I did was remind myself that life is sort of always like this. There can be phases of our life where we're justifiably overwhelmed because there's lots of different things coming at us at the same time. And that was part of what I was feeling.

But I also am careful to remind myself that there's almost never a time in my life where that's not true to some extent. There's a phrase Dante used, Nelmezzo, in the middle. Life has to be lived in the middle of all of these responsibilities and priorities. So if you know that there is something that you are putting off because you're waiting for a time, when all of a sudden you're going to find a perfect equilibrium, you're going to have that balance in your life, there's going to be a giant space in the calendar that's going to open up.

I want you to catch yourself, because there is a very strong chance that that has just become a form of procrastination. Because that time will never present itself to you in the perfect way that you've convinced yourself it might. And even if it does ever appear like that, it will be short. lived. The idea of the perfect time, the idea of the perfect amount of breathing space is itself a

fiction. And once we accept that, we all of a sudden start asking ourselves a different question. Not when is everything going to open up so that I can do some of these things I want to do? But instead, how do I crowbar some of these things that I want to do into my life now in the middle of all of these things that I have to do, and I'll probably have to do in some form six months from now as well. There are undeniably some bad times to go out and try to date, where you're at the peak of grief at the end of a relationship, when you are dealing with some intense recent trauma that you're trying to work through. There are times that are bad, But at a certain point, we will also have to recognize that we're never going to be at a point

where we feel like everything in our own personal growth journey has been achieved, that we've done every bit of healing we could possibly do. There are always going to be ways that someone could show up in our life at a time where we don't feel 100% ready. And we will begin a relationship in the middle. Number two, stop waiting for space to breathe and instead change the way you breathe. When I first started doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, early on you start to roll. Rolling is like the Jiu-Jitsu version of what sparring is to boxing.

It's when you're actually fighting someone. And that's a time where you start to get nervous, your adrenaline gets up, you start to breathe very heavy when you're inexperienced. And I remember the first time I did this, I was rolling. with someone and within two minutes, I felt like I was drowning. I felt like I couldn't catch my breath. I felt like I didn't know how I would go on at all. After the session, I remember my coach saying to me,

you know, sometimes what I'll do with some of the other black belts when we're doing training for competitions is we'll go to the extreme and we'll set ourselves a timer for an hour for us just to be rolling constantly for that hour. And I remember thinking to myself, I could not get past the first two minutes today without feeling like I was drowning. How on earth could someone do this for an hour? And I asked him that question. And he said to me, when you look up at the clock after five minutes and you realize that with someone on top of you and someone you're fighting, you've got another 55 minutes, you actually start to come to a different conclusion.

You say, well, I've got 55 minutes left of this, so I may as well just settle in for the ride. And when you do that, you start breathing differently because you can't hold your breath for an hour. You can hold your breath for two minutes, but you can't hold it for an hour. And when you know you're going to be going that long, you don't hold your breath anymore. You start breathing differently. So think about that in the context of your life. Again, this is what I did. When I was in that place of overwhelm, I said, you know, You know, there's always going to be something.

I'm going to go home for the holidays, and there's going to be a whole bunch of other new things that I have to do and people I want to see and things I need to tie up before the end of the year. I had that feeling. And that made me realize, oh, my God, it's not about to end. And if it's not about to end, then instead of waiting for space to breathe, I need to start breathing differently. settle in because this is a life. What you have is a life. Everything going on in it right now

is just part of your life today. A year from now, there will be other things going on. But that's a life. The understanding that all these things, all this juggling is it probably isn't going anywhere. Yes, we can improve on it and yes, we can simplify our life and we should do all of those things. But in the meantime, instead of delaying progress on things that are important to us, we can instead decide to simply be an active participant in our life as it is right now and to find time for the things that are important, even if imperfectly. Number three, lose the fiction of the fresh start. I feel like we almost all have this element of us that likes neat and tidy lines. We like to demarcate. This is what this chapter was about

and now this is what this chapter was about and now I'm doing this. And I always think back to being at school. You remember the first day of term in a brand new school year? There's always something to me at least exhilarating. I don't know if you had the same feeling, but for me there was something exhilarating about the idea of that really fresh start. I would always remember going to staples and buying new stationary, new pencil case, new pens, new pencils, erasers. And I would have these things that I would neatly put in my pencil case and I'd have a brand new notebook for lessons and new teachers, new lessons.

And I tell myself, this time, I'm going to do everything perfectly. I'm going to make perfect notes when the teacher says things. I'm going to do my homework in perfect, neat ways. I'm going to keep up with all of the lessons. And I'd have all of these intentions within a week, the mess had started again. My notepads already had stuff crossed out where I'd got it wrong. I missed a day of homework. I already felt a bit behind on something.

My friend Tom has already sullied my pencil case by drawing a penis on the front of it. And it was like that perfect pure feeling that I was trying to keep hold of would always elude me because it was always a false promise, much like the new year, the idea of the new year, new you, fresh start, is a false promise because we don't get these perfect beginnings and endings. What we get is just life on a continuum. I think one of the reasons we get so deflated in the new year, we get this rush of new start, new year, new me and then we get so deflated because we realize that it's a lie. Our problems, our grievances from last year, our financial difficulties, our issues in our relationships, the things that give us

anxiety, it all just comes with us into January 1st and it starts polluting and graffitiing all over that notebook and pencil case before we've even got to start. I want us to to lose that illusion of the fresh start. realize that all life just operates on that continuum, that there is always just a sense of everything blends into each other. And we don't really get the clean lines. Life is messy. And instead of looking for a blank canvas on which to paint, we have to look at it like it's this ongoing mural that we are adding to all the time with every brush stroke. I think of that in my business sometimes. You know, there's, there's things that I go, oh, I really want to update that.

I really want to change that. And there's this, there's this fantasy world I have where I just start everything again and just build it perfectly from the ground up. And then I realize, that's nonsense. Life isn't like that. By the way, even if I did do that, I wouldn't build it perfectly from the ground up again. And then three years from that point, I'd be wondering, oh, how do I do it perfectly the next time? And secondly, you know, that's not the game. The game is to keep updating and changing things and making it better. by increments. That's how life is. We make it better by increments. We make imperfect progress. Number four, don't over-exaggerate how much of your time this area that you want to make progress in

needs. I'm writing a book at the moment and I know that in my fantasy world, I just have a year of doing nothing else but writing this book. I remember saying that to my writing, coach and him saying to me, Matthew, even if you had all the time in your week to do nothing but the book, even solid every day, don't do anything else writers, only have a handful of hours in them a day. Some people, one or two, what are you going to do with the rest of that time? You can't write all day every day. It doesn't work like that. And I always remind myself of that when I'm wishing that I had the perfect amount of time to do it. I couldn't fill all of my time with it. The same is true of getting fit and healthy. You can't spend all of your time at the gym.

It takes one hour a day, right? The same is true of your love life. If you say, I don't have time for, you know, a love life right now. I just, and I want to say, but what does that mean? If no one is asking you for a relationship right now, then it's not going to take all of your time. Right now, your job is not to worry about how much time a relationship would take up, which by the from 15 years of doing this, never once have I ever encountered someone who met the most amazing person for a relationship, someone they had massive chemistry with, were head over heels for, could like immediately felt this feeling of, oh, this is what I've been looking for in my life, and then said, all of this is wonderful, but you know what, I just don't have the time.

It never happens like that. Time is always an excuse that people use before they've met someone that they love. When they find out they love someone, when they find out they love someone, when they feel have those feelings, they are making time everywhere that time could possibly exist. But in the beginning, all we need is time to flirt. That takes seconds. All we need is time to meet some people. All we need is time to go on a date. And that doesn't have to be your whole week.

It can be a couple of hours a week. When we're overwhelming ourselves with this area of our life that we want to make progress in, even if you had all the time in the world for it, that area wouldn't need all the time in the world for you to start making progress. Start small, crowbar it in in small ways, and then when it starts to become a bigger part of your life, you can evaluate what you might need to let go of in your life to give that thing more time. But don't create a problem there before you have one, because if you do, I will suspect that the problem isn't time at all. your fear of doing that thing, your fear of going out there and meeting people and getting rejected,

is being masked by an excuse like, I just don't have time. The fifth and final mindset I want to give you for progress this year is to be patient because the trajectory of your progress is what matters. When we're talking about incremental progress, when we're talking about just doing the thing you can do, and not using the idea that it's not the right moment in my life as an excuse to do nothing, those small actions that you take actually add up over time. And I always remind myself of this. There's a phrase that I use over and over and over again for myself,

which is every little bit of effort counts. Every little bit of effort counts. No matter how small, if I go for a walk today, that counted. It may not have been a five-mile run, but it counted. It wasn't nothing. It added to the scoreboard. If I write 50 words today instead of zero words, 50 words may seem like nothing in the context of a book that is going to be 80,000 words. But it counted.

Those 50 words, they count. It all counts. And when we think that it all counts, we get out of this all-or-nothing mindset. We get into just do whatever is the version I can do right now. let me just do that version. I'll recognize that it's imperfect. I'll recognize that on my best day, I would be doing better on that hypothetical best day with a clear schedule and a clear mind and feeling my best. I would do better. By the way, what a ridiculous concept, the idea of that that hypothetical day when we're firing on all cylinders. There's a hypothetical day where I do this

video twice as good as I've done it right now. But what am I going to wait for that hypothetical day where my mind is just so sharp that every point I make is perfect and everything follows the perfect linear progression and I don't get a word out of place and I don't elaborate for too long and anything. Am I going to sit here and wait for that day? Or am I just going to say today's Matthew is going to do his best in this video and that's the video I'm going to do. If the hypothetical day comes around where I do a better video, great. I look forward to seeing it. But this is the version of me today and that guy is going to make a video for you guys. The trajectory is what matters. What's the trajectory I'm on over time? And one of the things I think we have to do, while I agree

that it's good advice to sort of sometimes increase our sense of urgency in life, and I think in a way, we've already done that in this video because we've talked about the idea that you should look at life as something that needs to be lived now and not wait for the future, right? There's your sense of urgency. But where I think you can be patient is with the results. If you're taking some form of action today, even if it's small, even if it's imperfect, even if it's just the best version of it you can do right now, which isn't even that great, the cumulative effect of those things over time creates a different trajectory than the one you're on. That's one of the things I've been enjoying doing in my life recently to speak personally.

I used to be like always in a rush, always in a rush to get there. Always in a rush to go. I want to have it now. I want to have it this month. I want to have it this year. I was always in this mad rush to sort of get the result now. And I have actually taken a lot of comfort and joy and relief in just giving myself longer timelines for things.

Not longer timelines before I take action, but longer timelines for worrying about what the result is. The real value is not on performing miracles today that are going to burn you out in the next two weeks. The real value is in creating a new trajectory. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go, make sure that you do this one thing today. I promise you that every week you are missing out by not doing what I'm about to say. I send a private email to a group of people who have registered for it every single Friday. The email is called The Three Relationships and every email is packed with advice on how you can improve in the three core areas of life. Your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself and your relationship with life

itself. People really look forward to this email. It's not the kind of email people skip. People look forward to it in their inbox every Friday. Go over to the three relationships.com to sign up for that email for free. By the way, The three in that domain is the number three, not the word three. So the three relationships.com. And I will see you in your inbox this Friday. Thank you for listening, everyone. I'll see you in the next episode.

Be well and love life.