Love Life with Matthew Hussey - How to Build Lasting Self-Confidence in Dating | Rewind

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Why does confidence feel so fragile?You can get the date, enter a relationship, even achieve success in other areas of your life . . . and still feel like you’re “not good enough.” That insecurity can follow you through every stage: from messaging on apps, to first dates, to long-term relationships.In this episode, Matthew breaks down why so many of us tie our confidence to external “metrics” — looks, success, status, attention — and why that approach inevitably leaves us anxious and comparing ourselves to everyone around us.Matthew shares 2 powerful ways to build real confidence in dating; the kind that isn’t dependent on whether someone texts back, chooses you, or approves of you. Instead of chasing confidence through achievements, you’ll learn how to root it in something deeper: what already works about you.If you’ve ever felt insecure in dating, compared yourself to others, or worried that you’re not enough, this episode will help you shift your mindset and reclaim your power.---►► Looking for love, clarity, or a fresh perspective? Matthew’s weekly newsletter dives into insights that transform not just your relationships, but your entire life. Sign up for free at TheThreeRelationships.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Well, we did a video last week and I asked you to leave a comment. I said, here's the comment I'd love you to leave me. What is the thing that you feel is holding you back from being the most confident version of yourself? Here's what you wrote. The thing that's holding me back from being the most confident version of myself is the fact that every relationship that I have had in the last several years, mostly short term, ended with the person leaving me. Chronic health problems. Most guys wouldn't want to deal with them or have the maturity to embrace me with them. Yesterday, I had a realization, my crush may not be as interested in me as I am in him. The thing that makes me insecure is my age. I'm almost in the mid-30s.

Me too, Stephen. And seeing all of the other friends married or have partners in life makes me feel bad for myself and worthless. Well, I suppose part of the link between all of these things is that there is a universality to insecurity, to having our confidence knocked at different stages of our life. I mean, that's the thing about confidence, isn't it? You can have had it at one stage. You can relate maybe to a moment in your life where you felt confident and then something happened in your life that knocked you and now you're trying to get it back or maybe you never felt as confident as other people and you're wondering, what is this confidence thing people have? even is confidence. Confidence is defined literally as a feeling of certainty about the truth of something.

And when we look at that idea of certainty, I mean, there's your problem, right? We don't feel certain about an awful lot in our lives. And that's why even when our lives appear on the surface to be going, right, we can still not feel confident. Confidence itself exists. independently of the good and bad things in our lives. If you don't consider yourself to be confident in dating, I'll bet you that that lack of confidence follows you through every stage of the process. Right now, you might be trying to meet someone,

and you might not feel confident in that. You may be wondering, am I ever going to meet someone? I never meet anyone I like. I'm messaging someone on an app. They didn't message me the last two days. Now I feel rejected. Or it's never materializing into a date. and that's making me feel like I'm hopeless, I'm not worthy of a date.

Maybe you get on a date with an attractive person and you think, here we go, I should feel confident now because I'm actually on a date with an attractive person. Only now a new insecurity creeps in. I'm not good enough for this person. Or you look at other pretty people in the restaurant and think, they've got something I haven't, they're prettier than me. My date is more busy looking at them than he is looking at me. Or maybe you get off of that date and into seeing each other and you think,

well, it should be confident now, right? we're seeing each other. We're regularly sleeping together and having a great time and it seems to be in a good place. Only now your insecurity is the fact that you're going into people pleaser mode and you keep going out of your way to do everything for this person. You see them in their part of town. You see them on their watch, their schedule. You feel like you're doing everything to make them happy, but they're not trying as hard. Am I not worthy of this person trying as hard? But you don't say anything because you don't feel confident enough to ask for what you're doing. really want. The lack of confidence follows us to every stage. Well, if you're getting a relationship

with that person, should feel confident now, right? You've got the person. You're in a relationship. Only now you feel like you're not good enough to keep that person. How will I ever hold this person? I'm not good enough for them. Secretly, I know that and they know that. One day they're going to wake up and they're going to realize they can get someone better than me. More successful, wittier, funnier, prettier, younger. And that plagues you even. within what could or even should be a happy relationship. And so what do we do in order to be more confident? We build up all these stocks in different areas of our lives. We try and fix things, don't we? Let me get the best body I can because that will make me feel confident.

Let me get the best job I can because that will make me feel important. Let me put some money in the bank because that will make me feel confident in my financial security. Let me make myself as pretty as possible because confidence lies on the other side of that. Let me get into a relationship because that will make me finally feel okay. Except in truth, none of these things really work. If confidence lay on the other side of a great body, a relationship, a great job, then there would be confident people everywhere. But it doesn't. That's the first problem with putting our confidence. in these things is that they're volatile. They're volatile stocks. It's like building a house on quicksand. You're only as good as that thing staying the same. The problems with putting our

confidence in those stocks is always highlighted when something in life happens to remind us that that thing can change and that we've got too much of our self-worth wrapped up in it. A few weeks ago, I got a sty, right? Really puffed up my eye, made it look a mess. Immediately I was like, I don't want to do a video today. Even this. week I don't want to do a video and it was annoying it was uncomfortable and it was like just this little reminder oh yeah look look at you think you're confident but just this little thing can throw you off right now that's a nice reminder and that's natural that's human right it happens to the best of us but in that moment it's a nice little signal to reorient where we're placing our value

where we're placing our confidence are we placing it in things that can just be taken away from us, hence why these things don't work, because we're trying to find certainty in things that are inherently uncertain and changeable. But the second problem is that even if those things are going well, it still doesn't guarantee confidence. You know, I was told by a premiership footballer from decades ago who once won the golden boot, meaning they scored the most goals out of any player in the premiership league that season. He said, the next. He said, the next next season after winning the golden boot, you'd think amazing, right, won the golden boot, riding on a high. He said the next season was the worst season of my career, because I could never

live up to that. The best I could do was live up to that, right? And that was literally the best I could do. More likely is I would fail. I wouldn't live up to my last season. So even when we're winning, that doesn't guarantee confidence. A lack of confidence or an insecurity follows us to the top. And of course, when we put our value in these stocks, am I as pretty as that person, am I as successful as that person, am I as intelligent or witty as that person? When we put our value in these stocks, we start to invite comparison because we compare our stocks with other people's stocks. And now we're in a dating game of top trumps where we're just a series of playing cards being drawn against each other,

and you're always afraid that you're going to be drawn against someone who's scoring higher in all of the major categories, money, success, looks, you know, all of these things that we look at and go, those are objective measures of how attractive and confident someone should be. I remember when I was starting out in my career, I was about 18, I wanted to be great at public speaking, having this thought that, you know, Tony Robbins was this, incredible public speaker who could captivate thousands of people in an audience at a time.

And I remember having the insecurity that, well, no matter how good I get, I'll never be as persuasive or as powerful on stage as Tony Robbins because of his sheer physical presence, the height of him, the breadth of him. This is a giant man, literally, I'll never be that. I'll never have that no matter how hard I work and therefore maybe I'll never command the stage the way that he does. What's dangerous about that comparison is we try and emulate somebody else in a way that can have us drifting further and further from our true nature. But what's more insidious about that kind of comparison is that we end up discounting and often ignoring completely what works about us. Thank God I didn't get stuck on that thought about not being as tall as Tony Robbins, who is.

by the way because of course the reason that people connect with me is specific to me and to my relationship with people to something that people connect within my energy dare I say my essence and I think essence is a very interesting word because have you ever walked past a couple and secretly thought to yourself one of the couple seemed a lot more attractive and there was that part of you, that terrible part of you, that thought, how did he or she get him or her? But the truth is, we don't know the essence of that person

that attracted the person next to them. We don't know what that is. If it were all about the metrics, then you'd look at someone on Instagram who appears to be scoring high in all of the metrics, and that would be enough, except you get on the date with someone who scores high a bunch of metrics and then you just go to yourself, something's off. Something feels off about this person. I don't know what it is.

On paper, it should all be right and yet something doesn't feel right. Because you didn't connect to their essence. And someone cannot score high in those categories that we all think we need, but there's something about their essence. There's something about the way they are, the way they carry themselves, the outlook they have the energy they bring that it becomes very compelling about that person and I think one of the most powerful things we can do in life is get to know more about our essence get to know more about what works about us I'm not saying that getting better at things in life is not a worthwhile

task that working on your body working on your career doing getting good at skills, doing things, isn't going to in some way improve your life. It certainly can. And it can even give you a certain type of confidence. It can give you a kind of localized confidence in an area, a confidence that arises from competence in something. But that doesn't mean deeper confidence because, of course, those things can go away, life changes, and we'll often find that. that, you know, we look at people in life who appear to be very confident and then a change in their circumstances means the complete erosion of their confidence because it's based on circumstances. It's not based on something deeper, sturdier, more rooted.

The two pieces of advice that I can impart about this that I use for my life is, number one, since you know empirically from your life that achieving something, getting to a certain metric, getting what you thought you wanted, doesn't change all of your confidence issues, doesn't eradicate every insecurity. You can almost adopt a bit more of a fatalistic approach to your confidence. Instead of saying, I'll be confident when, say to yourself,

there's no guarantee I will be confident when. So if that's true, I may as well have a bit more of a fuck it attitude now. Instead of waiting for a feeling you're going to get later, enjoy the feeling now and say, listen, I'm going to get better at something because it's worth getting better at it. I'm going to try and achieve that because there's benefits in my life from achieving this. But if I know I'm going to feel the same way at the end of it anyway, or if I know that there's no guarantee that I'll have eradicated my insecurities by getting there, then I may as well have more of a sense of abandon right now and just say, screw it.

going to enjoy this. And number two, focus on understanding more and paying attention to what your essence is. I know that sounds heady, but to spend time figuring out an easier way of saying it is just what works about you? What is your special magic as a person? And sometimes the clues are in the kinds of things that the people we love say to us. When we get our best qualities reflected back, or discovering what it is we mean to people and why. I've had the benefit of hearing these things in the course of my career, even in the comments.

You guys tell me what works about me and why you follow me. And that has been incredibly useful to me because it's shown me that while I was trying to be, good enough in all of these areas over here. My essence was already doing the work over here. All I needed to do was show more of it. And that's the really insidious thing about insecurity is that it hides our essence. It stops us from leaning into what already works about us while we're trying to replicate what works about somebody else. And the most beautiful thing about your essence, about your special magic, is that it doesn't need any of those external winds to exist. You

know, for me, my essence is my essence, whether there's a million people subscribe to my channel or 100. It doesn't matter how well I'm doing in the scorecard of life. That thing I take with me everywhere. And it's about leaning into that as much as possible. Thank you so much for listening to the episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go, make sure that you do this today. I promise you every week you are missing. missing out by not doing what I'm about to say. I am sending 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 one of the three relationships

that I believe determine the quality of your life. Your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself and your relationship with life itself. It's a super valuable email. People really look forward to it. This is not the kind of email that you don't open. It's the kind of email you can't wait to see in your inbox every Friday. Go over to The3 Relationships.com to sign up for that email for free. And I will see you in your inbox this Friday.

Thanks for listening, everyone. I'll see you in the next episode. Be well and love life.