Modern Wisdom - #765 - Matthew Hussey - Why Is Love So Hard To Find In The Modern World?

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Matthew Hussey is the world’s #1 dating coach, a YouTuber, public speaker and an author. Navigating modern love can feel like solving an impossible puzzle, but in truth, there are specific skills and tips that can elevate your romantic life. Matthew has spent 15 years coaching millions of men and women through their relationship struggles, and today we get his best insights. Expect to learn if dating coaches are actually any easier to date, whether love should feel easy or if we need to become stronger, how you can realise the behaviours that are making you miserable, why being single is so hard for many people, the biggest problem with avoiders, how to get better at having a hard conversation and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 35% discount on all Cozy Earth products at http://www.cozyearth.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Matthew Hussey. He's the world's number one dating coach, a YouTuber, public speaker and an author. Navigating modern love can feel like solving an impossible puzzle, but in truth there are specific skills and tips that can elevate your romantic life. Matthew has spent 15 years coaching millions of men and women through their relationship struggles and today we get his best insights. Expect to learn if dating coaches are actually any easier to date, whether love should happen naturally or if we need to work at it, how you can realise the behaviours that are making you miserable, why being single is so hard for many people, the biggest problem with

avoiders, how to get better at having hard conversations and much more. In other news, I have been talking about some exciting stuff that we did a couple of weeks ago here in Austin, the most expensive, biggest, most technically complex cinema shoot that we've ever done with four huge guests and the first clip from that goes live tomorrow. We filmed a huge behind the scenes vlog, which will tell you everything that you need to know. I'm really, really excited. I haven't been this fired up to announce anything ever before. And I really hope that it comes across

and is as cool and groundbreaking as I want it to be. And if not, it'll be a good story. So check out the YouTube on Tuesday or just look at Instagram. I'm sure that you won't be able to escape it. One of my favorite purchases over the last two years has been my cold plunge from the team over at plunge.com. They are the gold standard when it comes to cold therapy.

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That's plunge.com and the code MW150 at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Whoop is a 24 seven health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, strain, recovery, stress, and more to provide personalized insights to help you to reach your goals. Whether you're obsessed with putting in a little more effort in the gym or getting those extra hours of sleep, whoop helps you improve your everyday health and wellness.

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your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free and if you do not like it after 29 days they will give you your money back. Head to join.woop.com slash modern wisdom that's join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. and please welcome Matthew Hussey. Do you think that dating coaches are any easier to date? Uh, God, I, uh, it's funny. I used to, I've been called a dating coach so many times in my life. I now opt for other titles because the title alone is something I try and steer away from. But I know I do. Uh, I, I know that for me, the first chapter of this book is really dispelling the idea.

Any myth that you were a competent data. Yeah. I wanted to take myself well and truly off that pedestal that anyone had ever put me on that I must've been a great guy to date as any kind of a, whether it was a dating coach people called me or a relationship coach or a love coach. I think it's one of the great challenges when you talk about an area is, you know, you're probably going to trip up in that area at some point and it's going to be a real existential kind of test of, you know, what you do and whether you, you know, the imposter syndrome you may feel in

what you do and whether you feel like you really are the complete package in everything you talk about. And I know, you know, it's a very weird thing for me because I would have people come up to me and say, I'm married because of you or this amazing relationship because of you or this. And for a long time, I hadn't, I hadn't found that for myself. And not only had I not found it for myself, but I think I didn't, I didn't always date in particularly healthy ways. So, you know, that's, that's tough. I was on stage in New York in a live event and there was a woman who stood up to ask a question.

I mean, bear in mind, there were like, there's over a thousand people in this room, a big theater and a woman stood up and asked a question. I can't remember what she asked, but I, in my answer, I alluded to the fact that I was single. I said, you know, I get what you're saying. I'm single too and this of being single is hard. And someone in the audience just shouted out, why are you single? How long have you got? And then another person in the audience, I was like, haha, that's okay.

Like I'm going to keep going. And then another person in the audience shouted out, why are you single? And then like, it just started to creep around the audience shouted out, why are you single? And then like it just started to creep around the audience and in like almost in unison the audience like were chanting like why are you single? I couldn't get forward. I couldn't get past it. And so I had to like, it was a very weird moment for me. It's very meta moment standing on stage in New York, helping people who wanted to find love, who were questioning why I hadn't found love. So, you know, it's a tricky thing. But also on the other side of it, some of the smartest, wisest people I know and the people who have the most to coach about love are

the people that just got divorced, you know, and they've been in a tumultuous relationship for the last 10 years or they've been, you know, just left the relationship with someone incredibly abusive or narcissistic. And those are some of the people that you need to hear from when you're venturing out into the world of love. I have a friend who's a powerlifter in the UK, holds a bunch of different records. And he said, I always want to learn how to bench from a guy who's got long arms. The point being the longer your arms are, the harder it is to bend.

Oh, that's good. So another friend William talks about, he says, research is me search. He happens to be the number one researcher of incels on the planet. He has to make the distinction between an incel researcher and a researcher of incels. He's like, I research incels, but you know, all of the evolutionary psychology guys that I'm friends with, everyone that's into human nature, dating, mating, all this stuff, everyone's trying to find their path through and yeah, you know, if you've gone through the fire and the flames, would it make your insights any more

legitimate if you'd breezed through some from 19, I found the love of my life and it was a blah, blah, it's like, I don't think so. No, I think we have to, you have, you have to make a lot of the mistakes that other people are making. You know, I've made so many of the mistakes that I advise against making. And you know, I, and look, that's the peril of being anyone who is obnoxious enough to stand up and give advice on anything.

Will be scrutinized by the standards they are telling other people to avoid. Yeah. And you probably deserve it. You know, like it's like you probably, if you're going to be any kind of advice giver and put yourself in that position, then it's natural. You're going to be held to a really high standard. And I, you know, I think what, what I always tried to do. Cause I was on YouTube from 19.

I'm 36 now. I keep saying I'm 37. I don't know why. I don't do that. I'm 36 as well. We need to hold on to the years of our thirties as much as possible. No, I'm 36 still for a few more months. But I am, you know, when I started out, I always felt like the one thing I wanted is

if someone came up to me on the street and met me, they wouldn't be surprised. There would be nothing about the me that they met that would feel at odds with the me that they'd seen on YouTube or on TV or anywhere else. But and that I think I achieved that, but it still didn't. When I look back now at my utter lack of vulnerability in my twenties, it's shocking to me in a way. It's not shocking because it's almost expected, but life is so much better now. I like, I can sit here with you and I feel like, and

this book is a reflection of that and be just much more myself. The book's awesome. I told you this before we started. You have put so much of yourself into, there it is hanging around there. It's so good. It's so good. It's open and vulnerable and it is, it's like personal development

through the lens of relationships. You know, so much of it is about patterns and how we hide away from emotions. And you know, it's framed through making up and breaking up in love, but it's actually just about human nature. It's really, really good. I highly advise everyone to go and listen to this. One of the things that you say really early on as well

is that our dating patterns are often a way to salve us from sitting and feeling our emotions. You know, we do something uncomfortable arises inside of us and then we clamor after a partner that isn't good for us or we rush into a relationship that's going to be bad for us or we pull away from somebody that makes us feel like, oh, maybe I am worth something. You know, so much of what we do with other people is the tip of the spear of what's happening internally. And we use that as a, to anesthetize ourselves away from that. So much. Yeah.

I relate to that so much. I, you know, we, when we do that, we're liability to ourselves because we end up hurting ourselves a lot, because we go through a lot of, you know, you end up going through a lot of heartbreak yourself and you end up, and you can go through heartbreak by being left and you can also go through, create heartbreak for yourself by leaving. And so I did a lot of that and then you hurt other people, I hurt other people and I'm not proud of those moments. Man, confused people are really dangerous. They hurt a lot of people, people who don't know what they want, people who haven't figured out their own stuff. They can be very damaging people. I know there were so much of And I know there were so much of what I was dealing with, I owed to being incapable of just sitting with my feelings, being incapable of even really being able

to truly access my feelings. Like I didn't, you know, it took therapy, I think, really, for me to get to a point where I could name what I was even feeling half the time, because I couldn't even name it. You know, I would sometimes, I would go through tremendous guilt for having broken up with somebody. That would kill me. I would, it would just, day after day, it would eat away at me.

And it's so much so that I'd be like, I never want to do this again. Like I never want to get involved with someone again, because I can't take hurting someone. And, and I remember a therapist once saying to me, you're the guilt that you feel. It's not that you don't feel guilty, but the guilt is an easier emotion than the real emotion you feel. And I was like, what's the real emotion I feel? And he was like, well, a big part of what you feel is disappointment. That, you know, you, there's something you want to find and you're struggling to find it and you feel disappointed. You know, you feel like and disappointment is a really hard emotion, right? When you feel like there's something you deeply want and you don't necessarily know how to find it or you don't know why you don't

seem to be satisfied or why you don't seem to be happy. It's easier to focus on like why you don't seem to be happy. It's easier to focus on like the guilt I feel for hurting someone else than your own personal disappointment. Why am I struggling? Why am I not happy? And it's why I wrote a chapter in the book called Never Satisfied because I, you know, I could relate to that feeling of being like, what's going on with me? That I don't, I have people around me that seem really content in this area of their lives and they seem to kind of glide through. And I can't seem to find peace here.

I, you know, I'm either being hurt or doing the hurting, but I'm not, I don't feel in a place of contentment. And that's a scary place to be. Cause you're like, then you start to think you're broken. Like I can't, I don't feel in a place of contentment and that's a scary place to be. Cause you're like, then you start to think you're broken. Like I can't, I don't know how to relationships are for other people. Happy stable relationships are for other people. Yeah. And for some reason I'm this sort of whatever the opposite of one of those weble

wob things that you push it and it doesn't fall down. I'm like the thing that doesn't get pushed, but it always falls down. Yeah. Why, why do you think so many people flip flop between comfortable, lukewarm relationships and inspiring and requited ones? I, I don't know that we've necessarily defined what the right kind of thing is. So we keep chasing the wrong thing. And you know, so much much of that I truly believe is

in our nervous system and it's in what is familiar and for a lot of us peaceful doesn't feel very familiar. It feels strange, it can even feel boring. You know you just go this isn't it. strange, it can even feel boring. You know, you just go, this isn't it. But then you meet someone and it's like, like that feeling that crazed, you know, attraction and crazy chemistry. And you think, Oh, this is it. Like this is important. And when measuring the importance of it by the intensity of what we're feeling

right now, we're confused about what that signal is right now. We're confused about what that signal is. Absolutely. Absolutely confused about what that signal is. And, you know, we, it often ends up getting us into really unhealthy situations and chasing people that aren't right for us or don't treat us very well. Um, you know, and I, I, again, I say this as someone who has done those things, I say this as someone who, you know, can remember a relationship where I completely lost myself, trying to please someone else, trying to hold on, trying to, you know, be enough, trying to, and, and, and really as a result, just losing myself. Hmm. just losing myself. And I can also relate to the other situation of feeling like where I was very much in the driver's seat,

but in a way that I felt like this can't be the thing. And it really took until Audrey, who, you know, I wrote this book, this was not a book written by a married person. This was a book written by first a single person. So there are many pages in this book that were written by me single, uh, then having met this person, then navigating my way through the early dating of all of that. And, and I've the final edit of this I did on my honeymoon, which is like a really crazy

art. It's almost autobiographical. So crazy. Yeah. And it's why I'm so passionate about this because this is not just stuff that. You know this is help me find peace the things in this book of help me find peace in my love life not just find my person but find peace in my love life which I think is. Is really really important and. You know it took me meeting Audrey my my, my now wife to start to truly understand what healthy looked like.

And would you have, would this relationship with her worked five years ago? Like, were you ready for this relationship five years ago? No, no. So we're even talking about such a narrow window. We're talking five years ago. This is the funny thing, man. Like I almost did get in my own way in this relationship. Like she helped me get out of my own way, but I almost did.

Like I almost blew it because it just, for me, I couldn't, I couldn't see how valuable it was in the first place because I wasn't even open to that in that way. I was like, there was just a part of me that did not let her in. I was not very vulnerable. And when I did get vulnerable, I remember a moment very early when we were dating and there was something that happened that made me jealous. I did not approach this situation in a very productive way. I came at it from a place of, of course, I was insecure. That's really where it came from, is I wasn't feeling secure in that moment.

I felt like I didn't trust either. So it was a combination of like insecurity and I don't trust people, which is something I've had to work on in my life because I trust did not come naturally to me. And that blend made me suddenly bring a version of myself that was not the best version of myself. And it was, you know, here's what was interesting. First, she came at it like someone would when you come at them like this, they come at you like this. But then she was like, she took a different approach somewhere in the argument, which probably in my head, it was like a five minute thing. It probably lasted about three hours, but somewhere in there, she stepped back a bit and she was like, look, I, something about this has affected you and I can see that. And I don't, that's the last thing I want to do.

Like, I don't want to hurt you. And I would never, you know, do anything that, that would be, you know, something that would make you feel like this in a warranted way. I promise you. Um, but the way you're bringing this to me, you can't do that. Like it's this isn't. So she's very capable of self-regulation in a way that in a way that in that moment I wasn't and it, and it, she, she, she regulated me and she showed this beautiful combination of like, it's not okay. She had a standard.

It's like, it's not okay that you do this, but I also, I'm, I want to understand where that's coming from for you so that I understand you better. And this, I want, I want to say this because I think this is going to be valuable to a lot of guys out there because when I then got more vulnerable and I told her what I was feeling behind that, I then instantly got cold after I'd said it. Like I was vulnerable with her about like, well, this is what it really made me feel. Like now I wasn't in anger mode or I wasn't in like passive aggression mode. Now I was in like, of fear because I was, I had the association that now that you know that you're not going to see me the same way anymore. Like I could deal with, I could live with you seeing me as passive aggressive or distant or like the, you know, I forget the loop or whatever.

Yeah. I can't be bothered with this. I could live with that, but, but now that you see this side of me, you're not going to be attracted to me. And I had a reference point for that because in a previous relationship, I had actually shared something that made me insecure with someone. And I was met with my worst nightmare response. I had literally said to someone, you know, about something that had

made me insecure and this person said to me that's really unattractive and it crushed me. It crushed me and I remember thinking to myself, like I was living with my friend at the time and I remember like going over to his room in the house and being like, my worst nightmare just happened. I was so afraid that if I said this thing, I would be looked at differently. If I took the chance and, and the words left this person's mouth, I just find that really unattractive. And it like, for a brief moment, I was like, I'm never doing that again. That is the last time I show that kind of vulnerability and what I perceive to be weakness. And what I obviously clearly felt shame around myself and I was already judging myself for

it. So I was terrified. I didn't love myself for that. So I was afraid if I say it to you, you're not, you're definitely not going to think this is attractive. And not only are you not going to think is attractive is going to change how you look at me forever. And that's all of my worst fears.

All of that came up when I was with Audrey in that moment. And she, and she did the same thing she has done our entire relationship, which is I said to her, she was like, why are you being cold? Like, she was like, now why have you gone cold? Like, what's going on now? You know, like, and I'm like, and she had to drag it out of me

that the reason I'm now cold is because I now am scared that now that I've said that, you're gonna look at me differently. And now I'm being distant as a result and putting my guard up. And she was like, you, I promise you like this, just for me, getting to know you better is always so enjoyable for me. I love getting to know you better. And I feel like I know you more now and it doesn't change me seeing you in all of the ways I already see you.

It just means I understand you better and I have context for you. And that's been the story of our relationship and it's been a very healing experience for me because I, and it made me, you know, I can really see how there are people that get the wrong message at a certain point in their life. And if they never learn a better message, it can be the thing that closes them down. That's the way that they see the world, right? That's the, like the laws of physics of their system. And it's so interesting. I once heard this idea about meditation. So anyone who's

ever tried to meditate will know this. If they're sufficiently introspective, whichever one that's listening to this is way too introspective. And they were talking about, you know, you sit and a thought arises, and then you notice the thought and the thought goes away. And then you have the thought, I'm the sort of person that notices my thoughts and then you have the thought, oh my God, I'm the sort of person that thinks I'm the sort of person that notices a thought and then the thought goes away. It's this infinite regress of like self-flagellation as you sort of wobble between wanting to become better and then lambasting yourself for being so self-congratulatory about being better and then lambasting yourself about making yourself feel ashamed and guilty about being the sort of person.

All in all, one of my favourite passages in the book, you have this line about self-compassion, you say, I struggle to believe I'm worthy of moments of joy and peace without first putting myself through a brutal schedule, monitoring my productivity levels down to the minute. Perhaps some people apply this earn your cookie mindset in ways that lead to healthier achievements. Not me. Mine is a mutation whereby joy and self-compassion are regularly outlawed by an internal tyrant who decides when I've been flogged enough for one day. Just when I'm about to collapse a voice inside says, okay, give him half an hour of peace before bed, but make sure he knows we'll start again bright and early in the morning. So interesting.

Our, our, our past conditioning makes us who we are, but it also sets the bar for what we believe that we deserve moving forward. Yeah, man. It's all I really ever knew was. Being feeling guilty that you weren't doing enough or feeling guilty that you weren't working hard enough or you know, that you were sitting around doing not if you were sitting around doing that. I remember growing up, if you were sat around doing nothing, like there was

like a chop shop has worked to be like, what's going on? This is, you know, one of the phrases was like, this ain. There's work to be done. Like what's going on? You know, one of the phrases was like, this ain't going to get the baby a new bonnet. I don't know if they didn't have that up north. The most London. Oh mate, this ain't going to get the baby a new bonnet. No, that was literally like, that was a phrase from my childhood. And I remember that phrase, that idea that like, this isn't useful, this

isn't productive, this isn't like, I think that stuck with me in a lot of ways. And I'm still learning how to... We'll get back to talking to Matthew in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Cozy Earth. As Matthew often highlights, self-care and quality rest are the cornerstones of thriving connections. And if you care about transforming your sleep and relationships, it's time to upgrade your bedding with Cozy Earth. They have the most comfortable bedsheets that I've ever found. If you haven't taken the ultimate red pill, the real red pill is bedding makes a massive difference. The thing that you interact with your bed through are your bedsheets. So high

quality bedsheets equals much more comfortable bed. They're made with viscous from bamboo, which means they're temperature regulating, super soft and will last forever. Best of all, they have a 100 night sleep trial. So you can try it for 99 days. And if you don't love it, you can return it. No questions asked.

Best of all, there is a 10 year warranty as well on all purchases. That is how confident they are that it's going to last and that you're going to love it. Right now, you can get a 35% discount of everything site wide from Cozy Earth by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to CozyEarth.com using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's CozyEarth.com and Modern Wisdom at checkout. That's what I mean. That's what's so interesting about the book. Like that insight isn't really to do with love at all.

It's an insight about our inability to not permanently be improving and sit with growth as opposed to just allowing ourselves to enjoy things. I think I've got this idea. I've thought about this a good bit over the last few years that if you're not particularly happy with the person that you are, self-improvement and personal growth offer a very unique kind of solution to it. But it's like a, it's a

phantom solution because what it says is, yeah, you might not be happy with yourself now, but look at how quickly you're improving. Tomorrow, you might be worthy of love. You don't feel like the world is going to give you love or acceptance or praise or like you're improving tomorrow, you might be worthy of love. You don't feel like the world is going to give you love or acceptance or praise or like you're a nerf or you're guilty and ashamed about the things that you want. Like who dares want what you want? Like you just put your nose on the fucking grindstone and keep going. And it's a way of not having to sit with emotion. It's a way of not having to sit with the things that you're feeling because you think, well, if I'm moving so quickly and if I'm improving so fast, it doesn't matter that I don't like me right now because tomorrow me might be sufficiently acceptable.

And I've been reading a lot of Alain de Barton recently and he's got this line where he says, uh, you're suffering not because you deserve to suffer, but because you've become far too familiar with the fee, the feeling of suffering. Hmm. That's good. And it's, it's true. It's true. I think that a lot of people that that, you know, anxiety comes easily.

Uh, self criticism comes easily. A lack of self belief comes easily. A lack of self belief comes easily. Um, uh, fear comes easily. All of those things are just home base. So it's not that you don't feel emotion. It's just that you have a very narrow band of emotions that you're prepared to sit in. What comes easiest for you? Guilt.

Uh, guilt's really, really good. Like guilt's probably the, probably the number one, I think. Uh, and just, you should be doing more. This isn't enough. You should be better. You should have done things in a different way. And even if you have had a victory, that victory itself isn't enough. There is, there is more to be done.

There is always more to be done. Yeah. Yeah. I relate to that. I got to, I think I got to 27 when like it started just hitting a wall and I was like some, I didn I'm in a bit of trouble here because it's not, none of it seems to, you know, I'd been running, running, running for so long. And I told myself, like, because I, you know, I came out of a kind of very financially unstable situation family wise and I told myself if I get if I get us out of that then you know we'll be in a good place and we'll be in

peace time and then we'll feel good and it will be a different different time and the peace time just never came for me. I never got to a point where I'd like done enough for made everyone safe enough that it felt like peace time. It's like having a war time president that doesn't know what to do now that there's no war to fight. It's like, and that for me was a really scary, a really scary place to be. Cause I was like, something's I re I remember thinking something's really wrong with me.

Okay. I'm, I'm, I had a real, a real kind of sense of internal panic, which is a very challenging thing to have when you're working with so many people and you're supposed to be the guy that's holding it together and giving other people advice who the fuck is this guy giving everyone advice when his inner the texture of his mind is just a was a yeah and it's a I kind of um yeah I feel sorry sometimes for people who and I say this knowing full well that I fit into this category, but I feel sorry for people who step into wanting to know it

all too fast because you don't leave yourself room to be a student and to just be someone who's growing and figuring it out. And I don't think I left myself that room and. You know, I, the guru's curse in a way. It is. And I had to so much of what I dealt with. I, I dealt with so shamefully and in private because I felt that. It wasn't okay for me to have those kinds of challenges.

And I carried so undermines the person that you are. 100%. I carried a lot of shame around that. And you know, I think those moments are actually very beautiful because you get the chance to like, sort of, you know, you get humbled and from that humility, you get to say, okay, something about what I'm doing is broken. Like I'm not, I'm going to have to find new tools here because this Taipei, I'm

going to outrun a problem, I'm going to solve this, I'm going to make money, I'm going to do this and you know, those tools don't, they're not working. And so it forces you into a different place. those tools, they're not working. And so it forces you into a different place. And I see a lot of men feeling like that's gonna be the thing. Like if they can do that, if they can achieve that, that's gonna be the thing. And I have compassion for that

because I've done the same thing. So it's not, I don't look at it with any sense of like, these, you know, they're so silly. They think it's, it's, but you know, at a certain point, I don't know, I realized for myself that internally something had to, something had to shift and I needed to be capable of having a different amount of self-compassion than I was giving to myself. than I was giving to myself. Well, think... What is more likely that your internal pathology,

person who wants to be successful, is going to be fixed by an amount of success? Like, is that really the thing? Because is it about the lack of success? Is it about the world not recognizing your brilliance? Is that really what it is? Or is it, when you sit and sort of wait with it, is it something else? Will Smith in his memoir, he said,

when I was broken, miserable, I had hope. But when I was rich and miserable, there was nothing left. And it's like, yeah. And unfortunately, there are a few lessons, I think, you literally cannot learn unless you learn them yourself. You know, you can hear this story a million times. Yeah, but not for me. Not for me.

Once, once I've got the house and once I've got the car and once I've got the financial security and once I'm respected by the world, all of these things, once of those things are lined up, yeah, these guys, you know, they said it didn't work for them, but really, I mean, how doesn't it work? Because you're the challenges that you as a person who doesn't feel like they've achieved what they want to yet in the world are so front and center. So you think, well, how couldn't it be like, it's so evident that this I want to be the adoration of the crowd. I'm in front of a thousand people and they, you know, they're looking up to me like I'm some sort of Messiah of love. And how could it be that? Of course it's that. It's just, it just didn't work for him. He

had a, you know, and it's like, I've been around some of the most wealthy, high status, you know, well accomplished individuals on the planet. And it is idiots all the way up. No one, no one knows what they're doing. No one knows what they're doing all the way up. There's a very rarefied strata of people, a very, very small number of people that have done the achievement thing and done the internal work thing and are actually comfortable with both, but the achievement on its own does nothing. And there are tons and tons of people I know who haven't done the achievement thing, but have done the internal work thing and are just totally fine.

Well, that's it. That, you know, those, those have become some of my greatest role models is, you know, some, sometimes people say to me like, you know, I want someone who's playing at my level when they're looking for love, right? And I'm like, what do you mean playing at your level? Like, what does that even mean? And it's usually some version of someone whose ambitions and success in their career is on par with where I'm at or someone who's similarly and it's like, I think that is such a boring way of looking at life. Because some of the people I know that are the best people to be around are the people that never

needed to do that in the first place for a sense of significance. Like how many of us that have achieved a lot were driven by some disease. Fear of insufficiency, crippling self-doubt, a desire to be loved by the world. Yeah. And necessary amount of validation. And then when we get there, we have the audacity to say, I want someone with the same disease. I not like, oh, I might start to realize that some of the people that didn't feel the need to do this, that might be the healthiest thing about them. Yeah.

I mean, that's, I think, especially for the current world of internet dating. We spoke about this last time that rising socioeconomic status of women can make it difficult for them to date in some regards. Women tend to want to, I would imagine you'll hear playing on my level much more from women than you do from guys. Uh, and yeah, if you look at that, especially as a woman who's got that level of drive, like you're even, you are even more of a pathology among your sex than the male equivalent, right? That's you're even more of an outlier.

And to think. equivalent, right? That's even more of an outlier. And to think. I think that I, I think it's a, it's a, it's a dangerous thing to us when, like one of my favorite things about my wife, Audrey, is that we lived very different lives leading up to meeting each other. And it meant that we had very different things that we were bringing to the table for each other. Like she had done way more like internal finding piece

type work than I had. I had just been running and she'd been finding a deeper level of peace. And she'd been finding a deeper level of peace. And so the peace that she had found was for me a huge part of the energy that when I was around her, I was like, I was inspired by it. So I was like, she's figured something out that I haven't. And I want to understand that. That's like that for me, that was like a, she was a warrior in a different way, on a different level. And I was like, I got to understand this. What, what has she learned? And she's learned things from me. But that, that idea that like, you know, it's, it's

this kind of fetishization of success and ambition and all of these things that we do that puts these people on a pedestal. Some of the people that inspire me the most are people in my own family that are just very happy. They're just like, they're just happy people. And I see them being happy at a level that some of my other friends, if they had that, they'd be like, it's Armageddon. And I just think that's so fascinating to me because it's, you know, the final chapter of the book I called Happy Enough. And I love that concept., the unhappiest people I know are the never enough people. And there's so many of them. And I, I like have to condition myself to stay out of that category because I'm capable of being in that category.

It's not that I'm above that. I just have to condition myself to get out of that because it's, it just never ends. that because it just never ends. Isn't it interesting that there's a lot of content on the internet at the moment about dating, mating dynamics and stuff. Almost no one ever talks about love. Like it's very rare. If you look at the most popular channels on YouTube, even mine to some extent,

you know, it's this quite sort of sterile transactional commercial value for value exchange. That's what people are talking about. They're talking about it in this sort of like performatively autistic, like you give me the thing and I give you the thing and our values meet. Like it's like, it's a currency of some kind. And so rarely do we actually talk about, all right, yeah. And like, how does this make you feel and what's the love between you two people? Like, and, uh, I think, I think that that is a conversation that's wildly

missing from a lot of, uh, a lot of this talk. It's why I, I've started talking in terms of finding love because I just, you know, for me, most people who genuinely deeply want to find love, they don't really want to date. You know, like they don't, they want to find love. I didn't want to, you know, like when I was being more intentional in my love life, it's not like dating was the most appealing thing in the world to me. I didn't, I'm an introvert. I don't want to leave the house most of the time. So the idea that I have to go and talk to a person in order to end up in a relationship with them is like, feels like an annoying step. But finding love is something we, I truly believe pretty much all of us want. Like we, on a deep, deep human level, we want to find love.

And, and when you frame it, most, when you, when you talk about dating, people like, oh, dating, I don't want to date. But when you talk about finding love, it's hard for people to say that's not something that's important to me. And the whole point of this book was to show people, even if you've struggled for years and years in this area, even if it feels like nothing's working, or if it feels like what you are trying to find is eluding you, what is a better path to finding love? How do you do love better? And that that's what really excites me now. And I think that that goes much, much, that goes much deeper than strategies that gets into like what's really going on with us? What's going on with me that I keep getting attracted to this kind of person that is chaotic? What's going on with me that I keep chasing

these people that aren't really investing in me or that make me feel really unsure of myself? Why do I find someone more attractive when they don't text me back than when they do? What's going on there? And those have become the fascinating questions for me. And it's not our reality, the one we've experienced our whole life is really just our reality. It's not reality itself. And I realized this more and more in my life where I would just look at people who experienced life differently than me and go, what are they doing or thinking that is different from the way I'm doing it or thinking about it that means they have a different result. Like I have a whole chapter in this book called, there's two chapters that live together that are two of my favorite chapters in the book. One is called Never Satisfied and the other one is called How to Rewire Your Brain. And there's a part of the chapter on Never Satisfied where I talk about the reasons why

we keep getting drawn to things that hurt us. Why do we? talk about the reasons why we keep getting drawn to things that hurt us. Why do we? For one, it's what we know. So if something is, it's, I talk about like a dolphin in captivity, right? Cause we're very good. We have a culture right now, self-development wise that anytime someone's going towards something bad, we say you have a self-worth problem. But it's a bit, that's a bit reductive because if a dolphin in captivity learns that in order to get fed, it has to

do backflips, jump through hoops and swim up to humans, and then it gets released into the ocean and it starts doing backflips for food in the ocean or it starts swimming up to fishing boats. We wouldn't say that that dolphin has a self-worth problem. We would say the dolphin is just repeating what it learned in the tank. It's just familiar. So a big part of what we're doing is just familiar to us. And it becomes, you know, that classic kind of self-development idea the the race car driver says You know Mario Andretti said if the key to race car driving is don't look at the wall your your car goes where your eyes go and

When we realize that whatever is whatever we've come to expect of life becomes our wall It becomes the thing we keep driving into because it is what we know. I tell a story in the book about I grew up with a childhood that wasn't, you know, like I worked in a nightclub from the age of 13. So like it was my dad owned a nightclub when I was a kid. So that was like not okay for me to be doing that. But I was doing that. And I used to experience a lot of like, you know, it wasn't a night. Like I don't want anyone picturing like a nice nightclub. This wasn't like a glamorous Vegas style. This was just a grotty, rough club back in a local part of England. And it was rough. And

people would get in fights and they'd get thrown out in nasty ways. And it put me on edge a lot, especially at a young age. And even in family I was you know have an interesting family and you know I was around certain things and it. It create a kind of hyper vigilance in me that really stayed with me I didn't really I didn't really lose it never really felt. Safe so for me going into a room. safe. So for me, going into a room, I was always scanning for threats. I was always scanning for where's the trouble going to come from. And I remember being out with my two brothers, we were in a little tiny bar in Japan and my brothers are having a great time. They're just chill. One of them singing like, Hey-yah on the karaoke machine and just like belting it out and carefree and I'm like looking, you know, I'm like hyper vigilant.

I'm having fun, but I'm also like constantly kind of a little bit on guard. And it was a person, a guy, a Western guy who just kept staring at my brother nonstop. And it got to the point where I just, I create a whole story in my head and went up and confronted the guy. He guy hadn't even done anything yet, but confronted the guy and instantly was, you know, like the bartender came around and no, no, no, no, like it's all fine. But I remember my brother saying to me, what are you doing? And me going, what do you mean? What are you doing? I was like, well, you don't understand. This is a whole thing. It was in my head. It was like

the scene had already happened. It's like, no, he was about to and then this was going to happen. And I remember thinking to myself, how do my brothers survive when I'm not around? Be meanwhile, by the way, my brothers are both bigger than me. One of them six, three, the other ones, the one six, two, the other six, four, both capable of taking care of themselves. But in my mind, I was like, how are they not constantly getting in trouble when I'm not around, but it's because that for me, that trouble was my wall.

And everywhere I would go, I would like look for where's the, where's the potential problem? Where's the trouble coming from? And they weren't looking for that. And it's not the troubles not around. It's not the bad characters aren't around, but they're not focused on them. So those things don't find them. They don't even, they're not even locking eyes with those things, but I'm the one locking eyes because I'm the one looking for where's the thread. Yeah. And that, and the sad part about that, this is the really tragic part is that.

part about that, this is the really tragic part, is that I am truly, I have zero interest in trouble. All I want is a peaceful, lovely time with people I love. That's all I ever want. But there's something so tragic about precipitating the exact thing that you want less than anything, which is a fight, confrontation, aggravation. And when you look at people's love lives, it's the same thing. They, everyone has their wall and keeps crashing into that same wall. I keep dating people that cheat on me. I keep dating people who end up ghosting me. I keep dating people who end up being narcissistic in their tendencies or or who don't invest in me or take advantage of my good nature. Just you keep driving into that wall and helping people to reprogram themselves away from that, I think is one of the most important things we can do. So you're looking for partners that feel familiar, not necessarily partners that feel loving.

Yeah. Not ones that will make you happy. How does it feel comfortable and comfortable is confused with happiness. It's not comfort can be misery, but when you know your way around it, there's something you at least know the territory. And I think that this is why I never, when I was coming up, I never used to understand fear of success. I understood fear of failure, but I didn't intuitively understand what was meant by fear of success. I understood fear of failure, but I didn't intuitively

understand what was meant by fear of success. And these days, I'm like, it's all just fear of the unknown. It's all just fear of being somewhere you're not comfortable. It's actually the same thing. I've always had fear of success. I told myself I didn't. Fear of success isn't something I understand. The truth is I've always been afraid of success. I told myself I didn't. Like I, you know, fear of success isn't something I understand. The truth is I've always been afraid of success. Anytime I step into a domain that's new to me, where things get a little bigger than I've experienced before, or a little more like, oh God, I immediately get uncomfortable because it's just unexplored terrain. The same way that if you sink too far down, that's unexplored terrain

as well. You're like, this isn't me. I've never sunk this low before. And you get afraid of that. But it's all just domain you don't know. And I think so much of life is how can I make what is deeply unfamiliar to me, something that becomes home to me and sit with it for long enough that it eases up. And so much of finding the right kind of love is that you will find that there are certain aspects of healthy love. If you've been constantly gravitating towards unhealthy love, or unhealthy attraction, there'll be aspects of it that feel alien to you. How do you become more comfortable with the alienness? Well, first connect with the pain that the other has brought you.

I think that's really important is you don't have to believe something better or more exists for you. You just have to know I can never do that again. And I always encourage people to say to themselves, what was missing the last time you were with someone in an unhealthy dynamic? What was missing that made you miserable? And you might have been white-knuckling it, trying to cling on for dear life, trying to make it work. But, and telling yourself it was the most important thing

in the world and you die if you lost it. But when you were in it, what were you missing that also made it hell to be in? And for a lot of people, it's, you know, let's say I never felt safe with this person. Like I, I constantly was made to feel like I wasn't good enough that I didn't match up that this person might be out the door any minute, or I just constantly felt insecure because they just never, they never showed up the way I was showing up.

When you connect with how bad that made you feel, hold on to that and take that with you because you don't need self-belief if you have necessity. If it hurt that, if you don't need like it, if I put a flame to your hand right now, you wouldn't need self belief to take your hand away. You just, it's, I can't keep my hand there. It's going to burn. It's the same in love. If in relationships, what has caused you so much pain that you can never be in a situation like that again?

That's the starting point. Make change necessary. You don't have to get more confident. Just make it necessary. And the next thing is decide the path that you actually want to be on. And one of the quickest ways to decide the path you wanna be on is figure out what was missing last time.

Okay, that's gonna have to be up there with the most important things I look for next time. No matter how sexy or fun or seductive or impressive or charismatic or whatever it is someone is, if I don't find this quality or this value or this way of that they interact with me, none of that matters. It's all irrelevant. It's worthless without that thing. And you stay with that truth even when it feels uncomfortable.

And also I believe you have to give your nervous system time to adjust. Because it's not, if you take a drug addict and on the day they quit, you ask them to sit and appreciate a sunset, it's going to mean nothing to them. It's going to feel like the most boring thing in the world because it can't compare. How can the gorgeous beauty, the understated, like transcendent, existential, connected or inspiring beauty of a sunset compared to just this crazy high that someone was on yesterday. It's not the same thing. So a huge part of it is telling ourselves it's not... I can't chase that thing in this thing because

it's not the same feeling. It's a different kind of feeling. It's ultimately going to be much better. It's going to bring much more peace, much more happiness to be with a healthy person, to be in a place where you feel safe, to be in a place where you feel truly seen, to feel in a place where you feel at home, to be with someone who accepts you.

But for a while, your nervous system might not respond to that, because it's so used to the drug of the other thing. And that takes time for your body to adjust. You've got another quote, which I love. My problem is not that my needs aren't getting met. My problem is that I have needs. All I need to do is get back to being grateful that I have this person instead of having

any expectations of them. Forget feeling safe, secure, loved. You're just lucky to be here. And that's that familiarity with suffering thing again. Like it's just home base. And the guilt that so many people have around having needs. Having needs. Who am I to have needs?

What do you mean to have needs? You do the thing, right? You again, the working class British mentality and maybe the American one as well, like you just show up, you do, you just crack on. And I think that, you know, you that's in a, in a way for so many people being up, being afraid to express our needs. It can make us anxious, it can also make us avoidant, right?

Because if you don't trust yourself to communicate your needs, then, like I'll give you an example. I always struggled in relationships to communicate that, like I might really like to have a few hours of reading time right now and that was something that if I was on my own I would do but when I felt like I was responsible for somebody else's needs or their happiness or I was supposed to be entertaining I would feel like it wasn't okay for me to do that.

And the sad part about it is I never even got, I never even gave someone a chance to support me in that way. Cause they may have been like, absolutely. Yeah, like let me, you know, one of the things that beautiful about my relationship now is that my wife will say, she'll anticipate those things because she knows me. And so she's like.

Hey I feel like you need some time this weekend to just do this or that and i'm like. I didn't even need like this so nice that she's she's literally thinking about these things. In previous situations. I didn't even give someone the benefit of being able to support me because i was too afraid to really voice my needs because I was thought deep down I was like, I'm not going to be enough if I'm not constantly there entertaining, doing something, showing up in some way. And I made myself very responsible for somebody else's feelings. And I also felt like this is getting even deeper, but I felt like if I said I needed to do this, there would be some kind of consequence. Like they would be like, well, if you're going to do that for the next five hours then i'm gonna do this for the next three days and like that would be abandoned for having asked for that. And so i didn't voice it but what that meant was.

You can very quickly see the trajectory between that and what looks like avoidance because you end up saying, yeah, I don't want a relationship because when you have a relationship, you just don't get to do anything you enjoy doing anymore. So you made your own destiny with this. The wall again, right? You, you crash into the wall you, cause it's what you know. So you end up, I don't, I don't, uh, a woman that I coached and she was dating a guy that by all accounts had been great so far. And then on a Saturday, he got together with his friends during the

daytime little get together at his house and she got really upset that he didn't invite her. And this was someone who had suffered with a lot of abandonment. So in that brought up everything for her. Like he doesn't like me as much as I like him. You know, he's just toying around with me. He doesn't want me to, he doesn't, he's not proud of me. He doesn't want me to be around his friends, all of that. So in the middle of the day, on the Saturday, she texted him and she said, why didn't you invite me?

Like there was no intro to that text, nothing. Just why didn't you invite me? Like there was no intro to that text, nothing. Just why didn't you invite me? And he said, I'm so sorry. I, you know, I was, I haven't seen these friends in a while. You know, I was just really looking forward to hanging. Can I call you later? And she said, don't bother. And the three days later, he still hadn't called and she was like,

see, this is what happens. Like I get like you know I just get her if I date I just get hurt now of course you see again like she had she had looked for the wall because if we can't find a wall we'll create one and she created the wall in her situation now look she had a right to feel hurt that she wasn't invited and to express that to him and for them to have a conversation about that but the way that she went about it literally precipitated the thing that she was afraid of and confirmed it. And that's the scary part. And that's why like what is going on with people

on the surface in their love lives often is so different and in some cases the complete opposite of what's really going on inside. And these are the like these days I spent years helping people with you know strategy in their love lives. These days this is some of the stuff that like interests me the most because it's so it's so life-changing when you start to realize these things about yourself and I think people will read this book and they'll get a level of understanding about themselves and a level of compassion for themselves in that, that they maybe have never had before. You know, I, like, here's a, here's a funny example. Like when I was a kid, I remember playing in the garden with like my brothers and a couple of friends of mine. And I can't remember what happened, Chris, but something upset me.

Like some, I think my mum came out and yelled at me and embarrassed me in front of my friends, something happened. And I like stormed off to my bedroom and. I stayed there in my mind thinking that I was like some, like I was embarrassed and felt shame. And so I just was like like I want to be in my cave and screw everybody. I also felt like in some way I was punishing everybody for having like you know hurt me in some way not that I ever wanted them to know that they'd hurt me but. I shut myself in my room and one by one, everyone came up and knocked on the door and was like, Matt, come down, come hang. My mom, my brothers, my friends, everyone was sent up to get me to come back down and

have fun because everyone was having fun. I was just punishing myself. And then I always remember my brothers came up and they said, it was my friend Alex. We're all going to go to Alex's now. We just had a sleepover at our house the night before. We're now going to go to Alex's house and we're going to continue to sleep over and we're going to watch movies and we're going to get food. And I was like, just go. Like, I don't, I'm good. And one by one, everyone came up and tried to persuade me and I didn't want to know.

I was like, just go. My mom finally comes up. She's like, Matt, come on, please. Like, come on, don't do this. Like, and I'm like, no, like just leave me alone. And I stayed home that night while my brothers and my friends went and had this awesome night.

And they came back the next day and my brothers came home and it turned out they had the best night and it was so much fun. And it like haunted me. That was like, who did I hurt there? Like they had a great time. No one had it in for me. No one was trying to hurt me.

But my inability to express that something had hurt me and that I felt shame for being hurt, shame for being embarrassed that something had got to me, but my anger felt more righteous and stronger than the hurt. know the hurt so I just. Robbed myself of this really lovely experience and when I look at my life. I think oh my god like that you can. You can draw a line through so many experiences in my life where I just robbed myself of moments of joy and fun and love. self of moments of joy and fun and love because I like it's what I did with Audrey in that moment of jealousy. I just the walls went up and I went it's easier for me to be mad or to say you're wrong than to just express that something about this has made me feel hurt. And God if that if

I took that to its like extreme if if I'd have not even that many steps further, if I'd have just done that three more times with her, she would have been out the door. And then I would have like, this is, I've never been more supported than by this woman. I've never been more loved or accepted than by this woman. And I could have lost her because I shut the door in my room and I told everyone to go away all because I couldn't express something that. That is profound to me.

It's mind blowing to me. And that's that those kinds of things have become kind of my obsession now. How can people become better at having hard conversations? How can we get better at having hard conversations? better at having hard conversations? How can we get better at having hard conversations? I think firstly, by not putting so much pressure on the way that we have them. Like I think sometimes we go, when we have a hard conversation with anyone, it very quickly turns into an ego battle. And if we can come to someone like, let's say in one's love life, love lives are shaped, any part of life is shaped by the ability to have hard conversations, whether it's friendships, romantic love, familial relationships. If we can't have challenging

conversations with each other, the relationship cannot improve. They are forged by difficult conversations and so many of us are so deeply afraid of confrontation, the rejection or the abandonment that might ensue after a confrontation or just saying it wrong, that nothing ever gets better and resentments get buried and boil over into contempt and people implode and that's when things go really, really bad. So the starting point of any hard conversation is knowing that everything gets better when you can have them. So even if you have them badly right now, having them badly is better than not having them at all. Make up for lack of eloquence with humility. And sometimes you can say to someone,

it made me feel strange when that happened. Like, that made me feel strange. And I guess it made me feel strange because, you know, it's, you're really important to me and, you know, what we have is important to me. And that made me feel, you know what we have is important to me and that made me feel you know when you did that it felt like it wasn't representative of the energy I want us to have with each other and maybe you didn't mean it like that I always think rightly or wrongly is a good

phrase like rightly or wrongly I felt like that was that was not a great way to come out. You're offering the other person the opportunity to help you uncover why you feel that way. I might be in the wrong. I'm open to this not being a you thing. This could be a me thing. Yeah. But together, make me feel something together. Let's work out because this is going to continue happening. Yeah. And if we don't want this to continue happening, then either we need to investigate what's going on with me or what's going on with you or what's going on with the dynamic. Yeah. And the target is the, you know, the target is not the person. It's what we're trying to improve the relationship and this is getting in the way of our relationship right now, or this is making it difficult.

And that can be as like an early dating. Someone might say, you might be in a situation where someone's barely responding to you and then all of a sudden they tell you like, hey do you want to do something today? And for you it's like you almost don't want to enable that behavior because if you say, if you're just grateful to see them and you're like, yeah I want to see you today, like I'm just grateful that you're now asking me out even though you've been completely inconsistent for the last three weeks and I can barely get a text out of you. That's where we go when we don't want to have a hard conversation.

And it's also where we go when we're coming from a place of scarcity is I just am glad that you're now asking me out. But if you wanted to actually say, no, this is a great moment for a quote, hard conversation, which might just take the form of a message that says, I'm, you know, I haven't really heard from you for the last three weeks. I was excited to see you, but I don't, you know, I feel like we may not be on the same page. I was excited to see you two weeks ago. Like it's, that's a moment where you're being willing to say the thing that maybe they're hoping you won't say, maybe they're hoping you won't point out the incongruent, the incongruence between what they're saying and what they're doing.

But when you're the one willing to point that out, it, you give the thing a chance to become off and realize that it's not. As opposed to this sort of, uh, like fantastical vacuum that you can fill with all of the speculation about why and how and what this means. And that was the reason that they said this thing is because of that. And it's, it's a selection criteria, but you're right. It very much comes from a scarcity mindset. If you believe that nothing better can come from this, that you can't get anything that would ever be better than this. There is no firm footing from you to make your needs known.

Yep. And the trap is that you think by not having the hard conversation, by not challenging a dynamic, that it's somehow safer. Yeah. If I just do what they want, if I just mold myself around their needs and wants and pathologies and uncertainties and fears and stuff, everything will be fine. You know, it's the nice children problem. I'm in therapy at the moment, which is why I'm starting to see everything with therapy language. And, you know, another Alain de Botton insight where he says that the people who behave like that in relationships are the ones who didn't feel like they had license to be able to make their needs known as children.

Because you maybe had an overly anxious parent or you had an angry parent or you had a busy or you had an aloof parent or whatever. Uh, so what are you going to do? Why? I'm just going to do whatever I need to, to make mom or dad happy. I just, I just, I just want them to be happy. But what you're permanently doing is subjugating your needs in place of making this other person feel okay.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's, when you've been trained to be that way, whether it's conscious or unconscious on the part of the people who raised you, it's a very hard thing to break out of because when you then make your needs known You feel incredibly unsafe and you don't know why and selfish you feel selfish you feel yeah, you feel bad and You feel unsafe because you're like something bad is gonna happen as a result of this I'm this person's not gonna love me anymore. They're not gonna or this friend isn't going to like me anymore.

And so by the way, you end up attracting friends who do only love you because of what you do for them. Again, it's the wall. You attract people who just want you because you're doing things for them. For a relationship to survive, to find relationships that aren't based on how much someone's doing for you, but are just based on someone who likes you and accepts you for who you are, not what you do. You have to be capable of saying no and seeing which relationships survive. You also have to be capable of just being who you are and not always doing things.

If the dynamic of any relationship, friendship, parents, romantic, whatever, if that dynamic is always you being a doer, that you don't ever get to stress test whether or not people are there for you to be. James, my business partner with Neutonic, the drink, he did a mushroom trip in Australia and this question came to him, do people love you for who you are or for what you do? And he's like a successful guy and lots of people follow him and stuff like that. And I think he was asking himself,

well, if the things that I do stopped, would the love that people have for me also stop? Is the world's acceptance of me contingent on me being able to offer it something in return. And the weirdest thing is that if you don't ever stop doing things, if you don't stop showing up as the fixer, the person whose needs are permanently subjugated by whatever anybody else around you needs to have happen.

Perfect example of this, I had a call with my mom a couple of weeks ago, it was day before my birthday, day before my birthday, right? And she'd heard her back, like not badly, but she'd heard it back a little bit. And as soon as I heard that, I was like, right, I'm upstairs, I'm showing her cause I've had a bad back as well. 15 minutes of a conversation was me giving a fully customized

demonstration of, well, these are the three movements and this is the rep progression scheme and this is how long you need to hold these positions for. You need to make sure that your feet are not stacked on top of each other. It's actually, it's this, which is a subtle difference between the two. And this is the book. If we need to get more references, it's blah, blah, blah. And if you need to roll up a towel to put it underneath each of these, that'll make it a little bit more, and I actually found that what you wanna do

is get a small kitchen timer and you put the kitchen timer next to you. And I was like, I thought to myself after, I was like, what the fuck am I doing? Like why have I, I've just immediately taken control of this situation to try and like, no, let me fix, let me get in there. Let me do something to make this go away.

And it's really like poorly holding space as well for the other person, because it delegitimizes a bad back might not be a great example, but it delegitimizes the way that that person feels because the subtext of what you're saying is your discomfort is making me uncomfortable. You must have it. You must take it away and I'm going to help you help you make it go away. Yeah. I'm responsible for making it go away. You know, is ultimately what we do with ourselves is like, I'm, we take on responsibility for

somebody else's happiness and it's okay to, to want the people in our family to be happy and to do things to help them be happy, but it crosses over and I know this because I have the exact same thing. It crosses over into I've made myself responsible for this person's happiness. And that's when we abandon ourselves. We're no longer focused on, you know, making ourselves happy. It's just, I'm responsible for the feelings of everyone around me. Which is of course another classic kind of hypervigilance thing as well. What are the red flags that people should look out for in relationships? Hmm.

I, I think people who can't take responsibility is a pretty difficult one to live with. If someone can't say sorry, they, if they don't have that kind of humility, that's a, that's a one of the more damning ones, I think. Because it's hard for... if you can't take accountability, if you don't have the humility to look at yourself and apologize, you also can't really grow. It's why one of the classic kind of hallmarks of narcissists is incompetence. Because if you can't, if you can't take responsibility for something, you can't get better. So you just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. And it's everyone else's fault and it's the world's fault.

And so you, you essentially maintain that incompetence. And so someone who can't say sorry or someone who can't take responsibility in a relationship, that's a really difficult thing to work with. That goes hand in hand with like someone who talks badly about multiple kind of exes, and it's just always everyone else's fault. Like it's, if you've got a string of people that you've dated, that you just

keep saying how awful they all were. It's like there's something going on there because you can't. You're the only common denominator between all of these different relationships. Yeah. So I, I, that one I struggle with too. Um, not keeping, not keeping promises, I think is a pretty big one. I think that's a big red flag. It's like a big red flag for staff and for people that you date. Because when you no longer trust that someone's going to do what they say they're going to do, it really breaks something in a relationship.

Because now that you don't trust that they're going to do something, you turn into a version of yourself you don't like with that person. Historically, the people that have ever worked for me that I micromanage the most are the ones that I don't think are going to actually get it done. It's that vigilance again. It's the nightly. Exactly. If someone proves that they just, if they say they're going to do it by next Wednesday, they deliver it by next Wednesday. I actually don't bother them at all. I'm like, I have fully hands off the wheel.

I'll see you next Wednesday. But when someone doesn't do it by next Wednesday and then they don't even bring it up and I'm like, wait, you said you were gonna do this thing today. I'm the one who has to bring it up and they're like, oh yeah, well there's this thing. It's like, now I don't trust that you're gonna do it and I don't even trust that you're gonna acknowledge it and I don't even trust that you're going to acknowledge it if you don't do it so in For me in dating and relationships if someone consistently we're all capable of breaking promises Don't get me wrong like we all over promise sometimes or we try and take too many things on and anyone's capable of that, but

If someone consistently doesn't honor their word with you in big and small ways That to me would be a big red flag. Because it just, I can't, those things, to me, there's like just fundamentals of a relationship. Can someone take accountability? Do they deliver what they say they're going to do? Like these things are the, like without those, you don't really have anything. If you, if someone does, if you don't trust someone to do what they say they're going to do. And if when they don't do what they say they're going to do, or they fall beneath the standard, they can't apologize.

Then you, you have a fundamentally broken dynamic that no amount of love is really going to make, it won't overcome it to be able to make you happy. You're not playing by the same rules in life. And when in any relationship, you're not playing by the same rules. If you and I have a friendship and I wrong you and I apologize, it's not the end of the world that I wronged you. You might go, I can live with it.

And you've apologized. We're playing by the same rules. You did something wrong. You get it. You've apologized. We're both living in the same universe. But if I do something wrong and you call me out on it and I say, I didn't do anything wrong.

In fact, what happened was you, like, yeah, I was like, oh, we're not even playing the same sport. We're not playing by the same rules. This is, we're not even playing the same sport. We're not playing by the same rules. This is we're operating in different realities here. The danger of any relationship is that you think we equate proximity and closeness to a shared experience and a shared moral and emotional world. And they're not the same things.

You can share the same bit of carpet with someone for years and think that you're on the same page about things. And then when something goes wrong, that person is like, you realize you're with an alien. That person, you know, I get stories of people who get sick and their partners just not like can't be asked to take them to the hospital and you go oh these are two people that like she or he thought they occupied the same emotional

space but they're on they're on different planets it just felt like they were close because they live together because they've been together for so long because you know it's like the you know and even in any bad relationship you're always going to be able to point to great moments. Like it and those great moments really confuse us but it is the equivalent of a broken what being right twice a day. You don't you wouldn't say it's a, that's a great device for telling the time. Just because twice a day, it was like, oh, it's right.

But that's what people do with love. It's like twice a day, it feels good and it feels right. And then they go, oh, it must be important, but broken. How can people get better at apologizing as the person that maybe they feel unsafe when I'm in the wrong. And you know, their face gets flush and they hear it and the shoulders come up. It's tight. Like, you know, you're wrong. Yeah.

Oh, and it, it just activates and you can do it in a sort of resentful way. You can do it in a passive aggressive way. How can people learn to be a bit safer when it, when it comes to being in the wrong and communicating that? I think slowing down and even communicating with someone, what you're feeling. what you're feeling. Like I know, like I'm struggling right now because I'm not proud of what I just did or said but I feel like my brain has been hijacked and I feel really defensive right now. But I also am not proud of that thing that I did. And even if you voice it in an angry way,

like I feel so defensive right now and I feel this, I feel that, and I know what I said was out of line just now, but like it, it just crack in the door, creating the crack in the door, creating the crack in the door for a different dynamic to start to kind of snowball. Because right now it's snowballing in one direction, but sometimes all it takes for it to start going in another direction is just one person to like be angry, but still grab the other person's hand anyway. Be angry, but still grab the other person's hand anyway. And just be like, like say, be a step more vulnerable than you feel comfortable within that moment. And of course, so much of this is about regulating your nervous system.

Sometimes it's breathing, going for a walk, just taking a moment to like go, okay, something's happened. I have gotten activated here. This whatever is going on for me right now, I know I have gotten activated here. This, whatever is going on for me right now, I know I'm in the wrong about this, but I have become activated in a way that is like way outsized from what's going on right now. What is going on there? And you could even, again, you could say that to someone, something about this has like, has really like, got me triggered and I don't know what it is. I don't something about it has like messed with me and I, you know, I don't

want to take that out on you. This is why I think the overly sterile approach of looking at, uh, dating in relationships is so insufficient because it leaves no room for this messiness. And this is something again, I hesitate to bring it up because it's like, you know, guy goes to therapy and all he wants to talk about is therapy. But the therapeutic relationship is one of the very few where you can be as messy as you want. You start five sentences and stop all of them. Just bail out and go, I know, I actually, I don't even know what I'm talking about. You repeat the same thing 10 times, 10 sessions in a row or 10

times within the same session. And learning to be like, right, okay. I, I don't, I don't need to present to anybody a perfectly well-formed thought. Especially if I don't have it. to anybody a perfectly well-formed thought, especially if I don't have it. There was a guy, I went to a retreat in LA a couple of months ago, and there was a dude there and I asked him why he'd stopped creating content online. And he said, because I felt like I had to live up to

in private the things I was saying in public. And I think that we almost, there's like a shadow of that occurring in these situations where if you don't have the skill or the understanding or the capacity or the safety or the room to slow down and to be able to say like, I don't know what's going on here. I'm a competent person. Maybe you're super high fly. You do all of these things.

Your partner looks up to you to drive whatever relationship forward or his parents or whatever, you're like, I don't know what's going on, but like, let me messily, chaotically just try and communicate to you that I don't know what's going on, but trying to bring something into land with this perfectly well-rounded box with a bow on it and it pushes it across the table like that, it's a lie. Like what you're trying to do is you are sacrificing honesty for smoothness and you're trying to make it seem. You're trying to make yourself seem like less of an insane person.

You're like, what functioning adults would say, what functioning adult doesn't know what they're thinking or feeling? This makes me sound like a crazy person. I can't access this level of truthfulness or honesty because what does that say about me? I, flawed, defective, completely unhinged and crazy. And, and you know, when it's really interesting what you just said, because

that what functioning adult says something like this or feels this way. That's a, that's a huge realization it has been for me for self-compassion is, it's not a functioning adult that's having this feeling right now. There's some child in me that is like, feels really unsafe right now and you know, maybe this connects to another time in my life, you know, maybe there's something about this situation right now that's making me feel really stupid. And maybe this connects to a time in my life where I felt really bullied

or I felt like I was really stupid. I was made to feel really small by people, whether it's family or whether it was in the classroom or whatever it was, I was, you know, this made me feel really, really small. It made me feel really stupid. And that's why I'm so defensive right now. Like, that's why I've gone on the attack, because suddenly I felt really small again,

or I felt really stupid. And the way the tone, it might just be as simple as the tone someone used with you. And it might be a tone from a much more loving person than whoever that was back then, but something about the tone took you right back there. And now you're not speaking to this person, you're speaking to that person, but they're the target. And understanding that, like, I think that's a beautiful thing. It's like, there's a scared, hurt child here somewhere.

And if I can understand that, then I don't have to feel like me saying this is me like giving up my identity as a person who's doing well in adult life or strong the rest of the time. Or I just, I can allow myself this moment where something bigger is happening than in, in me, then whatever is happening out here and have compassion for it. Look, ultimately, like that's what you're feeling. That is what you're feeling at that moment.

So you can box it up and tie the bow on it and shove it across the table if you want, but that thing is going to continue to happen. You're going to continue to be at the mercy of that mental pathology, that weakness, that shattered, splintered vector within which things are going to continue to insert themselves into your psyche. And it's going to show up in relationships because when you're on your own, you're perfectly capable of creating the limits of where you push yourself to mentally. You bring somebody else into that equation and everything gets blown out of the water. It's like, I, there's another party here.

They expect things from me. I can't take three days of ruminating about this because I have to say something now. So what do you do? You don't ruminate about it and you just come up with the nearest, this looks like a reason and you just sort of throw it at that or there's one that's really familiar

that you pick up and you toss at them or whatever. Yeah. Uh, so much of it's just self understanding. So much of this is the self showing up. It's not to do with the relationship. It's you, it's your patterns. Yeah. Your insufficiencies.

It's your fears. Yeah. And it's why I think we're, we're a lot worse to everyone else when we don't have compassion for ourselves. Because when we punish that part of ourselves that is hurt or scared or confused or freaking out when we judge ourselves for that, which is something men are really good at. Like I remember there was a comment on a men's podcast I did, I don't know where it was, but someone wrote, I switch off the moment I hear the word trauma.

And I thought, fine, that's okay. But it tells me a lot about how you deal with yourself, right? Like that's, I know everything about that state for, I know everything about how much of a tyrant you are to yourself when I hear that statement, because you call it whatever the hell you want. It doesn't matter to me what you call it, whether you use trauma or a different word. Something's going on with you when you feel awful. I was playing a pickleball near my house

a couple of months ago, and I was with my friend Aaron, who does the Align podcast, and he's very sort of embodied, really, really trying hard to feel his feelings at the moment, and this lady, we were playing music out of a little Bluetooth speaker, $20 Amazon little Bluetooth speaker, $20 Amazon, a little Bluetooth speaker. This lady over the far side, shouted and she shouted that this is a park,

it's supposed to be a peaceful place. I'm like, do you know how loud someone hitting a pickleball is, it's like 80 decibels. There's a problem around pickleball noise because it's way louder than tennis is. It's one of the reasons that they don't want pickleball to grow too quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're trying to create

special sound boarding to go around. It is really, really loud. Yeah. Yeah. The whiffle ball makes much louder noise. This lady shouted over, um, and such an interesting little loop of things happen. So my first instinct, the orderly British cook in me was like, I'll go on, I'll go and turn the music down.

He went over and turn them. I would be that guy. Yes. I was like, must, must not, must go and turn the music down. He went over and turn them. I would be that guy. Yes. I was like, must, must not, must not upset the, what, like this one lady and her dog who was out of water, she was a hundred yards away and it wasn't even that loud. Anyway, Aaron went and turned it up and started shouting, sorry, I can't hear you. Um, but then once we finished, once we finished up, he said, uh, I was like, I, you know, stupid woman, like, you know, what does she think about that?

His first point of call was, I feel really sad for her. Like imagine that walking through the park and seeing two guys with their tops off in the sun, having a great time and playing a little bit of music, activates you like that. And that's the same as the guy that says, I hear the word trauma and I mean, it's wishy washy nonsense. Like I'm not, that's a switch as the guy that says, I hear the word trauma. I mean, it's wishy washy nonsense. Like I'm not, I switch off. So I feel sad for you.

I feel sad because there are things again, call it what you want past experiences, things that weakness it, pick your word lexically that you want, but you are going to continue to be at the mercy of them for as long as you are the woman shouting about the music being turned on and guys guys they I Mean the extent to which they bottle this stuff up and don't do anything about it is is profound and really disconcerting, you know, I It's one of the most anyone who's been on any kind of men's retreat, typically it's one of the most beautiful, like guys need an excuse to

get together and talk. So like they'll come up with something else. Like for me, I remember 2020, it was like going on the Wim Hof retreat in Poland, you know, where you've got 12 guys who are just doing these ridiculous, crazy feats. But the best part of the five days was when we sat around on the sofa and we talked and it was like, we needed all of these other things. We needed to be doing like 10 minute ice baths and climbing mountains to justify us having a chat so that we like could actually get together. This chat isn't shit. Do you know what the men's sheds initiative is in Australia? No.

It's the prototypical example of this. So they've realized that guys talk shoulder to shoulder and women talk face to face. You can even see this in parties. So if you go to a party and you look at the angle of the feet of men and you look at the angle of the feet of women, women talk at 180 degrees and men talk at about 120. It's called blading. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. Look around South by Southwest this week and you'll see guys stood like this. So what they did was they created literal sheds for guys to go in.

And in these sheds, there would be one of them would be like, we've got a broken lawnmower. So they put the lawnmower in the middle and John's got the good hammer and Phil's got the good spanner and whatever, whatever. And then they talk, but the men would rather fix a lawnmower than go to therapy type thing.

The male proclivity to deny physical or mental pathologies. This is why, I remember, even I had this when I was younger. I go to the NHS in the UK for the people that don't know. That's a 10 minute meeting with your general practitioner. During that time, they need to meet you, greet you, diagnose you, treat you, and get you out of the door. It's fucking insane. And I would go and I would have like accumulated three things

because I was like, well, you know, like that knee, it's probably nothing. And, uh, you know, like my tiredness, it's probably nothing. And I'd be like, okay, so here's this like, there's a scroll, uh, that I've come in with of different, different maladies because, you know, men are resilient in that way, but they need a place, I truly believe that deep emotionally mature men need a place to be able to be emotionally open.

And I also don't doubt that there is either a generation of men or a type of guy and girl who that doesn't speak to. Talking about their feelings and stuff. They just don't feel things quite so deeply, or they don't think about feeling things quite so deeply. I'm not sure which one of them. Oh, I think there's a, there, there are types. There do seem to be types of people in life for whom life isn't

as challenging in those ways. They're not as sensitive or, and I don't mean sensitive in any kind of derogatory way. They just don't, they're not as tuned to things going on that can really wound other people, you know, can get in for the rest of us. I don't relate to those people at all. I am not relate to those people at all. I am not one of those people. For a long time, I kind of wanted to be that, you know, like I really wanted to be this, I think a lot of it comes from childhood, I just wanted to be this strong, capable, competent person.

Like if I, if I'm in control, must be in control, always must be in control. I must be in control. I'll fix it. I'll sort it. Don't worry. it's on me. Yep. I'm like, I'm fighting against the flood. Like, I'm swimming upstream here.

You know, I do feel things deeply and that's fine. It's no comment on my weakness as a human anymore than, you know, having size 10 feet or size 9 feet is. It's a part of your history. Uh, but not realizing that, not recognizing that, not dealing with it. That's, that's an issue. And you recognize that that, and I relate to this because I have very similar to that, you, it's an identity that you create for yourself that you then think is this is me.

And this is where my worth comes from is this. The things that you say in public, you have to live up to in private. Yeah. You know, you, and even the public can be the people around you at work. It can be your family. It can be, you know, you, we all have our public and how, you know, we think that this is the identity that makes us somebody. There's a whole, I think this is one of the most valuable exercises in the book.

I used to teach it just on my retreats and I think it's like an amazing, so much of what I used to do just on my retreats has made it into this book. And one of the big exercises is, I detail in the book a huge section on the three layers of confidence and the middle layer is the identity layer. And this is where we derive our confidence from. So the surface layer is, layer one is the surface. That's just how we walk, talk and act. What we portray as our level of confidence to other people. The identity layer is where do we get our confidence from? What do we think of as some of the sources in our life of our confidence?

So for some of us it's our career, it could be our relationship, it could be our body, it could be the identity we have as someone who's always got it together or is always able to take control whenever the time comes. Those identities can become our prison because whatever we get the most validation for and whatever makes us feel the most rewarded becomes our mutation. And then whatever becomes our mutation becomes our greatest vulnerability. So there's a whole exercise I take people through and people can do it from the book. It's called the identity matrix where you draw a box with squares inside it for all

of the areas that give you confidence on the identity level. There's the core level, which is the deepest level. And that's a whole different, that goes much, much deeper than any of these things I'm talking about. But when people draw their matrix, they quickly see that there deepest level and that's a whole different, that goes much, much deeper than any of these things I'm talking about. But when people draw their matrix, they quickly see that there are one or two squares that they have become wildly over invested in that make them appear confident when they're operating within their circle of competence. But the moment they step out of those, a very different person is revealed. A very different level of confidence is revealed. Or God forbid anything happened to one of those squares. Now it becomes essentially an existential identity crisis because this thing that is the primary source of my validation, uh, is no longer

there. And that, that's a, that's a really dangerous place for people to be. Well, that's ultimate scarcity mindset, right? It's fragility. Yeah. You think if I, if this goes wrong, I'll be nothing. Who am I? Yeah.

And then you see that happen when people's businesses go under and they, you know, they suddenly feel like they're worthless or when they get an injury, if they're, you know, constantly in the gym and then they get injured and they can't work out. Yeah. I had that, I had that toward the end of my twenties. You know, throughout all of my twenties, I was the, the big lean model guy. That was it. And then I had a series of really serious injuries. And I'm like, all right, I need to find who I am when I can't take my primary sense of

self-worth from being the strongest, leanest guy in the room. Yep. Oh, fuck, what does this mean? It was really good for me, to be honest, at the time. And I think it was the beginning of the trajectory of pushing me toward thinking more intellectually and, and I'm not necessarily emotionally, that was only recent, but starting to take pride in other things. And when you do that, that's a, that becomes its own game changer because you don't, you

start to expand your identity and no longer does who you are rely on this one thing. It's not contingent on it, no. No, it's a very powerful place to be. And so I'm always in favor of people in certain crucial ways diversifying their identity matrix so that they're not over-indexed in an area that they have counted on for their, you know, 90% of their worth. Of course, everything at the identity level is a problem. So like the reason the core exists as a level is because at that identity level, you're always vulnerable. And anyone in mindfulness circles, they would say that that whole middle

level is the problem is that any identification makes you vulnerable. Um, because it's a double edged sword, right? when it's going well you feel great when it's all what is going well you just now worried about losing it could you worry that you won't be something when you lose it. When is not going great you feel worthless so this that doesn't have to me that doesn't mean it should be ignored it's like. doesn't, to me, that doesn't mean it should be ignored. It's like, why not, you know, we're still living a life where we get up in the morning and we choose what to do. So you might as well live a life that galvanizes you against, you know, some of life's biggest reversals in any area. But it's also about recognizing there's a whole other depth to confidence that goes way beneath that. And this is, I think, the part that a lot of people end up tripping up on.

And this is probably for me, I think, one of the most powerful things in the entire book is this idea of what core confidence really is, because I think we have wildly misunderstood what it is. You know, when you ask people what is confidence at the deepest level they'll talk about self-love in some form and that gets really messy real fast because everyone's got a different idea of what self-love means and some people hate the term self-love, other people live by it. And I could never, when I was thinking, where does my confidence come from

if it doesn't come from any of these, if it shouldn't merely come from these things? Like if I lost everything, where would my confidence come from? Could it still exist? And when people hear that, they say, yeah, because you have to love yourself. But I never resonated massively with that idea, not because I didn't think it was important,

but because I could never figure out what the practical application, what did it look like to love yourself? You know, it can't be a bubble bath and candles. Like I don't relate to that. So what do you mean when you say love yourself? And I would step in front of audiences for years, because I was like constantly on a journey to refining what my version of self love look like that I could coach people in that actually meant something to me and wasn't just words and was a model that could be used. And I would say to people in events, like, why should you love yourself? And it would always be fascinating to listen to the answers and the way that people got themselves tangled up in it. The same ways that I had got myself tangled up in it, because they'd say, well, you should love yourself because you're special or you deserve it. And I'd be like, when you say you deserve it, why?

Well, because, you know, we're, I'm kind and I'm loving and I'm a good person and I'm good to my family and whatever. And I'm like, but that's a problem because what you're describing to me is you should get love when you get straight A's. But what about the days where you're not loving or you're selfish or you do something shameful or you hurt someone or does that mean you're not deserving of love on those days? And even when you are on your good days, there's always going to be someone who does those things better than you. So when you come up against someone like that, do they deserve more love than you? And people be like, oh, that's a problem because then now it feels like love that's highly, highly

conditional on me having these great traits. So they'd say, well, I guess it's, you know, we're special, like, and I go, but why are you special? Isn't everyone special? There's 8 billion people on this earth. Is everyone special? And they'd be like, well, yeah, everyone's special. I'd be like, well, I don't know about you. I don't feel very special anymore.

Like how does that make me someone who should love themselves? I don't really connect with that and I would go round and round the houses with people on this and what I began to realize was People try to love themselves using the romantic model of love and that's why it doesn't work Because when we fall in love with someone romantically Because when we fall in love with someone romantically we see qualities in them that we really like or admire that we find attractive and we want to get closer to them.

But the thing that makes all of that really attractive in the first place is that we're viewing them from some distance. And we get all these chemical rushes from getting close to them, dopamine and oxytocin and it feels so good. And so we don't need to try to fall in love with someone. It's easy, right? When we're falling in love, it just is like it's happening. We've never been able to do that with ourselves. Why? Well, if you look at why a lot of long term relationships fail, the phrase familiarity breeds contempt. The closer you get to someone

the more contempt you can have for them if you're not careful because you take them you take for granted all their good stuff and you magnify all the bad stuff and so now it starts to become this relationship where you just want to push off. That's if familiarity breeds contempt who would we have more contempt for than the person we've spent every second with since the day we were born? Like that is, it almost leaves no room for any other emotion at the end of the day. So being this person, and then when we add up all of our mistakes and all of our shame and all of the things we think we've done wrong and the ways we don't match up, that

contempt can reach a crescendo. So now you've got someone who says, well, yeah, looked like that. How am I supposed to like my, how am I supposed to love myself? I don't even like myself. Like how am I gonna get to love? And what I came to realize was that romantic model

has to be dispensed with when it comes to loving ourselves. We have to adopt a different model altogether. And so I started looking for what's the different model. And one of the relationships that started to interest me was the parent-child relationship. Because if you ask a parent, most parents, healthy parents, why do you love your child? They won't say well, because they got an A in English yesterday and because they did something so cute this morning and they'll just saying, what do you mean? Because they're my child, because they're mine.

They don't need another reason. They just go, this is my child. You can even see this effect with people and their dogs. You see really ugly dogs walking down the street and think, if you walk up to a dog owner and you say, why do you love your dog? They say, what are you talking about? It's my dog. If you tried to, if you offered them up a more beautiful, stately dog and said, do you want to exchange it? They'd be like, you're out of your mind. What are you talking about? This is my dog.

That for me left a massive clue as to what, how we can actually love ourselves, which is to say of the 8 billion, this is the mistake we make, we look at 8 billion people on this earth and we say how do I match up? Instead we have to look at it from a completely different place and go of the 8 billion people on this earth, I'm the only person who is responsible for taking care of this human. It's like at birth we were given a human. And someone else's job like a parent figure someone was their job was to help us get through the first few years and survive those first few years they may not done a good job they may have done a good job. Either way someone else had the job of keeping us alive but a certain point.

We got given custody of this human. And our one job from that point on is just give this human the best life you can give them. Whatever that means, whether it means helping them actualize, whether it means helping them be happy, helping them feel peaceful, helping them experience joy, give this human the best life possible. So now if you imagine someone asking you why should you love yourself the answer is very simple you don't need to find reasons you go why i love myself because i'm mine. I'm my human and that to me when i started looking at it like that it changed everything because it's this Because it no longer mattered whether I matched up to somebody else. It's like completely irrelevant.

Because I can't exchange my human for another human. So what's the point? What's the point in worrying what they're doing or what they're doing? They're taller than me, they're better looking than me, they're this, they're that. It doesn't matter. I'm the only human I get. So forget the comparison, just what would I do today if I was taking care of my human? And that turns loving yourself from a feeling you have to have into an approach. That changes everything because what you realize is I don't actually

have to like myself in order to love myself. Loving myself comes first. Liking myself can come later. But the more I love myself, the more I actually approach, like the more I take care of this human, nurture this human, stand up for this human, try and give them the best life possible, I might just also accomplish liking myself at some point and developing an affection for myself because it's hard not to develop an affection for someone who does all of that for you.

But in the beginning, you don't have to worry about the feeling. You just have to worry about taking care of your human. And that for me changed everything. Did you have a problem operationalizing that? Like turning that into practice when you first started? It required constant repetition because the instinct is to go back to comparison. The instinct is to go back to looking at where I don't match up. Or the instinct because of my wiring was to go back to guilt,

telling myself I'm not doing enough, telling myself. But it required me constantly going back to a frame of reference of going, I have one job. My one job is to take care of this human. How am I doing in that job today? Like if I'm, like I dealt, one of the things I talk about in the book is my chronic pain and I dealt with that for years and it was, for me, it became crippling.

And this was physical pain and I didn't know what to do. I mean, I literally, I still have it, but it's my relationship with is completely different now, but I had tinnitus, like tinnitus where I just had ringing in my ears non-stop for years and years combined with crippling headaches and ear and pain in my head and dizziness and all sorts of symptoms that really I couldn't be present in my life with all of it. But the thing that made it so much worse was how I treated myself every day that I had it. Like I hated myself for it and I I had all this story around it about what it meant and how weak I felt and how I wasn't being productive and how I couldn't get it together and it just all that story was like the worst thing about it. The pain was already bad.

The story then turned it into something completely unmanageable and my, my, I had to get to a point where I went, I have one job, like I'm supposed to be taking care of this human and right now when this human is in pain, I'm acting so inhumanely. If this was my brother or my partner or my mom or like, I would have such compassion for how in pain they are all the time. And with me, I'm just turning it into this artery of shame and self-loathing, which is just unimaginably cruel to do to a person. And that would be unimaginably cruel to do to any human being. So even if you just decide I'm a human being in this world and therefore I deserve as much decency and love as I would give anyone else. That would already be cause to treat myself better than I was in those moments.

But when I reminded myself, it's not just that I'm a human is that I'm my human. I have a special responsibility to give myself encouragement and compassion and love that, that changed things for me. And for me, operation, opera opera, me, operationalizing it meant consistently, like I have in my life what I call emotional buttons and they are for me triggers for thoughts or truths that I have access to at my fingertips all the time. And I have notes on my phone that have emotional buttons in, I have notes on my computer. Every morning I wake up and I do 10 minutes of just reviewing my emotional buttons and the things that trigger them.

And for me emotional buttons can come from all different places, but I would have emotional buttons around self-compassion that I would have at my fingertips so that I wake up in the morning and I know my instinct is to wake up in deficit. And to immediately, no matter. You've been asleep, you soft fuck. Yeah, exactly. Get up and start working. Exactly. Yeah.

You, you, you were not like yesterday, you did an amazing job, but that was yesterday. And now today we're in deficit and we have to kill ourselves to get to a place where we're even again. And that was like waking up with no compassion, no self-compassion whatsoever. So I had to have emotional buttons that in the morning I would read and they would connect me back to how I wanted to treat myself to why I was, you know, what energy I wanted to bring to this person today. And that for me, those emotional buttons are game changers. Those, by the way, are a great strategy for anything. Like you have, I have emotional buttons for before I go to the gym, I have emotional buttons for you know when I'm, I have emotional buttons for work, I have emotional buttons for writing, I have them for everything because they, I can't rely on having the right feelings naturally but what I can rely on is that I've felt something before.

Like if I notice I'm feeling particularly affectionate towards myself right now or I'm feeling more loving towards myself right now or I'm just, there's a way of looking at myself that's creating self-compassion, I will write that down and turn it into an emotional button so that the next time I need to access that, I don't have to try to locate the same thought. It's just I have a way of getting back there very, very quickly. Winston Churchill said, men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and carry on as if nothing happened. And it's a great, for me it always tied in with everything I do on, I teach people on emotional buttons because everything I want to feel I've probably felt before at some point and it's been connected with a certain way of thinking, a certain thought pattern,

sometimes an object or a piece of music or something. I just need an instruction manual for getting back to the places I need to get back to. And I have, through my emotional buttons, it's like having an instruction manual for everything I wanna feel at any given moment. And I have it for all different emotions. So I have emotional buttons for excitement, emotional buttons for wanting to train,

emotional buttons for feeling peaceful. I have them for everything. Uh, and they're some of the most valuable daily things that I use in my life. That's my operation manual. Hell yeah. Matthew Hussey, ladies and gentlemen, Matthew, I really appreciate you, man. I love this arc, this trajectory you've gone on from the strategy to the emotion, to the feeling and where we're at now.

The book's awesome. Everyone should go and check it out. Where else should they go? They want to see the rest of the things you do online. Man, honestly, the thing I'm most excited about is the book. I have, you know, you can find me anywhere online on any platform, and I've been putting content out for years and years, but this book I've put hundreds and hundreds of hours into. So, you know, if people go to lovelifebook.com, the book is called Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards,

Find Your Person and Live Happily No Matter What. And when you go to lovelifebook.com, you can order a book from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you want. But there's also a cool thing where if you take the receipt from the book, the order confirmation, wherever you get it from and come back to lovelifebook.com you can enter that for a ticket to an event I'm doing on May the 4th which is going to be a really exciting, it's going to be a virtual event but there's going to be thousands of people there who all who have got the book and want to then get coached in the application of the book into the year so that's gonna be fun.

I think the last thing I would say is just. I know that so many guys listen to your show and you know what you do and love what you do. I. You know I encourage them to grab a copy of this because it's a book that, like you said it earlier, it's a book that transcends the genre in many ways. It's in the same way that I think of like, you know, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. It's a book about writing that's kind of about life. I think of this as a book about love that's kind of about life.

It's a personal development book masquerading as a dating book. And so it's, but for anyone who does want to find love is really going to help you with that too. So I think it's for everybody and man, it's helped me. So I'd be shocked if it didn't help other guys out there too. And I appreciate Chris, the work that you're doing right now with yourself And I appreciate Chris, the work that you're doing right now with yourself is, I think it's feeding into the work. I don't think you should ever feel like you're boring anybody by talking about the stuff that you're experiencing and the work you're doing in therapy. And I think that's, I think in so many ways, that's the good stuff. People are going to keep loving coming to you for all the other stuff as well. But that stuff, we need to hear that

and to hear someone like you, even when, I don't know if you were talking about yourself when you said this, but even when you said, what do you do when you wanna, you know you're wrong, but it's hard to say sorry. In my head at least, I was picturing that maybe that was you sometimes and it instantly made you more likeable and more relatable and you know, I think we can all relate to that. So I just, I'm grateful for that work that you're doing and for the way you're putting

it out and I really hope that you keep doing it because I think that the guys out there will be whether quietly or vocally really really really in need of it. I appreciate that man. Thank you.