You Attract What You Think You Deserve - 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 no 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 competent data yeah I wanted to take myself well and truly off that pedestal that anyone had ever put me on that I must have 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 am I think it's one of the great challenges when you 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 impostor 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 was a very weird thing for me cuz I I would have people come up to me and say I'm married because of you or I mean this amazing relationship because of you or this and um 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 MH 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 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 sing Single I said you know I I get what you're saying I'm single too and this part 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 ha 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 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 this 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 uh so you know it's a tricky it's a tricky thing but I 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 they've been in a tumultuous relationship for the last 10 years or been you know just left a 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 bench oh that's good so another friend William talks about uh he says research his mear 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 I I I research incels that does 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 I don't think so no I I think we have to you 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 uh you know and look that's the Peril of being anyone who 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 AD 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 cuz I was on YouTube from 19 I'm 36 now I keep saying I'm 37 I don't know why don't do that I'm 36 as well we need to hold on to the years of our 30s as much as possible no I'm 36 still for a few more months but I um 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 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 20s it's shocking to me in a way it's not shocking cuz it's almost expected but life is so much better now 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 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 it's open and vulnerable and it is uh it's like personal development through the lens of relationships you know so much of it is about patterns and 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 we do something uncomfortable arises inside of us and then 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 antise ourselves away from that so much yeah I relate to that so much I you know we when we do that it we're a liability to ourselves cuz we end up hurting ourselves a lot cuz we go through a lot of you know you end up going through a lot of heartbreak yourself and you end up whe and you can go through Heartbreak by being left and you can also go through create heartbreak for yourself by leaving and it's so I I did a lot of that and and then you hurt other people I hurt other people and you know I'm not proud of those moments and it's 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 you know they they can be really they can be very damaging people and you know I 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 I didn't you know it took 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 that would kill me I would I would it would just day after day it would eat away at me and I 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 her someone and and I remember a therapist once saying to me your the guilt that you feel it's not that you don't feel guilty but the guilt is an 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 it's you feel disappointed you know you feel like and and 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 the 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 the guilt I feel for hurting someone else than your own personal disappointment at why am I I struggling why am I not happy and and it's why I wrote a chapter in the book called Never Satisfied because I you know I I could relate to that feeling of being like what's what's going on with me that I don't I I have people around me that seem really content in this area of their lives and they seem to kind of glide through Y and I can't seem to find peace here I you know I'm either being hurt or doing the hurting mhm but I'm not I don't feel in a place of contentment and that's a scary place to be cuz you're like then you start to think you're broken like I can't I don't know how to be relationships are for other people happy stable relationships are for other people and for some reason I'm this sort of whatever the opposite of one of those Weeble wob things that we push it and it doesn't fall down and 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 requir Ed 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 of that I 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 but then you meet someone and it's like like that feeling that crazed you know traction and crazy chemistry and you think oh this is it like this is important and we're measuring the importance of it by the intensity of what we're feeling right now confused about what that signal is I'm absolutely absolutely confused about what that signal is and you know we it 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 let say this is 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 and and I've I can also relate to the other situation of being 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 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 mhm uh then having met this person then navigating my way through the early dating of all of that and and the final edit of this I did on my honeymoon which is like a really crazy Arc it's almost autobiographical so crazy and it's why I'm so passionate about this because this is not just stuff that you know this has helped me find peace the things in this book have helped 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 um you know it took me meeting Audrey my my now wife to start to truly understand what healthy looked like and would you have would this relationship with her worked 5 years ago like were you ready for this relationship 5 years ago no no so we're even talking about such a narrow window we're talking 5 years ago this is the funny thing man like I almost did get in my own way 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 cuz 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 it look I remember a moment very early in the when we were dating and there was something that happened that made me jealous and I did not approach this situation in a very productive way and 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 and I felt like like I didn't trust either so it was a combination of like in security and I don't trust people which is something I've had to work on in my life cuz 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 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 the energy yeah 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 3 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 way in a way that in that moment I wasn't and it and it she so 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 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 cuz I when I 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 here's why I really got scared in that moment and after I'd revealed why I really got scared in that moment or what it brought up for me then there was a second wave 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 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 I took the chance and and the words left this person's mouth mhm 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 and what I perceive to be weakness M and what I obviously clearly felt shame around myself and had 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 it's attractive is going to change how you look at me forever and that's all my worst fears came to yeah 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 what now why have you gone cold like what's going on now you know like and I'm like and I had she had to drag it out of me that the reason I'm now cold is because I now I'm scared that now that I've said that you're going to 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 have context for you and that's been the story of our relationship and it's been a very healing experience for me because uh 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 uh and it's so interesting I once heard this idea about uh meditation so anyone who's ever tried to meditate will know this if they're sufficiently introspective which everyone that's listening to this is way too introspective and they were talking about you know you sit and a thought arises 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 way 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 flatulation 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 and all the one of my favorite 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 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 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 that if you were sitting around doing that I remember growing up if you were sat around doing nothing like there was like a chop chop there's work to be done like what's going on this you know one of the phrases was like this ain't going to get the baby a new Bonnet I don't know they didn't have that North the most London Fu 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 that phrase that idea that like this isn't useful this isn't productive this isn't like I think that that stuck with me in a lot of ways and I'm still 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 bed sheets 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 bed sheets so high quality bed sheets 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 10year 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 sitewide from cozy Earth by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Cozy earth.com using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's cozy earth.com and modern wisdom a 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 uh our inability to not permanently be improving and sit with growth as opposed to just allowing ourselves to enjoy things I I've got this idea I thought about thiso 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 enough 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 [ __ ] grindstone and keep going and uh it's 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 been reading a lot of aland Boton 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 the feeling of suffering that's good and it's it's true it's true I think that a lot of people their their you know anxiety comes easily uh self-criticism comes easily 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 I went I didn't fix it that year don't get me wrong it was like many years of slow car crash but like that was the moment where I realized I'm I'm in a bit of trouble here because it's not none of it seems to you know I I'd been running running running for so long and I and I told myself like cuz I you know I came out of a kind of very financially unstable situation familywise 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 be a different different time and there peace time just never came for me I never got to a point where I'd like done enough or made everyone safe enough that it felt like peace time it's like having a wartime president that doesn't know what to do now that there's no war to fight it's like and and that for me was a really scary a really scary place to be cuz was like something's I I I I remember thinking something's really wrong with me like I'm I'm I had a 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 is this guy giving everyone advice when his inner the texture of his mind is just it's a waser yeah and it's a it's a I I kind of um yeah I I feel sorry sometimes for people who uh 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 to be a student and to just be someone who's growing and figuring it out and I and I I don't think I left myself that room and you know it's like a guru's curse in a way it is and I I had to so much of what I dealt with I I 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 I cars the person that you are 100% I carried a lot of Shame around that and uh you know I I think those moments are actually very beautiful because you get you get the chance to like sort of you you know you get LED 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 taipe 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 and I I and I see a lot of I see a lot of men feeling like that that's going to be the thing like if they can do that if they can achieve that that's going to be the thing and 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 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 if you when you sit and sort of wait with it is it something else Will Smith in his Memoir he said uh when I was broke and miserable I had hope but when I was rich and miserable there was nothing left right it's like yeah and and unfortunately this is 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 those things of yeah these guys you know they said it didn't work for them but really like I mean how doesn't it work because your 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 and 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 of love and and uh how couldn't it be that of course it's that it's just it just didn't work for him he had a you know unit 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 like no one no no one knows what they're doing no one knows what they're doing all the way up there's a very rarified stru of people 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 they're 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 place for a sense of significance like how many of us that have achieved a lot were driven by some disease fear of insufficiency a crippling self-doubt a desire to be loved by the world necessary amount of Val then when we get there we have the audacity to say I want someone with the same disease I not like oh it 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 uh Rising socioeconomic status of women can make it difficult for them to date in in in some regards women tend to want to that 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 you're 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 ass 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 peace type work than I had I'd just been running and she'd been finding a deeper level of peace and so the piece 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 because 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 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 just like they're just happy people they and they 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 I just think that's F that's so fascinating to me because it's you know the the final chapter of the book I called happy enough and I love that concept but the the unhappiest people I 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 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 on YouTube even mine to to some extent you know it's it's this quite sort of sterile transactional commercial value forv 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 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 they don't they want to find love I 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 feel was like an annoying step but finding love is something we I 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 was 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 then when they do what's what's going on there and that those have come the fascinating questions for me and and it's not our reality the one we've experienced our whole life is really just it's just our reality it's not it's not reality itself and I 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's 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 um 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 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 for for one it's what we know so if something is it's I talk about like a a dolphin in captivity right cuz we're very good we have a 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 cuz if a dolphin in captivity learns that in order to get fed it has to do back flips jump through hoops and swim up to humans and then it gets released into to the ocean and it starts doing back flips 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 and JY 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 W it becomes the thing we keep driving into because it's it is what we know I you know I tell a story in the book about I grew up with uh 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 uh not okay that 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 it wasn't like a this wasn't like a glamorous Vegas style this was just a grot rough Club back in a local part of England and it was rough and you know people would getting fights and they get thrown out in nasty ways and and I and it put me on edge a lot especially at a young age and and even in you know my own family I was you know a interesting family and you know I was around certain things and it it created a kind of hypervigilance in me that really stayed with me I didn't really I didn't really lose it I never really felt 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 uh and my brothers are having a great time they just chill one of them singing like hya on the karaoke machine and just like belting it out and carefree and I'm like looking you know I'm like hypervigilant I'm having fun but I'm also like constantly kind of a little bit on guard and it was a person who a guy a western guy who just kept staring at my brother Non-Stop and it got to the point where I just i' created a whole story in my head and went up and confronted the guy the guy hadn't even done anything yet but confronted the guy and in instantly he was you know like the bartender came around and no 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 we don't understand there's a whole thing in my head it was like the scene had already happened it's like no you he was about to and then this was going to happen you and I I remember thinking to myself how do my brother survive when I'm not around Meanwhile by the way my brothers are both bigger than me one of them's 63 the other one's the one's 6'2 the other's 6'4 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 yep and it's not that trouble's not around it's not that 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 threat Vigilant yeah and that and the sad part about that this is the really tragic part is that the I am truly I have zero interest in trouble I all I want is a peaceful lovely time with people I love this 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 wo 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 uh narcissistic in their Tendencies or or um who don't invest in me or take advantage of my good nature or you just you keep driving into that wall and learn 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 partners that 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 the territory yeah and I 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 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 the it's actually the same thing it's I've always had fear of success I told myself I didn't like I I you know fear of success isn't something I understand the truth is I've always been afraid of success any time 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're 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 and sit with it for long enough that it that it eases up and and and so much of finding the right kind of love is that you will you will find that there are certain aspects of healthy love if you've been constantly gravitating towards unhealthy love there'll be 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 con 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 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 at 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 want to be on is figure out what was missing last time okay that's going to 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 carismatic 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 and also I believe you have to give your nervous system time to adjust cuz 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 CU 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 I a huge part of it is telling ourselves it's not I'm 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 it for a while your nervous system might not respond to that CU it's so used to the the drug of the other thing and that takes time for your body to adjust you've got a another quote which I love uh 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 uh familiarity with suffering thing again like it just it's just home base and the guilt that so many people have around having needs having needs who am I to have need what do you mean to have needs you just you do the thing right you again the workingclass 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 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 I give you an example I always struggled in relationships to communicate that like I might really uh 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 cuz they may have been like absolutely yeah like let me you know one of the things 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 wow I didn't even need like that's so nice she's she's literally thinking about these things but 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 cuz 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 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 5 hours then I'm going to do this for the next three days and like I would be abandoned for having asked for that and so I I didn't voice it but what that meant was that 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 cuz when you have a relationship you just don't get to do anything you enjoy doing anymore so you you made your own destiny yeah with this the wall again right you you crash into the wall you because it's what you know so you end up I had I had a 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 the 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 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 3 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 hurt if I had date I just get hurt now of course you see again like she had she had looked for the wall cuz 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 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 lifechanging 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 I like here's 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 mom came out and yelled at me 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 a I was embarrassed and felt shame and so I just was like like I want to be in my cave and screw everybody but 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 and I shut myself in my room and one by one everyone came up and knocked on the door and was like Matt come down like come hang you know my mom my brothers my friends like everyone was sent up to like get me to come back down and have fun because everyone was having fun I was just like punishing myself and then I always remember my brothers came up and they said it was with 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 the sleepover and we're going to watch movies and we're going to get food and and I was like just go like go I don't I'm 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 had turned out they'd had the best night and it was so much fun and it like haunted me that I 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 was I felt shame for being hurt shame for being you know embarrassed that something had got to me but my anger was felt more righteous and more stronger than my embar you 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 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 something about this has made me feel hurt and and God if that if I took that to its like extreme if I 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 thing that that is profound to me it's mindblowing to me and that's that those kinds of things have become kind of my obsession now how can people be 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 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 if 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 like 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 your 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 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 at it 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 made me feel something together let's work out because this is going to continue happening y 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 in early dating someone might say you 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 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 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 in conru the in congruence 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 what it's truly capable of becoming well you give it a chance to bounce 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 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 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 uh you know another aland Boton 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 uh 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 well I 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 cuz you're like something bad's going to happen as a result of this this person's not going to love me anymore they're not going to or this friend isn't going to like me anymore and and so by the way you end up attracting friends who do only love you because of what you do for them that's again it's the wall you you attract people who just want you because you're doing things for them for a relationship to survive you to find relationships that aren't based on how much someone's doing for you but are just are 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 yeah 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 newtonic the drink he did a um a mushroom trip in in Australia and this question came to him do people love you for who you are or for what you do uh and you know he's like a successful guy and lots of people follow him and stuff like that uh and I think he was you know asking himself well if the things that I do stopped would the love that people have for me also stop is 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 the fixer the person whose needs are permanently subjugated by whatever anybody else arounds you needs to have happen perfect example of this I had a call with my mom couple of weeks ago it was what was it it was day before my birthday day before my birthday right and she'd heard her back uh like not badly but she'd heard her back a little bit and as soon as I heard that I was like right I'm upstairs I'm showing her because 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 uh 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 you that'll make it a little bit more and I actually found that what you want to do is get a small kitchen Tim and you put the kitchen timer next to you and I was like I thought to myself after I was like what the am I doing like why 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 it 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 Bey and and to do and and and to 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 uh that's when we abandon ourselves we're no longer 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 h 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 you know 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 mhm so you just keep making the same mistakes over and over again and it's everyone else's fault the world's fault and so you you essentially maintain that incompetence and um 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 um that goes hand inand with like someone who talks badly about multiple kind of exes and it's just always everyone else's fault like it's if 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 it's you know I think that's a big red flag that's like a big red flag for staff and for uh and for people that you date cuz it when you no longer trust that someone's going to do what they say they're going to do it it really breaks something in a relationship because now that you don't trust that they're going to do something you turn you turn into a version of yourself you don't like with that person like the 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 well it's that vigilance again it's the night hyper vigilance exactly if I if someone proves that they just if they say they're going to do it next W by next Wednesday they deliver it by next Wednesday I actually don't bother them at all I don't I'm I'm like I have fully hands off the wheel I will 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 going to 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 going to do it and I don't even trust that you're going to acknowledge it if you don't do it so in 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 overpromise 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 cuz it just I can't those things are 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 a 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 and when in any relationship you're not playing by the same roles 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 rule R yeah 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 now it's like oh 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 the danger of any relationship is that you think we equate proximity and closeness to a 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 you're with an alien that person you you know I I get stories of people who get sick and their Partners 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'd been together for so long because you know it's like the the you know even in any bad relationship you're always going to be able to point to Great Moments like it and those Great Moments really conf 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 great 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 the person that's maybe kind they feel unsafe when I'm in the wrong and you know that their face gets flush and they they hear it and their 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 and communicating that I think slowing down and and even communicating with someone what you're feeling like I know like I'm struggling right now because I've I'm I'm not proud of what I just did or said but I feel like my brain has been hijacked and 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 and 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 for for a different Dynamic to start to kind of snowball cuz 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 and just be like like say be a step more vulnerable than you feel comfortable with in 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'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 hesitate to bring it up because it's like you 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 ah I know 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 there's a guy I went to a retreat in La uh a couple of months ago and there was a dude there and I asked him why stopped creating content online and he said because I felt like I had to live up to impr private the things I was saying in public and I think that we almost there's like a 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 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 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 adult would say that would what functioning adult doesn't know what they're thinking or feeling this makes me sound like a crazy person I can't I can't access this level of truthfulness or honesty because what does that say about me I I 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 a 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 was you know I felt really bullied or I felt like I was really stupid I was made to feel really small MH by people whether it's family or whether it was in the classroom or whether whatever it 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 some may 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 but they're the Target and understanding that like I I think that's a beautiful thing is like there's this 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 you know strong the rest of the time or I just I can allow myself this moment where something bigger is happening than in in me than 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 split Ed Vector within which things are going to continue to insert themselves yeah 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 and everything gets blown out of the water it's like I I there's another party they expect things from me you know I can't take 3 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 like the nearest this looks like a reason and you just sort of throw it or there's one that's really familiar that you pick you pick up and you and you toss at them or whatever yeah uh yeah 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 your patterns it's your insufficiencies it's your fears yeah and and it's why I think we're we're a lot worse to everyone else when we don't have compassion for ourselves cuz when we're 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 the I remember there was a comment on a men's podcast I did I don't know where where it was but someone wrote a 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 I know everything about that state I know everything about how much of a tyrant you are to yourself when I hear that statement yeah because you call it whatever the hell you want want I 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 uh pickle ball 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 uh and this lady we were playing music out of a you like a little Bluetooth speaker $20 am and 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 pickle ball is it's like 80 dbel there's a problem around pickle ball noise because it's way louder than tennis is it's one of the reasons they don't want pickle ball to grow too quickly yeah yeah yeah they're trying toate special soundboarding to go around it it is really really loud much the whiffle ball makes much louder noise this lady shouted over um and such an interesting little Loop of things happened so my first instinct the orderly British cuck in me was like I'll go and I'll go and turn the music down he went over and turned the mus I would be that guy yes I was like must must not must not upset like this one lady in her dog who was out of a she was 100 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 you know stupid one like you know what do 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 that's the same as the guy that says I hear the word trauma I it's it's wishy-washy nonsense like I'm not that's I switch off yeah so I feel sad for you I feel sad because there are things again call it what you want past experiences things that weaknesses you 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 Hoff 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 5 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 10minute ice baths and climbing mountains to justify us having a chat so that we like could actually get together this chat isn't [ __ ] is it um do you know what the men's sheds initiative is in Australia the prototypical example of this um so they 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 and men talk at about 120 it's called blading and once you see you can't un see it look look around South by Southwest this week and you'll see guys stud like this um 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 uh we've got a broken lawn mower so they put the lawn mower in the middle and John's got the good hammer and Phil's got the good spanner and you know whatever whatever and then they talk but the like men will men would rather fix a lawn mower than go to therapy type thing the male proclivity to deny physical or mental pathologies this is why you know I remember even I had this when I was younger I go to the NHS in the UK uh for the people that don't know that's a 10minute 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 [ __ ] insane um 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 you know like my tiredness it's probably nothing and my blah blah blah and I'd be like okay so here's this like this scroll uh that I've come in with of different different maladies because you know men are resilient in that way but they they need a place I truly believe believe that like deep emotionally mature men need a place to be able to be emotionally open uh 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 well 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 way yes yes 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 I am not one of those for a long time I I kind of wanted to be that you know like I really wanted to be this I think a lot of it comes from Child so 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 Y and 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 10t or size 9 ft 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 I relate to this CU I 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 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 uh 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 amazing Val 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 s 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 as our of our confidence so for some of us it's our career could be our relationship it could be our body it could be the the identity we have as someone who's always got it together or is always able to take control whenever the time comes and we we 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 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 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 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 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 I had that I had that toward the end of my 20s you know throughout all of my 20s 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 selfworth from being the strongest leanest guy in the room y oh [ __ ] what does this mean it was really good for me uh to be honest at the time and I think it was the beginning of the trajectory of of pushing me toward thinking more intellectually uh and and not necessarily emotionally that was only recent um but starting to take pride in other things and when you do that that's a that that becomes its own game Cher 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 diversify in their identity Matrix MH 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 you when it's going well you feel great when it's or when it's going well you're just now worried about losing it because you're worried that you won't be something when you lose it or when it's not going great you feel worthless so there's that doesn't to me that doesn't mean it should be ignored it's like why not you know we 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 what is confidence at the deepest level they'll talk about self-love in some form and that gets really messy real fast cuz everyone's got a different idea of what self-love means and some people hate the term selflove other people live by it um and I I could never when I was thinking where does my confidence come from if it doesn't come from any of these if it if it shouldn't merely come from these things like if I 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 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 I would step in front of audiences for years because I was like constantly on a journey to refining what my version of self- Lov looked 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 um you're special or you deserve it and i' 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 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 will be like oh that's a problem because then now it feels like love that's highly highly conditional y on me having these great traits so they'd say well I guess it's you know we're 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 then I I don't know about you I don't feel very special anymore like how where does how does that make me someone who should love themselves I don't I don't really connect with that and I would go round and around 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 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 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 it's 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 that is it almost leaves no room for any other emotion at the end of the day so being this p 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 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 at like that how am I supposed to like how am I supposed to love myself I don't even like myself like how am I going to 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 Al together 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 just say what do you mean because they're my child because they're mine they don't need another reason they just go this my child you can even see this effect with people in 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 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 but 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 have done a good job they may have done a good job either way someone else had the job of keeping us alive but at 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 uh uh 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 I 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 it no longer mattered whether I matched up to somebody else it's like completely irrelevant cuz 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 with 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 the like the more I take care of this human nurture this human stand up for this human and try and give them the best life possible I might just also accomplish liking myself at some point and having a developing an affection for myself CU 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'm 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 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 would became crippling and this was physical pain and um and it I didn't know what to do I mean I literally I had I still have it but it's my relationship with is completely different now but I had tinitus like tinius where my 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 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 inh inhumanely if this was my brother or you know my partner or my mom or like I would have such compassion for how imp 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 a unimaginably cruel to do to a person and that would be unimaginably cruel to do any 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 caused to treat myself better than I was in those moments but when I reminded myself it's not just that I'm a human it's 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 oper oper oper operationalizing it meant consistently like I I have in my life what I call um 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 um 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 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 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 uh you know what energy I wanted to bring to this person today and that for me those emotional buttons are game changers th 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 um you know when I'm I have emotional buttons for 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 if I notice I'm feeling particularly affectionate towards myself right now or I'm I'm feeling more loving towards myself right now or I'm or I'm just I there's a way of looking at myself that's creating self-compassion I will write that down and 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 I I 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 a c 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 I have through my emotional buttons it's like having an instruction manual for everything I want to feel at any given moment and I have it for all different emotions so I have emotional buttons for excitement emotional buttons for you know 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 hussy ladies and gentlemen Matthew I really appreciate you man I 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 uh where else should they go they want to see the rest of the things you do online man honestly the 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 this book I've put hundreds and hundreds of hours into so you know if if people go to llife book.com um the book is called love life how to raise your standards find your person and live happily no matter what and um when you go to loveif book.com you can order a book from Amazon or bares & Noble or wherever you want but there's also an call thing where if you take the receipt from the book The the order confirmation wherever you get it from and come back to loveif book.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 um who all who have got the book and uh want to then get coached in the application of the book into their year so that's going to be fun um and I I think the last thing I would say is just I know that so many guys listen to your show and you know watch what you do and love what you do I you know I I encourage them to grab a copy of this because it's 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 an Lam'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 is a dating book yeah and um 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 um and I appreciate Chris the you know the work that you're doing right now with yourself is I think it's feeding into the work I I don't think you should ever feel like you're boring anybody by you know 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 you know that stuff we 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 you know I uh what do you do when you want 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 and it instantly made you more likable and more relatable and you know I think we can all relate to that so I just I 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 in need of it I appreciate that man thank you if you're new to the channel here is a selection of videos I've picked out to get you started go on press away