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

30:16Is it about the world not recognizing your brilliance? Is that really what it is? Or is it when you sit and sort of wait with it? Is it something else? Well, Smith and his memoir, he said, when I was broken miserable, I had hope. But when I was rich in miserable, there was nothing left. That's right. It's like, yeah. Yeah. 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 in one so I've respected by the world all of these things once all those things aligned up Yeah, these guys you know, they said it didn't work for them, but really I mean how does it work because you're The challenges that you as a person who doesn't feel like they've achieved what they want to yet in the world are So front and center So you think well how couldn't it be like it's so evident that this I want to be the adoration of the crowd, I mean, front of a thousand people and they, you know, they're looking up to me like I'm some sort of Messiah of love.

31:27And how could it be that? Of course, it's that. It's just, it just didn't work for him. He had a, you know, 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. No one knows what they're doing. No one knows what they're doing all the way up. There's a very rarefied strata of people, a very, very small number of people that have done the achievement thing and done the internal work thing and are actually comfortable with both. But the achievement on its own does nothing and there are tons and tons of people I know who haven't done the achievement thing but have done the internal work thing and they're just totally fine.

32:09Well that's it. Those have become some of my greatest role models is sometimes people say to me like, 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 who's ambitions and success in their career is on par with where I'm at or someone who's similarly, and it's like, I think that is such a boring way of looking at life, because some of the people I know that are the best people to be around are the people that never needed to do that in the first place for a sense of significance.

32:59Like how many of us that have achieved a lot were driven by some disease? Fear of insufficiency, crippling self -doubt, desire to be loved by the world. Yeah, and then when we get there, we have the audacity to say, I want someone with the same disease. I, not like, oh, I might start to realize that some of the people that didn't feel the need to do this, That might be the healthiest thing about them. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think especially for the current world of internet dating, we've spoke about this last time that rising socioeconomic status of women can make it difficult for them to date in some regards.

33:43Women tend to want to, I would imagine you'll hear playing on my level much more from women than you do from guys. 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 think it's a it's a it's a dangerous thing to a she 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.

34:27Like she had done way more like internal finding peace type work than I had. I had 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. So I was like she's figured something out that I haven't And I want to understand that that's like that for me that was like a She was a warrior in a different way on a different level and I was like I got to understand this what But what has she learned and she's learned things from me? But that idea that like, you know, 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.

35:27Some of the people that inspire me the most are people in my own family that are just very happy. They're just like, they're just happy people. 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 fat that's so fascinating to me because it's you know the final chapter of the book I called happy enough And I love that concept but the the unhappiest people I know are the never enough people and there's so many of them. And I like have to condition myself to stay out of that category because I'm capable of being in that category.

36:15It'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 YouTube, even mine to some extent, you know, it's this quite sort of sterile, transactional, commercial value for value exchange. That's what people are talking about. They're talking about it in this sort of like performatively autistic, like you give me the thing and I give you the thing and our values meet.

37:00Like it's a currency of some kind. And so rarely do we actually talk about, all right, yeah, and like how does this make you feel and what's the love between you two people like? And I think that that is a conversation that's wildly missing from a lot of this talk. It's why I've started talking in terms of finding love because I just, you know, for me, most people who genuinely deeply want to find love, they don't really want to date. You know, like they don't, they want to find love. I didn't want to, you know, like when I was being more intentional in my love life, it's not like dating was the most appealing thing in the world to me.

37:48I'm an introvert. I don't want to leave the house most of the time. So the idea that I have to go and talk to a person in order to end up in a relationship with them is like, feels like an annoying step. But finding love is something we... I truly believe pretty much all of us want. Like, we... on a deep, deep human level, we want to find love. And... And when you frame it, When you talk about dating, people are 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 a trying to find is eluding you, what is a better path to finding love?

38:45How do you do love better? And that's what really excites me now. And I think that that goes much, much, that goes much deeper than strategies that gets into like what's really going on with us? What's going on with me that I keep getting attracted to this kind of person that is chaotic? What's going on with me that I keep chasing these people that aren't really investing in me or that make me feel really unsure of myself? Why do I find someone more attractive when they don't text me back than when they do? What's what's going on there? And that those have become 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.

39:39It's not reality itself. And I realized this more and more in my life, where I would just look at people who experienced life differently than me and go, what'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 And there's two chapters that live together that are two of my favorite chapters in the book. One is called Never Satisfied and the other one is called How to Rewire Your Brain. And there's a part of the chapter on Never Satisfied where I talk about the reasons why we keep getting drawn to things that hurt us.

40:23Why do we? For one, it's what we know. So, if something is, I talk about like a dolphin in captivity, right? Because we're very good. We have a culture right now, self -development, why is there any time someone's going towards something bad? We say you have a self -worth problem. But it's a bit, that's a bit reductive. Because if a dolphin in captivity learns that in order to get fed, it has to do back flips, jump through hoops, and swim up to humans. And then it gets released into the ocean. and it starts doing backflips for food in the ocean, or it starts swimming up to fishing boats, we wouldn't say that that dolphin has a self -worth problem.

41:08We 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 that the race car driver says, you know, Mario and Dretty said, if the key to race car driving is don't look at the wall, your car goes where your eyes go. And when we realize that whatever is whatever we've come to expect of life becomes our wall, it becomes the thing we keep driving into because it is what we know. I tell a story in the book about I grew up with a childhood that wasn't, you know, like I worked in a nightclub from the age of 13.

42:05So like it was my dad owned a nightclub when I was a kid. So that was like not okay for me to be doing that, but I was doing that. And I used to experience a lot of like, you know, it wasn't a night, like I don't want anyone picturing like a nice nightclub. It wasn't like a, this wasn't like a glamorous, vagus style. This was just a grotty, rough club back in a local part of England. And it was rough. And you know, people were getting fights and they get thrown grown out in nasty ways and I put me on edge a lot, especially at a young age and even in my own family I was, you know, have an interesting family and, you know, I was around certain things and it created a kind of hyper vigilance in me that really stayed with me.

42:55I didn't really lose it and 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 my brothers are having a great time. They're just chill. One of them singing like hay -yar on the karaoke machine and just like belting it out and carefree and I'm like looking, you know, I'm like hyper vigilant. I'm having fun but I'm also like constantly kind of a little bit on guard and it was a person who's a guy, a western guy who just kept staring at my brother non -stop and it got to the point where I just, I'd create a whole story in my head and when I'm confronted the guy, you guy hadn't even done anything yet But confronted the guy and instantly was, you know, like the bartender came around and no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but I remember my brother saying to me, what are you doing?

44:08And me going, what would 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, he was about to and then this was going to happen. And I remember thinking to myself, how do my brothers survive when I'm not around? Be it meanwhile, by the way, my brothers are both bigger than me. They're one of them six, three, the other one six, two, the other six, four, both capable of taking care of themselves. But in my mind, I was like, how are they not constantly getting in trouble when I'm not around? But it's because that for me, that trouble was my wall.

44:48and everywhere I would go, I would like look for where's the potential problem, where's the trouble coming from, and they weren't looking for that. And it's not the trouble's not around, it's not the bad characters aren't around, but they're not focused on them. So those things don't find them. They're not even locking eyes with those things. But I'm the one locking eyes because I'm the one looking for where's the thread. You digulent. Yeah. And the sad part about that, this is the really tragic part, is that I am truly, I have zero interest in trouble. All I want is a peaceful, lovely time with people I love.

45:34It's all I ever want. But there's something so tragic about precipitating the exact thing that you want less than anything, which is a fight, confrontation, an aggravation. And when you look at people's love lives, it's the same thing. Everyone has their wall and keeps crashing into that same wall. I keep dating people that cheat on me. I keep dating people who end up ghosting me. I keep dating people who end up being narcissistic in their tendencies or 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.

46:27I think is one of the most important things we can do. So you're looking for Partners that feel familiar, not necessarily partners that feel loving. Yeah, not ones that will make you happy. How does it feel comfortable? And comfortable is confused with happiness. It's not comfort can be misery, but when you know your way around it, there's something that you at least know the territory. And I think that this is why I never, when I was coming up, I never used to understand fear of success. I understood fear of failure, but I didn't intuitively understand what was meant by fear of success. And these days, I'm like, it's all just fear of the unknown.

47:12It's all just fear of being somewhere you're not comfortable. It's actually the same thing. I've always had fear of success. I told myself I didn't. Like, I, you know, fear of success isn't something I understand. The truth is, I've always been afraid of success. Anytime I step into a domain that's new to me, where things get a little bigger than I've experienced before or a little more like, oh God, I immediately get uncomfortable because it's just unexplored terrain. The same way that if you sink to far down, that's unexplored terrain as well. You're like, this isn't me. I've never sunk this low before.

47:51And you get afraid of that, but it's all just a main you don't know. And I think so much of life is how can I make what is deeply unfamiliar to me, something that becomes home to me and sit with it for long enough that it eases up. And so much of finding the right kind of love is that you will find that there are certain aspects of healthy love. If you've been constantly gravitating towards unhealthy love, or unhealthy attraction, There'll be aspects of it that feel alien to you. How do you become more comfortable with the alienness? Well, first, connect with the pain that the other has brought you.

48:39I think that's really important. Is you don't have to believe something better or more exists for you? You just have to know I can never do that again. And I always encourage people to say to themselves, what was missing? the last time you were with someone in an unhealthy dynamic. What was missing that made you miserable? And you might have been white knuckling it, trying to cling on for dear life, trying to make it work. But, and telling yourself it was the most important thing in the world, and you'd die if you lost it. But, when you were in it, what were you missing that also made it hell to be in?

49:19And for a lot of people, it's, you know, let's say I never felt safe with this person. Like I constantly was made to feel like I wasn't good enough that I didn't match up, that this person might be out the door any minute or I just constantly felt insecure because they just never, they never showed up the way I was showing up. When you connect with how bad that made you feel, hold on to that and take that with you because you don't need self -belief if you have necessity.

50:01If 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 his 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.

50:45No matter how sexy, or fun, or seductive, or impressive, or charismatic, or whatever it is, someone is. If I don't find this quality or this value or this way of that they interact with me, none of that matters. It's all irrelevant. It's worthless without that thing. And you stay with that truth, even when it feels uncomfortable. And also, I believe you have to give your nervous system time to adjust. Because it's not, if you take a drug addict and on the day they quit, you ask them to sit and appreciate a sunset. It's going to mean nothing to them. It's going to feel like the most boring thing in the world.

51:31Because it can't compare. How can the gorgeous beauty that understated like transcendent existential connected or inspiring beauty of a sunset compared to just this crazy high that someone was on yesterday? It's not the same thing. So a huge part of it is telling ourselves, 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.

52:16But it for a while, your nervous system might not respond to that because it's so used to the the drug of the other thing. And that takes time for your body to adjust? You've got another quote which I love. My problem is not that my needs aren't getting met. My problem is that I have needs. All I need to do is get back to being grateful that I have this person instead of having any expectations of them. Forget feeling safe, secure, loved, you're just lucky to be here. And that's that familiarity with suffering thing again. Like it's just home base. And the guilt that so many people have around having needs, having needs.

52:59Who am I to have need? What do you mean to have needs? You do the thing, right? Again, the working class British mentality and maybe the American one as well. You just show up. You do the, you just crack on. And I think that, you know, you, that's in a way for so many people being afraid to express our needs, it can make us anxious, it can also make us avoid it, right? Because if you don't trust yourself to communicate your needs, then like I give you an example, I always struggled in relationships to communicate that like I might really like to have a few hours of reading time right now. And that was something that if I was on my own, I would do.

53:52But 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, because they may have been like, absolutely. Yeah, like let me, you know, one of the things that beautiful about my relationship now is that my wife will say, she'll anticipate those things because she knows me. And so she's like, hey, I feel like you need some time this weekend to just do this or that. And I'm like, wow, I didn't even need, like, that's so nice.

54:31So 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, because I was thought deep down, I was like, I'm not gonna be enough if I'm not constantly there entertaining doing something, showing up in some way, and I made myself very responsible for somebody else's feelings. And I also felt like this is getting even deeper, but I felt like if I said I needed to do this, there would be some kind of consequence. Like, they would be like, well, if you're gonna do that for the next five hours, then I'm gonna do this for the next three days.

55:07And like, that would be abandoned for having asked for that. And so 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 because when you have a relationship, you just don't get to do anything you enjoy doing anymore. So you made your destiny with this. the wall again, right? You crash into the wall, you, because it's what you know. So you end up, I don't know, 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, a little get together at his house and she got really upset that he didn't invite her.

55:56And this was someone who had suffered with a lot of abandonment. So in that, that brought up everything for her. He doesn't like me as much as I like him. He's just toying around with me. He doesn't want me to... 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? There was no intro to that text, nothing. Just why didn't you invite me? And he said, I'm so sorry. I haven't seen these friends in a while. I was just really looking fall to hanging, can I call you later?" And she said, don't bother.

56:35And the three days later, he still hadn't called and she was like, see this is what happens. Like, I get, like, you know, I just get her, if I date, I just get her. Now, of course, you see again, like, she had, she had looked for the wall because if we can't find a wall, we'll create one. And she created the wall in her situation. Now look, she had a right to feel her that she wasn't invited and to express that to him and for them to have a conversation about that. But the way that she went about it literally precipitated the thing that she was afraid of and confirmed it. And that's the scary part.

57:13And that's why what is going on with people on the surface in their love lives often is so different. And in some cases the complete opposite it of what's really going on inside. And these are the like these days, I spent years helping people with, you know, strategy in their love lives. These days, this is some of the stuff that like interests me the most because it's so, it's so life changing when you start to realize these things about yourself. And I think people will read this book and they'll get a level of understanding about themselves and a level of compassion for themselves in that that they maybe have never had before.

57:52You know, I, like, 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 and embarrassed me in front of my friends. Something happened. And I like stormed off to my bedroom. room. And I stayed there in my mind thinking that I was like some like I was in barrist and felt shame. And so I just was 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.

58:35Not 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 one 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 punishing myself. And then I always remember my brothers came up and they said, it was with my friend Alex. We're all gonna go to Alex's now. We just had a sleep over at our house the night before. We're now all gonna go to Alex's house and we're gonna continue the sleep over and we're gonna watch movies and we're gonna get food.

59:13And I was like, just go. Like, I don't, I'm good. And one by one, everyone came up and tried to persuade me and I didn't wanna know. I was like, just go. My mom finally comes up. She's like, Matt, come on, please. Like, come on, don't do this. Like, and I'm like, no, like, just leave me alone. And I stayed home that night while my brothers and my friends went and had this awesome night. And they came back the next day and my brothers came home and it turned out they'd had the best night and it was so much fun and It like haunted me That was like who did I hurt there? Like they had a great time no one had it in for me No one was trying to hurt me, but my inability to express that something had hurt me and 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 stronger than my barit - you know, the hurt.

1:00:23So 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 draw a life, you can 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 that something about this has made me feel hurt and and God if that if I took that to it's like extreme. If I had not even that many steps further, if I had just done that three more times with her, she would have been out the door.

1:01:10And then I would have liked this is, I've never been more supported than by this woman. I've never been more loved or accepted than by this woman. And I could have lost her because I shut the door in my room and I told everyone to go away, all because I couldn't express something. That is profound to me. It's mind blowing to me and And that's that those kinds of things have become kind of my obsession now. How can people become better at having hard conversations? How can we get better at having hard conversations?

1:01:46I think firstly by not putting so much pressure on the way that we have them. Like I think sometimes we go, when we have a hard conversation with anyone, it very quickly turns into an ego battle. And if we can come to someone like, let's say in one's love life, love lives are shaped, any part of life is shaped by the ability to have hard conversations, whether it's friendships, romantic love, familial relationships. If we can't have challenging conversations with each other, the relationship cannot improve. They are forged by difficult conversations. And so many of us are so deeply afraid of confrontation, the rejection or the abandonment that might ensue after a confrontation or just saying it wrong, that nothing ever gets better and resentments get buried and boil over into contempt and people employed and that's when things go really, really bad.

1:02:48So the starting point of any hard conversation is knowing that everything 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 always think rightly or wrongly as a good phrase like rightly or wrongly I felt like that was that was not a great way to come at all.

1:03:39You'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. But together, let's work out because this is going to continue happening. Yeah. And if we don't want this to continue happening, then either we need to invest to get 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 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.

1:04:16And that can be as like an early dating. Someone might say you might be in a situation where someone's barely responding to you and then all of a sudden they tell you like, hey, do you wanna do something today? And for you, it's like you almost don't wanna enable that behavior because if you say, if you're just grateful to see them and you're like, yeah, I wanna 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.

1:04:51And it's also where we go when we're coming from a place of scarcity. I just am glad that you're now asking me out. But if you wanted to actually say, no, this is a great moment for a quote hard conversation, which might just take the form of a message that says, I'm, you know, I haven't really heard from you for the last three weeks. I was excited to see you. but I don't, you know, I feel like we may not be on the same page. I was excited to see you two weeks ago. Like it's, that's a moment where you're being willing to say the thing that maybe they're hoping you won't say, maybe they're hoping you won't point out the incongruence between what they're saying and what they're doing.

1:05:32But 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. Or you give it a chance to bounce off and realize that it's not as opposed to this sort of like fantastical vacuum that you can fill with all of the speculation about why and how and what this means and that is the reason that they said this thing is because of that. 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.

1:06:16Yep. 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. It's the nice children problem. I mean, therapy at the moment, which is why I'm starting to see everything with therapy language. And another landed bot on 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.

1:07:03because you maybe had an overly anxious parent or you had an angry parent or you had a busier, you had an aloof parent or whatever. So what are you going to do? Well, I'm just going to do whatever I need to to make mom or dad happy. 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 that's whoof, 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.

1:07:49You feel selfish, you feel, yeah, you feel bad and you feel unsafe because 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 so, by the way, you end up attracting friends who do only love you because of what you do for them. Again, it's the wall. You attract people who just want you because you're doing things for them. For a relationship to survive, you, to find relationships that aren't based on how much someone's doing for you, but are just based on someone who likes you and accepts you for who you are, not what you do.

1:08:28You have to be capable of saying no and seeing which relationship survive. You also have to be capable of just being who you are and not always doing things. If the dynamic of any relationship, friendship, parents, romantic, whatever, But 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 to drink, he did a mushroom trip in Australia and this question came to him, do people love you for who you are or for what you do? And he's like a successful guy and lots of people follow him and stuff like that.

1:09:09And 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 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 around you need to have happened. Perfect example of this. I had a call with my mom a couple of weeks ago. It was day before my birthday. Day before my birthday, right? And she'd heard a back.

1:09:57Like not badly, but she'd heard a back a little bit. And as soon as I heard that, I was like, right, I'm upstairs. I'm showing you 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 this position for. You need to make sure that you feed a knot stacked on top of each other. It's actually, it's this, which is a subtle difference between the two and this is the book if we need to get more references. It's blah, blah, blah.

1:10:25And if you need to roll up a towel to put it underneath you to use that, that'll make it a little bit more And I actually found that what you want to do is get a small kitchen time and you put the kitchen time and actually And I was like Thought to myself after I was like, what the fuck 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.

1:11:05You must have it, you must take it away, and I'm gonna help you, help it, you make it go away. Yeah, I'm responsible for making it go away. You know, it's ultimately what we do with ourselves is like, I'm, we take on responsibility for somebody else's happiness, and it's okay to want the people in our family to be happy, and to do things to help them be happy. But it crosses over and I know this because I have the exact same thing. It crosses over into, I've made myself responsible for this person's happiness. And that's when we abandon ourselves. We're no longer focused on making ourselves happy.

1:11:53it's just I'm responsible for the feelings of everyone around me, which is of course another classic kind of hypervigilance thing as well. What are the red flags that people should look out for in relationships? Hmm. I think people who can't take responsibility is a pretty difficult one to live with. If someone can't say sorry, if they don't have that kind of humility, there's a, there's up one of the more damning ones, I think, because it's hard for us. 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 NASA's is incompetence.

1:12:44Because if you can't take responsibility for something, you can't get better. So you just keep making the same mistakes over and over again and it's everyone else's fault. Because you're the world's fault. So you essentially maintain that incompetence. 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.

1:13:17That goes hand in hand with someone who talks badly about multiple kind of X's and it's just always everyone else's fault. 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 that one I struggle with too Not keeping not keeping promises I think is a pretty big one It's you know, I think that's a big red flag there's like a big red flag for staff and for And for people that you date because it When you no longer Trust that someone's gonna do what they say they're gonna do It really breaks something in a relationship because now that you don't trust that they're going to do something, you turn into a version of yourself you don't like with that person.

1:14:19Historically, the people that have ever worked for me that I micromanaged the most are the ones that I don't think are going to actually get it done. It's that vigilance again. It's the nightclub. I believe in it exactly. If someone proves that they just, if they say they're gonna do it next Wednesday, they deliver it by next Wednesday, I actually don't bother them at all. I'm like, I fully hands off the wheel. I'll see you next Wednesday. But when someone doesn't do it by next Wednesday, and then they don't even bring it up, and I'm like, wait, you said you were gonna do this thing today, I'm the one who has to bring it up.

1:14:56And they're like, oh yeah, well, there's this thing. It's like, well, 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 over promised sometimes or we'd try and take too many things on. And anyone's capable of that. But if someone consistently doesn't honor their word with you in big and small ways, that to me would be a big red flag. Because it just I can't those things to me there's like just fundamentals of a relationship can someone take accountability?

1:15:35Do they deliver what they say they're gonna 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 gonna do and If when they don't do what they say they're gonna do or they fall beneath the standard they can't apologize then you have a fundamentally broken dynamic that no amount of love is really going to make it won't overcome it to be able to make you happy. You're not playing by the same rules in life and when in any relationship you're not playing by the same rules. If you and I have a friendship and I wrong you and I apologize, it's not the end of the world that I wronged you.

1:16:21You might go I can live with it and you've apologized we're playing by the same rules. You did something wrong, you get it, you've apologized, we're both living in the same universe. But if I do something wrong and you call me out on it and I say I didn't do anything wrong. In fact, what happened was you, 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 danger of any relationship is that you think We equate proximity and closeness to a shared experience and a shared moral and emotional world.

1:17:02And they're not the same things. You can share the same bit of carpet with someone for years and think that you're on the same page about things. And then when something goes wrong, that person is like, you realize you're with an alien. and that person, you know, 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 different planets. It just felt like they were close because they lived together because they'd been together for so long because, you know, it's like the, you know, and even it, in any bad relationship you're always going to be able to point to great moments.

1:17:52Like, it, and those great moments really confuse us. But it is the equivalent of a broken what being right twice a day. You don't, you wouldn't say it's a 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 person that maybe they feel unsafe? I mean, the wrong and their face gets flush and they hear it and the shoulders come up. It's tight. Like you know you're wrong.

1:18:34Yeah. And 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 comes to being in the wrong and communicating that? I think slowing down and even communicating with someone what you're feeling, like I know,

1:19:06I'm struggling right now because I'm not proud of what I just did or said, but I feel like my brain has been hijacked.

1:19:21And 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 because right now it's snowballing in one direction But sometimes all it takes for it to start going in another direction is just one person to like be angry but still grab the other person's hand anyway. And just be like, say, be a step more vulnerable than you feel comfortable within that moment.

1:20:10And 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.

1:20:53This is why I I think the overly sterile approach of looking at 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 know, guy goes to therapy and all he wants to talk about is therapy. But the therapeutic relationship is one of the very few where you can be as messy as you want. You start five sentences and stop all of them. Just bail out. I know, actually, I don't even know what I'm talking about. We repeat the same thing 10 times, 10 sessions in a row, or 10 times within the same session.

1:21:34And learning to be like, right, okay, 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 a couple of months ago and there was a dude there and I asked him why he'd stopped creating content online and he said because I felt like I had to live up to him private the things I was saying in public. And I think that we almost there's like a shadow of that occurring in these situations where if you don't have the skill or the understanding or the capacity or the safety or the room to slow down. and to be able to say like, I don't know what's going on here.

1:22:23I'm a competent person. Maybe you're super high fly, you do all of these things, you partner looks up to you to drive whatever relationship forward or his parents or whatever. You're like, I don't know what's going on, but like, let me messily, chaoticly 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.

1:23:05You're like, what? Functioning adults 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 access this level of truthfulness or honesty because what does that say about me? Floor, defective, completely unhinged and crazy. 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 huge realization. It has been for me for self -compassion is it's not a functioning adult that's having this feeling right now. There's some child in me that feels really unsafe right now and maybe this connects to another time in my life.

1:24:04Maybe 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 by people, whether it's family or whether it was in the classroom or whatever it was. You know, this made me feel really, really small and 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 someone, it might just be as simple as the tone someone used with you and it might be a tone from a much more loving person than whoever that was back then but something about the tone took you right back there and now you're not speaking to this person, you're speaking to that person but but they're the target and understanding that like I think that's a beautiful thing is like there's a scared, hurt child here somewhere.

1:25:06And if I can understand that, then I don't have to feel like me saying this is me giving up my identity as a person who's doing well in adult life or strong the rest of the time. Or I just, I can allow myself this moment where something bigger is happening than in me, than whatever is happening out here and have compassion for it. Look, ultimately, that's what you're feeling. That is what you're feeling at that moment. So you can box it up and tie the bow on it and shove it across the table if you want, but that thing is going to continue to happen. You're going to continue to be at the mercy of that mental pathology, that weakness, that shattered, splintered vector within which things are going to continue to insert themselves into your psyche and it's going to show up in relationships because when you're on your own you're perfectly capable of creating the limits of where you push yourself to mentally.

1:26:16You bring somebody else into that equation and everything gets blown out of the water. It's like I, there's another party here, They expect things from me. Yeah. You know, I can't take three days of ruminating about this because I have to say something now. So what do you do? You don't ruminate about it and you just come up with the, like the nearest, this looks like a reason and you just sort of throw it at that. Or there's one that's really familiar that you pick, you pick up and you, and you toss it them or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So much of it's just self understanding. So much of this is the self showing up.

1:26:51It's not to do with the relationship, it's you, it's your patterns, your insufferiencies, it's your fears. Yeah, and it's why I think we're a lot worse to everyone else when we don't have compassion for ourselves, because when we punish that part of ourselves that is hurt or scared or confused or freaking out, when we judge ourselves for that, which is something men are really good at. Like the I remember what there was a comment on a men's podcast. I did I don't know where it was But someone wrote I Switch off the moment I hear the word trauma and I thought Fine, it's okay But it tells me a lot about how you deal with yourself, right like that's I Know everything about that state for I know everything about how much of a tyrant you are to yourself when I hear that statement.

1:27:49Yeah. Because you call it whatever the hell you want. It doesn't matter to me what you call it, whether you use trauma or a different word, something's going on with you when you feel awful. I was playing pickleball near my house a couple of months ago, and I was with my friend Aaron, who does the Align podcast, and he's very sort of embodied, really, really trying hard to feel his feelings at the moment. And this lady, we were playing music out of a little Bluetooth speaker, 20 dollar rounds 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.

1:28:32I'm like, do you know how loud someone hitting a pickleball is? It's like 80 decibels. There's a problem around pickleball noise because it's way louder than tennis is. It's one of the reasons that they don't want pickleball to grow too quickly. Yeah, yeah, that's right. special soundboarding to go around. It is really, really loud. The whistleboard makes much louder noise. This lady shouted over and such an interesting little loop of things happened. So my first instinct, the orderly British cook in me was like, I'll go and turn the music down. He went over and turned the music. I would be that guy.

1:29:04Yes, I was like, must not upset what like this one lady and her dog. He was out of what? She was a hundred yards away and it wasn't even that loud. Anyway, Aaron went and turned it up and started shouting, sorry, I can't hear you. But then once we finished, once we finished up, he said I was like, you know, you know, we were stupid women like, you know, what do you think about that? His first point of call was, I feel really sad for her. I can 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.

1:29:40That's the same as the guy that says, I hear the word trauma and I wish you washie nonsense. I switch off. So I feel sad for you. I feel sad because there are things, again, call it what you want, past experiences, things that, weakness it, pick your word lexically that you want. But you are going to continue to be at the mercy of them for as long as you are the woman shouting about the music being turned on. And guys, guys, they, I mean the extent to which they bottle this stuff up and don't do anything about it is, is profound and really disconcerting, you know, I, it's one of the most, anyone who's been on any kind of men's retreat typically, it's one of the most beautiful, like guys need an excuse to get together and talk.

1:30:33So like they'll come up with something else. Like for me, I remember 2020, it was like going on the Wim Hofre Tree in Poland. You know, where you've got 12 guys who are just doing these ridiculous crazy feats. But the best part of the five days was when we sat around on the sofa and we talked. And it was like we needed all of these other things. We needed to be doing like 10 minute ice baths and climbing mountains to justify us having a chance. So that we like could actually get together. This chat isn't shit. Do you know what the men's sheds initiative is in Australia? No. The prototypical example of this.

1:31:12So they've realized that guys talk shoulder to shoulder and women talk face to face. You can even see this in parties. So if you go to a party and you look at the angle of the feet of men and you look at the angle of the feet of women, women talk at 180 degrees and men talk at about 120. It's called blading. And once you see it, you can't see it. Look around South by Southwest this week and you'll see guys stud like this. So what they did was they created literal sheds for guys to go in. And in these sheds, there would be one of them. 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 whatever whatever.

1:31:49And then they talk. But like men would rather fix a lawn mower than go to therapy type thing. The male preclivity to deny physical or mental pathologies. This is why, you know, I remember, I even had this when I was younger. I go to the NHS in the UK for the people that don't know. That's a 10 minute meeting with your general practitioner. During that time, they need to meet you, greet you, diagnose you, treat you and get you out of the door. It's fucking insane. And I would go and I would have like accumulated three things because I was like, well, you You know, like that knee, it's probably nothing.

1:32:27And you know, like my tiredness, it's probably nothing. And I'll be like, okay, so here's this like, this is scroll that I've come in with of different maladies, because men are resilient in that way. But the need to place, I truly believe that like deep, emotionally mature men need a place to be able to be emotionally open. And I also don't doubt that there is either a generation of men or a type of guy and girl who that doesn't speak to. Talking about their feelings and stuff, they just don't feel things quite so deeply or they don't think about feeling things quite so deeply. I'm not sure which one of them.

1:33:13Oh, I think there's a there there are types. They do seem to be types of people in life for whom life isn't as challenging in those ways. 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 or can get in for the rest of us. I don't relate to those people at all. I am not one of those. For a long time, I kind of wanted to be that, You know, like I really wanted to be this. I think a lot of it comes from childhood. I just wanted to be this strong, capable, competent person.

1:33:57Like 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. Yeah. 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 having size 10 feet or size 9 feet is. It's a part of your history, but not realizing that, not recognizing that, not dealing with it. That's an issue. And you recognize that, and I relate to this because I have very similar to that. 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.

1:34:49The things that you say in public you have to live up to in private. Yeah, and even the public can be the people around you at work. Of course. It can be your family. It can be, you know, we all have our public and how, you know, So we think that this is the identity that makes us somebody. There's a whole, I think this is one of the most valuable exercises in the book. I used to teach it just on my retreats and I think it's like an amazing fact. 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.

1:35:31and the middle layer is the identity layer. And this is where we derive our confidence from. So the surface layer is, layer one is the surface, that's just how we walk, talk, and act. What we portray as our level of confidence to other people, the identity layer is where do we get our confidence from? What do we think of as some of the sources in our life, of our confidence? So for some of us, it's our career, could be our relationship, could be our body, It could be the identity we have as someone who's always got it together or is always able to take control whenever the time comes. And 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.

1:36:21And then whatever becomes our mutation becomes our greatest vulnerability. So there's a whole exercise I take people through and people can do it from the book. it's called the identity matrix where you draw a box with squares inside it for all of the areas that give you confidence on the identity level. There's the core level, which is the deepest level, and that's a whole different that goes much, much deeper than any of these things I'm talking about. But when people draw their matrix, they quickly see that there are one or two squares that they have become wildly over and invested in, that make them appear confident when they're operating within their circle of competence.

1:37:00But 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 is no longer there. And that's a really dangerous place for people to be. Well, that's ultimate scarcity mindset, right? It's fragility. Yeah, you think if I, if this goes wrong, I'll be nothing. Who am I? Yeah. And then you see that happen when people's businesses go under and they, you know, they suddenly feel like they're worthless or when they get an injury, if they're, you know, constantly in the gym and then they get injured and they can't work out, they feel like that, had that to all the end of my 20s.

1:37:56Throughout all of my 20s I was the big lean model guy. That was it. And then I had a series of really serious injuries. And I'm like, I need to find who I am when I can't take my primary sense of self -worth from being the strongest leaner guy in the room. Oh fuck, what does this mean? It was really good for me to be honest at the time. And I think it was the beginning of the trajectory of pushing me toward thinking more intellectually and not necessarily emotionally, that was only recent. But starting to take pride in other things. And when you do that, that becomes its own game changer because you start to expand your identity and no longer does who you are rely on this one thing.

1:38:44It's not contingent on it. No. No. It's a very powerful place to be. And so I'm always in favor of people in certain crucial ways diversifying their identity matrix so that they're not overindexed 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 whole middle level is the problem. Is that any identification makes you vulnerable because it's a double -edged sword, right?

1:39:26When it's going well, you feel great. When it's all, 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'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.

1:40:05And 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. When you ask people what is confidence at the deepest level, they'll talk about self -love in some form and that gets really messy real fast because everyone's got a different idea of what self -love means and some people hate the term self -love, other people live by it And I could never, when I was thinking, where does my confidence come from, if it doesn't come from any of these, if it shouldn't merely come from these things, like if I lost everything, where would my confidence come from, could it still exist?

1:41:00And when people hear that, they say, yeah, because you have to love yourself, but I never resonated massively with that idea. Not because I didn't think it was important, but because I could never figure out what the practical application... What did it look like to love yourself? You know, it can't be a bubble bath in candles. Like, I don't relate to that. So, what do you mean when you say love yourself? And I would step in front of audiences for years because I was like constantly on a journey to refining what my version of self -love 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.

1:41:38Then 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 way that I had got myself tangled up in it, because they'd say, well, you should love yourself because you're special or you deserve it. And I'd be like, when you say you deserve it, why? Well, because you know, we're, I'm kind and I'm loving and I'm a good person and I'm good to my family and whatever and I'm like, but that's a problem because what you're describing to me is you should get love when you get straight A's.

1:42:15But what about the days where you're not loving or you're selfish or you do something shameful, you hurt someone or does that mean you're not deserving of love on those days? And even when you are on your good days, there's always going to be someone who does those things better than you. So when you come up against someone like that, do they deserve more love than you? And people will be like, like, oh, that's a problem. Because then now it feels like love that's highly, highly conditional on me having these great traits. So they say, well, I guess it's, you know, we're special. Like, and I go, but why are you special?

1:42:48Isn't everyone special? There's eight billion people on this earth. Is everyone special when they'd be like, well, yeah, everyone's special. I'd be like, well, they're, I don't know about you. I don't feel very special anymore. Like, how does that make me someone who should love themselves? I don't really connect with that. And I would go round and round the houses with people on this. And what I began to realize was people try to love themselves using the romantic model of love. And that's why it doesn't work. Because when we fall in love with someone romantically, we see qualities in them that we really like or admire, that we find attractive, and we want to get closer to them.

1:43:31But the thing that makes all of that really attractive in the first place is that we're viewing them from some distance. And we get all these chemical rushes from getting close to them. Don't mean an oxytocin and it feels so good. And so we don't need to try to fall in love with someone. It's easy, right? When we're falling in love, it just is like it's happening. We've never been able to do that with ourselves. Why? Well, if you look at why a lot of long -term relationships fail, the phrase familiarity breeds contempt. The closer you get to someone, the more contempt you can have for them if you're not careful, because you take them, you take for granted all their good stuff and you magnify all the bad stuff.

1:44:12And 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 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 person, and then when we add up all of our mistakes and all of our shame and all of the things we think we've done wrong, 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 my, how am I supposed to love myself?

1:44:50I 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 altogether. And so I started looking for what's the different model. And one of the relationships that started to interest me was the parent -child relationship. Because if you ask a parent, most parents, healthy parents, why do you love your child? They won't say, well, because they got an eye in English yesterday and because they did something so cute this morning and they're just saying, what do you mean?

1:45:25Because they're my child. Because they're mine. They don't need another reason. They just go, this is my child. You can even see this effect with people 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 the massive clueless to what, how we can actually love ourselves, which is to say, of the eight billion, this is the mistake we make.

1:46:05We look at eight 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 up 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.

1:46:46And our one job from that point on is just give this human the best life you can give them. Whatever that means, whether it means helping them actualize, whether it means helping them be happy, helping them feel peaceful, helping them experience joy, give this human the best life possible. So now, if you imagine someone asking you, why should you love yourself? The answer is very simple. You don't need to find reasons. You go, 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 is like completely irrelevant because I can't exchange my human for another human.

1:47:34So what's the point? What's the point in worrying what they're doing or what they're doing with their taller than me? They're better looking than me. They're this, they're that which 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, 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 because it's hard not to develop an affection for someone who does all of that for you.

1:48:37But 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? Thank you. 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.

1:49:26My one job is to take care of this human. How am I doing in that job today? Like if I'm like, I dealt one of the things I talk about in the book is my chronic pain and I dealt with that for years and it was for me it became crippling And this was physical pain. And I don't know what to do. I mean, I literally, I had, I still have it, but it's my relationship with it's completely different now. But I had tinnitus, like tinnitus, where I just had ringing in my ears nonstop for years and years, combined with crippling headaches and ear and pain in my head and dizziness and all sorts of symptoms that really I couldn't be present in my life with all of it.

1:50:16But 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 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, in humanely.

1:51:08If this was my brother or my partner or my mom or like I would have such compassion for how in pain they are all the time. And with me I am just turning it into this artery of shame and self -loathing which is just an 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 cause to treat myself better than I was in those moments. But when I reminded myself, it's not just that I'm a human, it's that I'm my human.

1:51:52I have a special responsibility to give myself encouragement and compassion and love that that change things for me. And for me, operation, operational, operational, operationalizing it meant consistently, like I have in my life what I call emotional buttons and they are for me triggers for thoughts or truths that I have access to at my fingertips all the time. And I have notes on my phone that have emotional buttons in, I have notes on my computer every morning, I wake up and I do 10 minutes of just reviewing my emotional buttons and the things that trigger them. And for me, emotional buttons can come from all different places, but I would have emotional buttons around self -compassion that I would have at my fingertips so that I wake up in the morning and I know my instinct is to wake up in deficit and to immediately know You've been asleep, you soft fuck.

1:52:57Get up and start working. Exactly. Yeah. You were not like yesterday, you did an amazing job, but that was yesterday. And now today we're in deficit and we've to kill ourselves to get to a place where we're even again. And that was like waking up with no compassion, no self -compassion whatsoever. So I had to have emotional buttons that in the morning, I would read and they would connect me back to how I wanted to treat myself to why I was, you know, what energy I wanted to bring to this person today. And that, for me, those emotional buttons are game changes. Those, by the way, are a great strategy for anything.

1:53:40Like you have, I have emotional buttons for, before I go to the gym, I have emotional buttons for, you know, when I'm, I have emotional buttons for, for work, I have emotional buttons for writing, I have them for everything, because Because I can't rely on having the right feelings naturally, but what I can rely on is that I've felt something before. If I notice, I'm feeling particularly affectionate towards myself right now, or I'm feeling more loving towards myself right now, or I'm just, there's a way of looking at myself that's creating self -compassion, I will write that down. and turn it into an emotional button so that the next time I need to access that, I don't have to try to locate the same thought.

1:54:32It's just, I have a way of getting back there very, very quickly. Winston Churchill said, men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and carry on as if nothing happened. And it's a great, for me, it always tied in with everything I do on teach people on emotional buttons, because everything I want to feel, I've probably felt before at some point, and it's been connected with a certain way of thinking, a certain thought pattern, sometimes an object or a piece of music or something. I just need an instruction manual for getting back to the places I need to get back to. And I have, through my emotional buttons, it's like having an instruction manual for everything I want to feel at any given moment.

1:55:17And I have it for all different emotions. So I have emotional buttons for excitement, emotional buttons for wanting to train, emotional buttons for feeling peaceful, I have them for everything. And they're some of the most valuable daily things that I use in my life. That's my operation manual. Hell yeah, Matthew Hussey, ladies and gentlemen, Matthew, I really appreciate you, man. I love this arc, this trajectory you've gone on from the strategy to the emotion, to the feeling and where we're at now. The book's awesome. Everyone should go and check it out. Where else should they go? They want to see the rest of the things you do online.

1:55:48Man, honestly, the thing I'm most excited about is the book. I have, you know, you can find me anywhere online on any platform and I've been putting content out for years and years, but this this book I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into. So, you know, if people go to lovelifebook .com, the book is called Love Life, how to raise your standards, find your person and live happily no matter what. And when you go to lovelifebook .com, you can order a book from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you want. But there's also a cool thing where if you take the receipt from the book, the order confirmation, wherever you get it from, and come back to lovelifebook .com, you can enter that for a ticket to an event on doing on May 4th, which is going to be a really exciting, it's going to be a virtual event, but there's going to be thousands of people there who all who have got the book and want to then get coached in the application of the book into their year.

1:56:46So that's going to be fun. And 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 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, Anne Lamott's bird by bird. It's a book about writing that's kind of about life. I think of this as a book about love that's kind of about life. It's a personal development book, masquerading as a date book. And so it's, but for anyone who does want to find love, it's really going to help you with that too.

1:57:32So I think it's for everybody and man, it's helped me. So I'd be shocked if it didn't help other guys out there too. And I appreciate Chris, you know, the work that you're doing right now with yourself is I think it's feeding into the work. I don't think you should ever feel like you're boring anybody by 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 that stuff we need to hear that and to hear someone like you.

1:58:11Even when I don't know if you were talking about yourself when you said this, but even when you said, you know, what do you do when you want to, you know you're wrong, but it's hard to say, sorry, in my head at least, I was picturing that maybe that was you sometimes and it instantly made you more likeable or more relatable, and I think we can all relate to that. So 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.

1:58:46Thank you.

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