Celebrating Your Singleness W/ Lily Womble

Hey, girl. Welcome to the get yout Guy coaching podcast. My name is Anwar White, but you can just call me your own personal dating and relationship coach. Each week you'll hear actionable advice, tips, and strategies that you can implement in your own love life. I'm talking about healing your heart, dating effectively, and understanding men so that you can, you guessed it, get your guy. Are you ready to level up your love life? All right, let's go.

I never felt the way I do without anyone but you.

Hello, my loves, and thank you so much for joining me today. I have a special guest here in the get yout Guy coaching podcast. I have my dear friend and colleague, Lily Womble. She is the CEO and founder of Date Brazen. And it is all about feminist dating and dating on your terms. And Lily, just thank you so much for being here. I'm so happy that we're talking and getting to get together again.

Me too. I'm so honored to be on your podcast and you're killing it.

Well, thank you so much. And I just want to let everyone know that I was on her podcast a few months ago and we had so much fun and I think we're probably going to have even more fun today.

Yes.

I'm just really excited to have her here because I want you all to know that there are different ways to date and just like different ways to date. There are different dating coaches out there. And I think it's important for you to figure out which one you really vibe with. Right. Which one you feel a certain connection with. And it may not be me, and that's okay too. It may be Lily. It might be someone else. Finding a dating coach is very similar to dating. And so I think it's important for you to figure out which one's going to be best for you. So, Lily, enough about my little diatribe there. Talk to me about who you serve and everything about your business.

Yes. So I started my career in the feminist advocacy space. So I was working in nonprofits for the well being of women and girls around the world. And burnt out of the nonprofit space, took a hard right turn to New York, had 50 jobs, including making penis balloon hats at Senior Frogs in Times Square. Iconic. Iconic was not worth the panic attacks in the back from the strobe lights that were all over Cinderfrog Square. But meanwhile, I got a job sort of randomly as a matchmaker at one of the top, largest matchmaking companies in the us And I thought it would be a funny story about how I was a matchmaker that one time, but it blossomed into a career because I realized that dating was, was a place where women could learn how to thrive in not only in dating, but in their lives. And so using matchmaking as a tool at the time to help women realize what they wanted was possible was really great. And I was also really good at it. So I was like the third most successful out of 160 at the company. I know you know all these details.

But I want to tell, but I want, I want to ask you about that. Why do you think that you were so successful? What did you do differently than some of these other people as it pertains to matchmaking?

Well, it's interesting because if you are going to listener at home, sign up for a matchmaking service or work with a dating coach, always, always, always ask the company or the person, what is your metric for success? How do you measure success? Because I was really good at connecting with my clients, being emotionally intelligent enough to read beneath the surface of what they were saying, ask them the right questions, really, really sort of nudge them and push them in the direction of, you know, be open to being surprised, you know, have your preferences and your desires. But, you know, maybe you should go on this date with somebody you wouldn't have chosen for yourself. I was good in all of those respects. But the matchmaking company that I was working for defined success as going on a second date. Okay. So I was really good at helping folks pick a date that was good enough to go to a second date. The problem with that is they weren't using a long term success metric like a relationship or a partnership. And that's why people pay thousands and thousands of dollars to work with a dating professional, you know, to find extraordinary, to find their person. And so only about 3 to 5% of people in general from matchmaking were finding long term love. So that's when not so great match that, you know, day that I was said you were one of the most successful. Great. Hoorah, hoorah, hoorah. Then I started digging beneath the surface of okay, what does that really mean here? What do I want for my clients? And I wanted something deeper for them. I wanted them to have the tools to find something better than just a first date. And meanwhile, while I was matchmaking, I was in a toxic relationship where I was accepting very little love because I was living with this limiting belief that I was too much, too intense, too bossy, too loud, too in your face, too feminist, too whatever.

I'm a part of that club, too cool.

I mean, now my motto is, like, if you think I'm too much, like, cool, we don't have to be friends or anything. You can go live your life. I get to live my life. Hooray. But at the time, I was accepting very little from somebody who believed that I was too much. So I was attracting a mirror to my own limiting belief. And I remember one really day sharply where I was crying on his bathroom floor and then 15 minutes later would take a call with a matchmaking client and say, you deserve so much better. Let's get you out on some great dates. There's a total disconnect. So through examining. And my therapist didn't know what to say to me about my dating life besides break up with him.

Right.

My friends just wanted to swipe for me. And I saw that matchmaking wasn't working for most people. So I was like, what am I going to do? And I arrived at date coaching as the solution that both I needed and my matchmaking clients needed. But they didn't know it yet. So now I get the pleasure. After breaking up with the matchmaking industry about three years ago.

And that toxic guy.

And that toxic guy. Hello. Hello. That was a fiery, fiery beginning, middle and end, let me tell you. I'm sure in that process I became. I mean, I don't want to make a hyperbolic statement, but I feel like I was reborn at that moment we where I was done accepting less. I knew that I needed to do deeper interrogation into why was I accepting less. What was, what was beneath the surface of that? What did I really want? What were my deeper preferences? Offer.