Marketing For True Love with Annie Lalla - I Love Marketing #310

Could you use marketing to find the love of your life? The similarities between dating and marketing are amazing and explored in depth in this.

Episode of I Love Marketing.

Annie Lala has spent her life studying the world of emotions, mapping the complexities of communication and the subtleties of relationships.

A philosopher speaker and a thought leader.

Annie is known as the Cartographer of Love. If you would like access to the full presentation, the show notes, and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com for that's ilovemarketing.com 3 10. I'm Dean Jackson. He's Joe Polish, and this is the I Love Marketing podcast. Hello, this is Joe Polish, and I want to welcome you to what is going to be maybe one of the most vulnerable episodes that I've ever done on my podcast. And I've got my very dear friend, the love coach, Annie Lala on the line with me today. And Annie, what part of the world are you in right now?

Hi, Joe. I'm in Boulder right now. Very excited to be here.

Okay, awesome. Well, look, some people that may not know who you are. You are truly one of the most extraordinary humans that I have ever met. Of course, where our relationship starts is your husband happens to be a dear friend of mine for close to 15 years, Mr. Eben Pagan, who many people know to be an extraordinary entrepreneur. And you're a love coach. You're many things, but you've been extremely, extremely helpful to me and insightful to many people. And I know that you work with a lot of wonderful humans and great leaders in the area of love and romance and partnership. So for people that do not know who you are, kind of describe a little bit of what you do, and then I'm going to kind of share my experience with you.

Yeah, well, one of my taglines is I help skeptics believe in true love. You know, whether they're in single single life or they're in a relationship. I kind of specialize in those people who are on the edge of giving up, either on dating and relationship and finding love, or they're in a relationship and they're feeling like giving up. There's something about my particular genus that I can help teach them how to bootstrap faith, to climb back into the possibility of them finding love or making it work with their partner. Because with love, it's not I'll believe it when I see it. It's more about I'll see it when I believe it. So getting someone to believe in it again takes a particular kind of savvy. And that's kind of my sweet spot. So specifically, I help singles who are done with dating and ready to actually find their soulmate by showing them where they have their relationship document blocked, like their port is blocked, so they're not able to be dockable by relationships. And then I also help couples who are together and committed in a relationship. I specialize in supporting them through conflict resolution. That's my. That's another one of my superpowers is helping teach them the art of fighting so that they can alchemize drama and conflict into intimacy and show them how to create relationships that maximize freedom and minimize shame.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's a good description. And I'm going to come back and ask you specifics about some of the things that you mentioned. And I want to give all of the people listening to this sort of a background on how this conversation we're about to have came into being. Now, recently I did an interview with a guy named Nate Rifkin, very interesting guy who describes himself as a tall, geeky, introverted, weird guy that used his marketing skills as a copywriter to write a singles ad, which I did an episode with him on. So it's an episode previous to this one. So if you want to see where the background is, you can go back to a previous I love marketing episode. And you can listen to the one I did with Nate and how he was using marketing in order to find a relationship for himself.

And.

And it got me thinking about something that me and you have been orchestrating. Finding my soulmate, to use that term. And I want to give some background for everyone listening about this in twofold, what the purpose is. Why I'm sharing this is through a conversation with you we talked about. And I'm going to ask you this question. I'll just mention it is that in many ways, the highest use of marketing is in finding a partner, finding a soulmate. And I'll even ask you what you mean by soulmate, and we'll go to that. But it got me thinking. Like, you know, there's a lot of stuff that I teach people and share with people and interview entrepreneurs and all kinds of people in different areas of business and life on how to not only build and grow a successful business or a successful enterprise, but how to be a better human being. And I thought, you know, you are one of truly the smartest people that I know, and you're kind and you're compassionate, and you're different than almost anyone I've ever looked in the Area of love and relationships. And you have put in your 10,000 hours many times. I mean, you are just so good at this. For confidentiality purposes, I have a lot of close friends that work directly with you that are world famous. I mean, people know who they are and they have many areas of their lives that are working in business, but they come to you or when they want an area of love. And you're very, very good at it. And so I want to give some background on how this started. And we have. Literally, we're right in the middle of a process, a marketing process that I'm just going to share what you helped me craft together, but I want to go back to where it all started. So a while back, you had sent me an email and we had been friends and we'd known each other. You've even presented at my Genius Network annual event. You gave a talk. We've always had a great relationship. We hung out at Burning Man. You kind of showed me the ropes at Burning man since you've done that a million times. The very first time I was there, you adored me in the craziest outfit ever. And it was a lot of fun. In this particular area, though, you'd sent me an email and I'm just going to read this email that you had originally sent me. It'll give some value. Yeah, so. And this was. So anyway, it goes like this. It's. It's something. So the subject line was, you keep visiting me in my thoughts and you wrote, it's something important. My intuition knows that we need to talk, and yet I've been avoiding it somehow. Not sure why, but I go through whatever that fear is and asserting proactively. Proactively in the female. When we can talk. Next. Where are you these days? We're in San Francisco until mid October. Any chance you're in town? I'd love to meet in person. I don't know why I feel called to you. Mostly it's because I know how much Evan loves you and because I think your heart has the worn, torn characteristics, pain and triumph wise to be capable of one of the most epic love stories ever experienced by a human being. And I don't want you to die without experience. What I and Evan call the highest game a human being can play with their life. I want you to have that feeling, knowing truth felt in your bones before you leave this world. The knowing that you were able to give and receive fully the highest quality of love possible. This is what real spirituality is. I think I can help you. But Only if you're willing to suspend belief in what everybody else has told you and how love works, and try with me to build up a new definition of what true romantic love might look like for you from scratch. And then take one. The ridiculous courage to put the faith in. Into what we designed together as your future relationship. Letting go of all the. What's it supposed to look like? I'm offering this as a gift, not just to you, but to mankind. The human race needs you to be in love. Who you will be as a force and contribution to this world is exponentially increased when she finds you and you let her have you. Let me help. I was made for this. And of course, I love you either way, even if you don't respond to this invitation. Titus, hug. Annie. And so sorry I was stumbling over words there. I'm, like, squinting to look at those. Looking at this from a small device. So that kind of blew me away when you first sent it to me. And of course, I thanked you. And I was right in the process of. I just connected with a new person that I had started dating. So I didn't take you up on it right away, and it took a period of time, and this wasn't the right person anyway for me. As you say, it was practice.

But.

But now here we are today, and you have taken me through many, many conversations about love, about relationships, and about partnership, and I'm at a stage in my life where, you know, the most recent relationship and person I've been dating is a wonderful person. The challenge is based on proximity. We live in different states, and the way our lives are set up, it's very hard for us to create the partnership that possibly could happen if this person was in close proximity and other factors that I'm not totally going to go into. So suffice it to say, I'm single right now, and in the dating world and in the process of creating something for me for finding a queen. I mean, let's use that term. You are helping me. And I said, annie, let's share this on. Let's share this with the world, because a lot of what we've created will be really helpful to other people. And I want to take my listeners kind of through this process that you've been instrumental with, that you've not only been helping me with, and that we're getting ready to do this, but also you've done it with other people. So that's what created this conversation, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.

Yeah, well, thanks for reading that email, Joe. And you know, for people who didn't quite hear what it said, I basically had a transmission that when Joe Polish falls in love, everything he does is going to be taken to the next level. And you're already a force we reckon with in this world in terms of what you bring and what you create. But once you fall in love, your game always gets upgraded. And I just really believe that there is someone who's right for you and there's someone who's very lucky to be your partner. And I kind of self appointed myself to be PR agent for your heart. So thanks for letting me.

Well, of course I love this. And also like, I mean really, if you have the skill of marketing and you understand how to reach people and I'll do my best to not be joking about this because this is a very serious matter. If I say anything that comes across as sarcastic or using metaphors or analogies, it's as simple. Simply because of business. I've said selling is like seduction. There are certain things that you need to do in order to properly position yourself, to sift, sort and screen, to find the right sort of prospect. And you can use marketing in amazing, wonderful ways that help other people, that create value, that help yourself, or you can use it in very manipulative, different ways. It's not about marketing, it's about the application of it, it's about the person using it and all that sort of stuff. And I don't know a better application of using my marketing skills than maybe what we're doing right now. And of course, I guess the proof will be the end result. But after interviewing this kid Nate, who literally shy, introverted, doesn't know how to really approach someone, he ran a singles ad which ended up going viral, got picked up by the media, 250,000 hits to this site that he had set up, which is not what we're doing actually. We'll explain what we're doing. I don't want that level of PR. What ended up happening was he got over 1,000 letters of hate mail because he was so descriptive and talked about his political beliefs. But he also set up, got 100 offers for dates with what he has told me so far. You know, just some incredible women. And it got me thinking, you know, I should talk about what I'm doing. I should show this because we could use this. Maybe I love marketing becomes a place where we actually help people not only build and grow their businesses, but also maybe find their soul mates and their partners. So that's my long setup, Annie.

So let me go back to what.

I mentioned then, where I talked about, in many ways, the highest use of marketing is in finding our soulmate. And so I'd like to ask you, how is dating similar to marketing?

Well, you know, long before there were humans on earth, there was a form of advertising going on all around in nature. Like the original marketing was what evolutionary biologists call mate signaling. And in mate signaling theory, the information about mating fitness is conveyed when animals communicate. And so, for example, a fancier, more colorful peacock tail, which is very heavy to carry around and energetically very costly to grow and maintain. But the reason why malate peacocks do that is because it indicates that they have a high fitness value in order to create this big, laborious peacock tail. It shows that they have fitness level to produce good offspring, so it attracts females to mate with them. A big, beautiful tail says to the girl peacock, you want to have a piece of this? And so I actually believe mate signaling is the first unconscious marketing. So it's where marketing was born. But again, it's unconscious, and I just want to distinguish. Like you mentioned earlier, marketing can be used to manipulate or it can be used to produce great amounts of value. And even in mate signaling that the evolutionary biologists talk about, they have honest versus dishonest signaling. And so some animals will signal that they have a particular prowess or a particular skill set, but it's a deceitful signal, it's a fake signal, and if it works to attract the mates, it'll get reinforced, but it doesn't show up in, you know, basically the commercial doesn't match the product. So I just want to reiterate that what we're both trying to create here is mostly honest signaling in the mating game, where the commercial or what you're advocating about what you want and who you are matches the actual human, the version of Joe that you're actually creating on offer. It's not a deceitful trick. And the reason I'm saying it's mostly honest is because if we're super exact about it, all signals have some amount of ambiguity about it. I mean, every time a man shaves his beard or a woman wears lipstick, these are signals that don't fully represent the truth of the physical features of yourself or the other. So I'm not advocating, you know, you stop wearing lipstick or you stop shaving, or you, you know, you don't do sort of the normal dating tactics to bring your best self forward, but when you find your mate or you fall in Love or you have a relationship, that person, it's not a one time interchange where you can get away with duping them. They're going to be seeing you day in, day out. So you want the best version of yourself represented in your commercial as well as a head nod to your imperfections, your fallibilities. You know what's really going on there so that it's a holographic image of your totality. And Joe, you're probably one of the best I know at showcasing who you are, whether it's on a date or on a stage at a seminar, sharing your successes, your superpowers, but also your struggles, your fallibilities, the places you've had to clean up in your life. You're just super transparent about your greatness and your shadow and I really love that about you. And I think that's the right way to produce a commercial about yourself. When you're in the dating world or when you're introducing yourself to anyone, it builds rapport because people see you as human, infallible and not larger than life, and they believe it. And not many people follow. Not many people follow. Fall for the shiny perfect presentation, whether it's a product, a service or yourself. So I really want to encourage that as we use marketing to attract partners, that we do so in a way that holographically represents the totality of who you are, such that when they fall for you, they're like, wow, you really represented yourself accurately. There wasn't an attempt to dupe me or deceive me.

Let me ask you about that too because that's really, you know, obviously you want to put great attributes out into the world. And like you were saying, you know, I often wonder about what is honesty in the dating world where people have their status symbols and you're wearing clothes or you're wearing makeup or you're wearing, you know, you're driving expensive cars or you're what? You know, all the things that people do, call them games, call them, you know, presenting yourself in a certain way and yeah, at the same time. Yeah, no, definitely. They're signals. The, the thing of, of just if you're a really shy, introverted, scared, lonely person, at what point do you display and share that in a way to where it doesn't make you look bad or doesn't make you unappealing or. I mean, how does one. Because I imagine there's a lot of people that are lonely. Many people are. Truth be told, I think most humans are living quiet lives of desperation. And I Think many people don't enjoy their relationships. They endure their relationships. And I think there's a lot of fear that exists in all of that. And having been very open about my own addictions, I also have learned quite a bit about disclosure, which I tend to do, I think, as vulnerably as I can. And also knowing the difference between secrecy and privacy. What sort of advice would you give in the beginning of presenting yourself when is too much too much? And what are the stages, if you do have a criteria for that?

Well, so there's. There's no answer that any. Everyone can use at the same time. It's one of those things where you have to pay attention and be attuned to the dynamic. And so there's a. There. There will be a moment where something about yourself that you haven't yet revealed will come up inside as a thought. Like, I would like to share this right now. And I have this rule about if something comes up three times that wants to be spoken, I honor it on the third time. So, like, you know, on the first date, I might not share my craziest, wacky, you know, shadow bit, but over the course of a few dates, it'll come up as like, this is a piece of information about me that's relevant and that's pertinent and is coming up in my consciousness. And if it comes up a second time, then I know it's really wanting to be expressed. It's a part of me that's wanting to be understood. And by the third time, I'll just say, you know, this has come up a couple times, and I really want to not hold it back. I want to be honest and transparent about what's real for me. And then you share that piece. So it's a matter of listening to your own system and what's being offered up to your consciousness to share and tuning in. Like, the other person is super conservative and has never, like, done any, I don't know, agricultural experiments or they're kind of from a small town. The first thing you say might not be like, oh, I love going to burn a man, or I take psychedelics. You might want to tune into where they are, build rapport. And then after they've learned to trust and appreciate your particular way of being in a way that makes sense to them and isn't scary. Then later on, because you've built a connection where they appreciate and admire you, then you can offer in a segue into the other, more sort of experimental parts of your life once they trust you and what I don't want to encourage people to do is to build fake trust where you have to lie or deceive to garner trust. That's dishonest signaling. And so it's really subtle. It's kind of like, how do you know when to put up a boundary? There's no 100% heuristic I can give someone for that. But there's a hack I've given you, which is when something comes up three or more times, it's wanting to be spoken. And so it means there's a part of you that's wanting to be seen, heard, understood, and expressed. And, Joe, you probably tell it on the first time. It rises up in you because you've got so much practice. As soon as something comes up, you'd be like, hey, this is something about myself I want to share. But I would encourage people to stay attuned to the dance, the very delicate, subtle dance of the new friendship, the new relationship. And your system will tell you when it's right to share this detail or this piece of information and then just listen and honor it. That makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah, totally. No, totally makes sense. And I see a lot of people, I think, make a mistake with their vulnerability and their boundaries. Well, they'll just disclose, like, everything to everyone or they'll, you know, or they can't do it with a person, so they'll get up a moment of courage in half the time. I don't know if they're intoxicated, either on some sort of chemicals or some sort of belief system, and they'll put something out on Facebook. And I sit and see how some people go about doing things, and there are ways to do it effectively, and there are ways to do it that are not effectively. Now we're going to read a singles ad that me and you have drafted together for me, and I'm going to share that in a little bit. I want to give a little preface to this, though, in things that I think would be really helpful. And in my most recent relationship, we were sitting there talking about what was working, what was not working, and making the decision that, yeah, I can't really continue with this. And by the way, when I'm talking about recent relationship, I mean, I talked to this person early this morning and even said, oh, yeah, I'm doing this call with Annie, which she loves. And you had given this analogy of a doc, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. And since so many people that I know are entrepreneurs, and a lot of them live these workaholic lives and are so busy that they talk about wanting to have a relationship. They're either a deeper relationship with whoever they're currently in a partnership with, marriage or not, or they're single and just want something. But you had this great analogy about how we kid ourselves by keeping ourselves so crowded with busyness and not being available. And you use the analogy of a ship in the dock. And I would love you to share that, because I thought it was. I think it's pretty profound.

Yeah, well, you know, I was using it in reference to your own life. And I was saying, jo, we've decided that finding a romantic partner for you, a life partner, is really important. But you're always talking about how busy your life is and how you're running from event to event and every weekend's used up. And so I said, hey, you know, think of yourself like a. Like a port. You know, like a port that's on the edge of water. And you. You can. Your ships can dock. Literally, relationship ships can dock at your port, but only if there's room at the port. If there's no cargo ships and all these other things crowding out the port, then there. Even if a relationship that's viable comes by, there's no place for it to dock. So what that looks like in real life is that you meet a woman at a party or at dinner, and you start talking about your life, and she entertains the idea that you're someone she's interested in, or there's a possibility, but the way you're talking about your life or the way you're representing your current reality, she can't see a place where she could fit in. So she doesn't feel welcome. She doesn't feel like she can land. I mean, we've all been walking down the street and being busy. But just think about, you're lost in New York and you're in the middle of Times Square. You need to ask directions. There's some people walking briskly down the street in business suits who you would never dare approach and ask, you know, where's this street? But there's some people who are, like, moving down the street, smiling, kind of slow and languorous, and you're like, oh, that lady. That man would be available to my approach. They're dockable for me to ask a question. So I'll go ask them that question. And so we'll ask the person that's the most dockable to give us help for directions in a foreign city. Similarly, when we're dating, we're looking, is there a place for me in that person's life? Is there a place for my ship to dock? And I think a lot of people claim they want romantic relationship. They claim they want to find true love. But if you look at their dock, it's all crowded. There's no place for anyone to, you know, dock in. And so I was just pointing that out to you, Joe, like, let's create space on your port for a relationship to dock. And I think you've been trying to take that on lately.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, you also have to dock in a port that will fit your ship. If you're an ocean liner, you got to have a dock that it's an ocean liner. If you're a different. Not that I know anything about ships or boats or anything, so I'm speaking totally out of ignorance here. But the thing is, you have to find someone that's aligned with you. And if I look back over all my past relationships, one thing that I seem to do very uniquely is that almost every relationship that I've been in, going back probably 17 years, almost every person I'm friends with now, I don't. You know, I mean, some of them I don't talk to very frequently, but I don't have, like, I'm not at war with anyone. I've somehow managed to maintain friendships and relationships. And many of my past partners are friends with each other and hang out with each other, you know, even more. Some of them have become enormously close friends because of me. And I sit and think, well, I didn't screw that up. So, I mean, there's a certain level of kindness and caring that even when I've gone through some of the most challenging times or not picking the right partner that I have, you know, I've always done my best to be kind and caring and compassionate and loving, even though it wasn't the right. You know, it wasn't my soulmate, per se.

Yeah. So one thing you've done is always retain the dignity of. And the beauty of what you shared with that person, because once you start loving someone, you never stop loving them. And I think all breakups should happen from a. From a loving. Hey, we had a great time. We learned from each other. This is no longer working for us. Let's transition. But retain the esteem and the dignity that we both came into the relationship with. And I send you on your way with the highest regard. I'm clapping for you. I stand for your greatness. That is how a breakup should go. And I Think how we break up highly governs how successful we are in the next relationship. And if we have broken, uncuterized, unfinished, you know, very messy breakups, they leak our energy. And when we find another partner, we're not clean and whole. There's these open wounds to leaking. People can feel that. So the art of breaking up with dignity retained on both sides is something really important to me. And I'm just really proud of you for honoring that. Yeah.

And there's only, like I said, almost, there's only one person that I've not had resolutions really with. And you have been instrumental in helping me with that, which is like, again, one of the reasons why I think you have such a great, talented skill. And by the way, there's so many different directions I could ask you questions about. I literally could talk to you for a week. But for purposes of what we're going to share today, I'm thinking I should just launch in and read the ad that we have drafted, and then we'll talk about it. And what I want to do is share with people that it really. You can probably tell. I mean, I'm using a little. A slightly. Bit more comfortable with talking about marketing things than this. Although I'm extremely proud of where we're at with everything, and I really believe 100% everything that I'm about to share is this. I never thought that I would do an episode and really talk about all of this stuff until discussions with you and then recently interviewing this guy Nate. I was like, going, wow, this would probably be really helpful to a lot of people. So, you know, let's talk about it. So we ended up drafting based on a criteria and lots of conversations, the type of, for lack of a better word, an ad. A profile that is currently. We just recently put it on a dating site. And I won't mention the site. I don't think it's relevant. There's many different ones one could choose from, but basically, here we go. Can you hear me okay, Andy?

Yeah, we can hear you. So this is the bio profile for you on your dating site page, and it's meant to solicit the interest of the kind of woman you want to attract as your partner. And this is what you came up with.

Perfect. So here we go. I'm not interested in changing you. I want you to relax into being who you most want to be. I'm here to protect and encourage the parts of you that are creative, intelligent, fierce, and tender. I'll be your sanctuary and your trampoline. What I Want is a woman who's devoted to something so important she's dedicated her life to it. I will devote myself to supporting you there. Your growth and expansion will become our priority. I once read you don't fall in love with another person, you fall in love with who you get to be around them. I want you to feel the most yourself when you're around me. This will inspire me to do the same. I'm a successful entrepreneur with a wide array of passions and committed to personal development and growth. I aim to add value to every person I meet. I create connections between powerful leaders and build networks of collaboration. My high paced, intense lifestyle requires a strong woman who knows how to represent her needs and capitalize on once in a lifetime opportunities and adventures. If you're proud of the way you love others, remain tender in moments of fear and feel confident in your ability to hold the pain of another, then will resonate well. It takes courage to be sensitive and honest when life feels challenging. I need someone with this kind of courage. If you're in the top five most extraordinary women you've ever met, then I want to meet you. I promise I will treat you like a queen, but you have to already know that you are one. Yeah.

So, Joe, when you hear those words that you know represent your future partner, how does it feel for you?

It feels fantastic and it feels very true and it feels authentic. And it is what I'm looking for and it's what I want. And there's a lot more to it. I mean, you know, in other parts of the profile where it has me describe things about me, I also talk about the fact that I have a pretty crazy, twisted sense of humor and that I love laughter and I, you know, I'm into yoga and all kinds of other stuff that are, you know, things that I'm interested in. But in terms of describing what, what I'm looking for and what I want, I think, I think this pretty much is a good lead.

Yeah. Let's share with everyone what kind of thinking went into drafting this add to represent your future partner. And I can kind of share some of the things I got from our conversations.

Because what we wanted to do.

It is a piece of marketing. I'm clear. But again, we want to do honest signaling, not dishonest signaling. And I think if you read that to anyone who knows you well, I think, and I think you did, there would, they would nod like that is the kind of woman Joe needs and would want. And there is a part of Joe but wants all these things. So I feel proud that you accomplished that congruence. But one of the things we wanted to conserve for in this personal ad is it's targeted to pique the interest of exactly the kind of woman you want. An intelligent, romantic, strong, grounded woman who's wise in her body, who's caring and maternal and also ambitious. This ad will not be very compelling to a woman who's not empowered or proud of the way she loves or has a hard time expressing herself. It probably won't resonate for someone who hasn't figured out her purpose or her mission or who doesn't feel like she deserves a man who will fight for her growth or her greatness. So your future mate will read this and will self select after reading this because it does take someone quite self assured to be inspired to respond to this particular ad. And we're wanting that curation. We built that in something we also wanted. Yeah, go ahead.

No, no, I was going to say what I really don't want to do. Like for instance, when I did an interview with Nate about his ad that generated over a thousand forms of letters of hate mail. And again, this is something that went out publicly, was on the news media, which is completely different than somebody putting themselves up on a, you know, a dating site. And there are some dating sites that are more respectable than others. And so we went over what were the mistakes that he made versus one of the things that he, you know, and we kind of COVID this. So my whole thing here is not to offend anyone. What it is designed to do, though, is to attract who it is I'm looking for and to not attract who I'm not looking for. So another way in the marketing world, I'd be more open to say, repel who you want to repel. Attract who you want to attract. Well, yes, this is exactly what I'm trying to do. It's a filtering mechanism. And there, you know, there are. Why I think it's actually beneficial because I'll talk to a lot of people like, oh, I hate dating sites. And I'm like, well, I don't know if it's about dating sites more. You know, it could be the type of site that you're on. Part of it is. It's the copy, it's the words, it's what you're saying, it's how you're saying it. This is what marketing is. You cannot, in the business world, as David Ogilvy would say, you cannot bore people into buying. And if you want to attract the right sort of person, you have got to frame yourself in the most effective way humanly possible so that it's interesting, so that it is intriguing, so that it's ethical, so that it's honest, so it fits who it is you are. And at the same time, you don't want to just cast the net that brings everybody in so that many people can be disillusioned after they get to meet you. It has to be. It has to be real. And so I think I'm very proud of what is drafted here. And this was not something that was just whipped up. I mean, it. It took a lot of intentional things.

One thing I wanted to add that I learned from you and my husband, Eben, and, you know, all the marketers, they say when you write copy, especially marketing copy, you want to talk more about the customer and their needs than you do about yourself. And a lot of personal ads are, I like this, I'm like this, I like to take walks. I this, this. And we have some of that in yours. But we were intentional to make sure we were speaking to someone who would recognize themselves. So we were saying, you will be loved into greatness. You will be honored in this particular way. We really wanted any woman who reads this to feel appreciative and delighted, never offended. It shows a deep respect for the feminine. It honors womankind with its sentiment. Like, I know you wrote it, but I'm a woman, and, you know, I made sure that nothing in that would sou a disservice to the feminine. And, you know, Jo, I've watched you, and you've loved women, and I've seen how you love them before and after the relationship. And I know your heart, and I can see that your intentions are deeply loving and deeply benevolent. You've done a lot of beautiful things for women, even after you've broken up with them, that are still supporting their greatness and their development. And I think any woman who gets her way into your heart is in for an epic life of love and adventure. And one of the reasons I just want to share with everyone that I think this so and why I'm so keen on supporting you is, I think heartbreak and wounding and trauma breaks and rips our heart. But because the heart is a muscle, and like any muscle, when it rips, it can grow back stronger. And so because you've been through a lot of pain and hardship in your life, and you've been quite transparent about it, as a result, your heart and everyone who knows you knows this, your heart is very powerful. It has a profound depth it's willing to go out of its way to extreme lengths to help the people it loves. And so I actually think you have the ability to love so openly, so vulnerably, that literally books could be written about it. And I just want to make sure that people understand that. Someone who's been watching your heart navigate through the heights and the lows of relationships. I'm just really proud of it. I'm really proud to represent it. And I wanted to say that I didn't tell you this, Joe, but I actually created a customized email account called findjo lovemail.com findjo lovemail.com, which I will field is coming to me. And anybody you know, this podcast goes out to a lot of people. Anybody who knows anyone, anybody who's interested in exploring a connection with Joe. I just. I would love to represent you and help filter that and just be an open, warm invitation to people who are curious or interested in this experiment we're doing. And so hopefully you don't mind.

I mean, I'm just sitting here kind of thinking, oh, my God, you may have no idea what you're opening yourself up for.

I'll be able to filter through serious people and people who aren't. And I think you need someone super intelligent at the front lines, just like receiving the first contact. And not everybody who writes is going to get a response. But we've created this ad to be really sophisticated, and I think the people who have the courage to respond to this ad or know someone who would be a good match are going to be quite sophisticated as well. So I'm willing to take on that. And obviously, I will send you any interesting leads, but I just want everyone to know. Find Joe Love. F I N D J O E L o v e findjo lovemail.com Bring it.

Wow. Wow, that is. Well, thank you, Eddie. I appreciate that. And by the way, I have got to tell. I got to mention this, too, because I don't want this to sound like a setup here. Like, you know, you have clients that you work with. You don't.

You're not.

I mean, you. You're not in need of any sort of clients, and you've done all of this as a friend. I mean, you reached out to me.

We don't charge you anything.

Yeah. So, I mean, I just so appreciate the wow. I mean, I'm like, really?

Well, here's the deal, Joe. I mean, I'm not just a love coach. That's kind of my tagline. But my dharma, my purpose on this planet is to help extraordinary thought leaders. People are going to change the world and lead the future, to help them have relationships that work, that thrive, and that are extraordinary because what they're going to do in their life and they have a partner that supports them is just next level. And so this is how I make a contribution, is by lovingly babysitting the long life of relationships of leaders. And so I just see you as a leader, and I want you to have the relationship that matches that kind of greatness. And I just don't see anyone else who could do this for you. And so this is just. It's like my contribution to you because I do love you and you're doing great things in the world. But I get to do my purpose. It's an opportunity for me to do what I'm here to do. And so it doesn't feel like work. And, you know, I have enough clients so that I don't, like, I'm not needing the financial, you know, contribution from you. I just. This is a passion project.

You know. Go ahead, please.

Yeah, I'm just passionate because I believe in you and I believe in your heart. I want other people to see what's available underneath all the wacky jokes and sarcasm.

In the same way that my passion project is, you know, changing the global conversation about how people have been view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment and trying to find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy to share. That is my passion project. And that's one of the reasons why in the ad it says, what I want is a woman who's devoted to something so important that she's dedicated her life to it. I'll devote myself to supporting you there. Your growth and expansion will become our priority. Yeah, I mean, all of that is fed into even the ad, so.

Well.

Okay, so without talking about me, which I love. I mean, and I feel really honored to be able to do this, let me ask you some questions related to the marketing of this. And just. I'm going to. I'd like to ask you about dating and relationships in general. So having just read that, how can someone listening to this, to us talking right now utilize thoughtful, intentional marketing to find the love of their life? If they quite understand what we've described as fully as I would like them to.

Well, the first thing I would offer is remember that you are showcasing yourself. You're inviting opportunities. So you want to bring your most intelligent, brilliant, beautiful parts of yourself forward. You know, that you don't go to an interview with Curlers in your hair and you haven't brushed your teeth or showered, like we all know, to bring your greatness forward. And so the thing I want to encourage people to do is to showcase. Be afraid to showcase your brilliance. I just think humility is overrated. And remember, I said we're going to show our fallibility and we're being transparent about our shadow at the right time. But a lot of people play down their magnificence. And I'm not saying you brag about yourself in an ad or in a piece of marketing. We didn't brag about you. We honestly, we showed. We demonstrated your sophistication and your intelligence by the way we wrote the ad. We didn't say, I'm smart, I'm intelligent, and I'm romantic. We demonstrated it in the way we wrote the ad. And so I want to invite people to demonstrate their particular beauty or prowess or way of loving in the ad. And don't play small. And another thing is to ask for what you really want and believe you can have it. When you come from that frame, your ad has a power and it inspires the other person to recognize themselves as a match. And another thing I want to offer is, like, when you're. It's not just ads you're writing. Every date is a piece of marketing. You're marketing for what's available for them in a relationship. You're on a date, you're saying, time with me looks like this. When you extrapolate from this date, this is the kind of feelings and experiences and thoughts you're going to have if you were in a relationship with me. So don't forget it's holographic. It's representative of the whole. And so one of the things people do in dating is they. They go. They get busy looking for Mr. Right or Mrs. Right. But I would encourage you to start developing yourself to become Mr. Right or Mrs. Right. Become the person that your dream mate would actually fall in love with. Get busy doing that. Rather than looking for the person that can love you, become the person that could most love your dream partner. Who would you have to be? What would you have to have developed? Because if you're looking to be with the most amazing woman you've ever met, she's also looking to be the most amazing man she's ever met. So you want to make sure you can triumphantly offer yourself to that dream partner and sign your name to it. Like, honestly, when I fell in love with my husband, I wanted him to have the most extraordinary woman that would help him in the ways that he most needed and that could use in his development. And if I'd found another woman who could do better, I would have stepped aside. I want him to have the best development opportunity. And so the trick is not am I, Is he good enough for me? It's are you the right person to love them? Because when you fall in love, you want to give them the best. So you have to know I'm the best for them and for what they need in their life. That's what keeps the relationship going. And so that's a few things I wanted people to offer in their whether they're marketing with an ad or with themselves in person on a date. And again, you mentioned this in your ad. You fall in love with not a person, but you fall in love with who you get to be around that person. So when you're on a date, always be thinking about how is that other person feeling about themselves around you. So instead of bragging about how great you are or showcasing your skills, you want to also, in a date, you want to be asking questions and having conversations where the person you're having the date with falls more in love with themselves, not you. When they fall more in love with themselves and who they are and they find themselves interesting and intelligent and animated and funny in your presence, then they fall in love with you. They don't fall in love with you because you're amazing and you have all these skills. They fall in love with how they get to feel in your presence. So focus on how the other person feels in your presence without, you know, without being fake and contrived. But you're not selling you, you're selling themselves to themselves. Part of what happens when you get into relationships is, we can get into this later. But you fall in love with a vision this person has for you. You fall in love with a person who has a vision of who you could be that's greater than your own vision for yourself. Then you're accessing a portal to your own greatness. So just keep that in mind. Dating and writing ads.

So you had mentioned about developing yourself as a person to even be prepared if the right person. And I hesitate using the word right because part of it is I do believe that there's somebody for everybody, no matter where they're at in their current level of consciousness and their current level of development. I know that along my journey, there are times when I was just in a very toxic place in my life, which therefore made me not a very good partner.

And didn't show up. Talk about right, because you brought it up as if there's no right or a wrong. But let's just talk about whether there's a match. So, like, if you took your house key and tried to open my front door, it wouldn't open. It's not because your key is not good enough or not right or your key is not good enough or my lock's not good enough. It's just, it's not a match. So what we're looking for is someone who is a match to you. And I do believe there's someone who it's a win win to be in relationship with you and for them you to be with them. But it's not about someone else. Everyone you've not mated with or who not married is not right. They were right for you at the time. Everyone you've dated is either the one or practice for the one. And practice is very important. And each relationship is a school. It's an education, it's a gym, it's a dojo for you to develop your skills. So no relationship is a failure. If you were able to develop wisdom and learning about what you need, what you want, and how to do love, they were a success. You don't graduate from university and go, oh, that was a failure. I'm not in university anymore. No, you got your lessons from university. You graduated. Each relationship ending is a graduation to the next. It's not a failure. So just a frame to keep around that.

So what is the difference, Annie, between dating and relationship? Meaning when does dating become an exclusive relationship? And I want to be very careful about trying to even suggest this is the right or wrong relationships because I'm not positioning or presenting myself as an expert in this area, but I consider you an expert in this particular area. So you know what, you made this interesting comment to me. I don't know, a few weeks ago, we were talking about dating. You said, if you're really hungry and you're, you're starving and you haven't eaten a full meal, you know, snacking in.

Between.

You know, is what sustained you. So you don't have this creepy sexual energy about you. And you weren't saying that to me specifically. You were just talking in general. And I thought it was sort of interesting as it relates to dating. And I'll tell you, to myself and to many people, it's that confusing thing of, like most people, I don't think really enjoy the process of dating. I think a lot of people are just, you know, let's just lock this thing down. Once I find a person and I see a lot of people that I believe just settle. And if you simply in the United States look at divorce rates, you know, most of these things don't seem to work out all that well. And in the very beginning, the more that one can know about setting yourself up for success, probably the more likely that you're going to have that. So I just wanted to get your perspective on that.

Yeah, well, divorce often means you didn't do your research properly. It's kind of a harsh way to say it, but often it means you didn't really put the upfront. Due diligence. But you know, every relationship has its own learning curve. But let's talk about dating and relationship. And it's funny because I'm married to, you know, someone who was a very famous dating coach. Still, still is. But David d' Angelo or Eben Pagan, when I met him, he didn't believe in love or marriage or kids, all of which we have right now. So it probably took someone like me who can discern the distinction between dating and love to help inspire him to entertain that. But he always said he was a dating coach. He never said he was a relationship coach. He was very clear he could help people learn to date, I.e. get her number, go on a few dates, have sex. But he really didn't have a lot of, you know, info on how to do the rest of the game. And he said that to me when we first met. He was like, I am good at dating, but I don't really know anything about love. And I was like, great, I know a lot about love and so I can help you take it from there. So kind of say relationship pick up where dating leaves off. And there's two different games going on. And I mean games. I don't have a problem with the word games. I think life is a game. So I don't have a diminutive association. But the dating game or the short term mating game is very different than the relationship or the long term mating game. Let's just remember the ad that you wrote. We were very intentionally targeting women who were interested in the long term dating game. And you are interested in a long term mate. You're not looking for a hookup or a part time girlfriend. You could have all that. I'm sure they're lined up for you right now. But you're looking for a soulmate and a partner for life. And so you were giving signaling in your ad of long term mating potential, not short Term. Okay. And there's a distinction between them in the data, in the not just human mating but in animal matings. Just think of all of us have been at a place in our life where just as you said, snacking in between real relationship. We just want touch, we want cuddle, we want sex, we don't want it to be meaningless. But a one night stand can be epic and beautiful. If you're both present, you're both honest and you're both fully available and engaged. I have no issue with that. And the approach for short term mating games is very different. It makes use of kind of status dynamics. And you know my husband taught cocky funny, you know, cocky funny, as he said, does produce an attraction in the woman because it indicates higher status for you to be cocky and funny. And ability to not be approval seeking from her indicates to her that you're not lower status which turns off her attraction but indicates that you're higher status which produces intrigue in her. So I mean, you know, I haven't really mapped that out and it does work and it does produce attraction for the first few dates. But if, if you want a high caliber woman who isn't just interested in playing status game but actually wants to co develop an equal partnership to in a long term relationship that lasts forever, that cocky funny thing is going to be short lived. It's not going to, it's not going to work for the big game. And even when I met Edmund, he would try to use his dating shtick or his cocky funny anime and I would just look at him deadpan and be like what does that shit really work? Because here's what the deal is. Those dating shticks, they work on women who are pretty but who are have a slightly lower self esteem who are just looking to be like hoisted up into a higher status level. And it works for short term dating gig but it doesn't work to produce an attraction to a goddess or a queen or a woman who's looking to play the highest game of love with her partner. Those techniques, she'll see through them. So they're great for dating, they're great short term dating games. But if you're ready to find the long term woman, the woman you want to take home to your family, you want to build a life with you and have children with, you're going to have to have more than short term dating strategy. You're going to have to send signals and indicators that your high quality, high caliber long term mate potential. And so there's different signals. You'll send out for that. Right.

What I would say is the way that I use that analogy in business is there's transaction marketing and there's relationship marketing. And you can definitely use certain things to get a phone number, to get an email, to initiate someone, to probably get someone into bed. However, sustaining it requires something completely different. And it also depends on the person because there's just as many people trying to do hookups as there are people that really want to have relationships. And there's a lot of fear in the middle of it all where there's confusion and people simply don't know. And you know, one of the things you said about the word game, I mean, I've heard this from a lot of people. A lot of my female friends will say, you know, I want to find someone that doesn't play games. And I always think to myself, and I want to run this by you to get your perspective on it is in a lot of ways people play games. I mean the planet is filled with people playing games. I think it's a disguised way of saying I don't want to get hurt. And because if people were playing games that they were winning and that they weren't abusing someone, assuming there weren't a narcissistic, you know, psychopath. Yeah. That cared about people. I mean, you know, like people that. There are some people that genuinely get off by using and abusing people. However, I don't think that's most people and I think even people that come off that way just want to connect, they just haven't, they don't know how, they don't know how to connect with themselves. So I mean, if we're playing games that we're winning and the other person is winning too, we play games all day long. So it's. So the question is not playing games. It's like how you approach it in not getting yourself hurt. And in the process though, you can put up a lot of walls to connection. So I just want to get kind of your perspective.

I mean, life is a game, talking is a game. I mean again, I want to honor that. We're talking about transparent open games where everybody gets to progress along instead of deceitful, manipulative games. And I mean, I have a four year old daughter, all she does is play games. Everything's a game. I mean we walk down the street and we have to look for things that start with tea or what animal has a vertebrate, a skeleton, which animals don't have a skeleton. Everything learning is a game. And so it's about making win win games. And I'd like to give this heuristic, this hack to check on what kind of game you're playing. Here's a way to know what kind of game you're playing. If it's the kind of game that you would happily and proudly have put out on a television screen for everyone in the world to see real time, if you would happily be transparent about this game and everyone could see it, then it's the kind of game that you're proud of and that raises your self esteem and that is a win win. If it's the kind of game you wouldn't want anyone to know the background of or you would want to be hidden. If there's any secrecy, it usually indicates shame. And it's not the kind of game that is triumphant and that represents your highest self. It's a game that's shady and short term and win lose. So I always ask myself, is what I'm doing right now the kind of thing that I would be clapping for if it was on this movie screen? And is it the kind of thing that all the people I admire would be clapping for? And if it's not, it's probably a self centered, selfish, manipulative game. So if you're not sure how to know what kind of game you're playing, look for how much secrecy you have around it, how much you'd want someone else to see it. And transparency is an indicator of beauty, truth and goodness. How transparent something wants to be. The more good, true and beautiful it is, the more secretive and hiding and don't want you to see the behind the scenes. The more shameful win lose, the more exploitative it is. So you know, that's it. I don't mind. I just think I want. That's basically I teach people how to play better games with themselves in relationship. High quality games. Games that enrich their own lives and the other person's lives. I mean play is a divine foundation of reality. It's just I kind of want to emancipate the word game from manipulation. And most women conflate those terms. And you know, I don't even. It's deceitful manipulation. I mean we're always manipulating. Every time you say hello to someone to start conversation, you're kind of manipulating. But it's a beautiful manipulation. You're trying to connect. So it's what your intention is with the game that's the most important, not the fact that you're playing a game.

No, that's really Good. So the other part of my question of how does one go about dating? And then saying, okay, now it becomes an exclusive relationship or in between. Because I think there's. Even for myself, I mean, I have a lot of maybe areas of like, well, you know, how does one go about this whole dating? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, here we are, you just gave out an email that. Where people could contact you if they, you know, have a. If. If they're interested in me.

Yeah. So I'm going to be filtering for people who are interested in long term mating gains and for people who have a caliber that would match your level of sophistication. That's what I'm filtering for. Just so that it becomes win win so that you're not bored. They're not bored. I'm trying to find a match between two really extraordinary entities. Every woman is extraordinary in her own way. Every woman is a face of the goddess, but is she a match for this particular face of the God? And so I'm just trying to like just how you make connections between people. You're the best in the world at making connections that are of high value. I'm trying to make a very high connection, high value connection between you and a possible partner. And even if she's not your partner, I want that date to feel like a win win to both of you. And educational and fun. But in terms of knowing when dating becomes authentic relationship, I'd like to think of a relationship between two people as an entity. It's like a new entity being fathered and mothered by these two co parents. So you and I have a relationship and it's like this little entity that grows over time as we become better friends and more intimate. So when you're dating someone, there's a new little entity being born. This new little nascent, tiny relationship. It's very delicate. And as it grows, it matures. As you have more dates and more interactions and more connection, the entity develops and becomes more mature. And just like a child becomes an adult someday, it has its own identity and it knows what it wants. Your relationship between you and a new woman grows and it starts to have its own identity and it starts to have its own needs and wants. And it starts to assert those needs and wants through your impulses. And so to know when it wants to become exclusive, it's like you have to listen to the relationship speaking through you. What does it need? And every relationship has a point in time where it says, I want to have a name and I want to exist. And I want to have an assurance that I'm going on to exist into the future. And that's kind of the time between two people where both of them start to consider, hey, maybe this wants to be in a container that supports its growth and exclusivity. Like stopping dating other people can be a way of creating a container for one relationship to be focused on and to flourish instead of you squandering energy on new relationship potential. Every time you go on a date. When one feels really compelling and intriguing and it wants to grow, you kind of close down your attention to all the other bids and you focus on this just kind of the way you focus on a child so it can get its needs met and be nourished into adulthood. And I don't think a relationship ever, you know, stops growing. But you can smell when exclusivity or the talk about what is us is organic and natural. And it usually is starting to occur for both people at the same time. That's why I know it's a healthy relationship. If the guy's in short term mating and he's like, oh, she's my house girlfriend who I like once in a while, but I'm no way interested in her long term, but she thinks it's long term, then she's not listening to the cues and the signals coming across from you. And when I work with female clients, I'm constantly educating them on what are indicators and signals from this man that shows he's either interested in long term mating or, or short term mating. And a lot of women with low self esteem mistake short term mating interest for long term potential and then get heartbroken. But I think guys are signaling all the time where they are in their development. And so women have to educate themselves to read those signals.

Yeah, which is why I've always recommended some of my very top female friends to have a conversation with you because you're, you're very good at sniffing things out as, as, as they say. So if someone listening to this right now is looking for love right now, I mean, what's the best advice or piece of advice that you can give them?

Well, if you've been looking for Anything more than 3 months to know success, then I suspect there's some payoff, unconscious payoff they're getting from staying single. So when I meet women and their new clients, I often say one of my early questions for them is, you know, first of all, what do you want, you want in a relationship? Men or women? What do you want in a relationship in your dream? Relationship. And then they talk about what they want. And then I would say, how would you know when you get that? So, like, what are the indicators? They know when they've arrived at that opportunity. And then I ask this interesting question. I ask, what's something in your life right now that you value that you think you might have to give up if you found Mr. Mrs. Right tomorrow? And they kind of sit. They kind of get confused and like, nothing. I would be so happy If I found Mr. And Mrs. Right tomorrow. And I go, no. Okay, just think about it. If I'm going to wave my magic wand and tomorrow your ideal soul mate shows up. It's believable and it's true. Just feel in your body, is there any fear, is there any trepidation that comes up in your body in response to the tomorrow? They're here and I ask them to listen. And eventually they usually can find some part of them that's a little bit scared of actually finding that partner. And that part of them that's scared usually has a story about what they might have to give up if they actually found their partner. They think they have a belief that's lurking underneath, like a belief they might have to give up their freedom, their spontaneity, their career, their dog. There's something that they value that they think they might have to give up should they fall in love. And so we excavate what that belief is, because there's always one under there. If it's anything. Past three months of you longing for something and not getting it, there's a part of you that doesn't want it and is ensuring that you don't get it. And we need to go and interview that part, find out what its fare is, honor that fare and give that part an assurance that not only will you not have to give up your dog, your freedom, your spirituality, your spontaneity when you find your soulmate, but what if you actually got more of that? What if you got more freedom, more spontaneity, more push towards your career, you know, more aliveness instead of less. And so once we make that shift in belief where the part that's afraid of giving up something it values actually believes it might get more if it fell in love. Then we get speedy, swift movement in the direction attracting a partner. There's usually a payoff some part of us is getting if we haven't found love yet. So I help them look for that. What's the payoff you're getting from staying signal? What's the fear of Falling in love, that's lurking underneath, that's running the relationship game for you, running it so that you're not getting your partner. And then the other piece of advice I would say is what I said earlier, instead of looking for Mr. And Mrs. Right, focus on becoming Mr. Or Mrs. Right. Focus on becoming the most extraordinary version of yourself, such that you would be proud to offer this if you were to bump into your soulmate. You're like, I'm a work in progress, but I'm really proud of what I've created. And here I am offering it to you. And the last thing I would do is, like I said to you, is just being in an inquiry around what's blocking your port so that a relationship can or cannot dock. Is there anything blocking it? Ask your friends, is there anything about me that would have someone new that came into my life that might be interested, feel unwelcome. Your friends and family will know the things you do that scare partners off. Interview them. Find out what are the things that are getting in the way of your partnership finding you. So those are some of the pieces I would offer.

That's a really great question too. Are there parts of me that make me feel unwelcome? And ask people that actually know you. So I was telling you earlier that I, you know, have. I was speaking with the person who I was in last relationship with, and there's a quote that she loves from Rumi, which is, your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. And in a lot of ways, I think that's very similar to what it is that you are saying and in the process of developing yourself and building yourself as the right type of person, that if you were to bump into or discover or be discovered by your soulmate, you would be in a place where you could develop that alignment and that relationship and live into it. So my question to you is, there's a lot of people that are genuinely amazing, awesome humans. Just like there are many great business owners that provide the most amazing services and products and create enormous value, but they're struggling because they don't know how to get clients in the business world. In this particular case, it's like, well, how do you find a partnership? So I'm not a big believer in be awesome and you're going to get discovered. I'm a big believer and be awesome and do things to get yourself discovered. And very much the whole reason why we're even having this conversation about my ad that we are, you know, just recently put up is I'm not, you know, as much as I work on myself and develop myself, you know, a lot of times it's just not going to fall into my lap.

No, I mean, if you have great merchandise in your shop, but you have nothing in the window, no one's coming in. So we're talking about making sure your window is dressed and decorated in such a way that when they come into the shop, they're not disappointed, but that when they're walking down the street, they actually stop and walk into the shop and call you and email you and arrange a date that they take action in the direction of connecting with you. You have to be willing to go out there and meet people, put yourself out there. I mean, one of the reasons I want you to do this ad isn't because I think you're going to find your soulmate on the dating site. You may, but it's because I want you to be saying to yourself, to your friends, to reality, I am available. I am dockable. I am taking action in the direction of calling my partner in. And even if no one ever answers this dating site profile, you're congruently saying, I am ready and reality will respond accordingly.

Yeah, and that's a good point too. I'm glad you brought that up because it's just about taking certain initiatives. Because what's that whole cliche, the road to someday leads to the town of nowhere. And if you're not doing some sort of actions to initiate something, the chances of it happening, you know, it's like the way Chris Wayne Gretzky quote, you know, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And I mean, I think there's even a similar sort of story with you. Before you met Evan, didn't you or Evan initiate something like right before you met in terms of totally?

Yeah. I mean, I met him at Burning man, but I. A friend of mine harassed me finally and was like, let's put your match.com profile up. And I was like, what? I'm a fucking dating coach. But he just said, no, we're not trying to find your mate on dating site, but I just want you to have the. You're saying to reality like, I am available. And so we made this profile and I put it up. I never even logged in again and looked at it. But literally a week later, when I was at Burning Man, I met my soulmate and my partner and my husband. And I don't think it's an accident. I think something in me shifted once I pressed, you know, pressed send to the profile going up that came to terms with, I'm single and I'm done with dating, and I'm actually ready to find my partner. And here's the description of what I want and what I'm looking for. And I never had to use that profile, but it represented a shift in my psyche that then opened up a possibility. And I think, honestly, I tell all my clients, we need to get a profile up for you somewhere, even if you never look at it, because something in you will shift once you make that call.

And so I think there's a lot to be said of that step right there. Taking action. I mean, even going through the process that we did in order to write this ad and going through the criteria that I've done. And I will also mention this might be a future episode, but there was another person who listens to I love marketing that is a basically a matchmaker. And this person, you know, this kind of started with, say, like, what's the criteria that you're looking for? And she gave me a whole list of questions, and I started really thinking it through. And that was a lot of the initial thinking that came into, you know, what ended up becoming this particular singles ad. So to go back to questions for our listeners, I mean, you mentioned a few things of what to do, what not to do. So what. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see people make in dating?

Well, I had nodded to it earlier. I said most people pay a lot of attention to how they feel in a dynamic, in a date or an interaction, but they're not tracking how the other person is feeling. And I really believe that you want to be optimizing for two things, being yourself and being yourself in such a way that allows the other person to fall more in love with who they are and who they can be. So sitting down with someone who sees potential and greatness with you is always invigorating, exciting. Sitting with someone who just reflects back, you know, where you are, but doesn't stretch you or invite new thinking or new thoughts or, like, offer new inspirations. That's what has you want to go on a date again. You like how you felt at the end of the date. So are you behaving in such a way so that the other person across the table is liking how they feel at the end of the date? That's one thing. And the other thing. Another mistake is people think that just like you said, you wrote a List of things you want in a woman or that you want to experience. I help my clients write lists, but it's not things that I want them to have like a resume checklist, it's feelings I want them to have. I want people to write a list of how they want to feel when they're in love, how they want to feel in different parts of the relationship. Because emotions govern most of our choices, not the rational mind. Everybody knows that emotions have you buy or not buy a house or a car or an opportunity or product. So if you can, if you can inspire the kinds of emotions that another person wants to have more of, then that's a successful ad. Date, interaction, conversation. And the last thing is just remember, every date is practice for relating, practice for connecting, for talking, for loving. And so you want to bring to the practice your highest A game. You know, when Olympic medalists go to do their practice run in the morning, they don't show up half assed and do a shitty run because if they do that, they won't have practice for their highest magnificence on Olympic day. So they bring their A game to the practice run. Actors bring their A game to the audition. Every time you interact with someone, you're practicing for your final partner. So you bring your highest, most intentional beauty, truth, goodness, love. And you use these opportunities to practice being extraordinary in relationship. Even if this person isn't your soulmate, you will have had a win win interaction if they got to interact with you at your greatest. And even halfway through the date, if you know you're not going to marry this person or they're not their partner, you still continue to practice being extraordinary because every opportunity is an opportunity to improve your ability to show and receive love. And so it's like even though it's a treadmill, you're not going anywhere. You're getting exercise. And exercise is really important, like practice. So those are some of the mistakes people make. Oh, and then one other thing is people often write someone else off too quickly. They go on a date and they're, they're not like, oh, inspire, this is my soulmate. And then they never go back to continue the research. I would. Unless you're horrified by someone. I would give them three dates to garner enough information to be able to make a conclusion about how they be and who they are. And again, it's three more practice runs for you. How do you be with someone who's boring? There's many times in the future when you're going to be in love with someone and they're going to be talking and they'll be boring for five minutes. How do you cope with that? So like, learn to be graceful and beautiful even when someone's boring, or learn to change the conversation into something that's more interesting to you. That's another technology that you want to be practicing. Creating the date to be something that's fun for you, even with someone who doesn't seem natively that fun practice.

That's really great advice. I'm trying to think of the best questions to elicit from you. I mean, there's cliches about, you know, if you, if you don't love yourself, you're really not able to love other people. And I don't know if that's really true. I'd love to get your take on that. But the question beyond that is, you know, what practices do you have? Do you have and do you recommend to people for cultivating self love, for honoring themselves and caring? Because I think the more that you can connect with yourself, certainly the more you can connect with other people. And if you feel very disconnected from yourself, you're going to be disconnected from a lot of things. And I believe the opposite of addiction is connection. And so when someone's in deep pain in the throes of addiction, they're deeply wanting to connect and they're using behaviors or chemicals to numb themselves because of the pain and the loneliness or the shame and the guilt and all the other factors. So I don't want to make this about an addiction thing. I just bring the comparison because I can see the ultimate form of disconnection is addiction, which is real human suffering. And so when it comes to, I mean, can someone be a great partner but be in a place of incredibly low self esteem or self loathing? I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

No, no, no. I mean, most of my work with singles, even though I'm ostensibly trying to help them attract their soulmate, what I'm really doing is, is building up their self regard and their self esteem. And again, self esteem isn't just how confident you are. Self esteem, according to Nathaniel Brandon, is basically how much you trust your future self to cope with how reality shows up and to thrive in unknown circumstances. It's your belief in your future self, your resilience. So to build self esteem. I mean, first of all, let me say, and I said this to you before, you attract a person always in relationship who matches your current level of self esteem. So if you want to know where anyone's self esteem is, you Just look at who they're dating, who they're married to. There it is. Forget how they look. That's their level of self esteem around love and relationships. They may have high self esteem around building software or racing cars, but in the domain of love and relationships, whoever they're with is an indicator of self esteem because you always fall in love with someone at the same level of self esteem. So while I'm helping my partner, my clients find their partners, I'm trying to build their own level of self esteem and I'll tell you the practices in a minute so that as they're moving through reality, they're going to be attracting higher and higher caliber mates as their self esteem grows. Okay, so when I, when I give my clients practices to develop their self esteem, first of all, actually I want to say this quote, I think it's a nice nin quote. In order to say I love you, you first have to be able to say I and you have to be able to. The gravitas and the reverence and the connectedness to your ihood influences how impactful your I love you is. I love you from a person whose eye is flimsy and not very congruent and not very trustable isn't a very good like I don't believe that I love you. But when your eye is strong and powerful and congruent and connected, then when you say I love you, wow. Well that's, that's a huge contribution to me and I believe it and it can inspire me. So help a lot of people develop their ihood so that again, so that they're proud of what they're offering to their future soulmate and you know, a quick hack for self esteem development, which I've never heard anyone talk about, but it's my favorite is forcing someone to be to go on a reconnaissance mission in their life through the minutiae of their day to look for moments in which they feel delight, pleasure, connection to beauty. Like literally if you're walking down the street and you see a shadow on the sidewalk, that's particularly interesting and you notice that piece of beauty. If you can start excavating from your moments of aliveness, moments of beauty, delight or appreciation, then what happens is you over time start to systematically fall in love with, with your current life. I'm not asking you to get proud of big achievements, just microscopic moments of your day where you have delight at your own life. You might be sipping first sip of a cup of tea, you might feel a breeze on your neck as you're walking down the street and just to become conscious of that moment of aliveness and delight starts to brainwash you into believing that your life is fun, is interesting, is delightful and a man or a woman falls in love. But the person who feels they feel the most alive around. So the woman you're going to fall in love with, Jo, is the woman you feel the most alive around which is not the most happy alive includes the full spectrum of human emotions. So the woman you feel the most everything around is going to be the woman you feel the most alive around. And so she's not connected to her own aliveness, her own pleasure, her own delight and her own sorrow and fear and despair. If she's not connected to all her feelings, you're not going to fall in love with with her aliveness. Why do men fall in love with the woman that they feel most alive around? Because they want to feel the most alive woman is access to their aliveness. And same for women. And so if a human is not connected to their own aliveness and appreciative of it, the full spectrum, their sadness, their fear, their despair and their accessing their joy. If they don't know how to connect with all those feelings, they won't be able to help their partner connect them to those feelings. So Jo, if you met a woman who can't hold pain, she definitely won't be able to hold you in yours or help you hold your own. If you have a woman who has a limit to the joy she can feel or the amount she feels she deserves, she won't be able to help you feel more joy in your life. So your partner limits how much access you have to more aliveness and emotion by how limited they are in their connection. So as I'm working with clients, I'm working on connecting them to their own aliveness. And the more appreciative and connected you are over your own aliveness, the higher your self esteem.

That's great. That's really, really great. Let me ask you about commonalities. I mean, you know that Paul Abdul has been a client of mine in the past and has joined Genius Network. And I remember years ago she wrote a song called Opposites Attract. And there's been a lot of studies that say it's actually not true. Opposites really don't attract. They may attract initially, but in terms of sust maintaining a long term relationship, there's all kinds of things. I mean there's. I mean I cannot tell you how many people I have met, men and women over the years that the sex is great but everything else sucks, but they kind of like stay in it because there's sex and that's only short lived because you have to deal with the person. And then there's the difference between sex and love and, and everything in between. So my question to you is alignment. I mean my buddy Dan Sullivan, who, you know, you know Dan and Babs. What Dan said when he met Babs is that he was at a point, they were both at a point in their lives where they were okay if they were. Didn't meet their, you know, their partner and they were in a place where they were as they reported. I'm not, I'm not. This is just what they have said to me. And my interpretation of it is that we were both at a place where we're okay being alone. And in that place we found each other. And Dan had been, you know, previously divorced, which he called his, you know, practice marriage. And he said that I no longer wanted to work on a relationship. I just wanted a relationship that worked. And he found Babs and they were just a great match for each other. And they've been married many, many years and, and they have their prime directives, one of which being only align yourselves with people that are aligned with you. And so I think a lot about being aligned and having things in common. And I wanted to get your take on that because I mean, certainly there's no two people that love and appreciate everything from the same foods to the same music, to the same entertainment, to the same of everything. But I mean, what are like if there's a really hardcore liberal and a hardcore conservative, you know, can they work or at what point does one go into this and set themselves up for success with commonalities?

Yeah, I think, I think the opposites attract has varied levels of accuracy because in some way, I mean, men and women attract. But also, you know, homosexual couples attract each other. But I've noticed in every couple, same sex or opposite sex, there's always a polarity. Evan and I have talked about it and some people call it masculine, feminine, or top or bottom. But I actually think of it as more. One person is very good at wehood, at representing, identifying with the relationship and empathizing with the other. They're very other oriented. They're the we pole, the us pole. And then there's always another person in the relationship that's better at identifying their own needs and wants or are better at empathizing with themselves than the other. They're the I pole. Every couple I've ever seen Work has one person who's better at weing and one person who's better at eyeing and they find each other to cross train. I mean Eben is the most successful triumphant eyehood person I've ever met. He's the most Iish person I'd ever seen and apparently I'm the most we centric person he's ever met. And so he will you fall in love with a teacher who educates you in the domain you most need to develop. So he had he struggled with taking other people's perspectives in romance and like his empathy, you know, it wasn't as developed and considering another person is not as native to him as it is considering what he wants. Whereas for me I always know what the other person wants. I'm always orienting to what serves the other. It's harder for me to figure out what do I want, what do I need. So every relationship seems to have this I person, we person. And you know, again Kathryn Hendricks talks about them as the isolator or the fuser and in attachment theory they talk about it as the anxious and the avoidant. There's lots of different names for these polls and they all tie in together but I feel like I and we has no judgment on it and everybody in a couple usually knows which one's the more we centric and which one's the most I centric. And the trick is to realize that you came together to become students to the other person's genius. So instead of getting angry about how selfish and self oriented my husband is, I would say teach me how to do that. How do you just know what you need without worrying what the other person wants? And he would teach me basically how to self and I would teach him how to empathize with another person's perspective and how to preemptively intuit what their needs would be without them telling him so. We've been cross training each other so I'll never be as good as ihood as he is and he'll never be as good at wehood. But as parents we're cross training so that our daughter feels a more integrated version of both of us across these two domains. So I think opposites attract in that way. We attract someone to teach us about technologies and skills that we really long to develop but don't know how yet. And so the trick is to become the student instead of the enemy or the opposition to that difference. So that's the way opposites attract. But you have to have enough commonalities in terms of vision of what you want to dedicate your life to so that you can create a relationship vision that holds you both together. If I didn't believe in Evan's purpose on the planet and he didn't believe in mine, it would be very difficult for us to support each other in developing and pushing us towards our dreams. There's a shared dream we have about what's possible for human beings in relationship, in business, in the way they do their life. We're both committed to people becoming more successful in the things that they value, that we can overlap enough in our purpose so that our relationship serves both of our purposes instead of one or the other. And so I think couples need to have a lot of conversations about what. That's why you said in your ad, I want a woman who knows what she's willing to dedicate her life to. Because you already know what you're willing to dedicate your life to. You're doing it. And you want to find a woman who's also figured that out and is up to that game. Because then you can create a shared life purpose that both of you can co create together. Not just a child. Most couples only have a child as their shared passion project, and that's fine. And we definitely have that, my husband and I. But we also have more than a child. We have cultural changing, game changing agendas we have for how we want people to relate to success and relationships that we're both in agreement on. And that keeps our relationship strong because we're working on something together.

So when you. And you're really superb at conflict resolution or even just how to go about doing conflict, I mean, you're more open about it than anyone I've ever heard speak about it in the context of relationships. And they're certainly. I mean, I know a few people that swear they have never had a fight and have never really even raised voices to each other, but that's extremely rare. And I also know couples that love each other to death. They will have moments where I swear they're just ripping each other's heads off and then everything in between. So conflict. I mean, what. How do you. Our friend Sean Stevenson says there's a period of time, usually about six months, where the veil drops. And then the real person, their fears, their insecurities, all of their craziness and everything, you see it in a way that you've never seen before. When there's a certain level and if the relationship can survive that, then you know, that's. That's A great thing. I don't know if you have that same sort of viewer perspective and you.

Know, totally there's yet you get like a year and a half max of pure drugs to run on and all that. The oxygen. Yeah. And just the like the novelty and the way we squint at our partners. Crazies. At the beginning they were. Every couple that's broken up or divorced can look back to the first date all the way through the relationship and see the thing that eventually didn't work for them was there since the beginning. But they were squinting at it, making excuses for it. They were not full facing looking at it. And that squinting eventually, you know, cost them. And often that's what divorce is. You squinted at things that were never going to work because some other narrative was superseding it. And so I do think there's this year to year and a half time period where couples can. People call it the power struggle, the honeymoon phase, but it's really the veil fall. What John Stevenson means is you start to realize your partner is fallible, has woundings, has shadow, has ways that they cannot support you and fulfill your needs, not because they don't want to, but because their own shadow and wounding gets in the way of their ability to love you in the way you need in those moments. And so in that place, when you finally see them for who they really are, fallible, imperfect, trying to do the best they can from a childhood that wasn't always ideal. When you see the sort of messy wabi sabi version of your partner, if you can love that as is without ever knowing if they'll ever change and still standing for that change. But even if they never changed, could you love that forever? When someone loves that part of you as is, then you have a relationship that is now a crucible for both of your growth. Because people do not grow if they're not loved exactly as they are right now. So the trick in relationship and parenting is to send a double message to your partner or to your child. I love you exactly as you are right now. Imperfect, broken, fallible. And I know you can do even better. And I'm going to stand for that, that double truth. Like when my daughter first learned to walk, she was wobbling. She could only take one step and then she'd fall. So I think her wobbly walk is perfect. I love it exactly as it is. And we clap for it. When a child walks and do I have a vision that she's going to walk graceful and better in the future? I'm Standing for that vision without making the current version of herself wobbly walking wrong. I love her as is, and I'm standing for future greatness. At the same time, when you find a partner who loves you as is and would stay with you no matter what, as is and is standing for a greatness in you and a magnificence that they're going to fight for, that's when you have a relationship that's going to last forever.

So let me ask you a distinction on that. Say there's things about your partner that annoy you or just you're very bothered by. How does one discern between, you know, this is just not a right person for you, or you're just an unaccepting asshole? I mean, you know, and you're not giving someone a break. I mean, at what point are these signals just indicators that, yeah, this is just not your person versus, you know, let's not be so judgmental here. You have someone.

Well, yeah. I mean, every complaint was one of the things I teach in my art of fighting. Every complaint from your partner is a smuggled, I love you. I know you can do better than this. It's, you know, the complaint you left the cap off the toothbrush is. It sounds like a complaint, but if you can decode the complaint as I see someone who can be more conscientious and intentional, and you know that I feel really supported when the toothpaste isn't leaking all over the counter, and I know that there's a version of you that can have that level of conscientiousness, you have to ask yourself, is the complaint that your partner is making if you were to take it seriously, and if you were to build the skill that they're asking you to build, would it make you a more extraordinary version of yourself? So if Evan's complaining that I'm late all the time, and that's just some weird quirk that I have had that people have tolerated, I ask myself, is he standing for a version of Annie that will show up on time and that people can rely on, is that a version of Annie that I'm more proud of that's more extraordinary than the current version? And if the thing they're fighting for, whether it's beautiful bedside manner, feedback, or complaint, if the thing they're standing for is an improvement to the Annie game, then I'll take it on Now. I also help to work people express their complaints in more loving phraseology instead of, why the fuck are you all doing this? That way, I might Say, hey, you're doing this this particular way. I know who you are. I know how, I know what you believe in. This is not a match for your greatness or for the values that I know you keep. The way you're talking to our child doesn't match the kind of father I know you want to be. And I really believe that you can be that father and that you would be more patient in these circumstances. And so it's an inspiration for them to become a more beautiful version of themselves rather than a criticism and a put down of who they are right now. And that's an art. That's an art you can learn to inspire someone into change rather than criticize them, which usually does not inspire change, but has them dig their heels in and do the crazy behavior even more. Because human beings who have patterns, basically the patterns in you go, if you don't love me, I'm not leaving. Like, I'm not changing until you love this part of me. So until that part feels loved, it won't shift. You kind of have to love your partner's crazies into submission and then inspire them to take on new behaviors.

That's really good. That's really good. You know, when I met Gary Chapman, who is the author of the Five Love Languages, I was talking with him and he made this interesting comment. He said that if you want to know what your partner's love languages are, listen to what they complain about.

Yeah, that's good.

And it's like, huh. And so, yeah, the way that you've actually framed that, I love that. If you, you know, were to ask yourself, if you were to build the skill that, you know, the complaint is about, would I be a better person? That's a, that's, that's sort of an interesting scenario. So for people that are listening to this, that, you know, I mean, the purpose of this is to share really kind of the way I'm thinking about what we're thinking about in not, I shouldn't even say thinking about the way that we're utilizing marketing to position me to put out my signal out to the world that here I'm looking for a partner and how I'm utilizing marketing so that someone that is listening to this, that is single or looking for a love relationship, could actually utilize this. For people that are just listening to us for pure entertainment and they're in a, you know, a happy relationship or this is really who this is for. Someone that's in an unhappy relationship, they're married, they feel trapped, they don't feel like their relationship is even fixable. A couple of things. One, if improvement is possible, what does one do? And I know, Annie, that I'm asking you a big question here. That could be an entire episode as a standalone. So more so just improvement is always possible.

Improvement is always possible. Every relationship can be upgraded. There's never an end to it. So improvement is always possible. So until. Until a couple's no longer together, I think they're right for each other. They're learning something in the school of the relationship. They're getting some kind of nutrient education that they need. And when that's done, the relationship will desist. So there's no couple that's together that shouldn't be together until they're not together. And so it's a strange, weird test. If someone can leave the relationship because they're too irritated by whatever the other person does, then that's not the relationship for them. The weird mystery about true love is you will not have any shortage of complaints. There's a million things about Evan that drive me crazy that I could complain about all day long. But no matter how bad it gets and how frustrated and it gets really bad, I never. I can never leave. It's not that I don't entertain it in the darks of the depths of despair. I actually do. And so does he sometimes. But we can never actually execute. That's the final test. When. When the bond is so strong and not just the bond between your heart, but the portal. When your partner is portal to your own greatness and you can't deny it anymore. There's no place to run, there's no place to leave. Where are you going to go? They're the portal to your greatness. It's a motherfucker. But greatness usually takes a lot out of you. Everest is not easy to climb. And so it's only those who are willing to actually climb the Everest of personal transformation that true love requires. It requires this kind of initiation. It is not for the faint hearted. It is a gladiator sport. Anyone interested in this game of true love, be willing to roll your sleeves up and know every part of your life that you've squinted at, or shadow or demon or part of your history that hasn't been resolved is going to come up Resolution. And there is only one strong. There's only one force strong enough to keep you in the game. When everything in you says, I want to run, I want to leave. And that's this true love. And this is what I'm kind of fighting for people to believe in. But the thing is, no one can leave when it's the real thing. Just. Just like, no matter how crazy your kids drive you, you never just leave them on the sidewalk or abandon them. And most people don't. You have frustrations with your kid, but you never leave. That's the kind of bond that happens when you're in love. And so I can't remember the question you asked, but there's a difference between, oh, I think I could leave this, or I'm willing to leave this, versus, well, I'm never leaving. I'm in forever. How do I make this work? It's not how are we if we're going to work, it's how are we going to work? And you had said earlier this marketing is just for singles or people who are looking for partners or. I just want to be clear. I've never stopped marketing. I'm in a relationship with a marketer. And both of us continuously market for the kind of relationship we dream about and we fight and we collaborate through it, and eventually a new vision is born. But I am marketing for possibilities for Eben, for himself, for me, for our relationship, and for our daughter. All the time, every conversation, we're marketing for a possibility. So this skill of marketing is not just for finding your partner. It's for continuing to create the kind of life you want to. And enrolling people, being a leader, marketer is a leader that enrolls you into a possibility. Being a leadership for that possibility.

I love it. I love it. I mean, that was really beautiful. There was so much there that you stated. So I guess the other side of it, the part two of it, is if you're at a place to where you're unhappy, the juice is not worth the squeeze. You're conscious. You feel that you're. For whatever reason, maybe it's not even a bad person. It's just not working. How does one do conscious uncoupling, to use that terminology, in the best ways? I mean, at what point do you call it quits and say, my life is never going to blossom if I stay in this stuckness? And I say this, Annie, in very much, I think the same way you'd recommend, you know, before you blame someone else. You also have to realize it takes two to tango. And I mean, and I realize this all the time because I deal with people that are partners, that they have an addicted partner. And being an addict, addict myself, I understand both sides. I understand what happens when you have a crazy making person and when A person is crazy making. Because I've done both. And a lot of times I was having dinner with a friend of mine and she, you know, her. Her ex, who she still is in a relationship with, not in a love relationship, but they just are. Still wants to help this person, but this person is actively acting out. And I'm also talking with her about how she's enabling so much of this stuff. And so I say all of this before you're so quick to blame someone, realize that you have to look at yourself too. But. But that being said, what you know, I guess I'll let you know.

Yeah, that's the education. That's the education. Remember I said every relationship is practice for the one? Well, that practice. Each relationship you've been in wasn't a failure. It was a school. And you learned something. But you didn't just learn how to talk and how to be friendly and how to be loving. You learned parts of yourself that don't serve love and don't serve relationship. You get confronted with your own insecurities, your shadows, your myopias, your narcissisms, your pathologies. And so every time there's a. Every time, basically, one of my specialties is helping someone move through a breakup with grace and dignity. And my metaphor for breakup is you never want to break up in a fight. You never want to break up from anger or terror or the darkest, lowest moment. You want to interview yourself at moments of delight with your partner and moments of despair across a period of time, maybe three months, where you listen. If the only time you want to break up is when you're angry, I don't trust that breakup. But a real breakup, when a person is really in tune with this is the end of this particular dance. With this partner, you will feel the deep truth of the conscious uncoupling or the breakup calling for you. Even when you're in the most beautiful moments at them, you'll feel like, oh, I love them. I support them. They're amazing. This is beautiful. And this is not serving either of us. This is not the dance. This is not working. And so instead of breaking up in the middle of an argument, I encourage people to break up from the height of their connection. So if you think of a relationship as a landscape, and landscapes have high ground and mountains and valleys and different kinds of terrain, and think of a relationship having a vista. The highest vista of the relationship is the highest peak on which which is the most poetic, beautiful, connected, loving moments or experience or parts of the relationship that you can imagine. And so you go visit that part of the relationship. It might be weeks, months, years before the present moment. It's there. Every relationship has a peak of beauty and you want to go visit that peak, associate into it, stand in the place that you're most proud of, the US and from there you have the conversation from the most loving, from the most mutually appreciative, from the most the place you're the most proud of, the U.S. because if you break up in an argument or an anger, the other person has stolen from them their self esteem and their dignity. And you and the relationship which had its own entity, it lost its self esteem. It doesn't get left as something beautiful that you both shared this dead ugly thing that's kind of bleeding in the corner. And I feel like it's an indignity to the relationship. So I feel like you want to break up from the place where you most love the other person, not most frustrated with them. And when you break up from that place, they will trust the breakup, they'll believe it and they'll feel beautiful as they leave the dynamic instead of broken, not good enough. And with their self esteem and dignity depleted. If you want to maximize both people's dignity and grace as they leave the dynamic, you have to break up from the highest vista of love and poetry and beauty that the relationship ever had. And that takes courage. It's really hard to break up from that place. It's much easier to demonize them, convince yourself that they're beastly and then break up from there. Because then your heart doesn't have to ache and mourn the death of that us, but that us was alive once and it's dying in some way or at least transitioning to the next phase. And you have to mourn that. And most people don't have the courage to deeply mourn the death of an us. They want to kind of avoid the whole death process, just move on to the next thing. And I think that's missed out opportunity for development. So basically, if you think it's no longer, it's not the right relationship for you, I would invite you to take on this frame of shifting the dance, breakup or transition or whatever, conscious uncoupling from the place where you love them the most instead of from the place where you hate them the most. That's what would honor you them in the relationship.

That's great. That is really great. And you know, I have a friend named Ariel who we were over our buddy Craig's home in Los Angeles and people were giving Short talks. And she got up with a partner and they're in an open relationship. And I was. And she's pretty outspoken about what she talks about. And I was curious to see what she was going to say. And she got up and she said something that I thought was really interesting. And she said, you know, the way that the United States. I think she said the world, but it's specifically in the country of the United States. She talked about how a lot of the way that society gauges success of relationships is duration. And she said, I really think a way to gauge the success of a relationship should be depth, because you can be deeply connected with someone for a short period of time, but go to very deep depths of your connectedness and your love and your care in the relationship. May not have long duration, or you can have a very long relationship like, oh, you've been married for 50 years, but you might have been miserable for most of those 50 years, or. And I just thought it was a very interesting sort of frame. And in my life, I've certainly had some very deep relationships. Not. Not all of them, but a few that had incredible depth, but they didn't. They didn't have long duration. And so at this stage in my life, you know, obviously I want both. And I think most people want. Want that. They want that deep level of intimacy. And so anything that I should. Now we'll come back to kind of any, you know, wrap up with recommendations of what we had this conversation for in the first place was to use my. Me as a lab rat to show people what I'm doing and how I'm doing that and hopefully inspire someone that is wanting a partnership to go out there and get it and to take steps in order to do it and to hopefully learn from what we've talked about as a model. Now, in the realm of just love in general, is there anything that I didn't ask you that I should have asked you, anything that based on our conversation that you'd like to mention or talk about. And I'd also love to, you know, get any recommendations for anything that you would recommend. People should watch, read, listen to. I mean, we're not here to. I mean, I know you didn't do this because you're trying to sell anything other than. I guess we're kind of selling me in a little bit here, which is. Which is funny. I just wanted to see if there's anything else that we should talk about that you think would put a bow on this package.

I mean, there's so many Things we could talk about. We've done a really good comprehensive sweep on the marketing aspect of putting yourself out there in terms of resources. I don't know, I could. I mean, you talking about like where I could recommend people to go get information or books or like.

Oh, yeah, that's. Yeah, it could be books or even yourself. I mean, I know you, you've written a lot of great things. I mean, you give out your website, give out anything.

I mean, yeah, yeah, I mean. I mean, sure. I mean everyone can go to my website. Annie. Anniella.com a n n I E L A l l a.com and there's just a lot of free material. Teleclasses I created or videos. Literally videos of me in seminars with my husband fighting on stage. Like a real fight, not a fake fight. So that people could see like our conflict resolution process. There's articles I've written. You know, it's all there on tap as a resource. Obviously I'm available if someone wants customized coaching on any particular part of their romantic aspirations. But you said earlier are by selling anything. And I just want to be clear. I am selling something not just on this call, but in general. I'm always selling the idea of true love. It's what I think is my purpose. It's an idea that some people scoff at is considered kind of mythic and fairy tale. But I don't at all feel that very few people have it. It's an extraordinary transformational opportunity to be in a relationship that's true love. And it's the most important dance, I think, available for human beings on the planet to experience before they die. And so I really want to stand for that possibility in people's imagination whether they're single or in a relationship. I want them to believe in true love and to stand for it no matter what. And a question to ask themselves is if in a relationship or dating is if you're not sure after a year or two years of inquiry with a partner, if after two years, but even after one year, if you're still not sure, then they're probably not the one. There's something that comes with true love that anyone who's in love will tell you that even though our partners drive are crazy, that's crazy. Some part of us deeply knows that they're meant to be with them and their partnership was always going to happen. It has a kind of divine requirement in reality. It's like everything I've ever learned in my life felt like it was practice for being in this relationship, and you start to see your whole life as an opportunity, inviting this possibility of romantic partnership. So I am selling that and selling that idea because I think it's important. And our culture has kind of ignored it. But there's just, you know, marketing is standing for what you believe in. That's the highest value, and then seeing if other people are interested. And love is the highest value opportunity for humaning that I've seen available to people on the earth. There's the most growth, there's the most beauty, there's the most truth, there's the most transformation. It's just the best game going for feeling the full spectrum of what it means to be a human being. And so I want everyone to feel it before they die, and I want you to. And I know there's a woman out there that's looking for you, and I'm really glad that you've created an invitation for her to find you.

Thank you. Well, look, you have been phenomenal in this process, and that's why I'm such a believer. And there's all kinds of skills as humans that we do not have that other people have. And if you can go and find and collaborate with those individuals, it can lead you to what it is that you are looking for. And I don't care how anyone. You know, most people are not listening to business podcasts because they want to be entertained. I mean, music is probably more entertaining than listening to a business podcast. But a lot of these aren't even business podcasts. They're life podcasts. And I love marketing. There's a lot of things. I mean, marketing is really applied psychology. And it's also different than just learning about psychology, because you have to put things out into the world to see if you get a response. And so I'm looking for a response in this realm, and I hope that this conversation inspires some people out there to do it. And lo and behold, maybe it will, based on what you have actually set up there, Eddie, for me. Thank you. It will attract, you know, a partner for me along the way. And I. You know, this has also been one of those. One of those episodes where I feel incredibly vulnerable for some reason. Usually I'm just like, hey, whatever. And there's a little bit of pause, a little bit of hesitancy because I'm looking this through, and there's a little bit of maybe apprehension as I even talk about some of this stuff, because I'm having to put myself out there in a way that I have not ever done before. Like this. And I'm pretty used to being very vulnerable. I mean, I talk very much about, you know, addictive addiction and behaviors and all the crazy shit that that has happened in my life and what I've learned from it all in. And I think this one feels more close because it's so. You know, the other stuff, I can talk about my own life experience as it relates to hopefully helping others and realizing that people are as sick as their secrets and getting people to just be vulnerable and not have to fight silent battles. This one is so close to home that it's, you know, there's a little bit of apprehension. So I appreciate you even doing this with me because I certainly would have never left my own devices, said, hey, let me just talk about this. You know, talk about the single ad that I'm doing. So, I mean, it's sort of a.

Well, I pushed you. I pushed you to do it because I actually think of all the time creations you ever made in your life, all your networks, all your connections, all your masterminds, seminars, all of that has been practiced for creating this partnership that we're calling in. And so for you not to use your platform, your wisdom, your brilliance, and your network to broadcast your mating call just feels ridiculous to me. It might be the highest use of your network.

No, that's fantastic. So is there any. I mean, I guess one last question, because what, am I going to maybe do this again? Who knows? Maybe we should start the Joe and Andy show and we could just have a call in and I could just like, act like I'm really smart about relationships, and you could just answer questions. What do you think of. What do you think some of the unspoken ideal characteristics might be of my perfect partner? I mean, since we dwell so much into this.

Yeah. Well, just from personally knowing you, I think your ideal partner is someone who has a very healing physical touch. That seems to be something that was really important to you in past relationships. It is. With most men, the direct physical contact of a woman's touch on a man's body can be the instant calming to his nervous system. And so I think a woman who's very physically in her body and grounded and can use touch to soothe, I think would go a long way. I think a woman who's not afraid of pain, her own or others, it's really important. Not every woman would identify as that, but I think that's really important. You're very honest about your pain. You're very transparent about it, and you're very good at holding other People in their pain. People call you when they're in pain and you show up. So that's really important as a values match. I think a woman who sees what you're up to with your skills and with your work, sees it as inspiring, like really gets that you are on a mission to connect world leaders and create value at a level that's never happened with any other connector that I know and to feel inspired to support you in that. Like I said, you're going to be her sanctuary. You said in your ad you're going to be a sanctuary for your woman and a trampoline for her dreams. So you need a woman who can be a sanctuary for you in difficult moments and a trampoline for your dreams. But she has to love your dreams to be a trampoline for them. So she has to be inspired by your purpose. I think you need a woman who is a visionary, who's some kind of thought leader in her field. She doesn't have to be famous or super successful. She just has to be a pioneer in how she creates reality. Because you're a pioneer and you're a visionary. I think you need a match there. Just based on what I hear about you, I think she needs to be sexually adventurous and open minded. I just can't see you ending up with some really conservative ex nun. So I think also, oh, I think she needs to be an emotional leader because you're quite emotionally astute, but you need leadership to make it safe for you to go into emotional domains. And I think most women are emotional leaders, but definitely a self identified, I'm an emotional leader woman would be great. And I think she needs to be, you know, physically fit. You're very fit, good, healthy lifestyle, eat well. I think she needs to be business savvy, at least enough to support and understand your entrepreneurial life. And I think she needs to be ambitious and have really big dreams because the kind of work you do and the people you connect with, they are really once in a lifetime opportunities and adventures that come available to a partner who's with you. And I think she has to be able to capitalize on them and really appreciate them. And the last thing I think, just like you are very socially adept, you're very good at easily meeting people and making connections. I think she needs to be socially adept so that when you're in public forums and social spaces, you can go off and do your thing and she can go off and do her thing and there's like a sophistication in how she relates to people in social spaces. So like, gregarious, outgoing, extroverted, friendly. Yeah.

Wow. I mean, you are really, really good. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to read the other draft of the ad so that people also realize that this profile is not just something you create and it's perfect iterating.

It's always morphing.

Exactly. So I'm going to read the other version that we have so people can get this as a model. Take this and apply your own way. I've said this before in the business context, Gary Halbert would say any problem in the world can be solved at the right sales letter. And to go through the process of writing it out and really thinking it through the planning is just as important as the plan. And this has been really helpful in doing this. So I'll read this one last time and then we will wrap this up and I'll leave you with any famous last words you want to share. Any. And then we'll let all our listeners go to work on finding me the perfect love relationship and hopefully finding that for themselves. So here's.

I have an idea, Joe. I have an idea.

Go ahead.

Yeah, just because you read the first one. Yeah. Why don't I read the second one just so people can hear it differently. What do you think?

Perfect. Go for it.

So this was the last about me paragraph that you were looking at iterating.

So this is Jody, and I have to say this too, Andy, is that I've kind of had a scratchy voice on here because earlier I literally was getting. I had eaten some stuff a couple of days ago that I was allergic to and I've been a little under the weather for the last couple of days. So I know my voice has been a little scratchy during this, this whole sort of thing. So even when I was reading it, I was kind of stumbling through because my. My throat was a little sore. But anyway, yeah, no worries.

So this is everyone listening. This is draft two of Joe's personal ad. And again, it keeps iterating. We don't know which one's going to be up the next day, but you get to see this. A lot of it is the same and a lot of it is slightly different. So here it goes. As a woman, you have a brand of intelligence I may never have. And I want to learn from your wisdom and share mine. I'm here to protect and encourage the parts of you that are creative, intelligent, fierce and tender. I can be your sanctuary and your trampoline. What I want is a woman who's devoted to something so important she's dedicated her life to it. I will then devote myself to supporting you there. Your growth and expansion will become our priority. I once read you don't fall in love with another person, you fall in love with who you get to be around them. And I want you to feel most yourself when you're around me. This will inspire me to do the same. I'm a successful entrepreneur with a wide array of passions. Committed to personal development and growth. I aim to add value to every person I meet. I create connections between thought leaders and build powerful networks of collaboration. My high paced, intense lifestyle requires a strong woman who knows how to represent her needs, express her truths and capitalize on once in a lifetime opportunities and adventures. If you're proud of the way you love others, can remain tender in moments of fear and feel confident in your ability to hold the pain of another, then we'll resonate well. It takes courage to be sensitive and honest when life feels challenging. I need someone with this kind of courage. If you're one of the most extraordinary women you've ever known, then I want to meet you. I promise I will treat you like a queen, but you must already know that you are one. I look forward to meeting you. That's it.

There you go.

Wow.

I love to see which one people think is the best. And I guess but we'll know because we've already put one out there and so it's just all in the early stages, but we'll see. And I will leave this episode up. Even if I find the most amazing queen on the planet that totally her dents match my debts perfectly and that we, you know, live happily ever after, I still will leave this episode out there because I want it to be very helpful and beneficial and I hope it's very inspiring. So, anything else, Annie?

Well, I just want to remind everyone that it's really important to me that if you know someone, if anyone listening feels called and is curious and wants to inquire about this particular experiment, please email this email. It's findjolovemail.com F I N D J O E L o v e find joelovemail.com just bring your most honest, beautiful self and I'm going to respond and we'll figure out a way to make contact with Joe and you know, he'll filter through as well. But I just really want to invite anyone extraordinary out there who hasn't found their partner who's at all interested or piqued by this particular personal ad or this process. And I can't wait to meet you.

Wow. Wow. I mean, I'm so kind of just curious as to what is going to happen now. So, Annie, thank you. And to all the listeners, I hope you found this really valuable. We will put up on the show notes. I'll probably put a copy of the ad up there so you can actually see it. And also Annie's website is Anneala A N N I E L A L L A dot com. I'm sure you can tell she is really not only brilliant, she's just a very kind, very thoughtful, thoughtful, very conscious human. And I doubt this will be the last episode we do. I actually, Annie, would love to do a episode with you and Evan to just talk about not only marketing. Yeah. Because he's, you know, I've done many interviews with Evan and vice versa, but I think that would be fun also. And any, any, anything else?

No, I just, I just really want to honor you for being so naked and transparent and open about this process. I feel like it will inspire people to be more proactive. And you know, when I said to you, Joe, every single person who knows and loves you should know that your highest priority over the next year is to find your soulmate, your partner. And if they don't know, we need to close the gap. And you took me up on it. And I just want to say that to everybody else, if you're actually ready to find your partner and you're available for love, everyone you know and love should know this about you so they can support you in that process. Use your network, use your community. That's what they're there for.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. And if you're a first time listener to I Love Marketing, the majority of the episodes are on business stuff. And if you have been listening to I Love Marketing for a long time, then I hope you found this episode really valuable and you can subscribe on itunes or wherever you can find find podcast. And thank you, Annie. I really, really appreciate it. And to all of our listeners, I wish you the very best and look forward to hearing your comments and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of I Love Marketing. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, go to geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you'd like access to the full interview, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com forward/3, 1, 0. That's ilovemarketing.com 3, 1, 0.