What True Love Teaches Us About Ourselves: The Journey to Extraordinary Relationships

According to my friend John Perry Barlow, the difference between love and true love is the difference between a very large number and infinity. Now, infinity. Can you imagine loving another human all the way to infinity? Well, if you can, then you're off to a good start. Because you can never experience true love unless you're able to have the audacity to believe in it. I am a romantic idealist, but I'm not talking about happily ever after fairy tales here. I'm actually talking about true love as a crucible for personal development, as a path for transformation, and your own personal self actualization. In a true love relationship, your partner becomes a sacred mirror that reflects in equal measure your brilliance and your shadow. I actually think that our heart chooses our romantic partner to emancipate ourselves from smallness, to free us from the places that we're unconscious, and to grow us up in the areas that we've just stopped growing.

Our challenge to you is to pick one thing.

Start a ritual.

Agree to fight fair.

The two minute hug.

One of the things that I love to do is dance.

So.

So we created a ritual called the Friday night dance party to celebrate the end of the week. One of us takes turns to pick out the music and we just dance all out for two minutes. We're gonna give you an insight and we want some of you to join us. Are you ready?

Come on, Pa.

Come on.

Now.

What can you do? Date your partner. You want to deliberately schedule or else it's not going to happen. Also, treat it like a first date. Put some romance into it. Dress up for each other. So that means, gentlemen, don't wear your clothes that you're going to hang out in at home watching a ball game. Ladies, leave your yoga pants at home. The two minute hug.

So there's actually science behind this, that your brain chemistry changes when you have a long, prolonged hug and connection with someone, so you'll actually feel closer with that person after doing it. And if you do any of those things, you'll find yourself having a relationship that started like this 26 years ago and is like this. Today.

We're driving, we're going through this great canyon, Spanish Fork Canyon, just great Valley, awesome trees, awesome day. And you know what? My wife and I have our best conversations on these kind of drives. And that's how the conversation started out. She was telling me that I was an extraordinary radio show host and an extraordinary speaker, which. Don't judge that. That's my wife talking, right? And she just kept saying extraordinary. For a few things. I'm feeling Damn good at this time. And then she looks over at me and says, but you're just an ordinary husband.

Father.

Yeah, moment of truth, right? What have you had, like, have you had that in your life? You know, there's course corrections in life, and that's where you find that feather on your face and you realize something's going on and you make the shift and then there's force corrections that hit you like a ton of bricks, which was that moment for me. And I took the introspection assessment from Lifebook. So if you go to my mylifebook.com there's an assessment on 12 categories of life. What I found is that I was extraordinary in 10 categories and I was ordinary in two. One was my health and the other one was my relationship with my wife. And so rather than argue or fight, I got immediately emotional and I decided to do something about it. And what I found was in these other areas, there were things that I was doing on a regular basis to create success in my life that I wasn't doing in my life and in my marriage. So the first thing is I wasn't doing a weekly meeting with my wife where there's no kids around, no interruptions, no phone calls, but it was her and I sitting down and talking about what was going on in our life. You know, when you create a great future, like a bigger future like Dan would talk about, that's what really makes a marriage extraordinary. But a lot of people, when they get derailed and frustrated, they say it's a money problem, but the money problem gets them short sighted. It gets them off track. They're not thinking about this future that could be great. They're thinking about getting through something that's difficult and life becomes about that conversation. And I think extraordinary relationships come from the conversations we have. So why not set aside the time uninterrupted every single week with the person or the people you love and you go through and you have this conversation. Now, the first conversations went a lot like this couple good minutes, a couple bad minutes, like, you know, hey, you're gone too much. This is going on.

And.

And then I started thinking, well, what else do I do? Yeah, I have these meetings, but I also have people that I look up to in other areas of my life. When I was doing radio, I was going, who do I look up to? And I was learning from them. So I went out and I said, here are the people that I think have the best marriages in the world. John and Missy Butcher, Patrick and Laurie Giantempo, David And Nicole Jackson. I got Shawn Stevenson. We flew out to Chicago and I declared my commitment to my wife in front of them. We had a little ceremony and I asked these guys, will you support us? See, see, this is a key distinction in life. We have people that are gonna be our friends and we have people that we need to be only friendly with. And what I decided to do was anyone who didn't have an extraordinary relationship for six months, I wasn't spending any time with them. I'd be friendly, but I would decline any invitation. And I'd only accept invitations from people who had great relationships. And I started to invite those people into my life. And that's why I started this off in Chicago, which, by the way, we had a second honeymoon out there. The it was off the charts because we got to stay in John and Missy's apartment and they set up this great thing. Nice to be with rich friends that have good relationships, you know what I'm saying? So I had to do a do over where I went to my wife and I said, remember that time I said this? And she'd say, uh huh. I say, I don't know who said that, but that was absolutely the stupidest thing I've ever heard come from someone's mouth. I hope that you can forgive me. And it literally melted the walls. The next thing is when I invest in things, they tend to grow. So I started to invest in things.

Going back to the divorce and bankruptcy day. It was in the middle of the summer, it was August actually. And I remember walking around the next day and going to places and people were happy and they were talking. And I said, you know, I don't see anyone who's really bothered about the fact that I got divorced from bankrupt yesterday. Nobody seemed to be bogged down by the fact that I had had a bad day. And I said, I guess it's all my responsibility. So I said, how I handle this really is going to determine the rest of my life. I just decided to take 100% responsibility for it, which means that you don't hold anyone else responsible for what's happened to you. That led to the strategic coach and it led to my partnership with Babs and meeting Dean Jackson and meeting Joe Polish.

Well, when we met, I wasn't looking for anyone. And I don't think Dan was really looking for anyone either. I mean, he had his list of his relationship thing and stuff like that, but he sat down next to me and we interacted during that weekend in the workshop. And I liked him and it Was fun, interacting, doing stuff with him. And I got to know him, and we became friends. And I just loved the way he thought about things. And the way he thought about things really helped me open up and feel, you know, make the connections in my own mind about my business and what I was doing. And it just felt so good. And there was aha moments and all that kind of stuff. And we would share about what we were doing. We weren't dating or anything, but we.

Sure.

We talked a lot on the phone and saw each other from time to time.

Right.

You know, there's two sides to this story. So Dan. So Dan was looking at me. I went, what are you looking at?

Looking up, by the way.

Looking at you. And I said, this is what really happened. I said, yeah. And Right as you do.

Right.

And.

So, 38 years later, here we are.

There we go.

You know, it took about a year. We were just friends. And then all of a sudden, one time he was over at my house and. And we were talking, you know, and I got this funny feeling like I was just getting used to being by myself. And that was for about a year, just by myself and being okay with that. And I had just come to the thought of, you know, I'm really fine just being. Being on my own all this time. And then we were. It was almost like, you know, coincidentally with that, we were together talking in a room or something, and I just started. I got almost dizzy. I'm like, I think something happened.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

And I'd love to take this opportunity to kind of talk about attachment style, because this is something you career wire. And for those of you who are new to attachment theory, basically, the idea is, around two years old, we develop an attachment system which will pretty much determine how we relate romantically as adults. There's three main types. They're secure, avoidant, and anxious. Secure makes up about 50% of the population. They're not afraid of intimacy. They're also not codependent. They're able to communicate their needs and their boundaries. And when there is a conflict that comes up in the relationship, they don't blow out of proportion and see it like, oh, my God. It's going to be. It's over. So they can move through the ups and downs of relationships. Now. The next kind is avoidant, avoidantly attached. People subconsciously suppress their attachment system. What does this mean? It means when someone gets a little bit too emotionally close, they will do things called deactivating strategies to squelch intimacy. This might look like, say you go on a romantic weekend with someone and say they have an avoidant attachment style, and suddenly they're gone for a week. They go into their cave. Or if you have an avoidant attachment style, you might constantly idolize an ex or you'll date someone. First three months, it's great. And then you start noticing all their imperfections and you're like, no, not the one. So there's this constant pursuit of a unicorn or someone with an impossible future. These are all ways of actually not of keeping people not emotionally close. And it doesn't mean that avoidance can't be in relationships or say that they want a relationship. They just associate intimacy with a loss of independence. And they have a tendency to feel suffocated and a lot of pressure in their relationships. This usually comes from parents who enmesh them as a child. Then there's anxiously attached. I work. 90% of the people I work with are anxiously attached people. They take breakups the absolute hardest because they put a lot of their sense of identity into the relationship and the validation from their partner. And so people who have an anxious attachment style, they fear abandonment and rejection. And when they're triggered, say they text, and it takes four hours for the person that they're dating to text them back. They actually go into fight or flight. And to them it's like, oh, my God, I'm going to die. They almost feel this anxiety, like, oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.

The thing with a vow, which I've never done, was like, a vow is a commitment to yourself, to life, to God, whatever you believe in. And I wrote down, I vow to. And I don't know where this came from because I was thinking the last thing I was thinking of was love, right? I was. I was, you know, it was going to be more like, improve myself and get out of this. But what came out and that moment of purity from a place that's not the human me is, I vow to love myself. And it was a longer vow. I'm not doing it justice. But that. That was basically the gist of it. And I wrote it. And I remember sitting back and staring at it for like a minute or two. And like what is first, like what did I just write? Second, I know nothing about this. Third, shit, I gotta live this because I just made a vow. And it's like, I think a vow to oneself in those kind of moments is a true spiritual act because you're just doing something deeper, bigger than you. It's almost like then I started realize. It's like when you start to love yourself, life starts to love you. It's almost like finally, dumbass, like, let me show you what this is all about. And so within a month, everything had changed. Now I still lost the company. The company was done. But I was able to recreate myself into what I really want to do. Like what I do these days. We shouldn't be far better. It's a long winded answer to what is love? It's more love. I don't have a clear answer because it's something you feel, you know, it's like, you know, it's like something that I realized, like, look, whatever it was that saved me made me go for love. Not go for I'm going to like myself, I'm going to heal myself or whatever. Love is a fundamental thing we're wired for. I still can't even define love, but I know that all these people can create it within themselves because we're all wired for it. It is that thing, it is that feeling. But it's more than a feeling, it's a way of being. And when you're in that place, you make decisions very differently, you think about yourself very differently. I know like lately we worked doing it really hard and I just, my self esteem just seems to have gone through the roof. So I haven't worked on my self esteem at all. You know, I just working on the love for myself, it's just like a natural byproduct. What loving this thing has shown me is that the more I do it, the more life works. And I've noticed when I'm not doing it, my life just kind of goes wonky. It kind of goes back to the way things used to be where I just push through life. I just, I'm that guy who will go climb that mountain, who will join the army, who will start the company, who will make it happen. That's tiring. What I've noticed is when I'm doing this, it's almost like life comes to me. That makes sense. Yeah, that's something I really like. I think when your inner state gets more solid, when it gets more peace with yourself and you find this with people who Meditate and so forth. They say the same thing, but there's something special about love. So I wrote that part, you know, to show people, like, look, I am not. I have not attained any enlightenment with this. I am still a human being. I'm still about a bigger shit show than you probably are. You know, like, I like to try my best, you know, like so. But when I do, look what happens. And let me show you an experience. And that thing that. That experience is fiercely true. I'm not putting my best self out to the world. I'm putting my honest self out to the world. You know, as Joe, you know, you were talking about, like, look, you know, none of us need to share our secrets. You know, the word secrets exist for a reason, but it helps others and helps others know they're not alone and know that there's a path of healing and know that they can heal. And look at this guy. He can do it. I can do it. God, that's so sweet. And so success still comes in monetary ways, like, I mean, publishing numbers or whatever, but it's sweeter. But it's just all. Just you. We've all heard this. Neurons that fire together wire together. So a lot of our beliefs are just old patterns of thoughts that we're just running again and again. And they're like grooves that get stronger and stronger until we think this is a real thing. But really, it's just a groove that we create over our lives. So what I did was I just stumbled upon the groove of all groups, which is a group of love, and just started deepening that groove. And that groove actually overcomes all groove because we're actually wired for it.

A human being is a human feeling. And at any moment in time, you're either running towards a feeling or you're running away from one, no matter what you're doing. As for love, it's not a feeling, it's all of them. True love contains, inside it, the full range of human feelings. And you can use your awareness as a prism to take the white light of true love and break it out into the full spectrum of human emotion. Like a rainbow. When you fall in love for real, your partner becomes a champion for your wildest dreams and a trampoline for your greatness. And it doesn't matter what you've achieved in terms of wealth, impact, success, if you do not feel and experience true love before you die, you are going to be missing out on the most exquisite aspect of being a human being. And your heart will always be yearning to be seen, to be met and to be known.

There's a thing about loving yourself that I actually think this makes you a better human. I think this makes you more caring. I think it creates more compassion, more conscientiousness, more connection. And when you don't have that, you're disconnected from yourself, and you're disconnected from others. And therefore, you're not a very. You're not anywhere near as good of an entrepreneur as you could be.

Okay.

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Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.