How To Stop Obsessing Over Your Ex's Life After A Breakup

If we think that the relationship is our value, then we'll hold on to it. Even if it's torture, even if it's hell on earth. Because we think losing the relationship would mean losing our value. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Love Life podcast with me, Matthew Hussey. Before we get into today's episode, I wanted to let you know that the virtual retreat is coming up fast. Is from June 2nd to the 4th. Three days of immersive coaching with me on turning you into the most confident and powerful you you have ever been in your life. And this is the time to get your space on it before it's too late. Head over to mhvirtualretreat.com to get your ticket. If you like me as a coach, if you like my style and the way I help you overcome your challenges in life, this is your opportunity for you and me to spend three immersive days together, live from wherever you are in the world. Cause it's virtual, so it's super easy to take part. All you need to do is get yourself on board. Go to mhvirtualretreat.com to do that. And now let's get into the episode. I thought I'd come along and talk about something that I was speaking about with a small coaching group in the last week, which was our inability to get over certain people and to still be affected by what they do in their lives. And the example that I used was one of seeing an ex doing well in life. Maybe they found a new relationship, maybe they got a job promotion or their business is doing well. You know, we catch a glimpse on Instagram of something great happening for them. And though we may not like to admit it, there will have been a time, either now or in the past, where we felt a pang of negativity about that we didn't want them to do well. It may be a shameful thing to admit, but we might have been happier to learn they weren't doing well. And I think a big part of that is that we somehow feel like we're still connected to them and that our value derived from being with them. And now that we're not with them, we feel like it's a vote against our stock, against our value, that they didn't want to be with us and now they're doing well. It might have made us feel better about our own stock if we no longer had them, but they were doing badly. But if they're doing well, it makes us feel even more rejected, even more resentful. Even more like we're missing out and that somehow something that was meant for us is somewhere else and that someone else is going to benefit from that. That's the other thing, isn't it? We worry that someone else is going to benefit. Someone else is going to be with my ex. Someone else is going to get the good times, someone else is going to get the love, someone else is going to get the life. And we resent all of this. I like to think about this like a car rental. Worrying about what an ex is doing or how well an ex is doing is like wanting to know how well a car is doing that we already gave back. A relationship that ends is a rental. It was a rental. It wasn't ours. But when we act like it still is ours in some way, like it's still a part of our life, we get upset to learn that it's doing great without us. I made a decision a few years ago that I was not going to make those kinds of comparisons or have those kinds of resentments about how other people were doing. Not just because it's low frequency behavior. But we're not here to talk about what you know righteously, what's high frequency versus low frequency thinking. Because the truth is we all sometimes fall into low frequency thinking. It's hard not to, right? We're humans. But one of the the things that helped me was realizing that even when I've been in a relationship before, my value never came from that person. My value only ever comes from me. And when I'm no longer with a person, I think their life is their life. It has nothing to do with mine. If I was somehow deriving my worth from the life that they had or from who they were, then I was placing my value in something outside of me. And that is a losing game. I heard Tony Robbins recently talking about Warren Buffett and how Warren Buffett said that the greatest investment you can make is in yourself, because it was, it is the one that will pay dividends forever. And I think about that in our love lives, in our work lives too. You know, I have a company and I'm really proud of that company. But make no mistake, I do not see that company as my value. I see it as something that I have built, that I'm proud of. It's valuable, it has value, but it's not my value. My value is, at least in that context, the things that helped build that business, the leadership, the hard work, the creativity, the resource forcefulness, the resilience, the persistence, those things all belong to me, those are values that I have, traits that I have that helped to generate that value. But the organization isn't my value. If I were to lose it tomorrow, or if I were to walk away from it, I would still have my value. And the same is true in a relationship. We may build something of value with someone. I mean, that's what a relationship is, isn't it? It's two people who are building value together. But that value, your value, is not the relationship. Your value is your value. When you leave the relationship, your value remains intact. You didn't lose any of your value when someone walked away. And if we're sitting here saying to ourselves, but the relationship was my value. I liked how much value I had in other people's eyes when they saw me with that person. I felt important by being with that person. I felt special by being with that person. That's honest. If you can be that honest with yourself, that's great. But that then should be a signal, a signal that something is going wrong in the way I'm building my life, in the way I'm building my confidence. If I am putting. If I'm investing in creating the value that is me outside of myself. And a lot of us do that. We, you know, we were raised by parents who took care of us. Maybe they did a good job, maybe they didn't. Or caregivers, if we didn't have direct parents. And at some point, it was our job to go away and build our own value. We were old enough to be responsible for building our own value. And most of us were never taught that it was our job at that point to build our own value. So what we do then is we go looking for value outside of ourselves. We go looking for things that can make us valuable if we get them, whether it's status or a partner or money, whatever can give me a sense that this thing I have gives me value. And we spend our whole lives placing that value outside of ourselves. And that's why we get so terrified of losing things, is because we think, if I lose my money, if I lose my job, if I lose my status, if I lose this impressive partner that I'm with right now, then I lose my value, because that was my value. But we have to start making that key distinction that we can build things of value in our life, like a relationship, a career, a business. But the things that we create value in aren't our value in a way. Those things outside of us, they're only ever rented, like the car. We are the only thing that we are guaranteed to own from now till the day we die. We're the only asset that is always going to be there with us every single day. Relationships can end. Businesses can go under, money can be lost. Even friends and family, we know we can lose them. We are the only asset, the only thing that we will absolutely have for our entire lives. Most people, instead of building that asset, are always looking for some shortcut to value on the outside. And that's part of why we do it, isn't it? Part of why we do it is because we think that if we get with this person that's super charismatic or hot or, you know, powerful, they have something about them. We think that that's like a quick route to feeling valuable, to having value. But shortcuts like that don't work because all it does is make it make us a prisoner to that relationship. We can't lose the relationship because we don't want to lose our value. That's one of the reasons why people stay in toxic relationships for so long, is because even if they're being treated terribly, and let's be clear, if you're being treated terribly by someone that doesn't have value, right, that has a negative value. If anything, there's no value to being around someone who constantly treats us terribly. So why would we stay in a situation where there's no value to it whatsoever? Is because we think that our value is tied to that relationship. Because if we were basing whether to stay or leave on the value of the relationship, we would have left a long time ago. But if we think that the relationship is our value and it's not something that has to have value outside of us, then we'll hold onto it, even if it's torture, even if it's hell on earth, because we think losing the relationship would mean losing our value. We have to start building our own value. And then when we go out into the world, what happens is we don't cling to things that aren't serving us or making us happy. We invest in things where we feel like we're actually getting something back, where we feel like if it's a relationship, that person is investing too. And together we are building something of value. Together, you still have your value on your own, and I still have my value on my own. But together we are building something of value outside of ourselves. That's what a healthy relationship looks like. But you can only go into that in an impartial way when you already have a value of your own. And Like I said, a lot of people, they would rather the shortcut. They would rather get a helicopter to some status or some value by attaching themselves to something on the outside of themselves than to build it themselves. I don't know about you, but for me, in my life, maybe partly is because there's a little bit of a control freak in me, but I always preferred owning to renting. I didn't want to get my value from something on the outside. I wanted to get it from me. I knew people in my life. I still know people in my life whose value comes from who they're hanging out with. Their value comes. I'm not talking in relationships now. I'm talking about in friendships and in social networking. I know people that spend their lives just trying to hang out with the right people. If you're trying to figure out what they do, you don't even really know. Do you know anyone like that? You don't even really know what they do. All you know is that they're always at the party with the important people. They're always in the room. And I always saw that as like a. A really literal representation of. Instead of building your own value, your value is coming from attaching yourself to other people with value. And for me, I always wanted to create that value in myself, even if it was slower, even if it took more time, even if it was harder work, even if the ultimate value that I would achieve would be half of what I would have if I had tried to rub shoulders with people and get my value that way, or tried to date the right person and get value that way, or whatever. I would rather have half of all of it to feel like the value that I have, I own instead of rent. I hope this isn't too abstract. You can send me an email podcast.com to let me know. But this, really. This is. I find this to be a tremendously important concept. And I see it happen all the time with people. I see people who go through their lives trying to rent value or. Or going to places where you can only rent value and then feeling insecure because they don't have that feeling of ownership over it, trying to own it, trying to hold on to the person, trying to stay in with the right crowds, trying to stay at a certain level of status or power, trying to own things that can only be rented, and that's why they never feel insecure, and that's why they stick around in things that don't feel right or where you go, why does that person stay there? They get Treated badly. They don't have respect. They don't have true security. They don't even seem that happy. Why do they stay there? It's because their value is coming from something that can only be rented, but they're trying to own it because they've spent their life placing their value outside of themselves. I'd rather have less and own my house. I'm not talking literally, of course, this is an investment advice, but in your own life, you're a house that you get to own. And with the house that is me, I'd rather own it and build that house and work on the rooms in that house and make it beautiful, make it special. Because that's where I live every day and that's where my value comes from. That's my asset. I don't care about taking a picture in some fancy hotel that I stay in for one night because I saved up and then putting that on Instagram and that being my value because it's not mine. So the next time you find yourself, I told you I started this process or this podcast by telling you that this was going to be about how to move on from an ex and not feel jealous when you see them doing their own thing. But I want you to. This is what I want you to remind yourself of. Your ex is their own person with their own life. Wish them well and let them go. Because their story is not relevant to you anymore. Because it's not your story. The moment the two of you parted ways, their story was no longer your story. It was irrelevant to you. And if you're going, but I feel bad because they're doing well or whatever, that's because in some way you're still trying to borrow value from that person. And it irks you that they're doing well and that you don't have them anymore. But if you say that person was never anything to do with my value, their success was never my success, that has nothing to do with me whatsoever. I'm on my own path. My success is my success and that's it. Period. Their success has nothing to do with me. What they're doing in their life has nothing to do with me because my value doesn't come from that. They were only ever rented. In my relationship with them, it was only ever a rental. Now, what we built together could have been real. We could have owned that together. But if you break up, then that go. They go back to being a rental. And it doesn't matter to you what happens after that, because it was never yours. I Want you to ask yourself if instead of trying to borrow value from elsewhere, you doubled down, tripled down on the investment that is you, what would you do for yourself this year, this week, this month, if you dropped your ego? Because sometimes when we're starting again or when we feel like, oh, my God, I haven't focused on myself and my own value and my own investment in myself in a long time. For way too long, I've been deriving my worth from being in this marriage for what? Way too long, I've been deriving this worth from this company that I have or from these friends that I have, or from my status in society or whatever it is from the people I'm dating. If you've been doing that for a long time, it can feel like starting from zero when you start to invest in yourself again. But let me tell you, the value you build up in yourself, even if it's from nothing, is real. You own it, it's yours. No one can take it away from you. And when that is the case, all of a sudden, it empowers you in your life. You start going into decision making a little more boldly. You go into the room, that date, that job interview, much more boldly because you're actually connected to your value. You're not going on a date secretly going, you're going to be my value if you choose me. So please choose me, because I need to have value. You're going on a date going, I already have value. I've already built my value. I've already invested in the asset that is me. If you and I choose to build something together, that's awesome. I'm excited to see what we build. But if we don't, I walk away and I have all of my value to take with me. What would you do to invest in yourself if you took this approach? Because this investing in yourself is the antidote to caring what your ex is doing, to being obsessed with them and their life still, even though they're not around anymore. And for anything else in life. You know the comparison that we make with friends who we think are doing better than us or people in life that we think are further ahead than us or the fears we have about losing something in our life when we're afraid of what might happen to us in our job or our business, when we invest in ourselves, we safeguard ourselves against any loss in our life. And if we're too afraid right now, it's because we haven't been investing in ourselves. That can be reversed in a heartbeat. If you make a decision to invest in yourself today. Now, for anyone who wants to do that with me in June, from the 2nd to the 4th, I have my virtual retreat that I am running for three days. And every single person who's coming to that event is going to be investing in themselves for three days. The people that are already signed up have made a commitment to build the asset that is them, and they're going to come out of that program with a different level of confidence, with a different level of invincibility, because they'll be building the asset they own instead of deriving value from an asset that they can only ever rent. And if you want to do that for yourself, this is your moment to do that with me. I'm going to give you a link right now. I don't want you to leave the site of this podcast without going to this link. And do me this favorite, at least check it out. We have a team of people, Lottie and Michael, who speak to everyone who comes to this program. They talk to you about your goals, help you clarify your vision for the year, what's holding you back. And they'll spend roughly 20 to 30 minutes with you just talking about you, your life, the asset that is you. Speak with them, get some clarity. And if at the end of that phone call, you feel like this is the investment you want to make in yourself, come join me in June from the 2nd to the 4th, and we'll invest in you together. The link for that is MH virtual retreat dot com. Go there, check it out, book your appointment, and I look forward to seeing you on that program. This will be a decision that you thank yourself for for the rest of your life, but you have to take that step. Thank you for listening to the podcast. I want to read a review before we go because we haven't actually read any reviews in a minute now. So I'm literally going to pause, pull up the podcast on Apple and see what the latest review is. Jameson, let's hope it's a positive one, because, you know, it is a risk. No? And they're usually positive, aren't they? Here we go. So this one is from amuse23. This show always has a message that speaks to my doubts and insecurities and redirects my perspective to a more positive growth mindset. I have saved so many episodes to listen to again because of their uplifting view. Thank you for all you do, and I look forward to the next episode. That's beautiful. Thank you. Amuz23. You know, I was on a hike literally a couple of days ago with Audrey and there was someone who saw me. She had her headphones in on the hike and she pointed and she said, I'm listening to you right now. She was literally listening to the Love Life podcast as she approached me on the hike, which must have been a very surreal and weird experience. That's the sort of experience that makes you think you're living in a simulation. We also have one from bombshell 70 here who says I love this episode. I couldn't agree more. Thank you for posting it out there. I don't know what episode you mean. Bombshell, but thank you for leaving a review. We really do appreciate it and we appreciate all of you listening every week to the Love Life Podcast. I look forward to speaking to you in the next episode. Do not forget to go to that link MH virtual retreat.com to go and book your appointment to speak to either Lottie or Michael about the program. Remember, it's on June 2nd to the 4th. That is coming up very, very fast. So go do that now before the moment passes you by. There is not another virtual retreat this year. Do not delay your progress by missing it. We'll see you soon. Thanks everyone. Sam.