Matthew Hussey

So you can tell yourself, that was the love of my life, and I'm never gonna find anyone like that again. That's a story that will keep you chronically unhappy and chronically heartbroken. I meet people who are 20 years later still heartbroken about someone who left. You've developed a story that's just not true. But the story is keeping you in that place of chronic pain. You can grieve and be disappointed that someone wasn't the one, But that is different from grieving as though they were the one. If you stay locked in that story, it becomes your only story. There's so many stories waiting for the telling, whose stories begin precisely where your feet are now. And as long as you're stuck in that old story, you never actually open yourself up to what's possible. I think the world is like full of a kind of fake vulnerability right now. But people, and I did it like when I was dating in my 20s.

I- We're totally gonna talk about that because I love that you- well, it's so funny if you- were so honest about all that.

Well, if you had like said to me in my 20s, Are you a vulnerable open person? I would have been like, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

For sure. I didn't know that I wasn't. It took me until later to realize just how much of myself I held back. And just how many of the vulnerable stories I told were really like hero's journey stories. And everyone does it, especially in the media or in people who have written books or self-development or whatever. There's always the hero's journey of I was here. And it's usually some version of I was hideous, broke, doing terribly, all of that coming from squalor or difficult situation. And then I did all of these things and now I'm here. And that's not really vulnerability.

It's just your story.

And it's a story of how awesome you are, really. It's true.

It's the before and after picture with your makeover, right? You're like, I was here, but I don't care 'cause I'm here now. I'm not even insecure about this anymore.

No, 'cause it was all the way back there. And the further back, the better. Because then it's really the contrast of, and I'm the hero today. And I realized how much in my own love life, my stories that I told were hero's journey stories. They weren't, and by the way, in business too, right? Professionally and personally. And how much they were never really stories that I was afraid to share because I thought, if I share this, you might change your opinion of me in ways I can't predict. You might abandon me. You might not like me. You might think less of me. And those usually they tend to be to do with either past shame and regrets and things that you haven't really processed. Because we've got the mistakes we've processed, right? We've also got mistakes and shame and things we feel bad over that we've not processed and we're just like, fracture myself and present this to the world and just hope I never have to lift the lid on that box. And there are also the present day flaws and weaknesses and things you're still wrestling with and things that you're still struggling with. And we're far less inclined to want to talk about those. And it's, I don't want to get too meta, but I kind of, I've spent like 15 years of my life in the self-development.

Yeah.

World.

The law.

And that's a long time.

It's a really long time.

It's a long time.

That's a lot of deep diving. 17 years at this point. And I, and so I'm so well kind of connected to like the fabric of that and, and also the kind of, I suppose in some ways the history of it, the evolution of it, like what it's, where it's come from and where it's going, where it's been. And I'm kind of fascinated by... There's actually a lot of parallels, I think, between the way that experts position themselves in those things and how we date, how every person dates. Because it's, you know, we want to position ourselves as like the expert who knows what they're talking about and has it all together. And when you talk about vulnerability, it's like, no, no, no. This is something I used to do. I used to have this weakness. I used to have this imperfection. We don't like talking about the things that we're struggling with today.

Currently, like in things that haven't been vetted, processed, cleared, and corrected.

Correct.

Like, you don't want to talk about the stuff that you're in the shit with. still.

-Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I've been through many moments like that in my life. And sometimes rightly, you know, I talk about in this book, I talk about my journey with chronic physical pain. And there was a time in my life, not so long ago, where I hadn't figured it, you know, like I was in such a dark, dark place with it.

-Wow.

-That I couldn't, I remember saying to my publisher, this was even before I was in the process of writing this book. My publisher is a friend of mine, and her name is Karen Rinaldi. And I said to her, I am suffering so badly, but I also have this weird feeling like if I talked about it, it might help some people. And I remember her saying to me at the time, I think that you're.

So.

You'Re so raw with it right now that if you share it now, you might open up kind of something.

She afraid it was gonna like depreciate your sort of stock within the world that you were in.

No, I think she, 'cause she's a very like be vulnerable type person, but I think she was more afraid of what it would do to me. To suddenly have everyone asking me about something that I hadn't in any way.

And we're talking about physical now. -Yeah, yeah. No, it was like a totally different subject off of what you normally talk. You're not talking about physicality. It's more emotions.

-No, it was emotions, but it was like it took me over emotionally. That was the interesting part about it, is that it got so bad that I was I thought at one point, like, oh, my life is over. Like, my life is ruined because I had this combination of symptoms to do with, you know, one of them was tinnitus and I had constant ringing in my ears that never went away. And then on top of that, I had real, like, throbbing head and ear pain that also felt like dizziness and also felt like feeling off all the time. And I The combination of vertigo almost. I would Google vertigo a lot because I felt like it was close to vertigo, but it was also it had other symptoms too, and it didn't have the feeling like I was going to fall. But it was a physical pain behind my eye and in my neck and in my head and in my ear that was both that and then this loud ringing that never went away. And I got to a point where I was like, oh, my life is never going to be this. I'm never going to... I genuinely thought I'm never going to experience true joy again.

Because you're so uncomfortable.

I'm so... Every waking moment is just permeated by feeling in pain and... and I remember going to a therapist at the time. The reason I started therapy was because I was, I was like, I don't know what to do. I'm a Taipei person who's always been able to, like, work my way out of any problem. And. And I did everything. I mean, every treatment, every place you could go to, to try something, be experimental, do this, do the traditional route, do the non-traditional I did. everything and nothing shifted it.

Did you give up hope?

Yes.

Because how dark did those give up hope get to?

Really bad. Really, really bad. It got to a point where I said to my therapist at the time, I have made a decision that I am just going to live for everyone else. because I'm not happy and I don't think I can ever be happy again as long as I feel this. And I can't change. I can't do anything that's changing this. And every time I would get my hopes up that something would improve it, and then it didn't, I would momentarily I would feel better almost because I'd be like, someone would tell me about something like, even beforehand, someone would tell me about a new thing.

Yeah.

And I'd be like, oh, my God. Like, this is it. This actually feels like they're describing my symptoms, and this is the thing that helped them. And so. And I would, like, get. I would have this little, almost a bit of a high, like, and it kind of. And I say this in the book, like, sort of not unlike someone who has. Because chronic pain is chronic pain, whether it's physical or emotional, they end up doing the same thing.

And. And.

In people's love lives, loneliness becomes chronic pain. And the unmet desire to have love in one's life is a kind of chronic pain. And every date with someone you like is a new moment of hope where you think- that's true.

This is it.

This is it. And it gives you this momentary elation and you could talk to your friends and you want to share it because you're like, oh my God, this feels like I might be getting off this ride that I've been on that I am not enjoying or, you know, finally I'm gonna find love and it's the thing I've wanted my whole life and I haven't found it and I'm finally this has the hope, the promise of it and it's why it's so tremendously disappointing and so can be so tremendously heartbreaking when something doesn't work out, even if it's something that, you know, we sometimes shame ourselves because we get heartbroken over a person that was in our lives for a month. But it was never about that person. It was about this feeling that I might have found this thing that I've been looking for. I might have found a relief to this pain, to this situation. And I would feel that and then I would do a treatment, I would do something and it didn't work and I would crash and I would crash hard. And I said to this therapist, you know, after trying so many things, I was like, I'm just gonna live for other people because I'm never gonna be happy again so long as I have this and this doesn't seem like it's going anywhere.

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Out bear in mind I hadn't been I hadn't had it for months at this point I was like three years in four years in five years in you start to go like I'm throwing resources at this and nothing's making a difference and.

And.

He looked at me and he said, that is hallmark depression, what you're experiencing right now. He said, for you, it's circumstantial because it has its origins in original, in physical pain, but it's a distinction without a difference at a certain point, right? Because you're still, depression is depression. When you're there, it is whatever its origin is, It's there. And so one of the big, this is like a, we've ended up coming an interesting way into all of this, but this is one of the big messages of this book for me. And anyone who wants to find love, like I think this is going to be one of the best resources in the world for people who want to find love. And I really believe that. And I'm so excited for anyone who wants to find love to read this from the perspective of being able to get that in their lives and create that. But it's also a book that's going to surprise people in a lot of ways because they're going to find that there are some very, very deep things that it's going to help people on. Because that, what I realized with my chronic pain is that I had the chronic pain. I had the, I had the pain, the sensations. which were not good. But then I had my relationship with the sensations. And the thing that was causing me an amount of pain that was intolerable was my relationship with these sensations, not the sensations themselves. The sensations themselves really, really sucked. But, and there was no getting around that. But what would happen is this cascade, anytime I would feel the pain, which was all the time, you know, I'd wake up, I'd feel it, and it would send me into story mode.

-Sure, sure. Now you're bringing the emotional pain into it too. So now you have physical and emotional pain, and you spiraled.

-That'S exactly right, which is exactly what happens in a heartbreak.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

There's the, you know, if you think of heartbreak, it's a sensation in the body. We feel it. But what makes that sensation 10 times worse is all of the story that we attach to that sensation.

I mean, like, I remember listening, it was something that you said after a breakup many years ago that was really hard for me. And It was, and it was like one of the most helpful things. You said something along the lines of that the apology will never match the pain that you're at. Because the experience was so bad, because you had built it up, you wanted this thing, and nobody can say, I'm sorry, or give you a reason that will validate or eliminate the amount of pain you have. Nothing will reach it. The pain is so much higher because of the whole story around it. There's so much more to it than just the thing that happened. There's the dream dying. There's, like, essentially death that needs to happen. And so, yeah, the stories are definitely a tricky part of everything that we do in our life, whether it's our family or work or relationships or, you know, this relationship you had to the pain. So what was your navigation out? I'm so fascinated to know, like, I'm assuming you're not. You've created a lot of solutions for this.

Yeah. The biggest thing I'll say, the headline is I found peace with it. Even before it, now it has really come down and occasionally it comes back, but it's really, really come down to a level where I don't think about it. anymore other than to share my experience. But before it even came down, I found a level of peace with it that changed my relationship with it in a drastic ways. And I. I went on my own journey to figure out, like, what are tools that help me with this? And I would just grab from from everywhere. It wasn't one source. It was just, it became my, like, collection of things that really, really helped me, you know, to, to list a couple. Someone said to me, I remember being, I was working with a coach at the time, and I remember this coach said to me, I, I got on the call, and again, this was in one of my typically despairing days, and I One of the things I was lamenting on this particular day was the fact that like, certain, well, basically alcohol all triggered all of my symptoms in a much worse way. So, and then certain many of the food. I went to a doctor and he said to me, I need you to cut out sugar, salt. Joy.

Joy.

Spicy foods.

Joy.

And caffeine. Oh, the best joy.

Which was, by the way, if you're.

Like, that's the one, like caffeine is one of those things that's like when you've given up everything else, you're like.

At least I still have coffee. Exactly. Anytime I've come into the health realm, 'cause look, I can relate to you on a lot of levels of, I have been on my own health journey that kind of lasted about a total of five years, but like a really hardcore for a couple of years. And the one thing that I was.

Like, I just don't care.

I'm gonna drink the coffee. Give me something.

Something, like something that, because I, at least just a nod to my more hedonistic days. Something, like a cup of coffee can't be the thing that you're taking away from me. It's like a flat white in the morning. You can't even have that anymore. And so when this doctor told me I had to get rid of all these things, I was like, I had one doctor prescribe me antidepressants. and I had one doctor tell me, you can't have any of these things anymore. Salt, spicy food. I'm a foodie. I love food. Oh, and when he told me I can't have any of these things, I was like, well, I might actually need the antidepressants now, because, like, this is. What else do I have left?

I thought that was bad. It's gonna get a lot worse.

Yeah.

Like, whatever small joys I have are just being taken away. And I remember being on a call with this coach and saying, I can't even, like, like, I can't have anything. I can't have a sip of wine with dinner. I can't have. And she goes, look, we don't know how this is going to be a year from now. We don't know how any of these. Well, we don't know how you're going to react to things five years from now or even six months from now. All we know right now is that there are certain things in this moment that when you have them, they seem to be triggering. these pain responses for you. So let's lose the ceremony and just focus on removing some of these things for now. And then when things adjust, let's see what we can change or add back in. And it really, there's something about the phrase lose the ceremony.

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That was really, it became very important to me because she was like, saw me almost doing this ritualistic burning of everything I love in life. And being like, I can never have this. I can never have a sip of a great wine again. I can never eat this food. And she was like, Let's lose the ceremony. Right now, we're just treating the problem that we have in this moment. And then, so the first tool for me was, okay, lose the ceremony.

And.

You can apply that to emotional pain and physical pain. What's the ceremony that I'm doing right now that is creating, almost acting as if I know where everything is going to be and I'll never meet anyone like that again. I'm never gonna find a love like that. You know, we don't know that. We don't know that. All we know right now is that you're in a lot of pain. So let's just focus on making you feel better right now. But this whole, I'm never gonna be that happy again. I'm never gonna find love again. That's the ceremony. That's the burning.

Yeah.

That we need to like take ourselves away from. And then the second tool was everything changes. It, everything changes. One of the things that I learned with my pain is that it shifted at different times. So there were times where it was a nine out of 10, there were times where it was an eight out of 10 or a seven. And those two points of difference actually could mean the difference between me staying in bed all day and being able to go out and experience a little joy. or connect with someone. And anytime I would feel my pain was at a six, I'd be like, I almost didn't think about it.

I was gonna say, I almost didn't notice.

Yeah.

For like the last 20 minutes, I almost didn't think about it. And sometimes, like on those glorious days where I'd get an hour where I felt like for the last hour I didn't notice or I didn't think about it until someone asked me again, like, How are you feeling? How's your head? and I'd be like, oh, yeah, you're right. It sucks. You know, like, I would have an hour, and. And then my mission became, we'll make more of those. Like, if I got one hour, then it. There's a. There's, like, a crack in the door there. There's a possibility there. Let me make more of those. And, you know, I I I feel like that with all emotional pain, too. It's. There's a moment where your anxiety didn't bother you for the last hour, and it's like, well, that there's. There's. that instead of seeing I was anxious 23 hours of the day, but not on the 24th, and seeing that as a loss, I look at that one hour.

It's like, look what I can do now.

Yeah, we did that for an hour. We were able to manage anxiety for an hour or heartbreak for an hour. I felt better. I didn't think about that person for the last hour.

How much of a story can we develop for ourselves and how much do we need to put aside or what is the antidote for the storytelling that we like to do for ourselves around pain or painful things or emotions or relationship or something we're excited about? I'm almost thinking of the excited. It almost feels like it's in the excitement and the build up that we have the crash, you know, that keeps us on the roller coaster. So how do we temper that excitement? excitement we get about something and not build a story around it that could possibly leave us heartbroken.

It's a great question. Stories work in both directions. We have really positive stories and really negative stories. At the end of, if you've got someone in your life that you lost.

And.

The heartbreak isn't just a temporary heartbreak, it's become chronic. It's because the story has taken on a meaning that isn't necessarily true, but that meaning has taken root in a really unproductive way. So you can tell yourself, that was the love of my life, and I'm never going to find anyone like that again. That was the one. and they got away. That's a story that will keep you chronically unhappy and chronically heartbroken. I meet people who are 20 years later still heartbroken about someone who left. And that's a certain point. You've developed a story that's just not true. But the story is keeping you in that place of chronic pain. you can grieve and be disappointed that someone wasn't the one, but that is different from grieving as though they were the one. That's a very different thing. So, it's not to say you shouldn't grieve. My friend David Kessler said, Grief is a change. He's one of the foremost experts in the world on grief, and he said, Grief is a change you didn't want.

Yeah, exactly. Every time.

When you feel that, you can grieve that the future you thought would happen or the present that you thought you'd be in isn't the one you're in. But if you stay locked in that story, it becomes your only story. And that's a tremendous shame because there's so many stories waiting for the telling. whose stories begin precisely where your feet are now. And as long as you're stuck in that old story, you never actually open yourself up to what's possible. There are people that grieve the parent they never had, or the relationship with their parent that ended, or something that's you know, deeply, deeply painful. It feels like almost an existential loss that I look around and other people have had this and I've never had that, or I lost it, or... And that's okay to grieve that, 'cause there was something you needed that you didn't get, and it's okay to grieve that. It's necessary, in fact. But at a certain point, your grief robs you of the other stories that are available. What are the 1000 other ways that will present themselves to you in your life that you could actually have a corrective relationship with another person, a parent figure, whether it's a mother figure or a father figure. There are so many of them available to you. Life is a buffet of these corrective experiences, and you're missing them. You're missing them because you're locked into this idea that this story is the one. story of your life, and it's not. And the more you start adapting and changing the possibilities ahead of you, the more you start to kind of reclaim and invite in all these other realities that are still waiting for you. And I. I find that just for me, that's, like, wildly exciting.

Liberating.

Oh, my God.

There's so much on the horizon. It's like anything's possible at that point in time. So is it in the grief that we actually build the story or is it in the excitement of something that we generate the story? And then when the grief happens, when the ending happens, then all of a sudden the crash comes. Meaning, do you understand the, like I'm trying to ask, is it actually in the devastation of something where all of a sudden we develop this story? or was it because we developed one in the first place that was unhealthy or unreasonable, or the fact that we are looking to someone else for the way we feel versus generating it within ourselves? Because if it was self-generated, we would still be ourself in the end without them.

Yes, and we are always kind of, if we're not living on an island, we're living in relation to other people. Right.

So.

And we are all the time.

All the time in friendships, in relationships.

And.

And there are sometimes relationships that, through no fault of our own, end in betrayal or someone really, truly misled us about what the potential of something was. And we weren't mistaken. We were just. We were listening to what we were being told and following what we were seeing. And then the rug got pulled out from under us. And so it would almost be an act of tremendous cynicism to go into every situation going, I'm never going to...

Right, that's a sad existence too.

Yeah, I'm never gonna allow myself to see the possibilities.

Fall. I know that's always a little bit of a controversial, but like take the fall in love or like get whisked away or dream of something. that would be sad to lose that aspect of exciting things, whether it be a treatment that we think is gonna make us better, or a person that tells us something, or that we imagine into the future about them. It would be sad to lose that.

Yeah, because we're making space for possibilities. And not just possibilities, but realities. A marriage is that two people have decided on a vision for what they want to build together. And you have to be an active participant in that. And that involves believing in what the two of you have agreed upon. So you have to do that to some extent. I think it's very important. And one of the things I talk about a lot in the book is the importance of how quickly we arrive at these stories and some of the misguided ways we arrive at these stories and some of the kind of parts of ourselves that we have to be very wary of.

Yeah.

That are incredible writers. Oh, yeah. I've come up with a story in.

About five minutes when I meet someone. Some really, really good Storyteller. Yeah, that's right. And it's.

Our imagination can do a. Can do an awful lot, and then we forget that it's our imagination, and we start by, you know, we start looking for evidence just to. kind of glue it onto.

Totally.

And so much of the stories we create originates in trauma and in the things that have in the way that we received love growing up, which for many of us was really not great. And if you were brought up being taught you had to earn love and be certain things in order to earn love, you had to put up with some really bad things in order to get love or that love meant, you know, five days of your parent ignoring you and then one afternoon where they did something really nice for you and you felt safe in that moment and you're like, this feels so good, this is love.

And now the birth of an anxious attachment exists.

Correct.

Yeah. And now someone doesn't text you for five days and you feel like you're gonna die. And then when they finally text you, having not thought about you for the last five days, but they say, what's up? you're like, that's good enough.

Oh, my God. I'll take that bread crumb.

Yeah.

I really like this person.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, that's, that's a, that's not our fault. Like, it really isn't. It's not, we're not crazy. It's like we, we're not crazy. It's not when we, when people create stories, we're very quick to be like, that person's nuts. Like, you can't imagine what they just, what they thought was going on when, but it's, we've all We've all been raised in different situations with different survival mechanisms, thinking love is different things. And then running that model over and over again in our lives in a way that is so painful. We didn't decide, someone didn't not text us for a day, and we went, you know what I want to do today? I want to get impossibly anxious about this. I want to ruin my day. I want to not focus at work to the extent that my boss thinks something's wrong with me and thinks I'm a shitty employee. I want to be a terrible friend today because I can't focus on any of the needs of anyone in my life when I'm this depressed and this down and this anxious and feel this unsafe. I really just want to go through hell for the next 24 hours because until this person next texts me, no one makes that decision. Our nervous system just responds. responds to something. And we may not know why. We may have never done that excavation into our past and why we are the way we are. But at the very least, know that that was not a choice and that deserves compassion.

You were programmed that way.

Yeah, you were programmed. Essentially, your body was being programmed that way at a time where you weren't choosing your programming.

Correct.

And so, it deserves ultimate compassion.

Yeah.

And Oh, there's something going on with me. And then, of course, what happens is the stories, so many stories originate out of that place of wanting someone to be right. If something feels familiar, so even if it feels like hell, in a weird way, it's out, it's what's known to us, and we gravitate to what's known. And so, we create a lot of story around those situations. This person is They're the most incredible person. I've never felt like this before. That must make them really, really important. And then, of course, when that person disappears, how heartbroken we feel has nothing to do with how important that person really is. It has everything to do with the story that we've created as a result of that nervous system response. There's a whole chapter in the book I wrote called Question youn Instinct. which is kind of in some ways controversial because people like saying, Trust your instincts. But your instincts, you know, I have a boxing coach who once told me, like, your instincts can get you killed. When in the boxing ring, when someone throws a punch at you, if you're not trained, your instinct is to blink. That's an instinct. Someone throws a punch, you go like this. For sure. You go blind at the very time you need to see.

Yep, dead.

And that's when you get hurt, is, oh, my instinct was to blink instead of block. In a riptide, the current pulls you out and your instinct is to swim back to shore as fast as you can. But if you swim against the current in a riptide, you might drown. You might have to go against your instincts and swim parallel a further way out so that you can then come back in easier waters. That's not... Instinct won't tell you to do that. Training will tell you to do that. And so what we start to learn is our instincts aren't always bad. Sometimes our instincts are very good. But there are also other instincts that became wired in us at a time when they were firing wrong because of what we were taught to respond to or be okay with. or think is love, and they're still firing wrong now. So we have to question those instincts and start to develop some new and better instincts that will lead us towards real love, real relationships, instead of people who continuously hurt.

I feel like I know what you're saying. There's a certain way that something's going down and you feel a certain way, or you want to do a certain thing, or you run the same program with the next person, right? How do you, like, what's the rewiring or the reprogramming like? Like, what's that actually feel like when you're doing it?

I have a chapter in the book called How to Rewire youe Brain.

There you go, yes, exactly.

And I'm, like, obsessed with this chapter because it's, until we learn to rewire our brain for taking us towards happiness. Our bad instincts can consistently take us towards hellish experiences. And then we just think we're broken.

It's just the default programming. So you don't even know you're doing it.

No, no. And you don't even realize their patterns necessarily. You're just running these patterns over and over again in your life. And I, like, I, I give an example in the book. I'll come on to the how to rewire your brain. But, like, I think it's, it's good for everyone to think about this. I use a race car example in the book where I talk about the, is it Mario Andretti?

Yep.

And he, you know, he said, don't focus on the wall. Focus the car, you know, when you're driving the car, focus on where you want the, focus on where you want the car to go.

Oh, when I was young, my dad, like, if I turned around and when I was racing go-karts to look and see where the cars go-karts were behind me, he would yell, Stop looking back. And the same thing, I mean, I thought of that all the way into racing IndyCar and NASCAR. If I would look at my mirrors too much and someone was right behind me, I would focus. I would be like, I give myself three laps and I'm not going to look at my mirror. And undoubtedly, I'd gap the car behind me because I stayed looking forward.

So it's 100% true. This is the only podcast I'm going to do about this book where I get to have this conversation with someone who really knows what they're talking about. You know, Mario Andretti said, Don't look at, look where you want the car to go. Don't look at the wall, right? And the wall, for me, took on this really profound meaning because I would start to think about in my life, where do I always look for the wall? When you're looking for a wall, you will find it.

Oh, yeah.

There's a, There's a story in the book of me being in Japan with my brothers, being in a bar and finding the wall for myself.

What was that?

I grew up in different ways. I grew up with a lot of feelings of a lack of safety. It came from different places and I talk about some of them in the book in a more personal way than perhaps I have in the past, but it really generated this feeling in me that there's danger around the corner all the time. There's always like a... You always have to be vigilant.

And.

It would stop me from relaxing when I was out with people I loved. because I would be like in protect them instead.

You couldn't let your guard down.

Instead of having fun, you always say- Instead of having fun, you always say- I was just, and it's not I could never have fun, it's just that that hyper vigilance was triggered really easily for me. So there was always a feeling of like, my brothers are relaxing and having fun, but I'm on edge. And it wasn't, again, it's not a conscious thing.

Totally.

Not going, let me have a worse time right now.

No, it's your ego protecting you because there was something that happened when you were that you needed to protect yourself. And now it goes, we just don't want the worst thing in the world to happen. So we're going to activate this program of vigilance to make sure that we don't end up there again.

Yeah, me and anyone I love. So like that was like this PSA going off in my head all the time. We're not safe. Everyone is potentially in danger all the time. And we need to be watching ourselves. And guys, why the hell aren't you watching out? Now I'm angry at you because I'm like, you,'re not vigilant enough.

Of course.

You're just carefree having a nice time.

Of course, because we judge what we deny. And so like you deny yourself that ability to relax. So you're gonna judge it in someone else when they're doing what you were like, I can't do that.

That's exactly right.

So you can't either.

Yeah.

And so I remember being in this bar and my brother is like doing karaoke. He's like singing Hey Ya. On the karaoke machine, missing half the words. And this guy, by the way, my brothers do not need my protection. Both of them are bigger than me. One of them's like 6'2 the other.

One'S 6'4 you- do tons of episodes with one of your brothers, right?

Steven, yeah. But they do just fine, you know? But me, like, I go, I'm the oldest brother, so I go straight into like protection mode and there was this guy, there's another Westerner, Constantly looking at my brother and I could feel like he had a mean look in his eye and he was constantly looking over, constantly looking over. And in my head, I'm like, this guy's minutes away from doing something unpredictable. And eventually, by the way, now I'm telling myself a story of who this person is, of what they're about to do, of how it's going to go wrong tonight. Story after story after story after story.

And why you can't have fun.

Why I can't have fun. Great for you guys that you can just sit there and have fun.

I got it.

Yeah, I'm not allowed, I can't do this. And part of the reason I can't do this is because you're not doing it. It's like, so it's all so much story in my head. And the funny thing was the woman running the bar, she knew who I was. She had said hi to me earlier because she was like, I watch your videos. Fan, I love all of your stuff. So this is even more embarrassing in a way because it was like, I'm on show, but there's this guy who keeps looking and eventually I walked over to him. So now I'm not even waiting, I'm.

Just, I'm now- oh, you're on, you're.

Like- this is the wall.

You've gone down the pier.

Yeah, and you're the wall and I've seen you and now I'm going over and I went over and I was like, in a not very calm, like in my head I was totally calm, and I was like, Hey, everything's cool. I didn't. I was like, Listen, if there's an issue, we can take care of it. But, and by the way, I'm not-.

He's like, what the hell is this?

That's not me. That's like not me. I'm not someone who, like, confrontation is the last thing that I want. I don't enjoy it. I don't want it. All I want is to have a peaceful, loving time with my brothers. That's it. And yet, here I am, precipitating the very thing that I want the least in the world. Not just inviting it, going over to it.

Of course.

And I said this and he's kind of like stood up and then all of a sudden, the bar owner, she came running out and was like, hey, like she saw it, like instantly saw it. She was like, you over there, you over there. And I remember my brother Stephen comes up to me, he goes, What are you doing? And I went, you don't understand.

Because the only thing worse than going over to him and being confrontational, which is the last thing you want, is an actual fight. That's the last thing. So you are trying to, you're trying to like hedge your bets that you don't want to get there.

Yes.

And you'll make it, but you'll make it worse.

Yeah.

To make sure it doesn't happen the worst.

Yeah, that's exactly the very worst.

Yeah. Yeah.

It reminds me, I'll come back to this, but it reminds me there was a woman who I coached who was really, really afraid of getting hurt and had been through a lot. And for her abandonment was like, that was her wall. This guy she was dating, she was having a really great time with him. A lot of stories with me start with people saying, this guy's really. I really like this person, but. And then they'll tell me a bunch of heinous things about this person and the way they're behaving.

Yeah.

This one didn't have any of that. This one just had. We've had a great time, and he's a great guy, and he's done nothing to kind of, you know, nothing untoward, nothing. He's just. We've just had a great time together. But he had a barbecue. This was early in the dating process. he had a barbecue with his friends one Saturday and he didn't invite her. And it really hurt her. And it really activated all of that core abandonment wound that she had. And so she texted him during the barbecue. She wasn't going to, right? Because she was like, I screw him. He didn't invite me. But then eventually she couldn't help herself. She was like, why didn't you invite me? like, sent him a text and he said, I'm so sorry. Like, it was just, I hadn't seen these friends in a long time. I was looking forward to hanging out with them. And can I give you a call this evening? And she said, don't bother, which is, again, like her, like, I'm gonna protect myself.

Right.

Because the worst is getting totally abandoned. So that. So she's willing to go that far to make sure she doesn't end up in the worst.

With a guy she likes who has actually been good to her so far. And by the way, whose response to her saying, why didn't you invite me? Was not in any way dismissive was, When I get free, let me call you.

Yeah.

And we all do this in some way in our life. All of us have our thing. All of us have our thing.

So she said, Don't bother. And then every day that he then didn't call her, She said, See, I was right.

Exactly.

When she told him not to call. And by the way, he's also within his rights to feel like early in the dating process, Oof, I might give this a wide berth because if he's coming from a healthy place and what he's seeing is an unhealthy behavior, he could be forgiven for saying, I don't know if I want to sign up for this. You know, it might not be.

She's almost.

She's almost creating the story that she's made up in her head. And that's a danger, too, of, like, the story that we have.

We.

A good or a bad one. We can go find evidence of it. I've absolutely been guilty of looking for evidence of a fear or suspicion or an exciting thing I'm hoping for.

And this is like, I. what I say in that part is you, like I did in that bar, you, if you're not careful, you won't see your experience as your reality in this moment or your perceived reality. You'll just think that's people. You have to be very careful of allowing your wall to become your world where you now no longer differentiate between the two. And it's just like, oh, like in my case, the world is inherently unsafe everywhere all the time. And that's something I had to realize about myself and go, because I would think to myself, why don't my brothers just come back, having gotten into trouble every time they go out? When they just are not looking, they're like, Are they not paying attention?

They're not paying attention. Like, I see trouble every time we go out. How do they not?

How do they come home alive at.

The end of the So then how did you fix this? How did you actually get to the point where you could now have a much more rational relationship with safety? And what did that feel like?

For me, curiosity is a magical word. Because belief is a very strong word and it carries a lot of weight and it's a very heavy weight to move. If you just tried to take on a new belief that I am safe. Just like it's not, we're not really built to just like adopt a new belief out of nowhere when we've been carrying this old belief for so long. Sure.

Well, that reprogramming could take a very long time to, because you don't believe it, right?

You don't believe it. And it is, you know, just telling someone believe something different is a recipe for inadequacy. Because you feel like I must be doing it wrong. Because everyone just says believe and I can't just believe.

Right.

Everything in my body is telling me, this is true, this is true, this is true. As a coach, I've never found it very productive to just try to get someone to believe something different. But curiosity is like a gateway drug to a new belief because all curiosity requires is a little humility. And the humility is, is everyone having the same experience I am? And if the answer is no, Then you go, well, what's going on there? I don't know what it is. I don't know who's right, who's wrong. I just know that other people aren't all feeling this. And there's something different happening here. There was a time in my life where I was more of a jealous person. And my cousin and his partner, they're not jealous people. And I remember sitting with them and just being curious. Why don't you get jealous?

Yeah.

Like, what's going on there?

Do you not care?

Yeah.

No, no, no. We care deeply. Oh my God, it's the love of my life.

Huh.

So, okay. But so if you went out and then this happened and they did that, what would happen? How would you feel about that? I just think that it was blah, blah, blah. Like they were having a nice time and I want them to have a really nice time. So like, I would hear all of this and I'd be like, whoa.

Right.

They think they have a completely different structure to their thinking around this thing.

And.

And when it was people I respected or people whose opinions mattered to me, or they had a relationship that I really valued and thought, that's an amazing, strong relationship. And then they had a different relationship, let's say, with jealousy. I go, There's a whole other reality than the one that I've been steeped in, that I've thought is just reality. But there's a whole other one out there. So I would get intensely curious about other people and that curiosity might lead me to just try doing something different. So if I'd never been vulnerable, truly vulnerable before, it might lead me to actually share something about myself just to say, let me just run the experiment. What happens if I just try doing something a little different? If I share something before I'm quite ready or something that I think doesn't put me in the best light, what happens? And then when you try something new, it creates a new result. And that result might be good, it might be bad, it might be somewhere in between. the important thing is it's just different. It's different from the result you've been getting because the moment you get a different result, which the results are often surprising when you do something a little different, it's that it's a weird thing. It's like Inception. It says a different thing happening is possible. So a new belief arrives, which is just the belief that other realities are possible. It doesn't mean you know how to create the reality you want. It just is the belief that other realities are possible. And that for me is like a miraculous step.

Oh, it doesn't have to feel like this?

No, it's like I haven't been living in the world. I've been living in my world. And there are so many different ways to live. There are so many different ways to experience life. I have been lodged in this one thinking that that's reality, and it's not reality. I can literally do a different thing, and a different thing will happen, and that opens up the entire playing field for what is possible in my life. I know I struggled a lot with trust, and I would almost have this association that if I gave, gave it.

To him, I'd take an advantage. Oh, exactly, right?

Yeah.

And then the moment I learned like, well, let me just try giving without expecting, let me just try, you know, not worrying about whether it's gonna come back or if someone's gonna take advantage of me because I gave, I mean, just do that. And it became a transformative thing in my life to do that because I realized slowly, slowly, slowly, oh, it's okay. And by the way, again, I'm only using myself as examples here because I want people to, this can be so small and granular that you can miss the big wins that are held in the little tiny things if you just change little things along the way. But like, our mutual friend Lewis Howes, I remember watching him 10 years ago, I met Lewis. And I remember watching Lewis behave differently with people than I did. Like he would just kind of, like he's just someone, he's a big extrovert firstly, so it's very different to me.

Yeah.

And, but he also just was very, he was very giving with people. He didn't, he wasn't measuring.

You're right.

What can I do for you? Anything you need? Anybody you wanna, he's very, completely. He's very outgoing. He's very friendly. keeps up with things. He offers a lot.

Yeah.

And I would like, I would challenge myself because I'd be like, could I do that? Could I do that? Do I do that? And if the answer is no, why don't I do that? Oh, it's because I don't trust people's intentions. Because I feel like everyone has an agenda and because I'm like, there's some deep thing there. And I love people. I've only ever, one of the driving forces behind what I do is I absolutely love people. Anytime I'm on stage and my ego goes away and I'm just there to serve people, I love people. And I just get to show up for people and it's beautiful and I feel connected and I feel safe to just connect with people and just show up for them. But I would notice so many times in my life where when that safety went away and when I felt like, well, what if someone has an agenda or what if It was old stuff. It was old stuff. It was an environment.

Damn stories.

Growing up where it was like I felt it was, you know, that was real to me. It was that people had an agenda. It was that I couldn't trust and it was so there were very real things for me that imprinted. But then I'd come across a friend like Lewis and I'd be like, what? He's different. What's going on? Like, and, and, he's not just different and I wouldn't want to have that life. He's different and he's awesome and people love him and he's got an amazing community and he's ambitious like me. And so it was like it was, I could relate to him in a bunch of other ways except I could see that in that way he was doing things differently to me. And so I would literally as a friend, I'd sit with Louis, I'd be like, So, what happens when you do this for someone and then they just completely take advantage of you or they take you for granted or you do five things and they never do anything for you or it becomes unequal. You ask him all these questions.

Oh yeah.

And he'd give me answers that were different to the way I would think. He'd be like, well, I just accept that that's going to happen. and if I find that I keep giving someone and it just keeps being a one-sided relationship, then I divert my energy elsewhere, but I just make peace with the fact that there's gonna, if I give a lot and if I'm someone who is like that with people in general, there's gonna be a bunch of situations where people do take more than they give and that's okay. I just won't keep doing it with those people and I'd be like, huh, okay, so what's really going on is you're willing to to risk losing more than I am. Like, you're willing to at least for the first 20 of the relationship.

Give, give, give.

Give more deplete and know that, you know, okay, find out who someone is. But the. But the. What you get out of that is that you get all of these incredible people in your life.

Yeah.

Who only came into your life because you were willing to start from that place of generosity and. And it's not that Lewis has no boundaries.

He does.

Lewis has standards. But he, whereas my standard was like at the very, very front end of like, I'm not even gonna do it because I'm afraid that like, I, you might take advantage of me and then I'll feel so angry and so resentful and it'll be such a hurtful thing that I won't be able to come back from it.

And I'll, he's just like, okay, moves on.

He's just like, I'm moving on. It's okay. And I went, oh, it's okay. for people to do that to you at the very beginning or for you to give a little more, knowing that in the, it all works out, that it's okay and that you just don't keep doing it, but it's okay. He's at peace with it. That's a different way of thinking. So my curiosity leads me to someone doing it different. When I ask them what they're doing different, that gives me a different paradigm. And you have to be brave enough and silly, like, be willing to just be that person who asks dumb questions because in your, the area that you have struggled with for you is like you're a toddler. And it might be an area where someone else is an Olympic athlete.

Right.

It, you have to make peace with that because, by the way, there's areas where you are an Olympic athlete and they're a toddler. And when you ask those questions, you are like a toddler. who's speaking to someone who's already an Olympic athlete going, so how do I walk?

Yeah.

And that's okay. I'm, I'm willing to do that these days in those areas because I just go, this is where all my, this is where all the good stuff is going to come from. And in the last, if I look at the last five years of my life, all of the good stuff is in me being willing to just admit, okay, I'm a toddler here. It's not my fault that I'm a toddler here. There have been things, experiences in my life or my past or my upbringing that have made this really, really difficult for me. This has not come naturally to me. And if it was easy to change, I would have done it years ago. So it must be very difficult to change for me. And that means I deserve an enormous amount of self-compassion over this. But it doesn't mean my past equals my future in this area. It just means I need to start by learning how to walk. And when you start getting some little wins from taking those baby steps, it becomes really addictive because you just start going, oh, my God, it just keeps getting. There's a whole.

Yeah.

World out there that I haven't experienced because of this way that I have been for so long and has nothing to do with me. It's not personal. And all it's just the way that I've been for so long. I get goosebumps as they say it because I'm like, it's okay, it's not your fault that you're like that. You know, I'm all for rad, I'm all for rad. But it is your responsibility. Yeah, I'm for extreme ownership.

I am. Yep. Yep. But the two concepts are not at odds.

Yeah.

So then, you know, the big question for you. So I love how at the beginning of the book, as I started reading a little bit of it, you sent me, You really go into your dating life and how you were in relationships and how you acted. And the first chapter is called Karma's a Bitch.

So.

What was it that-- what sort of-- how were you in the place of relationships, which is your area of expertise, versus where you got to that now you're happily married? So, what changed within you that you became a match to someone who was really right for you?

The crazy thing about this book is I wrote this book single.

Okay, that's fascinating.

And then I finished the book Married, which is really crazy. Really, I think the last edit of the book I did on our honeymoon.

That's nuts. Well, then how could, okay, so was Karma's a bitch and talking about your dating life always going to be the beginning or did that sort of emerge as a necessary link to the stories that would be shared?

I wanted my intention starting this book because it had been 10 years since my last book. So I knew people may have had preconceived notions of who I am or what I'm like. And I had read a lot of comments from people saying like, this would be a great guy to date.

He knows about relationships. He's got to be the perfect guy in a relationship if he knows this much.

And it would make him very insecure because I would be like, oh, my God, I knew. I knew I was far from that. And I knew that I had regrets in that area. I knew that I had hurt people in that area. I knew that I had done, you know, I. The things that people would come to me complaining about, I had done my share of those things. So I was never coming from a place of wanting to be righteous about what men should be like. And because I was like, no, no, no, I'm not perfect. And I didn't want anyone to think I was.

I never got that impression from you that you were sort of the be all end all of how to do everything. You've always been humble.

Because I'd never spoken much about my own dating life. It allowed people to kind of map onto me. Whatever they wanted to. And so for me, I was like, let me just start this book by whatever pedestal anyone could possibly have put me on.

So vulnerable.

I can take myself off of that pedestal right now.

Was that a big decision or did.

You feel- yeah, it was scary. I would think so. It's still a bit scary.

As I'm reading it, I'm like, oh, okay.

I'm like, all right.

Yeah.

Because you know, you would think that I can imagine the insecurity because you feel like you should be great at dating.

Great at dating.

And do a good job and don't do the bad boy stuff.

Yeah, always stand up and, you know, I can't claim to have been that. And I'm more proud of myself today than I've ever been. Like, I really am. I feel really aligned and, you know, I have a lot of compassion for why I was the way I was. And don't get me wrong, it wasn't like heinous, but it just, I look back on it and I'm like, wow, that was a very different version of me that was coming to the table. And, you know, I think for me, I, you know, I was in a cycle of constantly dating and trying, you know, Trying to get selfishly trying to get my needs met or trying to have an experience or trying to just feel good, like trying to not feel lonely, trying to not feel like, because for me, being on my own was really scary and being just having a long gap where I was just like, I'm just going to be by myself, which was probably exactly what I needed. I wasn't giving that to myself. It was like it was easier to pick up the phone and call someone and be like, Hey, let's, you know, do something this weekend instead of like me trying to make it through the weekend just as a person not experiencing, just experiencing my own thoughts, which was at the time something I wasn't good at dealing with and still wrestling with too much. And I met my wife Audrey and you very quickly realized, like, there was a. A kindness to this person and a warmth and a love to this person, but at the same time, it was. She was never gonna, like, put up with me not being there and not being present and not being consistent. And I. It was a. It was a really interesting thing for me because I had to. I think for a while, I was, me and my wife talk about this all the time, this idea of chasing the wrong things.

Sure.

That you just chase the wrong things and you think they're going to make you happy, but they don't. And then, you know, you're left feeling anxious and weird and miserable and empty. And it's a really hard cycle to get off of because again, you have, your nervous system has been trained to go for that thing and to expect that kind of volatility or that kind of chaos or those highs and those lows and just peacefulness was not something that my nervous system was ever trained for. And when my wife Audrey came along, she represented peace, and I didn't know how to handle peace.

I'm wondering if you before she came along or you just actually, you just finally met the right one.

There was a bit of a connection.

And along the way, you just, we stumble, right? And we wanna make something more than what it really should be. And then as time goes and then you finally meet the right person, you go, I get now how it's actually supposed to be.

I give a lot of credit to Audrey.

Aw.

You know, I wish for every person that they find someone who is simpler than I was in those moments where Audrey met me, because I wasn't. I wasn't the simplest. But I don't think that you. You can't. You can't be with a person like that unless it ends up being a blend of both.

You.

You can be an incredible influence on someone, but if someone's coming to you and they're not starting to. They're not ready for those kinds of realizations. It is a fool's errand to try to change them. Audrey did not try to change me. She just presented me with this incredible experience when we were together. But she also made it very clear that if I couldn't show up to this relationship in the way that she needed, that it didn't matter how much she liked me, she was moving on.

And.

That was a very powerful thing for me because I felt someone moving on. Like I really did.

She called you into your maturity, really.

Yeah, because she was not waiting around. She was genuinely moving on. She was like, you know, I... What feels like a now famous text that Audrey sent me. But it was while I was in LA and I was like, I'm, you.

Know.

I think I'd sent her a message after us not being in much contact. And I said something like, you know, I miss you. And she sent me a message back saying, Hey, when you send me this, I don't really know how to respond. to it. We haven't really been that close for a minute. And so when you send a message like this, rightly or wrongly, it feels like a bid for attention. Yeah, it was like... It was, you know, I felt kind of naked with that because I was lonely.

You were checking. You were checking to see if she was still there.

And I think that we sometimes send out these, look, women do this too, but I'll speak to men for a moment. If there's women listening that, you know, are trying to understand men better who do this, they're not so many. Some, some guys are straight up, like, there's some straight up personality disorders out there.

No, that, but.

There'S also a lot of guys who are deeply confused about what it is they want in this life. For sure. Confused guy is a dangerous guy.

It's worse than ever, I think, for men right now.

They don't, they, they don't know where they're, they don't, they're not happy. They don't know where to find their happiness. And if you're not careful, you become collateral damage in their search for the thing that's gonna make them happy. And Audrey was not gonna allow herself to be collateral damage in my misguided search for what was gonna make me happy. And she's not playing this game. And not that it was consciously a game in my head, but it's like this thing that suits me.

Yeah.

She's not-- it doesn't suit her. And I think what's really interesting about that message back as well is that, and this is, I think, a big problem with dating today, is that people are afraid to show intentionality for fear of being desperate or being labeled someone who's too fast. But actually, intentionality is like your greatest asset. What she told me in that moment is, in case you have mistaken me for someone who is not looking for actual meaningful connection and relationship. In case you've mistaken me for someone who is just willing to tread water in this no man's land. I'm not. I'm looking for. And she wasn't being like, there was an ego in it, right? It wasn't like, I'm better than this. Like, screw you. It wasn't that. It was just. I just. We're. I'm on a different. I'm on a different path to you from the. What you're showing me, I'm on a different path. And there's something very, very powerful about that because I also knew how kind she was and I knew how loving she was. And I knew.

So you knew she wasn't trying to be hurtful or aggressive or just really.

Being clear about this is.

Yeah.

You and I are in different places, it seems. I mean, that right. Saying rightly or wrongly is quite a nice phrase because it's kind of making space for the fact that you could be wrong. But you're, you're, you're also still very much calling someone out. You're saying, this is my read of this. I could be wrong.

Yeah.

You know, but from what it, from where I'm standing, it feels a lot like this is more about you wanting attention than it is about you genuinely having any intentionality behind sending this message and. and that becomes a very, very powerful thing. But it can't be used for everyone out there listening to this. When you say something like that, it can't be a tactic. It has to be a standard. And there's a big difference between tactics and standards. A tactic is something you do in order to get a result.

It's manipulative, really.

Yeah, you're trying to, if I can make myself look a certain way by sending this message, then you'll be like, oh, this person's wow, they're confident, they're bold. I want this person. You're not doing it because it's who you are. And when it, when it, it's a standard. And from her, it was a standard at that point. And here's how I know it was a standard. It didn't get her a result. What I saw was, oh, this person's in a different place than me. I'm not going to try to, like, manipulate this situation to get what I want. I'm not going to try and. I'm not going to now try really hard just so that I can, like, get something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, I was like, oh, because that. Because I was. I was honest, you know, with her and myself in that moment, she checked me a little bit, and I was like, yeah, you know what? We clearly, we are in different places, right? like, fair enough. And so I backed off.

Wow.

But I know from her side it wasn't a tactic because if you back off from someone.

Yeah.

And then they, they don't text you again.

Right.

Then it was a standard. If three days later they text you.

And say, hey, what's up?

So what's going on? It's like, oh, it was a tactic. And because the tactic didn't work, you're now trying something else.

Yeah.

It genuinely, like we went like this because it was like a moment where we both went, okay, and instigated by her. So that's a very, very important thing. Standards you uphold even when they don't get you the result you would have liked.

Nice.

Tactics you do only to get the result you want. And if they don't work, then you just try something else.

Oh, yeah, totally. I'm curious what you think about, because you had said she wasn't, she's not trying to cheat.

Me.

And I've sort of gone around this idea and had experiences of just learning how to love people right where they're at and not try to change them.

That's lovely.

So how, like, talk about your experience with that. Have you been in that scenario? Or maybe from her perspective, because you alluded to, she's not trying to change me. Essentially, there was something that needed to change, maybe. Like, how can we do that? How much of loving someone right where they're at? when they might have an unhealthy habit, when they might, you know, act a certain way, you know, have a pattern that you don't like, you know, how much can you just love someone right where they're at versus trying to say something and get them to evolve and grow into something that they could be?

I think we always, to some extent, have to look at what we're getting right now. and say, is this enough for me? If this stayed this way, could I be happy? And you have to be really honest with yourself about that because anything else.

Is- Not like stayed like this and then this one thing, but like this.

Yeah, like if it stayed like this, could I be happy? And if the answer is no, that doesn't mean that you have to cut and run immediately. It means that you have to communicate what you need to communicate in order to see whether there can be progress. And then you have to be very, very honest with yourself about whether there is progress. The mistake people make is, We all change, we all evolve, and let's be real, relationships get sculpted in real time. So someone does shift and adapt based on what they learn about you and your needs and what you enjoy and what makes you feel safe. And we might find a partner that, you know, we talked about that example earlier of the guy who had the barbecue with his friends. It doesn't, just because she pushed him away in that moment, it doesn't automatically make her wrong for him. If he said to himself, you know what? I get this person.

She's hurting right now.

She's hurting. Maybe he was like that once upon a time, or maybe he knows people in his family like that. And so he has an extra degree of compassion for where that must come from for her. And he really likes her.

Her.

And he's like, you know what? I'm gonna talk to her about this. And maybe he then gives her a call that night, even though she said not to. And he says, look, I'm. I want to talk to you about today because I never meant for this to be something that hurt you. And I understand that this must have made you feel something that was really painful, because I don't know about you, but I feel like we've. been having a really good thing so far, and it must have been really painful for you today to want to push that away over this. And maybe she then, like, just a little bit, maybe she heals a little bit because she's like, wow, no one's ever come to the table with that level of compassion with me.

Nobody's loved me right where I was at, which was scared.

Which is.

Yeah.

And, and. that is an invitation to her. Because in the same breath as he says, that must be have really hurt you today. So you must have been in a place where you were really hurting to, to react like that. Because I know that's not been you so far. He might, in the same breath, be able to say, next time you feel that, can you do this instead? Because that was hard for me, too, the way you reacted.

Yeah.

And exactly. That's a. That's his standard.

Yep.

Right.

Is that. Look, I have so much compassion for you and that you must have been scared when you sent that text or you must have been hurting when you sent that text. But I also need you to have compassion for me, that I deserve to be with someone who doesn't. Who isn't so reactive.

Right.

When they're hurting, or at least it gives me the benefit of explaining to us that they're hurting instead of just shutting me out. That makes me feel unsafe. And so I need us to do this differently next time. That could be, it might not be, but that could be the beginning of a gorgeous relationship. One where she is able to heal, one where you know, they are able to see each other very vulnerably. And it might even be a moment where- Right. He heals a little bit because he says maybe he had a mother who the moment she felt like scared she was gonna get hurt, shut him out or was very avoidant. And maybe by having that honest conversation with her instead of just not calling her for the next four days, and bringing her to the table, maybe she starts to do something different than his mother did, and that's corrective for him. And so he starts to heal a little bit and realize that, oh, if I bring a different me to the table, I can also help heal someone else, and they can be different from that situation in my past. So, there's something very, very beautiful about that. Both of those things, it's an invitation. invitation for two people to be their higher selves and to progress together. But you can be that invitation to somebody else. But what you can't do is keep ignoring the fact that there's no progress. That's where people get themselves into trouble. You don't have to be utterly ruthless the moment someone trips up. by going, Screw you, I deserve better blah blah blah amount. Everyone's going to make mistakes. Everyone is going to do... There's always going to be a moment in early dating where something happens that you struggle with that another person does. Do you heal together in those moments? Is there progress after you communicate honestly? And maybe your version of that 1% shift away from your reality, your wall, Right. Is that you communicate differently than you have done when you see something you don't like. Because relationships are more about just running away when you see something you don't like. Relationships are, I see something I don't like. And whereas my whole life so far, I've used that as an excuse to cut and run and be like, I'm out. I deserve better than this. Maybe this time you have a very honest and compassionate conversation around that. - and maybe someone else in that moment says, well, no one has ever approached me.

-There is such opportunity within the intimate relationship to actually do some of the, well, there is always to do the biggest work, but to learn how to react and act differently in the world in specific ways. Because in the intimate relationship should be the safest place.

-Yes.

-Really, if you are willing to be vulnerable, and you can practice in that safe, safe place, then go ahead and let it spill out into the world, into other people where it would presumably be, there'll be more guards up, less dealing with things. And it's a more unsafe place, but in the relationship. But it's also the first place that we don't do it because we feel so scared that it's going to go away. But it is truly an opportunity to practice being vulnerable and and acting and reacting differently than we normally do.

And that is like the hardest thing in the world.

It's so hard.

So hard. And that's what makes it so great. That's what makes it so awesome, is that you are doing a difficult thing. Acknowledge it. You're doing a difficult thing.

So how did you know when you wanted to propose to Audrey?

When I knew that I'd found this incredible person to build with. like, I, I had the moment where I called a friend of mine, and I was like, he asked me, why? How? Why are you proposing now? Because I told him before I, you know, I was like, I think I'm gonna propose. And he said, why? And I said, why? I just feel like I'm ready to build. Like, I want to build something in my life. I'm, I don't want to keep just mindlessly hitting reset. I want to actually build something because it was clear to me that what In my career, what made my career so great is that I was actually willing to commit. I didn't do a hundred different things. I went deep and I just kept going with something.

That's really hard.

It keeps blossoming in new ways because I keep approaching it with life and energy and passion. I couldn't have predicted 17 years ago that when I started working with people in their love lives, you know, in 2024, I'm now releasing a book called Love Life. I I would have told you 17 years ago, I would have been like, there's no way I'm still doing that 17 years from now. Really? No way.

Like, oh, this will transition into something else. This is just sort of like a phase I'm having. It's. Yeah, it's hitting.

People love it.

I have something to say. We're having fun with it.

That's exactly.

And then it'll be something else.

It'll be something else, but it's, you know. 17 years later, I am just as passionate. And if you read my first book, it doesn't have quite, I mean, it doesn't have nearly the same depth of the things I'm talking about in this book. The first book was more about strategy. And this is about the deeper reasons why we struggle and helping people understand those. And I'm so, so, so excited about this because I'm bringing a new me to it. But it's part of a 17-year commitment to my work. And that's what's made it so special. And I realized that in my love life, I wasn't doing that. And so I said, I'm ready to build something. And I could not imagine a better builder than Audrey. Like, I can't, I don't, I just, she's an unbelievable builder. And the way she sees me, like she truly sees me. She sees me for all of the stuff that I thought would drive someone away.

And.

She still, she accepts it and she loves me for it. She loves me holistically. And that for me was like, it was like the ultimate feeling of safety. And here's the part I want to say because I think this is Life works different ways for different people. I was really, really lucky that at a time where I was trying hungry to find more compassion for myself, I found someone who had more compassion for me than I was giving to myself. And it made me It... the love and the acceptance and the compassion that she gave me for my darker side, it was like an external corrective relationship that modeled the internal corrective relationship that I needed to give to myself. And the ways that I needed to make space for those parts of me, things I was ashamed of, things I felt guilty for, things that I thought made me not enough, things that I thought if I stopped doing them, I wouldn't be lovable anymore. It, it became, it's not that by doing all of that, she made me feel safe. It's that she made, she modeled the kind of compassion that I could give to myself.

And that you were working on giving to yourself.

Yeah.

So you opened the door to seeing her for who she was because you were starting to do that for yourself.

There was a moment where I thought, God, this is. She has made space for every part of me. I better make space for every part of her. Like, that is. This is the greatest gift anyone has given me. I've. I've treasured it. I did not take it for granted. I was like, it woke me up because I was like, oh, my God, this is. This is really, really, really special. And I remember thinking to myself, I better give her the same level of acceptance. This is too expensive to play with. This is too rare for me to take for granted. But one of the great gifts it has given me is that it modeled the kind of compassion I can show myself. and we don't have to get that from a partner. We can get that from a friend. We can get it from a parent. We can get it from a therapist. We can get it. There's all sorts of ways that we can find these relationships that aren't just, there's corrective relationships for what a parent can be or what a best friend can be or what a partner can be. But there's also, I believe, corrective relationships for what our own relationship with ourselves can be. And when someone is able to view you holistically and contextualize who you are through the lens of where you came from and where you've been and how hard it's been for you to fix certain things or work on certain things, it offers you an opportunity to view yourself through a different lens. And importantly, that's not an excuse to continue with destructive behaviors. You know, in narcissistic relationships, viewing someone holistically gets weaponized against you. You have to be very careful in those relationships. That's where the word progress is so important. While it may be the most beautiful gift in the world, you can give someone else to see them in that way. You owe it to yourself to only put yourself around people who make you feel safe and who meet your needs at the same time as you're meeting theirs. In a narcissistic dynamic, in a narcissistic relationship, your capacity to view someone contextually and holistically and say, well, they're only doing that because when they were growing up, they went through this and they never got this love or they were abused or they were But the result of all of that empathy from your side is that they're still doing it to you today.

Exactly.

And they continue to do it.

Standard.

That is a recipe for an endless fall. And so I always think it's important to point that out. To me, what makes the most special kind of love, and I think this is one of the giant messages of this book, is you It is on us to provide a kind of love that is beautiful for somebody else. That's what makes us someone that another person wants to be around. But if you aren't marrying that with a strong set of standards for yourself, then you will give that kind of love far too cheaply. And it will wreak havoc in your life because there are no shortage of people who are willing to take that that kind of love and not give you the same in return. It makes you a target if you do not marry that kind of love with strong standards for yourself. And those standards originate from giving the exact same kind of love that you would give to someone else to yourself.

Exactly. It is always a mirror. Always a mirror. Wow. Cool. Congrats on such a journey. 17 years later, you're not in the same place. You're in a totally different place. And this is an area of human existence that will always be there, is relationships.

We all want to find love.

And it's critical to our existence is relationships. So keep doing it. I hope 17 years later, there's more books of more evolution and that you can take people on the journey.

Thanks, Danica. It's been fun. I know we've known each other for a minute now. It's going to be fun to keep watching each other's journeys as we progress through all of this. And for anyone who wants to get this book, there's a website I have called lovelifebook.com and not only can you pre-order the book there through Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever you want to get your book, we have some really cool additions for anyone who's buying a book. There's some really cool bonuses that aren't available anywhere else. We have a live event we're doing for all of the book buyers that that your ticket to the event is your book and it's virtual, so you can do it from anywhere in the world. But it's going to be a really special experience and this is a labor of love for me. So I really, really, I truly, I think it's going to help a lot of people deeply. If you do relate to feeling like you're scared of time running out or you worry there's something wrong with you or you feel like, you know, your friends are all pairing off, and you don't know what to do about that because it makes you feel like it's getting harder for you at a time where in many cases people feel like they're becoming more invisible and they're scared that they're losing their moment. I promise you this book will not only restore perspective, but give you a very self-compassionate and authentic approach to making this dream happen for yourself.

How to Raise your Standards, Find your Person and Live Happily No matter what. No matter what.

Yeah.

Cool. Thanks, man.

Thanks for having me, Frank.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to the Pretty Intense podcast today.

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