The No. 1 Reason a Man SUDDENLY COMMITS | Lewis Howes

So because I wasn't valuing myself and I wasn't in alignment with my values, I got different results. Maybe there's fun, crazy, exciting moments here and there, but it wasn't what I wanted long term.

What's up, everybody? I have something very special for you today. My dear friend Lewis Howes from the School of Greatness podcast joined me and my love life club members for a two hour exclusive conversation and q a and we are bringing you a snippet of that conversation today. If you don't know, Louis, the School of Greatness podcast is a top 100 podcast in the world on iTunes. Louis is an incredibly wise man. He just wrote a new book, the Greatness Mindset, which everyone should get a copy of. If you're trying to heal, become more confident, if you're trying to achieve big goals this year, and you want to know how you can get out of your own way, stop self-sabotaging and actually feel worthy of them instead of doubting yourself. This is an incredible book and I believe the best thing Lewis has created and I've known the man for 10 years of my life now. So go grab a copy from Amazon and then come back and watch this snippet of the conversation I had with Lewis Howes. And watch till the end if you want a way of accessing the whole thing. Enjoy. You have spent an enormous amount of time around successful men of one kind or another. Different ages, different backgrounds, but achievers. Many of them have a lot of options. They are very conscious about making the best decisions and optimizing their lives and doing all of these things. What do you see as the number one reason those guys end up committing?

Well, the guys that end up committing in a conscious way, I think the reason they do it is because they know with focused energy is gonna create more abundance in their life, more results in their mission. So the men with a meaningful mission, I believe, know they need a support, someone that brings them peace, someone that fully accepts them, someone that elevates them towards their mission. I think one of the most dangerous things is a man without a clear mission. as a wandering man, a man with no direction. Because then we're easily susceptible to latching onto things that other people are doing that maybe aren't the right things for us. But a man with a clear, meaningful mission, meaning has a purpose, is a drive, is a creator, wants to do something in the world, but also wants to impact people around them. I feel like he needs a safe space to be fully accepted for when he goes after crazy stuff. and when he makes mistakes. And I think having that safe space, that peace and harmony is priceless. We can't buy peace. I've been in relationships, I'm sure, I don't know if you talk about this, but I've been in relationships where I tried to buy peace in the relationship. Someone was mad at me, okay, we'll do what you want to do, I'll buy this. Someone wanted me to buy them something or they were gonna be angry at me, okay, I'm gonna buy it for you. you buy peace for a moment, but then there's always more stress. You can't buy the peace and you can't buy that in a relationship. You have to be it yourself and attract and partner with someone who also has that type of peace. It doesn't mean it's not gonna be perfect and there's not gonna be chaotic moments, but I think a man really wants a driven man, a man who is in his creative, a man who is driven for a greater purpose. wants peace at home.

So I have a couple of things to ask about that because there's, as you say, right, there's, and I, I remember someone saying to me years ago, back when I was like, in a very much a single time in my life, he was like, Matt, the, you know, results show people who are in committed healthy relationships, the men that are in committed healthy relationships, they go further.

They do.

Even if you're ambitious and you want to achieve and you want to get ahead, the people who are in committed relationships actually go farther.

I think they're healthier, they live longer, they feel a greater sense of meaning.

So what do you think, because a lot of guys who are achievers, they actually struggle to commit. They live in constant doubt or confusion or worrying if they're making the right choice. Could I do better? Should I try and get like, this person doesn't have this thing, maybe. But yeah, I like that they have this thing, but they don't have this thing. So could I find someone who has both? And then they find someone who has both, but they still don't have the, could I find someone who has all three? You know, that optimization can be the enemy of actually choosing. So what do you think happens in a guy's mind when he stops obsessively trying to optimize? and starts being able to accept someone's imperfections and lean into a person instead of constantly playing the game of, could I do better?

Well, I mean, I speak for experience. I mean, I was always in the chase mode for a long time in my 20s, where the chase was the thrill, right? But then once you got into the day to day and you realized, oh, do I actually want to be with this person? Or are we in alignment of our values, our vision, and our lifestyle? Do we want the same things? or the 10,000 meal test. Do I actually want to spend 10,000 meals sitting with this person for 10,000 meals? And when men choose or chase from a desire, a sexual desire first, as opposed to more of a spiritual connection or just life alignment, it typically will fail from my personal experience. I don't know, five or six different relationships in my teens and 20s and 30s that didn't fail in the sense that I didn't learn great things, didn't have great moments, but weren't the right alignment, weren't the right fit for a long-term mission that I have. And that's when we choose from sexual desire versus spiritual alignment, or at least just values, vision and lifestyle. And I think we learn to commit differently. And I speak for example, from my own personal example, is when that becomes exhausting. When it's so exhausting, we realize chasing and choosing out of sexual desire hurts us in the long run. It's hurting us from our meaningful mission, pulls us away from our path, from our purpose. When our energy is lower because we're constantly managing chaos and stress, we realize this is not what we want anymore. This was fun, but it's not fulfilling. This was interesting, but it's not in alignment of my higher self and my higher calling. And so we have to heal the wounds within us as men to stop choosing from a desire that is not of our highest self. And when we can choose from a higher self desire alignment, there's a lot more peace. And so you've known my story. You've seen me in, I don't know, how many relationships in the past.

We've been friends for 10 years.

Struggle.

Going on 10 years, I think.

Suffer, struggle. Highs, lows, excitement. This is crazy. Oh, now I'm in suffering. And the energy, the amount of energy it takes to manage chaos is exhausting. It's draining. And it sucks the life out of you. It could give you this rush and excitement for a while, but then eventually it's an unsustainable energy that burns out.

And do you think, in your case, do you think that you, that was because you put attraction before compatibility in those relationships?

100%. And it was more, putting a desire from a wound that I was unconscious of. So I was attracted to someone to fulfill something inside of me that I was lacking. So I had to learn how to stop lacking in that thing inside of me, stop being attracted to something that I thought would fill something inside of me that I was missing inside of me. Instead, I had to go create that and remind myself where it was inside of me and accept myself, the parts of me that were missing. accept it, create wholeness in my heart, and then I could choose differently. Because I'm not choosing from a desire of like, I need this thing to make me feel good about me. Yeah. And then I still don't feel good about me when I have it.

Well, it's really interesting because so many people choose people that they feel like will elevate them or make them look good to the rest of the world, or, oh, I finally will look like I've made it because I attracted this really hot person or, you know, like it all It happens to everyone. It happens to women too. It's like you're going through this process of getting approval from the world for who you chose.

I'm not sure how many women watching or listening have dated the guy who's perfect on paper. And they were like, I should be happy with this person because they have this thing that I feel like I'm supposed to need or want, or it gives me some sense of safety. But they knew maybe they just weren't in alignment with this person. It doesn't mean they're wrong or bad. It just wasn't the right match for them. And they try to force it. And again, I don't know if anyone is watching can relate to that. When you force it, you realize, oh, this is just not working. Yeah. So we got to choose from not from something that's lacking, but from something.

That'S complete within us and choose from that space. And sometimes it's not just incompatibility in outlook or behavior or values. It's incompatibility in intensions. Like, you don't want a relationship and I do, but because you're hot and tall and handsome and this and that and that, I go, well, maybe I can like just keep going casually to see where this goes. When normally, if it was like, if you didn't have all those attributes that made me put you on a pedestal, then I would say to myself, I'm not doing this. You're not even serious. You text me every three days. But because they have all those things that that we're trying to like get because we're trying to fill something in us, we put up with these things that we would never normally put up with.

Yeah, and when you're trying to be in a relationship because you're lonely and you feel alone, you're probably not gonna choose correctly because you'll put up with things or you'll oversee things that'll come out later. And the sexiest thing that I know you talk about all the time, the sexiest thing for a man in a woman, for a conscious, healthy man in a woman is when they are fully loving their lives, literally living love life, right? When they're fully loving their lives, that is one of the sexiest things and most attractive things for a male counterpart.

So let me ask you this, 'cause this kind of gets to the heart of one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today. So many people will say, I really love my life. I'm super grateful. for what's going on in my life right now. I have friends, I have a good job, you know, I have lots of good things in my life. And yet there's this ache inside of me that doesn't go away because I really do want to meet, like love is one of the best things you can find. Maybe it's the best. And I don't have it. And I suppose the question I have for you because you work so much with people in their confidence and self-doubt. And it's one of the things I wanna come on to later when we do our members Q&A. But what do you think is the way to go through life if someone is in a stage of their life where they're like, I'm ticking all the boxes of like things going well in my life, but it still pains me not to have this and maybe throw into that that I feel like time is ticking and I'm worried I want a family and it's like, that's clocks running out on that. I almost want to like put you as strange as it may sound and as hard as it may be to do, you're one of the best people I've ever met at when you want to get something, you go out there and you make it happen. Yeah. You, everything you've ever said to me that you want to do, everything that you've ever set your mind to, you aren't, you're like the ultimate Strategist, you believe in yourself, you move through life from a place of action. I almost want to put you in, like, you know, now you're 40-year-old Lewis the woman who's like looking for love.

I'm a woman.

Yes.

Okay. Yep.

Like, and you've got that fear of time is running out.

You're single.

You're single. Time is running out. I'm afraid I've got a great life, but Man, do I want to meet someone? What would you do to stop yourself coming from that place of need and lack so that you could bring your best to a date?

That's great. I love the question. I think I saw someone say this, I'm not sure where this quote was from, but someone said, the biggest failure is winning at the wrong game. And I think that relates to relationships. You know, being in a relationship, being in the wrong relationship doesn't mean you're not gonna experience love at the greatest levels. Like just because you're in a relationship, you could still feel completely alone and unseen and unlovable, but you're in a relationship. So it's almost like you're losing even though you've won. So we don't wanna make a decision. And I love one of your early videos, and I watch a lot of Matt's videos, by the way, because I just think it's fascinating. But one of your early videos, was of you and all these kind of stick figures. It was like, I don't know, 100 men. And it was not, it was like just crossing them all off the list until you find the one who's a good match for you. It's not being disappointed if like the first four or five dates don't work out. It's just like, oh, you're one person closer to finding someone who is a good match. So don't choose out of loneliness or because it's like the clock is ticking too soon. because the worst thing you can do is live a long life with the wrong person. That for me is a sad, like it's sad. You could have just waited another year and maybe you'd have found someone who would have been a better match. Now, obviously you've got it, when you make the choice, you've got to go all in and make that choice. And like you said in the beginning, there could always be someone who's going to be younger or more successful or more talented in something. So you can't let that confuse you. But making sure you are matched in values, vision, and lifestyle, I think is huge and you align in those things. When you find that, then that's an opportunity for love and success and love. If you're 40 and you're single and you're saying, hey, clock is ticking, and maybe I made some mistakes in the past and I was in relationships too long or I stayed in that relationship for six or eight years, which I hear from a lot of women, and then I got out of it and now it's too late. What do I do? I mean, I met Martha when she was 39. you know, and she was married and divorced and she doesn't have kids yet. And she was in a state of, she wants a family, she wants kids, but she wasn't willing to negotiate her values, her vision, or her lifestyle. She wasn't willing to give in because she had done that before and it left her heartbroken in a sense, right? It left it just not in alignment because she chose, like I had chose previously, not in alignment. So you're going to fail when you win if you choose a wrong relationship. So I think wait as long as you can until you feel like here's an opportunity for growth, here's an opportunity for a real genuine connection. But for me, don't wait by sitting around saying, I'm gonna wait for the guy to find me. Like really, as you say, drop the handkerchief as many times as you can to attract more opportunities for you. and frickin' get a basket of handkerchiefs and throw them out around the world if you need to, to let guys pick it up and see, okay, who's interesting and let me explore this person and let me go down the path of having more interesting connections. As opposed to, is this the one? Just have an interesting connection with guys without thinking, am I sexually attracted or do they this? You're gonna learn about it little by little. But drop a bunch of handkerchiefs.

So that's perfect because I wanna take the way you see the greatness mindset and apply it to that directly.

Right.

As I was going through your book, which is fantastic by the way, I think it's your best, I think it's the best thing you've ever made.

Thank you.

Like it's really, really good.

Thank you.

I'm gonna make sure everyone gets the details for this afterwards. I'll link it up. But it's called the Greatness Mindset. Like any tools that you think are really valuable from the book that people should apply to going out there and making it happen. And one of the things you talk about is creating that mission. Like what's my vision? What am I actually trying to do?

Right?

So you wrote, I thought this was really fantastic. You said, none of us can see how a mission can be accomplished at the start. because our only perspective is what we have at the moment. So that made me think of like, people who have been single for a while, or people who have come out of divorce, or people who have been broken up with, or they, or maybe they feel like in every relationship they get cheated on, or they're always the person before the person that they marry, and they're the person they marry. And so it's like they can't even.

See.

Maybe they don't specifically know what their mission is, and I want to talk about that, because how, you know, what's your view of how you create a love life goal? Yeah. I want to talk about that because it's a little, it's kind of interesting, but we'll come back to it. But then, you know, we lack perspective when we're trying to achieve it of how it's going to be accomplished. That perspective is shaped by what we've experienced in the past, not by what we might experience in the future. But when we start moving forward, our perspective begins to change. Opportunities we never imagined were suddenly open to us. Connections we we didn't realize were possible, opened doors we didn't even know existed. Resources we assumed were unavailable suddenly become accessible because we learned secrets we didn't know were once hidden from us. And it all starts by having a meaningful mission. Yes. So beautifully put, and it sort of, to me, it almost describes what we're doing here in this club, is it's like figuring out realizing that you don't know until you start moving and maybe moving in ways you haven't before, what is actually possible. So how do you, what's the mission you think people could start with in their love life? Because it feels to people like, if I create a goal that I wanna meet someone by the end of the year, I don't have full control over that. So it feels like this hard goal to hit.

Or you can meet someone, but maybe the wrong person.

Right.

So it's getting really clear on what you want to experience, what's the feeling, that you want to experience in this relationship you want to have. And I created this mission for myself. I actually had a vision for a relationship 10 years ago that I spoke about on my podcast. And I had someone put me in a meditative state and close my eyes and imagine like, okay, what does the ideal life look like in a relationship for you? And I visualized it and I spoke it into existence. Now, I acted based on sexual desire, the previous eight years after that. I didn't act on the mission. I acted on my wounds still, my desires. And so I got painful results because I didn't act on the mission. And in order to step into that, like you said, I had to become someone different. I had to be someone differently in order to attract something I had never had. I had to show up in different ways. I had to heal. I had to face certain things that I was afraid of in order to create an environment for that partner to come to me.

What did to, I want you to keep going, but I just think, I feel like a lot of people are going to be asking this inside. There's you and I, you know, you and I talk all the time about this stuff. We're not in front of audiences. We're like always talking about our own lives and what's driving us today. And one of the things that we talk, the word that comes up a lot is peace.

Yes.

How much we value peace. There was a time, it sounds like for you, where what was most important was sexual attraction. And at a certain point, it actually became something else. It became peace or whatever word you prefer. For people out there who are listening to this and going, How do I make that shift? Because even when I'm telling myself, yeah, peace would be really nice, or feeling loved or feeling needed or feeling like someone was good communicator or consistent, that would feel really nice. And yet, what I keep getting attracted to is these people that are charismatic and super kind of sexy or handsome or unavailable or like spontaneous, you know.

Which might be fun momentarily, but doesn't support me for a long-term committed relationship.

So exactly. So how did you make the switch, not just logically? Because to me, what I hear when you say I had, you know, eight years ago I had a vision, it felt like almost you logically knew that that was probably a good thing to go for. But emotionally you kept going for the other thing. How did you make that switch and how do you think other people can make that switch?

I made the switch through constant suffering. through experiencing pain and breakdown in multiple relationships that didn't work out. So because there were multiple relationships that I was a part of, I was the common denominator. So I was the root of all these relationships not working out. I can't blame these other people, although, you know, it takes two people to be in a relationship, but I can't blame them for what they did. I take responsibility because my value, based on my actions, I would devalue myself and give in. for something else that wasn't what I truly wanted. I would give in. So I didn't value my values or myself. It doesn't make me bad or wrong. It just that's what gets me challenging results. So because I wasn't valuing myself and I wasn't in alignment with my values, I got different results. Maybe there's fun and crazy exciting moments here and there, but it wasn't what I wanted long term. So I had this vision in my mind eight years ago, 10 years ago, and I'm living that vision now because I started to value and appreciate myself and heal the things that I was running away from or I wasn't addressing. I was concealing these kind of pains, these wounds. And I think the first step for any woman who has been in a heartbreak or gone through a challenging breakup or divorce or been alone for a long time and feel like they're struggling getting in a great relationship, is you've got to be willing to heal and reveal your past pains. I'm not saying you need to dump all this on the guy that you're on a date with, but you need to be able to do this with yourself and with someone close to you. So when we overcome the power of this mindset, there's six key elements in this, and we make a decision. We look ourselves in the mirror and say, okay, I'm realizing I'm living in some of these states. What is it the roots that's causing me to be powerless in these moments? how do I learn to heal certain wounds that caused me to feel this way so that I can move forward in a more greatness mindset, a powerful mindset? And that way I can make decisions. I can have confidence when I'm around certain people. I can put my walls up if I feel like, no, I don't want to abandon myself in this situation. This is a no for me. You know, I'm not going to sabotage myself here. I'm not going to give in here with this guy again. And I can value myself. Again, ladies, what we value appreciates in value over time. But if we say it's a value, but we discount it and we go against it, then we will be discounted and we'll be treated that way with the men that we're dating. So we must learn to appreciate our value so that we appreciate in value to the person that we're dating. We become more desirable, more attractive when we do that. I'm not talking about sexual or outer looks desire and value. Although obviously put yourself together, make yourself look presentable, but it's really the character of your value. Your heart, your generosity, your compassion, your acceptance. You know, one of the things that we want as men, and I'm sure women want as well from their men, is acceptance. But it's hard to be in a relationship when someone is constantly judging you, nagging you, comparing you to someone else that they used to date, comparing you to their girlfriends, husbands or boyfriends, no man wants to feel that way. They want to be accepted. And no woman wants to be judged either. They want to be accepted. So when I chose dating Martha, I went into the relationship saying there's one condition, there's multiple actually conditions that I wanted to have. We have to be in alignment on a lot of things. But one main thing, I said, I will fully accept you. That doesn't mean I may not be frustrated or let down at certain times, but I'm going to accept who you are as a human being at your core, your values. And again, we may have arguments and disagreements, but I'm not going to try to change who you are because I know that you are on a growth journey. I know you want to constantly work on self. So for me, I feel confident that you will continue to improve. as I'm committed to my growth and that's coming together as a core value of growth, then I will accept you. And that's just something I've chosen because it brings me peace. And going into that, as opposed to saying, well, there's lots of other women out there that could do this or that or whatever, younger or hotter, this more money, whatever it is, I've made a choice because I want to have a long term, healthy, committed relationship that will bring peace to my heart. It'll bring me more joy and abundance and love and excitement than chasing a bunch of the for moments. And again, for the women watching, you've got to appreciate your value because then it will appreciate over time.

Thank you so much for watching this clip. If you want to watch the entire two hour conversation between me and Lewis, you can do so inside the Love Life Club members app. Yes, we have an app now where you can watch not only the entire two hour Lewis Howes session, but also master classes of all different parts of dating relationships, and confidence interviews with experts. There's a question tool where you can ask your question and it will give an answer, which is really cool. And there's a whole community of people there that are on the journey with you that you can engage with and interact with. The good news is we have a 14-day free trial available right now for this, so go check it out and grab yours and I will see you over there in the Love Life app. And by the way, don't forget to grab a copy of the Greatness Mindset. I know you're gonna love it. and grab one for your friends and family too. I'll see you next time.