This Small Rule Will Change Your Life

There's a famous saying we've all heard: wherever you go, there you are. And here I am in a storage cupboard.

What are you doing in there?

I'm filming a YouTube video.

In a storage cupboard? Why?

It's unorthodox.

Okay, well, we had a whole box of Uncrustables. Have you seen them?

No, no. I don't think— I haven't seen them. Sorry, is there something I can do for you? Because I'm trying to—

I— Bye.

Look, you can move to a new country, change your friendship circle, date a new person, get a new job, hide away in a storage cupboard, but who you are didn't change. So the moment you get triggered again in the old way, you're back to where you started. Feeling out of control of your mind and your emotions, and stuck with the one person you can never get away from—

yourself. Mmm.

These are my own crustables. Have you ever felt like no matter what you do, you are stuck with you? This can make us feel hopeless. Like wishing that one day life is gonna be different for us is futile. That we will always struggle to feel like we are in the driver's seat in our dating lives, because we are always always just a few hours away from feeling uncertain and anxious again when someone doesn't text us back. Or we know from past experience that in our dealings with people in general, we are always just one fawning moment away from being ashamed at our inability to stick up for ourselves, and wishing that we had said something different in the moment. Something a more confident person would have said. I am Matthew Hussey, and I have been a coach for tens of thousands of people in the last 18 years of my life. Millions online. And when you have coached people for that long, you become humbled by how hard and how scary change actually is. Real change. Over time you learn to become allergic to the kind of language that suggests that someone who is anxious is gonna learn one special technique and they'll never be anxious again. Parentheses: for real this time. But there is a rule that I have been coaching and using for myself for the last few years of my life that has been one of the surest ways I've found that any of us can genuinely evolve from the person we used to be to a version of ourselves who is having a better experience of life while creating more of the opportunities we want. I call it the 5% Rule. By the way, if you've made it this far into the video, please subscribe and like this video. It really helps us get it to more people who need it. Before we learn what this rule is and how we apply it, We need to talk about the wall. Mario Andretti famously said of Formula 1 driving that if you don't want to crash the car, don't focus on the wall, because your car goes where your eyes go. This is a concept that has been used in self-development for a very long time, but I think it's become so cliché that it's lost its potency, and it happens to be one of the most important concepts there is. All of us learned at some point in our lives that life is a certain way. If we grew up with parents who could turn at any moment, our nervous system became programmed for that reality. We may find ourselves later in life second-guessing every move of our partner, trying to make them happy, intermittently asking them, "Are you mad at me?" anytime they go a little bit quiet, and we might feel ourselves unable to ever truly relax into a feeling of safety in a relationship. Or you could be like my client who learned through her experiences that people always wind up abandoning you. So in order to protect herself from getting hurt, pushed people away before they could ever deliver the final blow of rejection. Now this manifested very clearly when a guy she was seeing, who by all accounts it was going well with, arranged a small get-together with friends and didn't invite her. This moment of feeling left out by him ignited all of her fears that he didn't feel the same way she did. So she sent him an abrupt and angry message while he was with his friends at the gathering saying, "Why didn't you invite me?" Now, he responded by saying it was just an overdue get-together with some old friends, but could he call her later after it was done? She shot back, "Don't bother." When over the next couple of days he didn't call her to resolve the situation, her belief was confirmed. Everyone would always eventually wind up hurting her. There's a phenomenon at play here that is best explained in the book nook. Welcome, friends, to the book nook with me, Matthew Hussey. Don't worry, I'm not gonna read from my own book in every book nook moment, but I did happen to write an entire piece on staring at the wall in this book. Feel free to turn to page 94 if you have it. I talk about an experience I had on an evening out with my brothers where I almost got into an altercation with someone who I perceived to be a threatening presence to my brother. Luckily, someone I knew with my best interests at heart came over and stopped anything from happening. But what was interesting about this moment is I felt angry afterwards towards my brothers because I thought, "Why aren't you seeing the danger here? Why am I the only one who sees what was about to happen?" Here's what I wrote about that. I used to wonder how my brothers survived without me around. Then I realized they didn't find themselves in situations like this. For me, historically, these situations were everywhere. For them, they weren't. Why? Because I was staring at the wall and they were not. At least not the wall I kept staring at. And when there was no wall in sight, I still unconsciously scanned for it. For any situation that would validate my ongoing public service announcement to anyone I love: "We are not safe, and we all need to watch out all the time." What I didn't realize was the extent to which I wasn't just experiencing, but creating a different reality than the ones my brothers were a part of. Whatever you're looking for, You'll find it. And sooner or later, you'll have spent so much time staring at it that you won't even realize it's a wall anymore. You'll think it's just life. We have to be extremely careful about the normal we are creating for ourselves. There are so many different realities, yet our focus and our choices trap us in one we don't want. Don't let your wall become your world. My wall, I suppose, was my constant looking for threats, for danger, and the hypervigilance I had that was constantly scanning for some sign that there was someone around that meant me or someone I loved harm. And that was a problem because there's always some asshole in a room. There's always someone with bad intentions. But I was going out scanning for that person and putting all of my focus on that kind of person wherever I went. Now, one of the things—

Matthew, what if you don't know what your wall is?

Hmm.

I distrust you inherently, wall, but what you've said intrigues me.

What if there's a subconscious belief system that's directing our behavior in dating and keeps leading us to crash into the wall, but we don't even know what the heck it is. We just know that every time we go out there and try to find love with another wall, it never seems to go our way.

Have you got a date coming up, wall? Another wall?

Yeah, they're quite the catch. I'm a little intimidated, actually. They're load-bearing. But I keep thinking it's gonna go the same way as all my other dating experiences.

Well, what you're really talking about is having a destructive narrative in your love life, but you don't even necessarily know what that narrative is. But my guess is that it leads to you overinvesting too quickly.

Oh, yeah.

And probably getting attracted to some of the wrong qualities in someone that you only realize it when you're too deep in and emotionally invested and now primed for heartbreak.

You're reading me like a book, Matthew.

Well, and anyone out there who relates to this, I need you to go and watch something for me. It is called Dating with Results.

Dating wall results? That's perfect for me.

No, no, dating with results. You can find it at datingwithresults.com, and it is designed to help you overcome the 3 biggest blind spots in early dating today so that you can finally get rewarded for all of this effort you're putting into your love life with a genuine love story instead of feeling like all All of that energy is for nothing.

Well, I got a date with myself, your video, and a tube of grout.

You know, I think you're gonna be the first wall who has ever watched this free guide of mine. We've had over a million people watch it, but never a wall.

Walls need love too, Matthew. Walls need love too.

Yes, they do.

Matt, what are you doing?

I'm just talking to the wall. Sorry. Sooner or later, we will have spent so much time staring at our particular wall that we won't even know it's a wall anymore. We'll think it's just how life is. Jerry, these are load-bearing walls. They're not gonna come down. There was a phrase that older generations of women in my family used to say regularly. A man is only as faithful as his options. To them, this wasn't a wall. It was a truth about life. Not unlike men who think it's just an objective truth that a woman will leave you if they find someone who's taller and has more money. It has become more than a wall. It has become their entire worldview. We see this everywhere. Women are crazy. They only care about money. Men care only about sex or looks. Producers need constant validation. Validation.

I don't know if this joke works, Matt.

No, no, it definitely does.

It's not too meta?

No, David, this is funny. It's really funny. Really? Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks, Matt. The problem is that whatever wall you're looking for, you'll find it. We will even see it where it doesn't exist, like my client who didn't get invited to the gathering of the guy she was seeing. And our wall is costing us the many other versions of life that we could be living if we could only widen our gaze and therefore broaden our experience. Of life. The problem is that we have crashed into a certain wall so many times that we no longer believe anything different is possible for us in life. So how on earth do we go about changing it? There are two things tied into the wall. The first is a belief about what we think the world is like, what we think life is like, and the second is a belief about our own limitations. This is where The 5% Rule comes into play. The Five Percent Rule says this: Change is hard. I cannot necessarily just magically feel a different way than I do, or be a different person than I am. If it was that easy, I likely would have done it already. But I do have agency to do something slightly different than I would normally do in this situation. So, what does the 5% Rule actually look like in action? Take the example of my client on the day of the gathering that she wasn't invited to. Her nervous system in that moment was fully activated. A fight-or-flight response had taken over, which is a sympathetic nervous system response that gets triggered when the brain perceives danger or high stress, and the system pumps adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream to prepare you to react. She obviously had a desire to communicate with him what she was feeling, but instead of that coming out in a vulnerable way, it came out in an abrupt and cold way when she said, "Why didn't you invite me?" This was the fight instinct in action. Then when she got his response, and it didn't soothe her enough to calm her fears, or take her out of that triggered state, despite him offering to call her later that day, Her response system switched to flight. That was when he offered to call, and she said, "Don't bother." This was her rejecting him before he had the chance to hurt her any further, which was what she wanted to avoid even more than she desired to be close to him. But what if instead she had just done something different? It wouldn't even need to be a lot different. Just not quite what she would normally do. A lot different is hard. If a situation makes you really anxious, and I tell you to just stop being anxious and be confident instead, It'll probably seem impossible. But what if instead you just thought to yourself, "My reality clearly isn't the only reality. It can't be. There are other ways of being in this world. There are other ways to experience this life. My reality is a result of the train tracks that I have been on my whole life, which have felt fixed, but they are not actually fixed. I can do something different, and different will lead to different." So what if instead of her saying, "Don't bother," when he offered to call later that day, she passively-aggressively said, "Sure." Now, that would still be abrupt. It's not a great response. It would be cold, but it might create a different result, because they would actually get on the phone. Or what if later on, having done what she did do, she realized she overreacted, and then reached out to him to say, "Hey, I'd like to talk if you're still free." I want you, my dear viewer, to think about a situation in which you feel you get hijacked by your normal way of responding to a situation. What would doing something 5% different look like? Maybe you're someone like me who is prone to overwhelm from the stress of work, and maybe your normal response to this overwhelm is to go to a catastrophic place in your mind about how you can't possibly cope with everything that's on your plate, how you'll never get it all done, how bad things are going to result from you not getting it done, and what all of this says about your inadequacy as a person. What, like my fifth one of these? I just want to point out for clarity that this video is not sponsored by Uncrustables. We have not benefited from a single dime of that sweet, sweet Uncrustable money. But if you are an exec at Uncrustables and you happen to like these videos You know where to find me. In this storage cupboard. Obviously. What's the 5% shift? Instead of going to catastrophe, maybe you remind yourself that not everything is nearly as immediate as your brain is making it, and that there's actually more time than you think. Some things should probably get done today, sure, but a lot of things can take, I don't know, maybe the next 5 or 10 years of your life, which perhaps gives you just a little more time than your overwhelmed mind told you you had. Maybe you're someone who finds it difficult not to assume the worst anytime someone doesn't respond the way that you would like them to. Whether it's a new love interest who is taking too long to text you back, a friend who didn't respond to your latest request to hang out, or a colleague who sent you a slightly abrupt message. Normally you'd find yourself immediately going cold on these people and ascribing the worst intentions of rudeness, arrogance, untrustworthiness, or even a tempting diagnosis of a personality disorder. 5% shift. Rather than coming to any or all of these conclusions immediately, you tell yourself, "I'm gonna send one more text to check in," or, "I'm gonna call them so that I can hear the tone of their voice," or simply think about the times when I might have come across a little abrupt without meaning anything by it. In other words, you apply a more marginally generous lens than you normally would have, or you at least reserve your your ire for the other side of one more call. When we are 5% less reactive in life, 5% more generous in our interpretation of others, 5% more candid, 5% more brave, 5% different to what we normally do, we don't just create a marginally different result in the moment, which in itself, by the way, is a revelation to a brain that had previously assumed assumed that all that is available to us is all we have ever gotten in the past. That alone is a miracle to learn that different is possible, but it's bigger than that. A 5% shift in the present has the potential to change the entire trajectory of our future. When two motorcycles leave the same starting point, but their trajectory is 5 degrees apart from one another, the difference may not look like much to begin with,, but continue their progress, and you will find that they wind up in completely different parts of the country as a result. And a 5% shift in the way you show up to situations is enough to change your life. Thank you for watching, everybody. Leave me a comment below about something you want to do 5% differently than you normally do in a certain situation that you have on your mind right now. I can't wait to read them. And you know what? They're going to give everybody ideas about what their 5% 5% shift could be too. I will see you again next week right here.

I knew I smelled peanut butter. Give them to me.

You don't know what you're doing. Stop it. I'll keep one. I'll keep one. I'll keep one. That was actually 5% better than she normally does.