What It Takes To Find A Great Relationship, Being "Happy Enough" Single + New Year Habits...

Hello, everyone. Snuggle in. Settle down. Pour yourself a cup of hot cocoa, because it's the hussy boys in the room again. Hello, Matthew.

It might be the morning, maybe they don't want to snuggle in, maybe they need to get the hell up.

It's a good point, let's cover all bases. Go to bed, get some sleep, get up lazy bones, enjoy your walk, hope you're having a nice lunch.

Or a lovely drive.

Or a lovely drive, oh that snow we're having is bad, or oh it's really hot, isn't it?

Yeah, I hope you're enjoying your time on the beach.

We've covered all of them. Hello, Matthew. How is, you know, we're coming to the end of January and I think this is an interesting time to think about people's goals. This is typically it, right? This is where people start to forget quickly the things they were doing or they're already finding their habits a little harder to keep to than they thought they were. You know, your first week goes great, your second week still want it and you're now starting to be like, oh, have I bitten off more than I can chew? you know, should I carry on with these things? Do you find there's this wobble point here?

I think you've been generous, Steve. I think that happened two weeks ago.

Maybe I'm just describing my own journey with trying to keep my good habits going.

I think you've already done better than most. If it's, if you've got to this point in January and you're still keeping up with the habits you set for yourself on the first, I've been, I.

Did try to set them more modestly this year. That was my sort of. intention.

Wait there, Steve, because I've got a jug of water that I'm supposed to be drinking right now. So, you know, you keep everyone entertained.

Brilliant. I mean, this is just great radio. Well, you know, guys, I want I'll tell you mine. I did this 30 day challenge for January. I'm trying to these this is modest. I'm trying to moisturize every day. I'm trying to do yoga sessions at least like a couple a week. And I've also been writing 300 words every day, even these modest goals. that's not like my life goals, by the way. That's just like things I've been wanting to do. You realize how, like, man, just getting a few yoga sessions in a week that I want to do more of is tricky. I noticed myself putting it off, and even though every time I'm doing it, I'm loving it, I'm like, I'm loving this yoga. It just. It's like finding the time to slot it in and making the appointment with myself. Steve, I've got.

I've got to drink one and a half of these a day. Look at the size of this jug.

He's holding up a large jug saying bottled joy.

Yeah. And I've got to drink one and a half of these. That's about 120 ounces. Right.

So there you go. I mean, are you finding these things, you know, I wanted to tie this all in, Matt, because your latest video was about to-do lists. It was about the fact that checking off these things can once you just keep checking off a bunch of to-dos it can start to feel a bit empty and you wonder why am I doing this? So, you know, do you, how do you find it? Drinking water, have you found a way to make that meaningful and enjoyable for yourself?

Well, my friend, Jesse Itzler, who got me excited about drinking water every day, he said he imagines himself when he's peeing. He literally thinks to himself, I'm peeing out the toxins right now. And he really imagines, he said, whether it's true or not, he doesn't care. It's just imagining peeing out the toxins does it for him. So that's been one thing for me. And also I quite like, because I got this big jug, it's made it a bit of a game. I realized when I was just drinking single, bottles of water, or even glasses.

It didn't really... No, it's no fun.

I always need to make a game out of it. When I've got a full bottle here and I'm just like, right, that's my job today.

Yeah, yeah.

The more I drink, the more the water goes down in this bottle, it gamifies drinking water for me.

That's a good little hack. The only other way I have to make water fun is to put little crushed ice cubes in it. And I think, oh, lovely cold chew on some of them ice cubes, which isn't good for my teeth.

That doesn't do it for me.

So to-do list and adding meaning, is this something you've consciously tried to do?

I always think about this because I'm, basically a lot of my, not all of them, but a lot of my videos come out of just what I struggle with. I've spent most of my life, I'm an ambitious person as you know Steve, and the danger of being a sort of Taipei ambitious person is that you get so obsessed with how much you're doing in a day that that itself can become kind of this monotonous thing of just ticking off another thing for the day. I do like to do a lot of things, I like to get a lot done in the day, but you can lose sight of what it's all for. I do try to remind myself, you know, I have on the retreat we call them emotional buttons. I have these emotional buttons, these little things, these thoughts, these ideas, these images, whatever they may be that remind me what each to-do on my list is actually about. And if I connect to the bigger picture of what it's about, then it gets easier to do the action in the micro otherwise just otherwise going to the gym is just an hour of pain. Yeah.

And I do things like, you know, I do I've been watching lately that Michael Jordan documentary, the Last Dance.

Yeah.

And even that has been just creating I've been watching it in the mornings and it's been making it's been giving me a bigger why for going to the gym of like, I want to, you know, I want to be the best at what I'm doing and I've that pride they have and that sort of dedication in it. It just creates an image for me of why this means something. Like, I've been lifting more weights and it just, it adds some purpose there of like, I'm being a dedicated person, there's discipline.

I'll tell you what I did, Steve. Sarah Blakely, Jesse Itzler's wife, to tie the story all together, who is the owner of Spanx, she sent me a, she sent me her new line of Spanx for Men. and I'm wearing it right now.

And look, this is tucking in a belly. Is that. Is that what it's for?

I don't know. If. I mean, I. I don't know what. Yeah, I suppose that's what they do, but I'm like, I'm really. I've put it on because putting this on, I'm like, I'm not hiding here. If, like, whatever I need to get lean, if I'm gonna wear. If I'm gonna wear this shirt, so. I'm wearing it right now is always sort of remind me that, oh yeah, I do want to get to the gym because, you know, it's nice when I can wear a fitted t-shirt and look all right. In quarantine, it was really easy just to put on bigger and bigger t-shirts just so that I didn't notice that putting on weight.

Right, right. Yeah, it's an interesting one. Just like, I, yeah, I do think a lot about trying to make the things I do have intent behind them. Warren Buffett even had this thing where he took, I don't know what you think of this, but he talked about writing 25 things down and then he like crosses everyone off except for the top five to find out like these are the really, you know, these are the things I can really do well.

So you'll write down 25 and choose the top five most important things of those 25 things.

It's like 25 things he can do and then it's like 20 of them are distractions and then he- what do.

I think he can do for what?

I think it's just like goals or things he might be wanting to work on that sort of thing, like all the goals you might have.

Just select the five most important. Yeah, I have to do that because I spend so much time, I write down way too many ideas and I get too over excited all the time about things I want to do, books I want to read, activities, and it just becomes absurd. I can't do it, Steve.

Yeah, it's the choosing is so much of, and realizing what not to do. Like, I even, again, to just throw another big name out there, but again, I don't know if this is true or not, but I did read that Jeff Bezos even schedules time for nothing, to almost be able to think and have some space and like assess a bit. There's something quite nice about that even just to kind of re-adjust. You constantly want points where you readjust like, are the things I'm doing make sense? Do they make sense? And are they actually adding meaning and purpose or are they just a bunch of stuff?

Yeah, it's true. Get off the hamster wheel.

Yeah, so there you go, listeners.

So.

What do you think about people setting intentions? Final thing. What do you think about people setting intentions for their relationships? This thing comes up a lot of people talking about setting relationship goals and it's one of those things where there's an element of you're waiting for the right time. But there's also, well, I have a to-do list, which is I want to get out there and meet the right person. This is my year. I want to find a great relationship.

Well, I think there are many things that contribute to finding a great relationship. I don't think it's one thing. Going on an app and sending messages to people and trying to make a connection there is one thing. Making connections within your circle or even, you know, expanding your circle so that you can make more connections is another thing. Having more hobbies or activities or doing the same hobbies and activities that you already do, but, you know, doing them in a slightly different way. So instead of doing the same class that you do now, Do go to a different yoga class or join a, you know, if you like, if you're doing self development on your own right now, maybe you can do a course that's an online community that involves meeting people. There's lots of different ways of doing even the things that you already do. You don't even need to take on new hobbies. But if you start adding these things, then they add up to a year that That makes it far more likely that you will meet somebody. And ultimately, that's all we can do. That's all we can really control. It's no different to business. You, you know, in business, you don't know what one action is gonna be the thing that brings in this amazing opportunity. And often it's not that. It's that whatever action it is, it's that action repeated many times. over the year. It's picking up the phone every day to prospective clients. It's meeting with people every month that you might do a deal with. It's constantly putting out content, never knowing what the one piece of content is going to be that really lands and gets shared a lot. It's the thing you do every day. It's not the thing you do once in a while. But it's the combination of all of those things. It's not one thing. It's that there, a business is a combination of, you know, five to 10 to 15 different things that you repeat over and over and over again. And our love life is the same way. You can't control when exactly when the love of your life is gonna walk through the door, but you can control how many times you open the door or how many times you step outside of the door, All of these things you can control. You can control how many times you get dressed up and look decent so that when someone does walk through the door, you feel good. You can control how much time you spend working out or training so that when someone does walk through the door, you feel sexy in your body. So I just think when people are trying to impact their love lives this year, it's not one thing. It's many things. It's, you know, part of the reason I love the retreat program is because it understands that your love life is a combination. I see it, Steve, as like a Venn diagram with three intersecting circles. And in the middle is an extraordinary love life. So one circle is your circle of competence in your love life. So that's how good you are at Having a great date, having good conversation, being a great communicator, communicating your standards, your boundaries, creating attraction, you know, all the things that our Get the Guy programs are designed to do for people. The second circle is your confidence. That's your relationship with yourself, the amount of self-love you have, what you believe you're worth to be. And the third is your life and how rich your life is. So that when you do meet somebody, you have a life to share with somebody, not just a life that you want to get from somebody. And where those three circles meet, where your competence in dating meets your confidence in your own worth and your love for yourself, and it meets a great life to share with somebody, that's where you have an exceptional love life. And so I'm always just a bit baffled when people say to me like, there's nothing I can do for my love life right now because of the times we're living in or because of this, because of that. I'm like, I don't get that. You know, there's three major circles for.

You to work on.

You're telling me you can't, there's nothing you can do in any of these circles right now. I don't, it's not possible. Your love life is the combination of you working on all three of these circles. And by the way, that doesn't mean any one of those circles has to be perfect. Like that's the other thing people mistake me for is they often think that I'm saying that, oh, what Matt, so I've got to be a perfect communicator and do everything that you talk about in your programs. No, you don't. You don't. You could get so much wrong. Oh man, so I've got to like have this incredible love for myself and be the most confident I've ever been in order to attract someone. No you don't. There's plenty of people married who have not figured out the relationship with themselves part yet. You know, like that's, it's not absolutely essential. It helps and there are plenty of relationships that are unhealthy because people haven't figured out that part. But you don't have to be perfect in that area and you don't have to have a complete life in every way. I, you know, I think actually in some ways what's funny is I think sometimes we go too far in our, not us personally, but I think people go too far in the self-development world in the rhetoric of you have to learn how to be happy on your own before someone. I'm like, really? Because Half the world hasn't figured that out and they're in relationships. So, what are you really trying to say that everyone who's in a relationship has figured out how to be happy on their own and that's how they found someone. Give me a break. This is nonsense. Steve, I think, you know how Dan Harris released the book 10% Happier when he referred to meditation. You know, there's a lot of, overwhelming rhetoric about meditation leading to enlightenment. And he actually made a name for himself in the meditation world by saying, listen, I think meditation can just make you 10% happier. And I think that's a modest goal that you can actually expect to accomplish. There's my alarm going off. He was like, that's a modest goal you can hope to accomplish by meditating more. And that made meditation manageable. Well, I'm going to say that in your life, you don't need to be happy single. You just need to be happy enough. If you can figure out, like we're all, we all know that there is a special kind of happiness that comes from being in love and having a happy relationship and that it's It is a special kind of happiness. I don't like when people take that away because it's patronizing. It expects us to deny what we all know is true, which is that we are looking for a relationship because there is a kind of a different experience of happiness to be had when we have a really fulfilling and rewarding and loving relationship. So I think we need to stop, everyone needs to stop thinking that I need to be just as happy outside of a relationship as I am inside of a relationship. It's different. It's a different experience. But I do think that a more achievable goal is for people to just say to themselves, you know what? I'm just gonna work on being happy enough. Happy enough that I'm still enjoying my life single. Happy enough that if the right person comes along, Or someone I really like comes along, I don't trample all over my own life, my standards, and my schedule in order to please them. Happy enough that if someone comes into my life that I fall for, but they're bringing misery to my life because they're not treating me well, I can walk away. That to me is what happy enough means. It doesn't mean you're just as happy no matter what. It means you are happy enough where you are right now to make the right decisions.

Well, I 100% agree with that. And I totally, totally agree with you on the meme of people saying you need to have all your be totally complete before a relationship is actually stifling to people and unrealistic. and unfair.

It's so overwhelming. It's so overwhelming. It's like that's such an unreachable goal that it's like, oh, well, I'm never gonna have a relationship.

Finish self-actualization and then you can have a relationship.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. All right, well, I think that's a wonderful place to wrap up. We've hit the high point there. Well, everyone, if you really do want to work on those circles of yourself and actually build your self-worth to a place where you love yourself enough and feel comfortable and confident enough to be in a relationship, join our wonderful retreat this year, which we have coming up. Go to mhvirtualretreat.com this is our second ever virtual retreat. The debut was a smash. And we had a blast and know you will too if you want to join mhvirtualretreat.com Amazing.

I hope to see as many of you there as possible because we're going to have an incredible time in when is it Steve? March 20, March the 19th to the 21st.

Yeah, yeah and email us your thoughts on the podcast podcast@matthewhussy.com All right brother Wonderful to see you. Happy and healthy in Los Angeles. And we'll catch up very soon.

Thanks, Steve. I've got to go pee.

Go and swig your water, you silly old sausage.

I see the blog sites. Ookie-Wookie got a new wife. Shorty got a new boo. Yeah, love, beautiful. I'm looking for love.