#420: The Science of Attraction: Why You Haven’t Met The Right One with Matthew Hussey Expert Love Coach & Bestselling Author
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When I started podcasting, an online store was the furthest thing from my mind. Now I'm selling my group coaching on the regular and it is just so easy all because I use Shopify. There's one job you have.

for your whole life that will always be your primary job. And that is to take care of the human that is you. Most of us have never understood that to be our job. So we have been sleeping on that job our whole lives. But when you realize that the same way a parent says, it's my job to love and take care of this child. When we realize it's our job to love and take care of us,

we start making completely different decisions in our lives.

I'm ready for my call. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with us this week. All right, you're going to get really excited. We've got Matthew Hussey today. He's a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. His YouTube channel is number one in the world for love life advice with over a half billion

Billion with a B views. He writes a weekly newsletter and is host of the podcast Love Life with Matthew Hussey. Hussey provides monthly coaching to members of his private community at lovelifeclub.com. Over the past 15 years, his proven approach has inspired millions through authentic, insightful, and practical advice that...

not only enables them to find love, but also feel confident and in control of their own happiness. He lives out in LA. Matthew, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Heather. It's good to be here. Excited to have this conversation. Yeah, you know, my show is so much about confidence and I know that...

your show, your book, your writing is a lot around confidence, but also intertwined and entangled with love, which I never talk about. And so I'm certainly not a master in that arena. And I'm so excited to get into this with you today. How do

How did you start down this path? Like, how did you become the best confident love coach that there is? I started because I was interested in helping myself in my love life. I grew up both shy and introverted.

That's not a way of being that gets you an awful lot of opportunity in your love life because you tend to hold back a lot and you don't start a lot of conversations and you don't approach a lot of people that you might like to speak to. And it kind of leaves you in a place where you're being chosen all the time instead of

actually choosing the people you might like to be with or at least speak to. And I really related to that feeling of feeling like I'm not in control and I'm just waiting for something to happen to me. And that often landed me with people that were lovely, but they weren't the right person for me. So when I started out 17 years ago now, I was helping people with the same things I'd helped myself with, which is

to actually go out there and be a little braver and to step outside their comfort zone and to create more opportunity again. And I had this idea in my mind that, because I was working with predominantly women,

I had this idea in my mind that if women had more choice, they would make great decisions about who to be with. Because I saw so many women I cared about with people who treated them poorly, people who weren't really choosing them, that they were just being strung along by instead of being given a real relationship. And I thought, God, if these women had more options, they wouldn't put up with this. They would go with a better option.

Now, I was right in one sense that it did give people this huge empowerment when I gave them techniques and strategies for going out there and creating more options. What I was wrong about was that if people had more options, they would make better choices. Still, I found in my journey over the next few years that even with more options, you

the people I was working with would still end up often with people who they had to chase, people that they felt like were not calling them back or were being inconsistent, were going hot and cold, people who were stringing them along or often lying and manipulating them. So I thought, "Oh, there's something more here. I have a lot to learn because

there's something deeper going on for people that they keep making these choices that keep leading them back to pain in their love life instead of happiness. And that began what I think of now as the second phase of my journey. I wrote a book 10 years ago that was all around how to get results in early dating. But 10 years later, I've written a book that is about the deeper reasons why we are struggling to find love.

I love all of this. I'm a former psych major in college, and I've done so much work on myself in this arena. But I want to pause for a second because I like something that you brought up. If we had more options, maybe we'd make better choices. What were some, or can you just share a couple of the strategies that you taught around how to create more options for yourself and for others? It's funny. One thing I came up against when I was helping women all those years ago was that

At least for me as a guy, even though I didn't feel like I was very good at making the move, at least there wasn't like an aversion to making the move in principle. Whereas a lot of the women I was working with had an aversion to the idea of making a move.

They felt like it wasn't old fashioned in the way that they wanted to be old fashioned. It felt like they wanted the guy to be the one who came over to them. And I saw that as a massive limitation because I was like, there are so many great guys that aren't just racing up to you when you walk into a room. You know, if you always wait to be chosen, you're always meeting the loudest person in the room by definition, because that's the person who's going to come over to you is the person that comes over to everybody.

So how do you meet the person who's not in the habit of going over to everybody who might, by the way, actually make a much better person to be around and to fall in love with? Well, you have to be a little more proactive, but how do you do that in a way that doesn't feel like you're going against all of your nature in wanting there to be this, at the very least, a mutual kind of pursuit and certainly not one where you're the one making all of the moves.

And I started saying to women, look, if you think you're old fashioned by not making the move, that's not what old fashioned was. Old fashioned was a woman walking past a guy and inadvertently dropping her handkerchief in front of him. And then she would keep walking and he would see the handkerchief and he'd think this is a wonderful opportunity to act like a man. And he'd pick it up and he'd hand it to her and he'd say, madam, you dropped this. And she'd say, did I?

And they'd now have a conversation that he thought was his idea. He thought he was bringing the handkerchief to her and that he was the one initiating the interaction. But it wasn't. She chose him. She initiated. She just made him feel like it was his idea.

And what I started to do in my work was show people how to drop the handkerchief in the modern era without having to carry around a handkerchief. What are some modern ways of quote, dropping the handkerchief so that you can make the move? Because one of the things that remains true in this day and age is people want to be brave, but they have a hard time being brave. If you are someone who,

who goes through life making other people braver, you won't have to worry about approaching everyone all the time. You will be more approachable. And if you're more approachable, more opportunities are going to come your way. So I like to help people, women in particular, focus on approachability over approaching.

So that when they go into a room, people feel brave around them. And when people feel brave around you, you won't be short of options. So there's a taste of what I've been talking about for so many years that is the kind of front end of creating opportunities. And it's the irony is that's me and my wife literally met.

in a way that could have been scripted based on all of the things I've ever taught anybody else. Because I used to teach this three-step model of eye contact, proximity, and then saying something, but not worrying too much about what you say, just using an initial sentence to create a green light for someone to talk to you. And

When I talk about eye contact, I say you have to make more than you think you do, because a lot of women will look at a guy once and then look away and be like, he knows, but he doesn't know. He has no idea. So you have to look more times than you think you have to.

The second thing is proximity. It's very hard, even if you're making eye contact with someone, for that person to walk across the room to talk to you. That's a big step and it represents a big social risk, right? Because you're like, I'm going to walk across the room. If I get rejected, I got to go back to where I came from and it's embarrassing and they're going to laugh me off while I walk back. Whereas if you get proximity to someone, if you just get close, that's another step in making them brave.

Because they're more likely to turn their head and say, hey, how's it going? If you're standing right next to them or close to them, then they are to walk across the room to say something to you. So the second step is proximity. And the last step is say something. And my wife, the night we met,

Literally, we made tons of eye contact. There was a fight that I was watching on the TV in this bar that we were in, and there was a big fight going on. I'm a boxing fan. And as I was watching the boxing, she came and sidled up next to me to watch the TV as well. And so we got proximity.

And then she literally asked me a question about the boxing, about how something worked. I don't know what it was. And she has never asked me a question about boxing since it was the one and only time she's ever been interested in boxing coincidentally. And we started talking and I'm sure I would have at some point talked to her if she hadn't talked to me, but yeah,

you know, all three of those steps happened. And as a result, obviously there's many things that happened in between then, but you know, we just got married last year. And I think, God, what would have happened if we only made half the eye contact or if she had never come and stood next to me and looked at the TV with me, or if she'd never said something, or frankly, if I decided to stay home that night, you know, which I almost did because the weather was crappy and I didn't want to go out and I was feeling a bit tired and

And I still decided, you know what, I'm going to go. And I went. So it's just these things blow my mind because you never know in your life. You never know when something is going to happen. But we have to start engineering those moments where things can happen a little more if we want more options in our life.

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I love that she nailed your three-step process and didn't even know that she was doing it. I love how she had no idea who I was. She didn't even, you know, like, it's not like she knew me or anything like that. So it's crazy, but it works, right? She's batting a thousand on the program. She's nailing it. I'm in time again. Okay.

So you gave me an epiphany when you explained that when you walk into a room, the man that's loud enough, bold enough to walk up to you and come clear across that room is probably doing it to every other person because he is that bold. And that's the pattern, which I never thought about. So thank you for enlightening me in that regard. That was a wow moment. OK, then you explained earlier that.

Once people go through this, you know, there are options you thought women, which I would agree with you, if they had more options and more people to choose from, they would make better choices. However, you said what you noticed and learned was they weren't. They were still choosing people that were manipulating them, not available, not treating them. How did you find that? And what revelations did you have around why that was happening?

We don't choose what is going to make us happy. We choose what we know and what we think we're worth. So most of us don't go through our love lives, picking situations and people that are going to bring us peace and long-term happiness.

So we have to go, what is it that I know that I'm familiar with that I keep being drawn back into that is actually bringing me an awful lot of long-term unhappiness? And where is what I think I'm worth working against me? There is a chapter in this new book that I've written called Never Satisfied, and it's

It's about the different reasons why we keep going for the wrong people. The first one, as I've mentioned, is because it's what we know. And we have to have maximum compassion for ourselves in that respect, because what we know is a result of the past we've had. And much of that past took place in a time when we weren't deciding the kind of life that we were having. We were just thrown into the kind of life we were having and

the kind of parenting that we were around and the models that we saw for what love is. And a lot of us in those times, we got wired up in a way that was necessary for our survival during that time. Our nervous system got wired up in a way that it had to, to react. But that nervous system response that we have, the way we got wired up is not necessarily serving us today. What we know might be inconsistent love.

What we know might be people who abandon us. What we know might be people who make us feel less than, but if it's what we know, we get drawn to it because we get drawn to what is familiar. Even if it makes us unhappy, it feels crazy to us. Why would I keep choosing things that make me unhappy? But we don't choose what makes us happy. We choose what's familiar.

We choose what our body recognizes. When someone comes along and they're a certain brand of charisma and a certain brand of sexy, and they make us feel unsure of ourselves, and then they don't text us back for three days. And then we start to feel almost that anxious energy in our body. For many of us, that feels a lot like love.

That feels a lot like this special feeling that, you know, if we had inconsistent love growing up, if we had people that made us constantly guess whether they were going to be there or not, then that's what our body recognizes as love, even if it has nothing to do with love. So we keep going back to it. That's the really tough part. Like I talk in the book about this idea of the wall. We're all drawn to this wall.

that's been created for us, our reality. There's a famous race car driver, Mario Andretti, that said, if you want to know how to race a car, don't look at the wall. Your car goes where your eyes go. So if you're looking at the wall, you're going to crash into it. Well, in our love lives, we have a wall, all of us, something we've come to expect. And if we're not careful...

We focus on that wall so much that we just keep crashing into it, even though we say it's the thing we don't want. So there was a woman that I worked with, lovely person, was dating a guy that she said is great. He's been wonderful. He hasn't done anything wrong. I said, so what happened? She said, last weekend, he had a gathering with his friends and he didn't invite me. And now this woman was terrified of abandonment. Everything she'd ever been through in her life made her terrified of abandonment.

And when he invited his friends over and he didn't invite her on this Saturday daytime, it activated every part of her. And her nervous system kicked in and went into that place of danger. And she started telling herself stories about how she liked him more than he liked her, how she was excluded, how maybe he was embarrassed of her and he didn't want her there. All of this, she was going to get hurt.

Now, the truth is, we don't know if any of those things are true. They might be. One of the things that she thought might actually be the real reason, but she doesn't know that yet. So she texted him in this activated state and said, why didn't you invite me? And this was in the middle of him being with his friends.

He said, I'm so sorry. There's a group of my friends that I haven't seen in a while. I was looking forward to seeing them and getting them together. Can I call you later? And she said, don't bother. By the time she spoke to me, he hadn't called her. It had been three or four days. And she said, I don't know what to do. I just feel like this always happens. And now let's look at what the process is for her in figuring this out, because this is a classic example of

The last thing she wants is abandonment, but this is her wall and she keeps crashing into that wall. And by the way, if we're looking for the wall, even when it isn't there, we'll find it. We'll create one if we have to, because that's our reality. And we're so busy looking for it. And we're so busy worrying about it.

that it becomes our reality. When she recognized this has really activated me, I can feel myself. I've gone into fight or flight. And for her, her tendency, when she goes to that place is,

I'm going to push someone away. I'm going to avoid so that they can't hurt me. So that's where the don't bother came from. I'm going to reject you before you can reject me because the worst thing in the world would be for me to be abandoned again. So I'm going to reject you first. And in that moment, she has to stop and first give herself maximum self-compassion. I didn't choose to feel like this right now. This is an automatic nervous system response.

to what has just happened. Something about this situation has triggered me.

It is not my fault that it has triggered me. This is deep stuff. And there is an inner child there that is screaming right now. Now, these feelings are real. They come from a time in my life when they were real. Doesn't mean that what's happening right now on the outside is the story I'm telling myself, but the feelings I'm having come from a very real place and they come from a very real time in my life. So instead of shaming myself for feeling these feelings,

Let me give myself love and compassion right now. Step two, let me recognize what my pattern is, which is to immediately become avoidant when I get scared like this. Has that pattern served me in my life? Well, sometimes it served me when I've been right, but it's also pushed a lot of people away and it's in danger of making it so that no one can really get in. And that would be a travesty for my life.

So this pattern is not helping me. Then it's okay. But the reason I have this pattern is because I really do feel like I'm in danger. And I really do feel like I have to protect myself right now. And I don't want to get hurt again and so on. Right now, our belief is working against us, right? We have a belief that this is always the case that I always get abandoned. Here's another example of

Our belief is that. So you just have to believe that it's not that is really hard for people. It's like, I don't know about anyone else. I don't have an easy time just believing something because I'd like it to be true. If my body is telling me, no, this is the truth, then that's what I'm feeling, regardless of what I'm telling myself in the moment.

So I focus not on getting people to just believe something different. If I take someone who's been cheated on their whole life, just believing that the next person is not going to cheat on them. I find that almost insulting to ask that person to do because it's just not their reality. Even if we may know from a distance, not everyone is going to do that to them. That's their reality. So let's respect that belief system for a moment.

but say what would be a way of starting to shift the way I am in these situations without having to just leapfrog to believing something new which feels impossible?

This is where curiosity comes in. And I find curiosity to be one of the most valuable values and emotions, if we can call curiosity an emotion. It's one of the most valuable things there is because curiosity doesn't ask you to believe something different. Curiosity just asks you to believe that other ways of being or experiencing the world are possible. And it's a kind of a gateway to belief.

What that woman could do is find a friend of hers that is much more vulnerable than she is and doesn't immediately jump to these conclusions and just ask her really dumb questions. Like if this happened to you, would you immediately think this? And maybe her friend says, I mean, I'd have to see if it happened a couple of times first. I'd wait a bit and see. And you go, oh, yeah.

There's a moment where I would go left and you go right. Or you might say to that friend, what would you do if you were feeling really anxious about this? And that friend might say, I'd like text him or I'd call him and be like, you know, I got in my head about something today and explain a little bit about it, you know, and see what he said. And so you go, oh, where I say, don't bother. This person says, gets curious and ask some questions of him, albeit in a warm way.

So you see these little moments where people depart from the way that you do things. And that's very powerful because we have to acknowledge there are certain areas where life has made it really, really hard for us to do what might feel really easy for other people. Trusting people might be really easy for some people because they've had a great life in that respect.

But for you, if your trust has been broken in fundamental ways in your life, you may really struggle with that. You have to almost treat yourself like a toddler who is learning to walk in an area where other people might be athletes. And that's okay, by the way, because there's areas where you're an athlete, where other people are a toddler learning how to walk.

But when there's an area where you're a toddler learning how to walk, you have to ask those really basic questions and get curious about how other people live and then try borrowing 10% of that.

And just from a place of curiosity, sprinkling some different ways of reacting into your life, just to start to see what happens if you step outside of your normal groove. What happens if she doesn't say, don't bother when he says, can I call you later? She says, I'd like that. What happens if she gets on the phone to him and says,

Oh, I got in my head a bit today about something. I feel a bit embarrassed to say this. He's like, well, oh God, you inviting your friends over. I'm sure you were just having a nice time with your friends, but I kind of got in my head about, you know, hoping that you'd invited me and feeling a bit hurt that you didn't.

And you then see what that person says. And that person's reaction is going to be different to the reaction you're used to because you're used to just pushing people away. The different reaction you get starts to create this belief that different is possible, that there's other worlds than the one you're used to, and that you can start to experience them just by stepping outside your normal groove.

And that then starts to mess with your belief system because you go, oh my God, what I've experienced in my love life until now is only a reflection of the world that I've created. It's not a reflection of the world. There are so many different worlds. And if I want to start to access new results in my love life, I have to, with curiosity, start deviating from my standard patterns.

So that's how I write about it in the book. And I give people, of course, many more steps on how they can do that.

I love that. The thing that came up for me while you were explaining this for me, I call it, I don't react. I respond with all the grace and class within me, even though I might feel compelled to blow up in a moment. I challenge myself to say, I'm going to stay calm for as long as I need to, until I can respond with class and grace. Especially if I give myself enough time, the emotions diffused and you're able to approach it in a much more calm, smarter way.

manner. And then for me, when you explain the person that maybe handles these situations, well, I call it channeling my inner Samantha. It's one of my best friends. She's the sweetest approaches everything with love, never thinks anything bad can happen. I channel my inner Samantha and I approach it the way I think that she would. And that's very, very helpful. So when you get into all this in the book, and I love the wall metaphor, thank you so much for blowing that out and explain that to us. It's so spot on.

How do you get these women like this one woman you were working with? She starts to understand it's her. She starts to understand she's approaching and attracting the same kind of person over and over again because it's what she was comfortable with. How do you get her to get off of that path now and start attracting someone who actually wants to treat her well, isn't going to abandon her?

Well, we first have to start by saying, what is it that's really important to me? Like, what do I want going forward? We can't just go out into our love lives trying to get someone. Like if I just get someone and they're attractive and sexy and they look the part and they feel they have the charisma that I want and the this and the that, if I could just get that, then I'll be okay. It's not true.

We've all been in relationships before where people had those things and we were terribly unhappy because our needs weren't being met. And it's important to remind ourselves of those times. Sometimes if we're single long enough, we forget about the pain of being in the wrong relationship and we start focusing on the pain of being single.

and how, God, I just really want someone again. But we have to stay connected to the pain of the wrong relationship. Stay connected to the pain of someone that you were with making you feel less than or making you feel like you weren't good enough or not accepting you or shaming you or making you feel like you were constantly uneasy or betraying you in broad daylight. Like we have to stay connected to that because we're

When we're in that pain, we get a very clear picture of what we can never tolerate again. Not what we desire, but what we can never tolerate again. Big difference. And when we realize, oh, I can never tolerate that again, whatever that thing is, if you look at its opposite, that's something that's going to bring you real peace and happiness. You know, a teammate, someone who's loyal, someone who sees you, someone who truly accepts you, someone who's consistent.

Someone who makes you feel safe. Like these are things that create great relationships. So I talk about it as deciding your path. Like what's your path? And then you have to make a pact with yourself that no matter how charming anyone is in this life, no one can ever make you stray from that path.

If they don't have the values and the character of the kind of person that you want in your life, it is irrelevant how wonderful they look on paper or how eligible they look to everybody else. Because that's what I always hear. Oh, they're so eligible. And they're eligible based on what? That they're single at this age and they're attractive and they're successful and they're charismatic. That doesn't make someone eligible to me.

But we talk about those things like that's eligibility. No, eligibility is they're an incredible partner. They're an incredible teammate. They show themselves to be trustworthy. They're consistent. We have great times together. I feel more of myself around them. I feel at home with this person. I feel like I can be vulnerable with this person and the things I'm vulnerable about are accepted.

So we have to decide our path. I talked about a chapter called Never Satisfied. The Never Satisfied is about all of the reasons we chase the wrong people. But the chapter that follows that is called How to Rewire Your Brain. And that's about how to make sure that we only align ourselves with the right kind of people going forward and we reprogram ourselves for the right kind of people. We have to decide what our path is.

and then be vulnerable enough to bring out a game with people, you know, not hold back, bring our best selves to the table when we date someone. But the moment we realize this person is not on our path, we're willing to have the challenging conversations that we often avoid. Because one of the reasons we ended up so far down the wrong path is that we never mentioned the things that bother us. You know, I have people saying to me six months into seeing someone, Matthew, you know, I'm seeing this person,

but I don't know what we are. And I'm like, okay, but you need to ask them that question because I don't have more information about what you are than he does.

So why is it I'm the first person you're talking to about this? I should be the second person you're talking to about this if you got the answer you didn't want. But we avoid hard conversations. We all of us struggle sometimes with conversations where we're afraid of the answers.

where we don't want to get an answer that we don't want, where we don't want to spoil the party if we're having a good time with someone. But we have to have that conversation because we have to know if they're on our path or not. Am I investing time and energy in someone who's actually got the same intentions as me?

Or am I doing this under the misapprehension that we're in the same place about what we want and we couldn't be further apart? And a lot of people realize that after investing months and sometimes even years in someone that we do not align at all in what we want in our lives or from each other. So you have to decide your path.

You have to be willing to have the challenging conversations with people. And you then have to be willing to do what's necessary when you realize people aren't on your path. And the way you do that is you stay focused on your happiness.

Because if you focus on your ego or trying to get this person or the short-term comfort of having someone in your life or the drug of dopamine and oxytocin that you feel when you're getting someone's attention, if you focus on those things,

you're going to get further and further away from your happiness. And a lot of people are in cycles of that for years where they are just chasing the highs. They're chasing the dopamine rush of dating. They're chasing the feelings that get produced when someone chaotic comes into their life and it feels impulsive and exciting and romantic. And, you know, it can be hard to deprogram ourselves away from these feelings, but that's a certain point.

It's about deciding what do I value more? You know, do I value peace or do I value this crazy roller coaster? Like what is more valuable to me at this stage in my life? And I had to get to a point in my own life, had to make different decisions about what I valued because I wasn't happy. What I was chasing in my love life wasn't making me happy.

And I was on my own little dopamine ride that I was like, oh my God, this is just leaving me anxious and unhappy and unfulfilled. I have to change something here, but that can take a little time. Sometimes you have to stop doing the old thing for a little while so that your nervous system can calm down and you can start to appreciate a new kind of energy.

But when you're chasing the old thing, it's very hard to appreciate the new thing. It's like if you eat enough sugar on a daily basis, normal food doesn't taste good anymore. It changes your palate. But if you come off of sugar and then two weeks later you eat an apple, it tastes like a candy bar. You know, it tastes so sweet. Your palate has reset itself. And I think sometimes in our love life, our palate needs to

reset itself because we've been so used to the old thing that

feels exciting but creates chaos in our lives and makes us unhappy and anxious and feel bad about ourselves but produces these highs and it's not happiness it's producing it's a kind of addiction and we have to break free of that addiction i believe if we want to find long-term happiness in our love lives

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Oh, so good. I relate to that so well. And I love the sugar analogy. That is spot on. So right. Okay. I know that you get into steps and tactics to create confidence within yourself. And obviously the more confident we are when we go into relationships, the more we're going to show up as a vulnerable versions of ourselves. We're going to show up as those real versions and be willing to have difficult conversations. How do you teach people to build confidence in their relationships and in themselves? The

The way I coach confidence is in some ways a little unorthodox because I think it's really important to define what confidence is if we're going to achieve confidence. And whenever I tried to define confidence, I realized people have so many different definitions of what confidence is and what it looks like. In the book, in order to have a complete model for confidence,

We need to acknowledge that there are three different layers for confidence. There's the surface layer, which is how we walk, talk and act, how we're perceived from the way we conduct ourselves in the world.

Then if you go a level deeper, there's what I call identity confidence. And identity confidence is the things that we draw confidence from in our lives. So I imagine that if you drew a square and inside that square, you put smaller squares inside each one of those smaller squares would be something that gives you confidence.

So, for example, my career, let's say, could give you confidence. Your car or your house that you're living could give you confidence. The fact that you play the guitar and you're really good at it could give you confidence. The fact that you have amazing friends and an amazing circle could give you confidence. Your relationships with family, there's all these different things that add up to confidence.

Now, on that, we can go into that level, but that's the level where a lot goes wrong because a lot of people overinvest in one square and that ends up being where they derive most of their confidence. So, you know, you see it in some people in their relationships. They forget everything else in their life and just give everything to their relationship and

And then they don't realize that 95% of their identity now is only coming from their relationship. So when their relationship goes away, it doesn't feel like just a death of a relationship. It feels like the death of me. This is like everything I am, everything I'm worth, everything that makes me, me is this relationship.

So, and that, by the way, happens with people's careers too. People who over-invest in their careers to the detriment of everything else, when they lose a career, it feels like the death of their identity and they freak out. My whole life when I was 43 and I had put everything into my career and then I got fired. You are speaking the truth right now, my friend. Right. And everyone's got their version of that.

And so what I always encourage at the identity level is diversification where you say, right, it's okay that some squares are bigger than others, but I need to understand that any square that gets disproportionately big becomes my biggest vulnerability. And by increasing my investment in other squares or even brand new squares that I never had before,

I am starting to mitigate the effects of any one part of my life going wrong.

Now that, and I write a whole chapter on that in the book called identity confidence. So anyone who wants to dig deeper into that, that is one of the most powerful things I not only in the book, but on my retreat, when I do a retreat once a year for six days, that's always one of the big moments because people get to draw their own life and draw the squares inside it. And people have some massive realizations and wake up calls when they start to do that exercise.

But to keep moving down the three levels, underneath the identity level is an even deeper level of confidence, which is what I call the core. And the reason the core has to exist is because even though I believe in shoring up our confidence on the identity level, the problem with it is that it's always inherently vulnerable. Anything can go wrong at that level. And if we're not careful, if our confidence isn't underpinned by something even deeper, then

When things go wrong on the identity level, they can threaten to destroy our confidence.

So what's the deepest level? The deepest level is the core. And that is the relationship we have with ourselves that is deeper than anything we are good at, anything we do that we think makes us appear special to the world or important or validates us. Any attributes we think make us shine is deeper than all of that.

So this is where we get into really interesting territory. And I also think this is an area that trips most people up, but everyone can have their own name for it. But when people think of the deepest level of confidence, most often they think of some version of learning to love yourself. And self-love is a concept that I have always struggled with because I never really felt like I knew how to do it.

So whenever anyone would say, you have to love yourself, I'd be like, okay, tell me how. And very few people ever had good answers to that question. But the other problem with it was my brain. I have a very rational and like hyperlogical brain. And I'm sure many people out there listening to this will relate to what I'm about to say. My brain would go, okay, even if it's important to love myself, why?

should I love myself? Like on what basis should I love myself? And that was a question that even fewer people had great answers for. I would stand on my retreat. I would stand up there every single year. I've done this retreat for 16 years of my life.

Every year I would stand in front of the audience and I would say, does everyone think it's important to love yourself? And every hand would go up and say, okay, why should you love yourself? Like on what basis? And people would all of a sudden be stumped. And then all of a sudden people would start saying, well, because I'm kind or because I'm

ambitious or because I work hard or because I treat my family well. And all I would see is a bunch of things they were listing that belonged on the identity level of confidence, not at the core. Because really all that is, is another way of saying I'm lovable when I'm doing everything well. I'm lovable when I'm kind. I'm lovable when I'm ambitious. I'm lovable when I'm getting an A in life. But what about the days where you don't get an A? What about the days where you're selfish and

What about the days where you're mean to someone and you hate yourself for it? You've hurt someone and you hate yourself for it. What about the days where you screw up? What about the days where you lay in bed all day? You just felt too lazy to do anything. Like, how do you love yourself on those days? If the reason you're telling yourself you should love yourself is because of all of these wonderful qualities you have. And by the way, what do you do when someone with even more of those qualities walks into a room? Do you say they're more lovable than you? So now we're just into comparison.

So even though they feel deep when I'm talking about my kindness, it feels deep. My love for myself can't be based on the days when I'm kind because the days where I screw up and I hate myself for it, that's actually the day I need self-love the most. And that's the day I'm in danger of not giving it to myself based on that idea. So I said, okay, confidence at the deepest level is about self-love, but self-love can't be based on all of these traits that we think make us special because

Because most of us will say, if you say you're special, most of us go, yeah, right. I'm one in 8 billion. Like how special can I really be? And everything I think I do well, someone does it better. So

They're more special than me, I guess. Like, I think most of us have a really hard time selling ourselves on the idea that we're special. But I don't think you need to sell yourself on the idea that you're special in order to feel confident. I think trying to find ways to feel special is a trap. So what's the real way to get that feeling? I started exploring other models for love, other ways to love ourselves. Because the special model, by the way, is based on the romantic model.

that I'm one day going to fall in love with myself the way I've fallen in love with other people in my life. That's never going to work, right? We fall in love with other people, not just because of their great qualities, but because they're a bit of a mystery. And of course, over the course of a relationship, what's a very like well-known line, familiarity breeds contempt. Well, if familiarity breeds contempt,

When it comes to ourselves, who would we have more contempt for than us? We're more familiar with ourselves than anyone else on the planet. We've spent every waking moment with ourselves. We know all of our flaws, our insecurities, the regrets we have, the things we've done. It's hard not to have contempt for yourself. So the romantic model won't work. What's the model that will work? When I started looking for this, I said,

Okay, confidence has to be based on a new model altogether. What's another model? The parent-child relationship. In the parent-child relationship, if you ask a parent, why do you love your child? A parent will look at you like you're a crazy person. But here's what they won't do. They won't list a bunch of attributes that make their child great.

They'll say, what do you mean? I love them because they're mine. It's my child. The question barely even computes. I love them because they're mine. They don't compare them to other children. They just go, I love them because they're mine. It's my child. What if you applied that same model for loving someone to yourself? Now, how do you do that? You recognize that you don't need to think that you as one in 8 billion people are special.

you see the truth that what makes you special to you is that out of 8 billion people, you are the only one charged with looking after the human that is you. What you have is a special relationship with the human that is you. Imagine that the day you were born, you were given a human and someone told you for the rest of your life,

You have one job. That job is to give this human the best life you can. That's it. Now, you may volunteer for other jobs in life. You may decide to become a parent. You may decide to work for someone. You may decide to make friends. Those are jobs you're going to volunteer for. There's one job you have.

for your whole life that will always be your primary job. And that is to take care of the human that is you. Most of us have never understood that to be our job. And so we have been sleeping on that job

our whole lives. But when you realize that the same way a parent says, it's my job to love and take care of this child. When we realize it's our job to love and take care of us, we start making completely different decisions in our lives. When someone comes into our life and they're abusive, or they treat us like we're disposable, or they're not sure about us,

They pick us up and put us down. We don't tolerate that anymore. Not because we're so confident. We don't tolerate it anymore because we go, it's my job to take care of this human. And I can't let someone in my life who's going to treat my human this way. This doesn't serve my human. When you think of yourself as yours, it's like imagining someone saying to you, why do you love yourself? And you go, what do you mean? Because I'm mine.

Because I'm my human. I don't need to give you a list of attributes. I just need to tell you I'm my human. I have a special relationship with me. And when you have that relationship, you don't even need to start by liking yourself because loving yourself isn't a feeling. It's a job. It's a responsibility. You don't need to like yourself to love yourself. Loving yourself is an approach. So when you say, how does someone become confident? That is the deepest, deepest level of confidence.

how I have found people can be confident in a bulletproof way because their confidence isn't based on anything egoic. It's not based in any way on trying to convince themselves that they are special in comparison to anyone else. It's their confidence is just based on a very pure and very specific intention. The intention to give the human that is yours a

the best life you possibly can. And if you ask every day, what would I do for this human? If I was trying to give them the best life, it completely changes what you do with your life. It changes who you say yes to. It changes who you say no to. It changes who you let into your life. It changes who you get out of your life. It changes everything.

Matthew, this work that you've done is transformational. This new book is incredible. Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person and Live Happily No Matter What. Coming out April 23rd. Where can everyone get this book and how can everybody keep up with you? So thank you so much, Heather. The thing I'll say to people is I hope that anyone listening has had an epiphany or two listening to this, but epiphanies don't change our life. Repetition does.

And this book is designed to not just give you those epiphanies, but to be the place you can come back to over and over again and

to methodically repeat those epiphanies so that it becomes your way of living and your way of existing. What I just said to everyone, I didn't need to hear it once. I've needed to hear it a thousand times. And that's what this book is designed to do. It's designed to be your co-pilot in helping you find your person, finding the love that you want. But it's also designed to be a compassionate and loving voice in the times where

you're struggling or the times where love is nowhere to be found or where you've just lost love and you're trying to recover and heal from it so whatever age you are it's going to meet you where you're at and

If you want a copy, it's at lovelifebook.com. You can buy it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you like. But if you come to lovelifebook.com, I have a really special bonus for people right now as my thank you. We are doing an event on May the 4th, a virtual event for every single person who gets a copy of the Love Life book.

It's called find your person. And it's going to take all of the ideas from the book and bring them to life in a live coaching session that is going to help you to find your person this year. So if you go to lovelifebook.com, you can both order the book there and you can use your receipt to get a free ticket to that event. Find your person on May the 4th. And like I said, that's all at lovelifebook.com.

Matthew, thank you so much, guys. Get this book. You've heard some of these massive epiphanies he's dropped on you. The book is going to transform you, transform your life. Matthew, thank you so much for being here and thank you for writing this book.

Heather, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. All right, go get the book, Love Life. I'll link everything in the show notes below. Keep creating your confidence. I'll see you next week.

What's up, everyone? I'm Hala Taha, host of Yap Young and Profiting Podcast, a top 10 entrepreneurship podcast on Apple. I'm also the CEO and founder of the Yap Media Podcast Network, the number one business and self-improvement podcast network. That's why they call me the podcast princess. On Young and Profiting Podcast, I interview the brightest minds in the world,

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