Create Connection and Elevate Your Love Life with Matthew Hussey

Your relationship with the pain is the thing that's making the pain intolerable. Take a great relationship, throwing kids, it's like throwing a hand grenade in the middle of the living room. (laughing) Nothing stays the same. Everything changes and it's changing all the time. You don't know when someone's gonna walk into your life. You don't know when something different is gonna happen than something that's happened before. You have no idea. Own your future. Because if you don't, someone else will. Hey everybody, I am so excited. For you to spend time with me and a dear friend for the next 40 minutes or so, to talk about one of the most important things in life, relationships, connection, connectivity, a life with money and out without relationships, a life with success without love is probably the most unfulfilling thing in history. And this guest that's coming on is not only a New York Times best-selling author, his advice on relationships and connection is so profound that he is the number one viewed on YouTube when it comes to relationships. And I'm so excited he's here right now. He's got a brand new book coming out. So I want you to take this link down right this minute. Brand new book called, you ready for this one? Love, life, book, well, it's love, life. I mean, who doesn't want to love life? But I love the twist of it. Love can allow you to love life on another level, whether that's love of a significant other, that's love and family, love and relationships. It is so important. Go to or write this down. Don't go yet. You're not going to want to miss an inch of this. Love, lifebook.com. Love, lifebook.com. When you're watching this, it might be the first day you can order, you can be one of the first ones to have it. You can make sure you go on our Facebook group or in our communities and let everybody else know, I know you're going to absolutely freak out. This is someone I met probably two years ago and since then I've got to know him and now his new bride. I met them together. Before they were married, now I know him as husband and wife. They're an incredible couple. Audrey's just amazing and without further ado, can we please give it up for Mr. Matthew Hussie? The crowd goes wild. What's up, Matthew? It's so good to speak to you, man. If I'm not talking to you one to one, I'm just seeing you in front of insanely big crowds. Either doing your thing or with Tony or. I only ever see you in two contexts. A very private one or an absolutely insane one. Yeah, I feel like that's my life as well, right? Matthew, I just want to tell you, when I say, and I know those that feel like are part of my family, they know I don't say it lightly, this is a friend, someone I think is amazing. It's not words that I just generously throw out there. I know a lot of amazing people don't care. But I mean, at the first time I met you, I could tell about your depth, your caring, and how much you truly want to transform people and how you live now, maybe not always. Some of the things I want to ask you, maybe not always, but how you live and congruency with what you teach. And I think that's why you have so many falls. I think that's why so many people's lives have changed. I think it's why you have a twist on finding deep connected relationships and love in a way that's resonating with people. So I'm really excited to dig in there. I hope I have the questions that pull it out in a way that really impacts everybody. But why, I know the sounds broad, but why are relationships, why should relationships be more important than maybe some people give it credit for? Because you get to a certain point in life and some people give up on love or they give up on finding and rekindling the connection with the person and they find other things to dull the senses. Maybe it's a glass of wine a night. Maybe it's their girlfriends. Maybe it's golf. Maybe it's being super dead. Maybe it's, hey, I'm just going to be a single parent and that's it. And I don't mean that disrespectfully, but I feel especially had gone through a divorce in my life and I found true love. And I'd probably had to become a better man to really have the love that I have now. It didn't just fall on me. But when I see the difference of not having connected loving relationships in my life compared to now, I feel limitless. I feel I could do anything. I feel like I have goosebumps talking about it. And I'm hoping we could give some insights to people today that maybe you want to take what they currently have that's OK and make it amazing, or if they're not in a relationship or they're not getting along with their partner in business or life, that they can have a couple unfair advantages to take it to another level. So why is this so important? Well, I think firstly, Dean, when you and I met in the environment we met in, I know there's-- it was a kind of environment where there were a lot of demands on your time. And everyone wants a piece of you. And everyone wants your advice. You're that guy in the room that even among leaders, every single person wants to hear what you have to say. And you were really-- I'll always remember that you were kind enough to sit with me for 10 minutes and sketch out a diagram of something you thought I should be doing in my organization. And to this day, I remember every single word of that conversation and it's made a huge difference in our organization. So that feeling is mutual. Firstly, I want to say so many people have been through so much disappointment in this area of their lives, in their love lives, especially that they do give up. They lose hope and it's kind of natural, especially if we got to a certain point in our life and we thought we'd be somewhere else. We thought we'd have our person by now. We thought we'd have the kind of love that other people talk about, but we've not found it. And we feel chronically dissatisfied in this area or worse. We just feel invisible. There's no one who's seeing us, no one who wants us. And it gets to a point where people start to get afraid, like, oh my god, this is never going to happen for me. I had a woman dean that I coached, whose first question to me was not, how do I find my person? She said, how do I kill the desire to find my person? - Wow, that just hurt my heart. - Yeah, it's heartbreaking. And because she said, if I hold onto this, she said it hasn't happened for me so far. I've never found the kind of love that I hoped one day to find. And if I never find it, but I hold onto this desire, I'm gonna be sad for the rest of my life. - Heartbroken every day, like unrepeat, like an alarm clock. - Chronically heartbroken, chronically sad, chronically lonely. And more people then care to admit, feel that way. And we're kind of shamed in today's, it's like, we can't win in today's world because we're like shamed if we act too desperate about wanting to find love. We're shamed if we get in a relationship and we care too much about that relationship. And it's like, oh, all you care about is, you know, your relationship, you've changed for this relationship. We're shamed if we're single and we're not insanely happy being single. Like, why are you not happy? You have to be happy first before you ever meet the one. And so we're shamed for not being happy on our own. It's like, it's this thing where we feel like, God, how am I supposed to be? Because it's a universal feeling of wanting to find love. But I feel like, you know, there are so many people who find it hard to admit how badly they wanna find love and how much they look at their friends with a sense of longing and envy. God, I really want what they have and I haven't found it. I think relationships are so important because I think everything always ends up coming back down to relationships, not just in our romantic lives, but in our social lives, in our work lives. You know, ask anyone and you know this better than anyone, Dean. Anyone who becomes super successful suddenly, like, it's like a buffet of people that you meet and you, you know, people pour into your life at an insane rate and all of a sudden it's like, you know everybody and everyone wants to know you and you have all these different connections. But you still go home from the party, the event, the mastermind, the whatever. And if you're not careful, you're like, who are my friends? Who are the people that I actually feel truly connected to? And you know, we get to a point in our lives, I think, where we realize, God, I really need to invest in some key relationships because ultimately, the ones that determine my quality of life are not the 300 connections that I have that are superficial, it's the 10 or 15 connections I have that truly make me feel connected. And of course, when you find the right romantic relationship is like the ultimate version of that. Yeah, so true. So I'm going to maybe this is a hard question to answer. But how did you help that woman? Because if I-- That is a hard question. Yeah, I mean, what are some of the first steps? If someone said I resonate with her, then it's not everybody. Listen, I would bet to say half of you listening right now are in a relationship. Maybe 60% are in a relationship, right? And I should say a committed, strong, one person-only relationship, right? And maybe 40% I'm just guessing here. 40% aren't. So close to half might be saying, hey, that's kind of somewhat me. And then after this, I'd like to go back to the-- maybe the half that are in a relationship and how do you handle that if you work together or you work two completely separate lives? Or someone said to me the other day and I know you guys haven't experienced it yet, but it's true. Take a great relationship, throw in kids, it's like throwing a hand grenade in the middle of the living room. I get it, right? It is like, hey, wait, we used that eight nights and we'd go, you know, have a nice dinner and a glass of wine and go get romantic. Now we got a foot in our face and one poop and one scream and it's like, a hand grenade. So if we're gonna go in on relationships, I'd love to talk to the group of people that maybe resonate with the woman that said, "Hey, I just want to give up on even thinking about it." Then let's talk a little bit about people in a relationship that would like to take it to another level and then we could talk about how one obstacles, outside obstacles come in, how do you manage that? Is that cool? Yeah, let's do it. Well, firstly, Dean, when I get to that stage with Audrey and that happens in our lives, you know-- Call me. All things willing. We will be coming to you for advice on how you manage that. I'm gonna give an answer that probably people will find really unexpected and it's actually gonna help people who are both single and people who are in relationships because what I'm about to say will be something that a lot of people relate to on some level. What relatively no one knew about me before I wrote this book because I-- for the first time ever tell some of these stories in this book, is that for years, I struggled with really immense physical chronic pain. At the age of 27, I got tinnitus and my ears started ringing really loudly and never stopped. They still ring really loudly. You know, it's still going on in my life. And I also, alongside that, developed chronic pain in my ear and my head, which thrombed nonstop. And I'd doctors told me it was gonna go away after months or it would figure itself out. I'd got every kind of test and five years later, it was still going on. Seven years later, it was still going on. And it really, for a while, it ruined my life. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't be present in my life anymore. All I thought about was this pain that I was feeling all day and the ringing in my ears that I would hear all day every day and at night when I turn the lights out. And I first went through panic and then I went into action mode and thought my Taipei personality is going to figure this out. And I couldn't through money at it, traveled across the world, tried to do everything. I could not make this thing budge. And eventually I went to despair. And I said to a therapist, "This is the first time I went to therapy was for this "because I truly didn't know what I was gonna do." And I said to this therapist, "I've just decided "that this morning that I'm gonna, from now on, "I'm gonna live for everyone else." Because, you know, I have a family, I love a team, I love people that I coach, that I love helping. I'm just gonna live for them because my own life is over. I'm never gonna be happy again, so long as I have this pain. And I don't know how to get rid of the pain. So, where does that leave me? And I truly couldn't see how I was gonna sign up for another 50 years of that. What I said to that therapist and what that woman said to me actually are in many ways the same thing. How do I live with this chronic pain in my life? And everyone, everyone listening to this has some form of chronic pain in their life, be it physical or emotional. And for me, chronic pain, I wrote an entire chapter on the book on it. Chronic pain has been one of the greatest gifts of my life because it has the tools that I had to develop to deal with it, have become tools that I use every single day. What the big thing that I realized, and this is something I said to her that day, was the pain has, there's the physical component of the pain. And I asked her, I said, where do you feel this pain? When you feel it, when you get in bed at night and you long for a partner, where do you feel it? She said, I feel it in my stomach. I feel this, this pain in my stomach. I said, okay, so there's a physical component to this. You feel lonely and you feel it in your gut. The physical component on its own is really, really difficult. So let's just acknowledge that. That on its own is difficult. That deserves compassion. That deserves love. That deserves you saying, I, you know, I'm laying in bed right now as a person who is feeling the pain of loneliness. I, right now, is when I need my own kindness the most. But notice that you have another component to that pain which is everything that goes alongside it. Everything that that pain becomes a trigger for. And that's the story you're telling yourself about what it means about you. Oh, I messed up my life. I could have had someone, but I didn't do the right thing. So now I don't have someone. It's too late for me. It's never gonna happen. I'm gonna die alone. It's because I'm unattractive. It's because I'm not good enough. You have the fire that's the pain and our brain just keeps dumping gas on it. Exactly. With the fuel is the story, the belief behind the pain. Yes. And that, that fuel is what's happening is your relationship with the pain is the thing that's making the pain intolerable. Because if you change a relationship with the pain, the pain will no longer be intolerable. So we need tools to improve our relationship with the pain. One of those tools for me was literally I tell myself every day, everything changes. Nothing stays the same. You don't know when something different is gonna happen and something that's happened before. You have no idea. So we have to start to leave room for curiosity and possibility that anything could happen, that nothing stays the same. And I'll give one more. I mean, in the book, I give seven or eight of these, but I just, this one's a really interesting one. There was a study done on rats where one rat was on a wheel and it could run whenever it wanted to. There was another rat that was on a wheel, rat B, rat A was the first rat. Rat B was on another wheel and it was hooked up to rat A's wheel. So anytime rat A ran, rat B had to run. So rat A was doing the choosing, rat B was just running whenever rat A ran. Both rats were doing the exact same amount of exercise. But at the end of the experiment, rat A showed all of the positive markers of exercise and rat B showed the negative markers of stress. And what it showed was that when we choose our pain, we're no longer a victim of that pain and when we choose our pain, it becomes a very positive thing for our lives. When we feel like rat B in life and that woman in that moment, she felt like rat B. When we feel like rat B, all of a sudden, this pain becomes a negative thing in our lives. And it's out of, and it's out of our control. There's nothing correct, worse than not being in control of your decisions or your choices. So by, in that amazing example, when you give into the pain, someone else is telling you when to run on the wheel, a story, a belief, a past belief, a friend saying, oh, you're still single and they say it as a joke, but it triggers you to go home and drink a bottle of wine and cry yourself to sleep on the couch, right? - Yeah. - That's right, that's right. And when you, what I would start to see in my life is I went, okay, how do I go from rat B to rat A? How do I make the transition? And I would start seeing the most difficult things in my life. And I would see them like they were on a menu, like a food menu. And all of these circumstances or difficult things were on the left. And next to them on the right was all of the unique benefits and growth that could only come from that specific item on the menu. And I would start to realize that for me, for example, with my chronic physical pain, I realized, this is the thing that's made me bulletproof because the mindset and the resilience and the ability to surrender, which by the way, I'd never learned before because I'd always had to enable to grit my way out of any problem, the ability to surrender, which was a brand new ability I had to develop, that became this unique benefit that I could only have gotten through that tremendous chronic pain. and I started to go, this is one of the greatest skills I've ever learned in my life. This is gonna get me through a whole bunch of other things that haven't even happened yet. I'm this situation is uniquely valuable and so I almost imagine myself like retroactively choosing it from the menu of life so that I could get the unique benefit that comes from it. And we have to remember, we choose pain from the menu of life all the time. We write books, that's painful. We choose to climb literal mountains. How many friends do you and I have Dean who do these ridiculous things that everyone else would see as torture? And they do them because they want unique benefit. They choose to. So I would argue that the benefits I've gotten from the pain I didn't choose in life are just as valuable if not more as the benefits I've gotten from the pain I did choose in life. And when I realize that, I go from rap B to rap I. So good. And I wanna talk about the word choice for a second. As I get older, I have four kids now. If it's up to my wife, we'll have a fifth one. So I'm trying to hold that one back, but it looks like that'll probably happen too. But my oldest is gonna be 18. And I might parent my younger ones. I go from almost 18 to 1 1/2 years old, right? Although the youngest. And I have to say, if my daughter knew I was sharing that she wouldn't be happy, but when she was in ninth grade, this is just the way I parent. It doesn't make it right. But I'm gonna tell you this story because I think it's so relevant. She went into high school. My daughter's a little bit like me, a little dyslexic, little ADD. I struggled through high school. My son, my 15 year old son, he's in the hardest high school that he got in on his own in ninth grade now. Straight A's freaks out if he's got an A minus. My daughter, it's a little tough for her. So my philosophy is one of two things, Matthew, for kids after high school is go to college, or you can mentor under somebody for two years. And you'll probably mentor for free. And you have to be the best apprentice, the best employee they have for free for two years and go all in and condense decades in the days, right? If my daughter wanted to learn how to be in relationship, education, I'd say go work from Matthew and Audrey and go kill it for two years, if they want an interior design or whatever it is. So that is what I've been telling them since they were little. So ninth grade, my daughter said, Dad, I think, not that she had to make a whole life choice in ninth grade, but she's like, I like the apprentice model. School's difficult for me, but she was a B and A student, and her grades started going seas and dees sometimes, once she made that decision. So I sat her down, going into tenth grade, and I said, hey, I just want to tell you, the hardest thing in life is to not have a choice. When there is something that someone else controls you or someone else controls your decision, for me personally, maybe I don't know about you, Matthew, it's been the hardest thing in my life. It says, no, I'm sorry, you can't go in there. That's the door you go in. It's like, no, no, no, I want to go this way or I want to spend time with my family. I want to choose my calendar. I want to choose who to say yes to. I want to choose on what I work on. I want to choose who I surround myself with. So I try to give her this lesson on choice, and I don't know if she got it or not, but I'm not the father that would ground a child for bad grades if they're trying, if they're just skipping school, but she was trying, and it wasn't. I offered her a counselor, you know, somebody to help tutor. Anyway, I'm telling you this story for a reason. My daughter's in eleventh grade now. She comes to me two weeks ago and says, dad, I think I definitely want to go to college. But my grades the last two years aren't good enough. I don't think I can get in. And I just had a letter sit with it for a moment. It hit her hard. Like, and it was looped in her head. She's like, but what if I really want to go? She goes, what if it's too late? And her brain was focusing on, I should have. I could have. And then she even said, you should have been more strict on me. I'm like, whoa, so now this is me. And if I would have been more strict, you would have rebelled and said, my dad's a jerk. Makes me get good, right? So I said, I said, it's hard not to have choices in it. And it's just so relevant when you were sharing this with me. It's like, when you let that thing, the pain that you have in your head, the pain that that woman had in her heart, when that's in control, you don't have choice. But if you choose to look at it differently, if you choose to own it rather than it owning you, you get to decide if that's your fuel or your anchor. So with my daughter, she was looping. She stayed up all night, like literally looping. And I talked her in the morning. And I said to her, hey, so, is it mean you definitely can't get into school? So here's what I want you to do. I want you to reach out to the two schools. I want you to get them their transcripts to two. You want to go to. And I want you to ask them what I need to do in 12th grade, what business would I need to start? What charity do I need to start? What grades do I need to get in your school? Or one on Murdy reached out and gave her a plan. I'm like, okay, so now you're in control. You had the choice to reach out to them. You can choose to get a tutor. You can choose to go stronger. How do you feel being in control? Like we just talked about it this morning. And she's smiling. She got her control back. She got control of choice back. So it just resonates with me so much that when you let the thing, the heart break, the loneliness, the lack of intimacy if you're still together, that you don't bond like you used to. If you let that thing run you, then you're not in control anymore. Does that make sense? - And it makes total sense. And one of the things you mentioned something profoundly important about your daughter's story, which is that the instinct for most of us in those situations is to go into that mode of, I wish I had done something different. I wish I had charted a different course for myself that would have meant that by now I would have been somewhere else. I wish I'd made a different decision. I wish I hadn't made that mistake. We have those at all points in life. And it's no different to that woman who came to me who was in her 60s saying like, "I feel like I blew my charts." People feel like that when they are in abusive marriage and they stay there for 30 years. And then they come to me in their 50s, 60s or even 70s and they're like, "I wasted my life." You know, I spent my whole life, most of my adult life in a relationship with someone who treated me horribly and I missed out on so much and then they hate themselves for not getting out sooner. But there's a section of the book and it's within the confidence section because one of the deepest keys to confidence is self-forgiveness. And there's a part of, when I talk about self-forgiveness, I talk about the fact that we have always been doing the best we could. Now our best sometimes is terrible. Our best sometimes isn't good enough. Our best sometimes is. It was still our best. It was our best for better or worse, for good or awful. What we did at the time was the best we were capable of doing in that moment. And you know, people have their own beliefs. My, I'm a little deterministic in my beliefs in the sense that which isn't the same as fatalistic. Fatalistic is like, I can't change anything. But deterministic says, based on your DNA, based on your brain, based on your parents, based on your childhood, based on the mentors you had and the ones you never had, what you did in that moment was precisely what you were going to do in that moment. And it was the best you could do in that moment. But what I like to think of, this is an analogy that changed my life theme and it gave me the recipe for self-forgiveness in those moments in life. I like to think of life like it's a relay race. You know, like in the Olympics, you have four runners in the relay race. Each one of them runs a quarter of the race. When you've run your part of the race, you hand the pattern over to the next runner and the next runner sets off and runs their part of the race. I think of my entire life like it's been a series of runners in a relay race. And when an oh, in the Olympics, if runner number two in the race stumbled and cost all four runners a few seconds, those runner number three and four, they're going to have a more difficult race to run as a result. That's the truth. They're going to have to make up some time. But it would be strange if runner number four went home that night and yelled at themselves in the mirror for what runner number two did. Oh my God. That wouldn't make sense. That's so good. You did. Right. So what we get there is a separation of accountability and blame. There's a great line in Jurassic Park that always stuck with me. When Dr. Hammond is talking to one of his employees, he says, I don't blame people for their mistakes. I just asked that they pay for them. And there's something profound about that because what it says is, I need to stop blaming myself for something an old runner did with less resources, less wisdom, less mentors, less life experience. I need to stop waking up and blaming a brand new runner today for something an old runner did. And you know that baton handoff, if you have those moments in your life, it's literally a line on the sand of the old runner and the new runner, the old me and the new me. And if you can have that differentiator, how could you blame the old runner who didn't have the capabilities, who didn't have the depth of feeling, who didn't have a new mentor, or didn't read a new book, or didn't see a new path to get a different result? It's brilliant. It's a great and the new runner that wakes up today, you know, they've got a race to run. So allow them to travel lightly. They've got work to do. So don't wake them up with the past. Say, hey, before you go, let me give you this and this joint bag and this giant suitcase and this and then and they'll go now go run a great race. That's not fair. You have to let the new runner go and do their work. And that means letting the new runner take accountability for improving the life of all the runners, but not the blame for the old runners. You are many runners in one race, travel lightly. So good. So good. Both your analogies, they're spot on. I love those because they just, they hit you right. I mean, the relay, really race one is just perfect. So let me ask you, you have and a lot of this applies, whether you're in a relationship or not, all of it, everything you shared does. Would you say that the most people you help, again, you're most watched on YouTube when it comes to relationships. I freaking love that you are because I know your heart and I know how much transformation you help others achieve. Would you say it is half people that are single and half people in a relationship that want to make it better? How is that split with your demographic? I'd say I'm very known for helping people go out and find their person, but increasingly, with, you know, especially with this book, it's gone into much deeper waters about what's going on with us and what's going on with our confidence and our happiness and now why are we struggling to feel satisfied, whether we're in a relationship or out of one, increasingly, I have more and more people who are also in relationships who follow the work. So I love that. That's why, let me write into what I'm thinking here is with all that you've seen, when you touch that many lives, like what everybody has to understand, especially our listeners, right, our tribe, our family work. They're in the self-education industry. They're on their way in. They want to write a book. They want to create a course. They want to do YouTube. You have amazing courses. You have coaching programs. They want to model what you do and they want to serve others. They want to impact others and of course create success for themselves. I love that meaning is you get to expedite your learning curve. You're around so many people with so many questions and so much coaching and creating courses and writing amazing books that your results get compounded because they're so much coming at once, right? If you were just, if you lived in a little town of 5,000 people, I grew up in a town of 5,000 people and you never left your town and you just tried to help people in your town have better relationships, you have example of a few hundred maybe in your whole lifetime. Compared to you, I have millions of people watching you and comments. So why I love books, why I love the knowledge business, the knowledge industry is because you get these expedited results, right? When I'm going to do a live event that I've never done before, I find something that's done a hundred of them and I hire them because they're around it so much and everything else in my life. And the reason I'm saying, sharing that is because you were working mostly with people on how to find love and now everybody's attracting, like if you know how to find it, I would bet to say the similar type ingredients on finding love is probably similar ingredients to keeping love or bring love back. Would you say that to be true? Well, I think so many of the reasons why we we struggle in long term relationships is because we forget about the things that work in the beginning and the things that you know, we start to take for granted that we know this person inside out. We already know everything about them. There's you know, there's there's nothing new to learn and I think that that can be the beginning of a kind of stasis that you know, if you take that phrase familiarity breeds contempt, it's a really scary phrase really when you think about it and you think about long term relationships. What happens to so many people? They familiarity means I stop thinking about I stop taking as impressive all of these things about this person that are amazing and I start magnifying all of the parts about them that bother me and over time, I think one of the most dangerous things about long term relationship is we get further and further away from what it was like when we were dating other people. So you when you first meet your partner and you decide they're great, you have this immediate point of comparison with someone else in your life and you go, oh my god, like look at how many amazing things this person brings into my life. I was constantly anxious in my last relationship. I was constantly suffering and never felt good enough. I never felt safe emotionally and then we get into this amazing new relationship and immediately we're hit with all of these amazing things but over time we lose that point of reference. Wow, so good. And and it's really that's a that's a kind of scary place to be. Proust said the journey of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes. Now if you think when someone goes and has an affair or they leave hop from one relationship to the next, they're seeking new landscapes. Yeah, but if you can train yourself to see the person in front of you with new eyes, I believe that's one of the great keys to staying happy in a relationship and to be practical, a great question you can wake up and ask tomorrow and just like five minutes to journal to yourself, what complaints do I not have because of the partner I am with and have been with for the last five. What a great way to twist the question Matthew, that is so good. You know, as you were talking about, I was like, what would it be a great one to be a great exercise and you just basically said it. When's the last time you just wrote down all the things that you love or loved about the person you're with because it's easy. You know, one thing I heard this from my partner in friend Tony Robbins years ago and it stuck with me about relationships the longer you and them the more that sometimes the more you keep score. And then soon as you start keeping score, it's like, wow, I worked really hard at home today, but when he got home or she got home, she didn't recognize me and he get that kiss right away and you keep scoring. Well, I'll be a little nicer when I come home next time if I get a little more love and maybe your wife or your husband was having a horrific day and just it was a one day thing, but the next day you're cold and she's like, oh, he's going to be cold to me. I'll wait and all of a sudden this compounding of keeping score and then you forget who you were just like you said, all those things that gave you butterflies, all those things that made you excited. I'll look at the way, you know, she choose her food and now it's like, oh, the way she choose, right? It's like, it's like these amazing things shift and I have to tell you, and I want to ask you this, when you realize the power of relationships and you realize the energy that it takes and it's worth every bit of the energy and it's not just energy alone, action without a skill. That's why I love that you wrote love life and for those of you, maybe just join us halfway through lovelifebook.com. Make sure you grab a copy of this book. I wouldn't be doing this interview. I wouldn't be promoting it if I didn't know this man's heart and his depth of knowledge. So looking for a relationship or looking to take yours in next level, go get this book. You can thank me later, I promise. But in this journey and the energy it takes in a relationship, it's the most rewarding thing on the planet, right? You could put energy into a business and hopefully you get profits and impact out of it. Put that kind of energy in a relationship and it bears fruit that's the only reason I could say this because I believe I was a part, I don't believe, I know I was a part of the problem in previous relationships. And when I went through a divorce and I had to look at my kids in the face and say we're not going to be together anymore and my parents went through a lot of divorces and it freaked me out and I went through a really stressful time in my life, like beyond anything I had ever imagined, kind of unwound me worrying about my kids so much. When I came out of that, I was smart enough to be surrounded with really great people. You're one of them, right? We have a small group of people. We get together, we mastermind, Tony Robbins is my partner and brother, Dr. Daniel Aiman was a big influence. There were some great people in my life and I had this fundamental realization that if I bring the same version of me to the next relationship, I will get the same results. And I went to work on me, I'm not surely far from perfect, but I found the places where like wow that's what I did in my previous relationship. No wonder it didn't work and I get to acknowledge it and do something different even if sometimes it feels uncomfortable. Sometimes it's comfortable to do the same crap my dad did. My dad's been married five times, right? So I'd love to ask you, you're the relationship expert. The number one in the world right now. Whether there's some things in your old relationships, even though you and Audrey have an amazing relationship, you guide people, you've transferred formed so many lives. Have you had a similar experience with some things in the past? Or you're like, oh, I can't believe I did that. Or is that just me? Where do we start, team? I, I, I was, I certainly count myself as the, the problem in all of my relationships prior to Audrey and, and, and, you know, even in, there's, even in a relationship where I felt like in a lot of relationships, I was in the driving seat being the problem. And then I had an experience of not being in the driver's seat. And I was the problem to myself, not to the other person in that one, because I was anxious all the time. And I never felt good enough. And I was constantly questioning my worth. And I stayed, you know, I, I kept trying to please this person. I kept, you know, doing everything I could to try and make them happy. I completely let go of my own needs. I stopped doing the things that made me feel like me. I, I kind of lost myself. And, you know, I, I, even then I was kind of the problem because I, I didn't, I didn't value myself enough to say, I'm miserable all the time here. So I, I, I definitely, I definitely came to being single again, realizing some things not working about the way that I'm showing up. And I think then it took me, it took me a long, it took me a while to realize a couple of things. One was that I was, I was the guy that was always, I was either jumping from one monogamous relationship to the next, or I was single and dating like an addict in this dopamine fueled way. And I, what I realized, I realized a couple of things. One that the way I was dating was never going to bring me happiness. That I was dating like it was a drug. It didn't make me feel good. It didn't make me feel connected. And it was not, it was actually making me more anxious and taking me away from a place of peace and calm and happiness. So I got to the point of realizing I have to start looking for something different than what I've been looking for. I almost felt like I want to build something. I don't want to be constantly jumping around. But I also started to realize that, and this, I even realized this more when I started dating Audrey that, oh, I got some real issues with trust here. I didn't realize it. If you'd have asked me at 25, do you have issues with trust? I would have said, of course not. But in my thirties, I started to realize because Audrey would do things that triggered me and made me like, you know, there was a moment very early on in our relationship. Well, we weren't even, we were dating at the time. And she said something to me. She told me a story. And the story made me jealous. And I got jealous. And then I went cold. And then I started to get like, so I kind of slightly passive aggressive. But I completely shut down. And she was like, where are you right now? And I wouldn't tell her, I wouldn't tell her, I wouldn't tell her. And then when I finally did talk about it, I just blamed her. And I remember that we ended up in like a two hour argument over this thing that, by the way, should never have been an argument in the first place. But we ended up in a two hour argument. And then finally, after two hours of me, the walls went up for me. And after two hours of having to like pull out of me some moment of vulnerability, which I wasn't showing, because deep down, beneath that jealousy, I was scared. I felt like her, I felt worried. I felt like I was going to get abandoned or I felt emasculated. There was all this stuff going on underneath that. And I couldn't mention any of it. Because in my mind, it was weakness. If I mentioned what I was really feeling. And if she sensed weakness, I wasn't going to be this heroic alpha, you know, exciting guy that she'd been dating so far, I was suddenly the truth of me was laid bare. And she would see that truth. And she would go, oh my god, yeah. So she finally pulled something out of me. And then once I'd said it, Dean, I then went called a whole other, a whole new time. Because I was like, now that I've said it, I hate that I've said it, I feel exposed. I feel, you know, you've got to get stronger and more quiet and more, you know, yeah, I get it. So then I went, I completely shut down. I had like a vulnerability hangover where I was like, I'm not going to, now I'm just shutting down. And she, she looked at me and she said, listen, I knowing more about you is just a lovely thing for me. She said, it doesn't change anything about the way I see you. It doesn't change all of the wonderful moments we have. She said, I like seeing different sides of you. I get to know you better. And it, it's like, I feel closer to you as a result. It doesn't change how attracted I am to you. It doesn't change any of those things. And I started to realize in those moments, oh man, I've got, I've got like some work to do. Like here I am thinking like, I've got it figured out. And I'm this great person to be with and to date. And this person in front of me is not doing. She's not acting crazy. She's not. It's me. It's me. It's the man in the mirror. I can't go. Yeah, I can't go to my friends and be like, you'll never guess what she did. If I, if I tell this story how it actually happened, they're just going to look at me and go, what's wrong with you? Yeah. So I was like, I, I, I've got to figure this out. And but what was really amazing about it was that the way she accepted me, it, I realized like, oh, this is a, this is a healing partner for me. Yeah. This is not someone who agitates my wounds. It's definitely someone who reveals my wounds. Right. The right partner helps reveal your wounds. It helps you heal them. Yeah. It wasn't someone who inflamed my wounds. It was someone who helped me heal them. And that for me was, I assigned that she was the right partner, but it was also bear chance for me to do work that I had been putting up for a very long time. So good. You know, I'm loving this conversation, Matthew, a couple of things I'm just going to do high level takeaways. I'm taking notes like crazy is a couple things that might seem like, you know, duh. I know that. I know that all the time. I also know if I eat less bread and go to the gym more, I'd be in better shape, but doesn't mean I necessarily do that on the level. And I think sometimes we know what we should do in our relationship, but we have wounds. We have things that have put protection, put walls up, trust issues, all those things. And sometimes it's hard to see through them. So some of the big takeaways I have today from this conversation is how cool would it be just to remind if you're in a relationship to write down just the things that you really enjoy about that other person or enjoyed in the past. Do not think about any of the other. If you're not in a relationship, what would you enjoy? What would how would it fuel your experience? How could you bring so much more to the table now that you've been through loneliness or sadness or you've been through as as Matthew went through the chronic headaches and the buzzing in his ear? It brought another level of a man to him, his ability to to get through things, empathy, compassion, strength, vigor. How can you look today? Maybe the thing that was your anchor as the wind behind your sail? How can you look at the good in the current relationship or the good you could have? And then the last part of this whole conversation, which I love is how can we look in the mirror and identify what part of the problem we are? And that's probably the toughest one. And I know it's the one that's allowed me. I truly am not in an Instagram relationship. I'm madly in love with my wife. I mean, my text to her when I left this morning was I not only love you, I'm so proud of the woman you are, the mother you are, and thank you for being in my life. That was the morning. Seven years in, right? That's not for any other reason except I found this gift and I love having a conversation with you Matthew. I love what you're doing. I love that you wrote this book and I love how many lives it's going to impact because I've just been on both sides of the spectrum and I know what it's like to be single and think I don't think this can happen to me. I know what it's like to be in a relationship that just felt off my ex is a wonderful human. And but we weren't meant to be together and she's thriving and I'm doing amazing and now I'm in a committed, unbelievable relationship. My business has grown. I'm a better father. I'm a better friend. I'm a better human. So I've been on all three and I love that you bring light and hope and true techniques to people that they could see it. You're doing an amazing job. I have one more question to ask you before we go here today because the majority of the people they're going to listen to this are in our world because they're at a place where they want to start. I said this before or they're in and they want to share their life experience. They want to help people like you are that you're helping people with love and I know so many times people think well I wasn't perfect in my last relationship. How could I help people with relationships? All right, wasn't perfect at my job. Being in this industry, calling it the impact industry, the knowledge industry, the information, there's a million names for it but basically for a living you get to help people shorten the gap from where they are to where they want to be. And this is your life now. Books and podcasts and courses and coaching. What is this industry meant to you? Or impacting others? What is it meant to you? Because there's a lot of people that are dying to do it and there's just something holding them back. I mean, for me, it's been, for me, it's been the ability to commune with other people who, in one way or another, are going through it. And I have always found the greatest antidote to my pain to be more pain, but not more pain of my own, the pain of other people. Because when I realize that other people are going through these things too, I don't feel alone in the world. And, you know, someone asked me recently, like, what you, you know, you started making YouTube videos at 19 years old. What would you say to yourself now if you could go back and talk to yourself at 19? And I thought about that. I was like, what would I say to myself? And then I knew exactly what it was. I said, I would tell myself, Matthew, by all means do this. Just don't feel like you need to know it all because you don't. You can, what you have in abundance is kindness, empathy, a genuine desire to connect with people and to help people. And a huge heart. So people are going to feel that at every stage of your journey and at every stage of your competence. So right now you don't need to be the guy who knows it all and come from that place of ego or insecurity. You just need to be the guy that cares. And over time, you'll know more. You're getting those skills. You'll play catch up and life will happen. What? And you'll get a lot of advice. You know, but you'll get the wisdom. But right now, understand that your energy is your greatest asset and the wisdom will come. But don't let the lack of wisdom, I make you not do it or be, do it and pretend you know more than you do. Ah, so good. So good. Matthew, this is so much fun. This is going to impact so many people. If you hear me pushing Matthew's book, because I just know this man is you've got a glimpse of it today. Go to lovelifebook.com. Go grab this book today. You might be as you're listening or watching this today. It's being released right now. You can pre-order. Go get it. Then let's start chatting about it in our communities. And really let's spread the word of this incredible book, this incredible message, because we all need to take our love, our connection, our community to another level. And I love what you're doing. Matthew, thank you so much. Keep doing what you're doing, man. You're making waves in a big way. Thank you, Dean. And so, so, so, so appreciate you having me. I so appreciate everybody listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. The one cool thing we're doing right now is a virtual event on May the 4th. So if you do get the book before May the 4th, just make sure you register your purchase on the page, lovelifebook.com. You'll be able to find the links to get the book there, but there'll also be a place you can register if you want a ticket to that free event. So long as you do it, the four May the 4th, but yeah, happy reading everyone. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you for having me, Dean. Nice work.