Want to find love in 2024?
Now is the time when everyone is making New Year’s resolutions. It’s fun and I love that feeling of optimism before January begins.
But we also know how hard it is to break old habits and patterns—and end up feeling a sense of failure and frustration if we don’t reach our goals . . .
In today’s new video, I share with you the #1 resolution you should focus on this year to move toward a successful love life.
You’ll learn how to identify some of the deeper fundamental beliefs that may be working against you and how to start unwiring them.
So whether you’re feeling broken, hopeless, frustrated, or just ready for a fresh start . . .
this New Year’s message is for you.
This is normally the time of year where people begin to make resolutions or have already made resolutions about things that they want to change in 2024. Those resolutions tend to be around things that ultimately, we would like to achieve. Many people watch this channel because they want to find love, they want to be more confident, they want to feel more attractive in themselves, they want to work on their self-worth.
But I suppose the way I’d like to start this year is, in some ways . . . it feels a little antithetical to the idea of resolutions. Because I think one of the big problems with New Year’s resolutions is that they assume we are starting with a new operating system, and that the operating system we have—that we’re starting with in 2024—has these capabilities that can run the new programs we are going to start.
So a resolution is like a new program. I want to run this new program. Whether it’s waking up earlier, going to the gym, attacking my dating life differently, approaching people differently when it comes to love. Those are new programs that we want to run.
And we may have a resolution that says, “Run the new program,” but what we have to understand is that we’re still carrying the old operating system into the new year. Just because the calendar year ticked over into a new one, it doesn’t mean we now get given a new operating system for the year.
So, what happens with resolutions a lot is we try and run this new program on an old operating system. You know, it maybe works for a couple of days or for a few hours and then it stops working. It starts glitching. Why is that?
For anyone who is watching this and wants to not simply watch my videos on YouTube, which I very much appreciate, but actually wants to come on a coaching journey with me to get results faster in your love life, I have a free event called Dating With Results that you can watch right now.
In it, I show you the reasons we’re struggling so much in love and I help you understand the practical things that you can start doing this week to find love faster. Come over to datingwithresults.com. You can watch this event for free. This is not a paid ticket event, it’s just my way of giving you something practical and substantial that can help you exponentially in your love life if it’s a priority for you right now. Go over to datingwithresults.com, and I’ll see you over there for this amazing event.
The operating system that we have right now is most likely the one that we have had for a very, very long time, since we were children, since that operating system was initially formed. And that operating system has given us all sorts of patterns that show up in our life today.
Maybe it’s a pattern of people-pleasing that we have. And that goes all the way back to a parent figure we were trying to get love from. Maybe someone who taught us that we needed to do things in order to feel love, that we needed to achieve or be somebody or perform, that we had to work for their love, that that love was conditional. That stayed with us. That imprint was left. A faulty imprint that said we had to do things in order to be worthy of somebody else’s love—that we weren’t enough as we were.
And as a child, we don’t recognize that that’s not true. It just gets received as truth: “Ah, I need to do these things for somebody in order to be loved.” And so we take that into our lives in all sorts of ways. We may not realize it; we may have never done that kind of introspection. Few people have, and that’s understandable. We either don’t have the tools or we don’t have the money to work with people who might give us those tools or might help us understand those insights.
But these things are governing all of our choices all of the time. And so, in that case, you have the person who spends their life pleasing other people, fawning over other people, which is a typical trauma response. We have those different responses: fight, flight, freeze, shut down, or fawn—fawn being the typical people-pleasing response, and it’s one response to stress.
Maybe our nervous system as a child learned that in order to survive, we needed to please, and as a child, the stakes really are that high for us. We need to survive. We need other people to survive. So, when we’re in an environment where we’re trying to survive, we learn certain mechanisms.
In adulthood, we no longer realize that it’s not necessary to please this person that we’re on date three with to survive, but the inner child still feels like it’s necessary to survive—still terrified of losing that love or that person and what that might mean. And so we go into our familiar pattern. That’s the operating system.
Other people grew up in an unstable home. They had to manage the peace. They had to be the diplomat, tread on eggshells around people so as not to upset anyone. They had to tend to emotionally-immature caregivers who weren’t able to perform in their role.
And so you had to be the adult as a child in that relationship. You had to be the peacekeeper. And then you grew up learning to subjugate your needs in life. Because what do you do if you grow up in a household like that? You learn that there’s no space for your needs. You’re managing the needs of everybody else. And then you go into life worrying about other people’s needs all the time and never bringing forward your own. I’ve seen this pattern time and time again in dating with people who are constantly worried about the other person or what they can do for the other person, how they can tend to their needs, but are terrified of ever bringing up their own needs or what they want because their operating system says there’s no space for that.
The realization is that we are still today being governed by those historic forces, by this wiring that we didn’t choose, this wiring that was created in a time where we weren’t consciously choosing any of it. We were just getting by. We were just surviving. We were just trying to get the love that we needed. That wiring is still there and that wiring is not our fault.
I find that to be one of the most helpful realizations as you go into a new year. There will actually be wiring that is working against you in the things that you want. I know that sounds like a devastating realization and a depressing realization to think that there’s some way that your brain has been formed that is working against you, but I actually find it one of the greatest recipes for self-compassion that there is.
You know, I’ve spent 15 years doing this and I have a membership where people join me and they tell their stories, and there will always be other people listening to the story going, “Why did they do that? Why would they ever fall for a person that terrible? Why would they think that continuing to overinvest in this person who’s giving nothing back is a good idea? Why did they ignore that red flag?”
These things are very easy to say from the sidelines when it’s not us, because that’s that person’s wiring. And our wiring can make us do things that seem so obviously wrong, or are bad decisions from the outside, and it can make us feel a lot of shame, because we go, “What is wrong with me? Why do I keep falling for these kinds of people? Why do I keep making these same mistakes in my dating life? Why do I keep ignoring these red flags that in hindsight seem so obvious? Why do I keep being so afraid of rejection? Why do I cling on to people like I’m going to die if they abandon me?”
And that “What is wrong with me?” is a source of tremendous shame. It makes us feel like we’re not good enough, or we’re stupid, and it makes us embarrassed to even speak about the decisions we’ve made or the things we’ve done. And maybe worst of all, it makes us feel like we’re broken, like we’re never going to be okay: “There’s just something irreversibly wrong with me that’s baked into my being, the DNA of who I am, and it’s never going to change.” And that creates hopelessness.
We all have something that for us may as well be the hardest thing in the world, when for someone else, it was like learning to walk when they were a toddler. They learned to walk. We didn’t learn to walk in that area. So it may be easy to other people, but to us, it feels like the hardest thing in the world in that moment. It feels like something we don’t know how to do.
If we’ve never been vulnerable, then we need to learn the basics of being vulnerable. If we’ve never had standards, then we need to learn the very basics of standing up for ourselves and being there for ourselves or defending ourselves. If we’ve never asked for what we want, then we need to learn the basics of asking for what we want because we may as well be a toddler in that area.
There are other areas where we’re extremely advanced, but understanding this, to me, is the key to being kinder to ourselves, because we begin to realize that, “It is not easy for me to change, and if it was easy for me to change, I would have changed it a long time ago.”
We live in a world where everyone’s promising change overnight, but the reality is the kind of changes I’m talking about here, they don’t happen overnight. They’re rewiring a lifetime of conditioning.
And so, how do you do that? Well, you start with compassion. Yes, it’s our responsibility to change these things. It’s not our fault that those things were there, but it is our responsibility to change them about ourselves. But I believe that that change is much more effective when it’s layered on a foundation of compassion.
I keep doing these things because there was a time in my life where this thing was necessary for my survival, where it kept me safe somehow. It was a defense against whatever it is I was dealing with at an age where I should probably never have been responsible for having to deal with that in the first place. And that was my best attempt at dealing with it back then that I’m still using today. And it’s way out of date, but at this point, it’s all I know. That’s compassion. And then when we have that compassion, we can start to say, “Well, what might help me step out of this way of being?”
One of the things that, as I lead into the new year with you, I’m really thinking about a lot is this concept of slow but real progress. If we go on a journey together where we are making real change by starting to rewire our brains and the way we operate, the way we think, the way we respond to situations, then we will start to construct new beliefs and those new beliefs become the fuel for a different kind of life, and then we create a new reality with it.
And that’s something that we’re probably not going to do in the next couple of weeks, but it’s something that we can make huge, huge headway on in the next year together.
One of the ways I’m doing that with people is my new book that’s coming out in April called Love Life, and if you haven’t pre-ordered a copy, I urge you to do that, because I have entire chapters in that book that I’ve written based on what I’m talking about, because it’s on my mind so much these days.
Although I haven’t talked a lot about this stuff on YouTube or in other places, I’ve poured it into the book because the book is really a representation of where I’m going with my coaching and what I’m thinking about a lot. And I think you’ll really enjoy it if you’re enjoying this video and if it’s speaking to you. We’ll leave a link for you to go and check that out. It’s at lovelifebook.com. Also, when you pre-order, you’ll get a lot of really cool bonuses over the coming months that are just for people who pre-order.
Some of you will want to take a bigger journey with me. Later this year, I have a Retreat in September where we’re going to go away for six days together in Florida. For anyone who wants to do that deep work with me, go to mhretreat.com.
But even if you’re just here watching the videos with me this year, I want you to set aside this idea of immediate shifts by taking on a resolution. Now that’s going to be different, and instead say, “What are the patterns that consistently cause me pain in my life? What are the patterns that seem to follow me into every year no matter what resolutions I make? And what can I begin to do to start to unravel some of that old wiring and start to create some new wiring that is going to serve me differently going into this year?”
I would love if—and I think this would be a beautiful exercise for us all to go through—you leave me a comment letting me know what pattern you want to work on this year, and not just a pattern that you want to make yourself accountable for changing, but a pattern you want to give yourself compassion for having in the first place.
Remember the first step: Give yourself compassion. You didn’t create that pattern back when it started. The situation that you were forced to deal with did, but we can be empowered to change it this year.
So, what’s that pattern for you? I’ll give you mine because I believe in being vulnerable here with you. Before I went and got married, before I went on my honeymoon, I was just finishing writing my book, I had to run my Live Retreat, and I was going to get married, and although these were all wonderful things, I really got myself so stressed that I was on the verge of burnout. And I kept telling myself that when I got back from my honeymoon, I would feel peace again, and I would no longer feel like I was burning out.
And what happened was I got back from my honeymoon, and within a week, I found a way to get stressed again. Even though the wedding was over and it was a success, even though my book had been written, even though my Retreat was already done, and all of those things were great, I came home and I went straight to stress again.
And the reality is that’s not because there were all these things to continue stressing about, it’s because my nervous system is wired for stress and it looks for ways to get stressed. Can you relate? It looks for things that it can latch on to to get me stressed again because that’s my comfort zone, that’s my natural state, and if I’m being honest with myself, it’s been a state that I’ve been used to my entire life.
So, that’s my pattern going into this year that I’m working on. What’s yours? Leave me a comment. I’m excited to read these comments. Of all the videos I’ve released this year, I feel like this could be the video with the most vulnerable and enlightening and really community-driven comments section, because it can make us all feel like we’re not alone by reading each other’s comments here.
I am so grateful that you have all been with me this last year. I really appreciate your patience as I’ve been writing this book. I am so excited for all of the things that we’re going to do together this year.
Now that I’ve written this book, I am so excited to make more YouTube videos, to create more podcasts, to keep bringing you new ideas, things that are helping me, things that are helping me to grow.
I’m in an interesting stage of my life where I’m looking at the things that have been shaping and driving me my whole life and how they’re not serving me and how I can change those.
And I promise you that while I’m on that journey, which in some ways I’m still a beginner on and I’m learning as I go, I promise you to just keep bringing everything that I’m finding useful for me to you. So, thank you. Welcome to a new year. I love you guys. I look forward to reading your comments.
Matthew Hussey
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