Hey there, this is Clay with www.modernlove.life and this is the Relationship Inner Game Experience.
Now, when it comes to what I've been noticing, a lot of in the people that we've been working
with is that there is really this lack of getting real with what is actually happening
inside of the dynamic, inside of the relationship, inside of the dating scenario, inside of their
own love life.
And instead, often people get caught up in these what I can best describe as distractions,
these meaningless things that they think are important, that they focus in on, like, oh
my God, I'm in love with this person here, but they're dating somebody else.
What do I do?
How do I stop them?
How do I break up that relationship?
How do I do all that stuff?
Oh my God, like this person here is not texting me enough.
I send them a text message and it takes them two days to get back to me and they're just
like stuck on all of these things.
And if they're not being willing to get real with what's actually happening, then they're
not going to be able to change the way they bring themselves into a dynamic.
Okay?
So if you're not able to get real about what is actually happening in the dynamic between
you and maybe a person that you want to get back together with, maybe a person that you
want to date and be in a relationship with, maybe a person that you are currently in a
relationship with and you want things to get better.
If you're not able to get real about what's actually going on and you're stuck in your
own head thinking about, you know, Oh, do I look like an Alpha male?
Is that a signal of interest?
Should I demonstrate higher value?
Should I neg her?
If you're too busy caught up in your head about all of this BS, then you're not going
to be able to get real with what's important.
And as long as that happens, there is no possibility for anything other than what is happening
right now to continue to unfold and happen over and over and over and over again.
Do you understand that?
As long as you are closed off to any other possibility, you're going to live in the same
reality that you are living in right now when it comes to your relationship and that's fine.
That's great.
That's wonderful.
If you actually like the reality that you're living in right now, if you have a great dating
life, if you're single and dating and you're enjoying that, then that's perfect.
That's wonderful.
If you're in a great relationship right now and you're enjoying that and that's perfect,
that's wonderful.
Keep it up.
But if that's not where you are right now, if you're trying to connect with somebody
and you're unable to do so, it's because there's some part of you that is unable or unwilling
to get real with what is actually happening.
So for example, let's say you want to get back together with your partner.
The two of you broke up and he wanted to get back together and too busy obsessing about
whether or not they're dating somebody new because you saw something on facebook and
they posted a picture of them with some person of the opposite sex that you don't recognize
and you're just obsessed like, are they dating somebody new?
Is it a rebound relationship?
Is it maybe a fake relationship is a real relationship?
What do I do?
What are my chances?
What are my odds?
Statistically speaking, what is the percentage chance of us getting back together again?
Are there any medical, a university studies researching rebound relationships and reconciliation
odds?
And you see how as long as you continue to live your life within that context, you will
continue to have the same experience, which is probably something like anxiety, self doubt,
fear loss, and of course when you're living your life from that point of view, it's probably
very difficult to actually have a positive emotional connection with, in this example,
the partner that you're trying to reconcile with.
After all who wants to be in a relationship?
Who wants to reconcile with somebody who's anxious, afraid over analyzing everything,
all of that stuff?
That doesn't sound like a very fun relationship to be in and so what you have to understand
is if you're caught up in this mental construct, so to speak, you're going to continue to live
in that mental construct unless you can actually tune into what is really happening.
Oftentimes the best place to look at is the emotional connection.
Whereas the emotional connection between you and the other person, if you're not connecting,
something is in the way.
What is that?
Are there still hurt feelings from the breakup?
Are the two of you just not able to connect on an emotional level because you're only
talking about tv shows and sports and work and just, you know, dumb surface level things
that don't actually amount to anything and there's no real substance there.
Are you just sending these meaningless text messages back and forth to each other like,
how are you?
Hope you are doing well.
I am good.
Hope it is good with you.
I am fine.
And you know, at the end of the day, nothing has actually been communicated.
No one's actually stepped forward and said, actually, I've been having a really lousy
day to day.
I walked in and my boss, he was really upset because I did this project and it didn't work
out the way that, that we wanted it to.
And it was really because I made a mistake on it and I now I don't just don't know what's
gonna happen to me at work.
Have you actually had that kind of conversation?
If you haven't, then it's just been a bunch of sound and fury, meaning nothing.
As William Faulkner might have said, "What you need to do is you need to get real about
what's happening or what's not happening in your life."...
In your love life, in your relationships.
And when you're able to do that, when you're able to actually see what you are currently
not allowing yourself to see because you're focused on these distractions, you know..
Well, it's like evolution.
So therefore, you know, I have to be the Alpha male to communicate that I have many sexual
options.
And then she'll go out of her way to date me because I have a pheromone.
If you're focused on just mental distractions like that, they're taking you away from what
is actually important in a relationship, which is the quality of the emotional connection
between you and the other person.
If you're focused on these mental distractions, then you're unable to get real and as long
as you're unable to get real and unable to see what's happening in the emotional connection,
then you're going to continue to get more of the same.
And if more of the same is not currently taking you down the road that you want to go on,
then I suggest that you stop doing what you're doing and you change course.
Okay?
Because right now, whether you're taking action, whether you're not taking action, whether
you're doing something, whether you're not doing something, whether you're actively trying
something out, whether you're passively waiting for something to happen, you are going to
continue to move in a direction because even no choice is a decision.
Even choosing not to do something is deciding something and no matter what you decide, it
will inevitably have some sort of outcome and if you look at where you are right now
and if you look at the results that you have gotten thus far, you can probably connect
the dots and see what the inevitable outcome of how you're operating is going to be.
For some of you, it might look like loneliness.
It might look like being single for another month, another year, another five years, another
decade.
I don't know.
For others of you, it might look like just bouncing from one drama filled relationship
to another.
Never having any sense of stability, never having any sense of security.
Never having that longterm committed relationship with somebody that you can finally trust with
your entire life.
Maybe for others of you that will just look like constantly beating your head against
a wall, trying to, you know, get orange juice from the lemon and if you don't like the trajectory
that you are going on, if you don't like the outcome that you are headed down, then it's
time to get real about what's going on.
It's time to get real about the connection that you're having with other people.
It's time to get real about the impression that you are leaving with other people and
it's time to get real about your way of being.
And once you can start to do that, things can start to change, but if you continue to
stay on your trajectory, if you continue to stay in your way of being, if you continue
to stay with your little about alpha males and females or continued distraction about
pickup artists or you continue to distraction about we all want, we can't have and you continue
to distraction about men need the thrill of the chase or whatever it might be.
That's when it causes you to focus on, quite frankly, bullshit.
What do I text him?
Do I text him the smiley face Emoji or the birthday cake Emoji?
It doesn't matter because how you're bringing yourself to the interaction is full of anxiety.
It's full of fear.
It's so closed off to the actual ability to connect with somebody on an emotional level.
It doesn't matter what you text him because he sees you that way, and unless you can start
to change how you relate to other people by getting real about how other people are experiencing
you, then you're going to continue down that trajectory and you're going to end up at the
last stop on that train line and that last stop is not where you want to be.
It's time you got off the train and it's time you got on a different train by getting real
about the impact that you're having on other people.
So with that being said, let's go ahead and get into questions for this week from our
students that are enrolled in our courses.
This week we have a question from Diana.
Diana writes in and says, "Dear Clay, I really enjoyed listening to relationship Inner Game,
episode number nine on the 5 Stages of Emotional Availability from the descriptions.
I am in the Validation Trap Stage #4 and I know that I have low self esteem.
Well, I have high self confidence.
My questions are, would you recommend any specific exercises or practices for improving
self esteem?
And when you say identity in Relationship Inner Game episode number nine, I hear self
worth and self esteem.
Is this a stretch?
Thank you for your great work that you do and share with us Diana."
Okay.
So when it comes to your first question about any exercises or practices for improving self
esteem, I don't know if you know this, but I actually wrote a book called the Self Esteem
Solution that covers the topic of self esteem in much more detail than I probably could
cover in a simple podcast like this.
It does cover a lot of exercises and practices that you could go over to improve your self
esteem.
But I think the most important thing to realize is to identify what exactly is causing you
to not hold yourself in high esteem and then to deal with that accordingly.
There are all different sorts of things such as, you know, feelings of unworthiness or
a past life experiences or just other things like that, beliefs and values and, and all
sorts of things.
So it's really important to go and look through those and if you're interested, the self esteem
solution is currently as a kindle audio or as a kindle, a digital book.
I'm looking into getting it published as a physical book as well too, but there's some,
some hurdles and some other things on my to do list.
They're making that a little bit prohibitive right now timewise.
But yeah, that's definitely something that I would look at.
I think issues like self esteem and things of that nature are things that people often
overlook when it comes to dating and relationship advice.
Instead choosing to laser focus in on tactical things like, what do I text to this person?
What do I say to this person?
Whereas you're not really often addressing the bigger picture stuff when you're focused
on those minute little details, like, should I be in a relationship with this person?
Do I have the skills and ability to actually have a great relationship with this person
or am I just kind of trying to, you know, run a marathon when I haven't even gotten
off the couch for, you know, several years.
Right.
And so I do think that issues of self esteem and things like that are things that a lot
of people have overlooked and should be addressed.
Absolutely.
You also mentioned that you have high self confidence.
I want to talk a little bit about the difference between self esteem and self confidence.
Confidence is, I guess the best way to describe just how confident you are in doing something.
It says nothing about your fluency or your skill or how you hold yourself.
It's just about how confident are you in doing it.
You could be doing it completely wrong, but you could still be confident.
So that's not necessarily something that you should strive towards is confidence after
all, you know, if somebody is confident that they can drive a car with a blindfold on,
that doesn't mean that I would like to get into the car with them and go wherever they
are driving.
That sounds very dangerous and scary.
Even if they were very confident, I would much rather have somebody who is anxious and
freaked out by the fact that they were trying to drive a car blindfolded because at least
then they would be honest and I know that I could trust them.
Whereas somebody who is, you know, a blindfolded and pretending to be confident, then that's
obviously very scary and I don't even know if I can trust them.
Whereas with the anxious person, I at least know that I can trust them to be honest.
Right.
So confidence isn't really something that I really emphasize or that I recommend that
people try to develop a.
sure.
It's nice to have, but it's optional.
Right?
I would rather you focus on things like self esteem, which is more about how you hold yourself.
Do you believe that you are worthy of the things that you want?
Do you believe that you are worthy of the relationship or the partners or whatever it
is that you want and if you're not worthy of these things, you might find yourself constantly
chasing people that are maybe emotionally unavailable or are unable or unwilling to
give you the kind of outcomes that you were really looking for.
So self esteem is absolutely very important.
So that is something that I would recommend that you take a look at a through resources
such as the Self Esteem Solution.
I mean that's my book.
I obviously recommend it but there's also lots of other great resources out there as
well too, for, for self esteem related issues.
Your second question is, when you say identity in Relationship Inner Game, episode #9, I
hear self worth and self esteem.
Is this a stretch?
In a certain sense I suppose you could say that they're related.
I didn't really have that in mind when I was saying that in the episode #9 Relationship
Inner Game podcast.
But what I was really talking about, there was a process of detaching yourself emotionally
from any sort of outcome or dating scenario or relationship scenario or something like
that.
Meaning something about you.
Like, Hey, there are attractive women that want to date me.
That means that I am like the real deal.
I'm a really cool guy, or something like that.
Or Hey, there's a guy who wants to marry me.
That means I'm finally worthy and have finally achieved everything I need to do in order
to make my, I don't know, my parents happy, or hey, I'm finally in a relationship that
means that my ex was wrong and that I am a lovable person or something like that.
Right?
It's about simply shifting that to simply just saying, Hey, I'm in a relationship that
doesn't say anything.
It's not a reflection of my value as a person.
It's not a reflection of what other men or women have said about me in the past.
It's just that I'm enrolled in a relationship or somebody is going out on a date with me,
whether or not they're more attractive or less attractive than other people that I've
been out on a date with is irrelevant.
All that matters is that I'm here with this person right now as opposed to me using some
aspect of them such as their, um, I don't know, physical attractiveness or their personality
or something like that as a measure of how I am progressing or as a measure of whether
or not I am a success or a failure, right?
Whereas self esteem is really about, um, how you perceive yourself.
Right?
So it's possible to be caught in the validation trap, but have a high level of self esteem
if you're still playing into that story of, for example, um, the, the more attractive
the women that I date, the higher quality of a man that I am, right?
The more attractive based off of, I don't know, societal expectations, the more high
quality a man I am.
Right?
As long as you're playing into that, you can still have high self esteem, but as long as
you're playing into that, you're still seeking validation from other people, right.
And it's possible to let go of that and to simply still have highest self esteem.
So have high self esteem, but instead to be playing a completely different game such as
I'm with somebody that I find attractive and that's all that matters, or I'm in a relationship
and I'm enjoying it or I'm not enjoying it.
Right?
It's not a reflection of the past, it's not a reflection of all the people that have rejected
you before.
It's not a reflection of something else of that nature.
And that's really what I was talking about in that episode, #9 when we talked about the
different types of emotional unavailability and sort of moving through those towards being
emotionally free.
Sure, self esteem can be a dimension within that, but it's not really the same story.
So I hope that explains things to you, Diana, and please let us know if you have any other
questions moving forward from here.
Thank you.
Okay.
So those have been our questions for this week and if you've liked this video, please
go ahead and give us a thumbs up.
Go ahead and subscribe to the channel so that you can receive notifications when we upload
and post our next Relationship Inner Game Experience.
And please leave a comment down below.
Let me know what you think.
Again, this has been Clay with www.ModernLove.Life and I hope that this has helped you improve
your relationship inner game.