Clay Andrews: Hey there. It's Clay with modernlove.life.
We are going to be talking about five things that high value people do not do with their
ex or really in any sort of dating or relationship situation. As we go ahead and get into this,
I want to just first start by clearing up what exactly does it mean to be high value.
Now I know that there's probably a lot of people out there that might associate being
high value with being a supermodel or being really rich or being an alpha male or something
like that, being some sort of high achiever, a alpha female or something like that if that's
even a thing, it is, but it's not probably quite the way that you think it is.
We can go ahead and put most of this aside because for the purposes of this conversation,
being high value means that you're living into your values in a high sort of way. That
is to say, if something is really important to you, are you living into that? Are you
experiencing that regularly? Are you pursuing that in your own life? Are you demanding that
as a standard from other people, et cetera, or is there something else that could be potentially
causing you to not live into these values? And we'll get into that more in a little bit.
Let's go ahead and start moving into this. So the first thing that high-value people
do not do is that they do not collapse when it comes to their ex, when it comes to social
interactions with other people, dating relationships, sorts of situations.
So what exactly is collapsed? We've talked about this in other videos, but just to quickly
sum it up, it is to say, you're confronted with some sort of situation, some sort of
predicament, let's say, where someone is asking me to do something that maybe isn't in alignment
with my values or someone is asking me to do something that makes me feel a little bit
uncomfortable, or someone is asking me something that's kind of putting me on the spot or something
along those lines. We have a choice that we can make. One of those options is collapse.
The other one we'll get into in just a moment, but one of those options is to collapse and
say, "Okay, I'm going to set my values aside and just do whatever it is. I think you want
from me, I am just going to make you happy. I'm just going to appease you in some capacity."
And people have all sorts of reasons for doing this. Maybe they're non-confrontational, maybe
they have low self-esteem. Maybe they're people pleaser slash nice guy slash nice girl sort
of thing, going on there, there could be all sorts of other things, but many times there's
this sort of covert contract, this sort of implicit understanding or agreement that the
person who is collapsing kind of makes with someone else, implicitly, of course, implicitly,
this isn't some sort of verbal thing where they actually talk this out and make the agreement
official with the other person. That's just kind of going on in the person's own mind,
but they often think, "Okay, hey, if I take care of your needs, if I make sure that that
your problems are all solved and I give you what you want, then you will be nice to me.
Then you will give me what I want." So if I sleep with you, even though it makes me
feel a little bit uncomfortable, then you will fall in love with me and want to be in
a relationship with me. These are sorts of things that might embody
collapsing. Okay? High value people don't do this because they're more anchored into
their own values than they are into just sort of making someone happy for the sake of not
rocking the boat or whatever the case might be. The second thing that high value people
don't do with their acts or dating and relationships situations is posturing. So again, we're in
that sort of situation where we can choose to either collapse or we might choose to posture.
Posture is the other alternative that many people feel as if they have to choose between
collapse or posturing in these sorts of situations and posturing, what this really is, it's kind
of the opposite of collapsing instead, your kind of puffing yourself up, trying to convey
a certain identity, a certain appearance, a certain mask if you will.
Basically, you're trying to put on a certain type of performance. That's probably a little
bit disingenuous or inauthentic. Now this is stereotypically kind of the macho bad boy
jerk kind of role. Women can obviously do this too, but it's most widely understood
as the macho bad boy jerk kind of thing. But it's not just isolated to that because if
you look at what's happening on an emotional level, when someone who's coming from that
way of being, is they're kind of choking off a certain slice of the emotional spectrum.
And they're just only expressing, I don't know, maybe happiness and anger, but they're
not allowing themselves to show, I don't know sadness because they might think that makes
them weak. They're not allowing themselves to show maybe that they have needs, because
I think that makes them vulnerable or something like that. So this is the classic example
of posturing. Of course, there are also other ones as well,
too. Another common one that people do is always being happy, right? If I'm just always
happy around my ex, then they'll see how great my life is. And they'll fall back in love
with me and they'll want to get back together with me. First of all, it's totally fine if
you genuinely are a jerk although I hope you're not watching my videos if you're a jerk go
watch someone else's videos, but it's also find if you're genuinely happy, but we don't
just want to kind of force happiness if that's not how we're genuinely feeling, because that
can kind of send a mixed message to someone else. They're like, "Okay, I'm happy all the
time." And then they might think, "Well wow, that's great that you're happy, but I'm having
this totally normal human experience after our breakup. I have good days. I have bad
days. Sometimes I feel like crud, other days I feel great. Maybe I'm doing it wrong and
you're doing it right." Or something like that.
It can also kind of create a disconnect because if they see you as always being happy or always
being some sort of constrained emotional state, they might feel like there's a greater disconnect
because they're experiencing deep down inside a full spectrum of emotions. It can also cause
a lot of sort of energetic, non congruency and congruency between the two of you, because
maybe on some level they can tell that you are not being authentic in this situation.
And that you're actually choking off constraining your emotional experience to a certain, very
narrow band of that emotional spectrum. And they can tell that and they can tell that
there's something out of alignment, something in congruent with how you genuinely feel versus
what you're trying to portray and express to the world. And this can come across as
them saying, "I don't know, something just doesn't feel right. I don't know. It seems
all polite and everything, but I don't know. I'm just not feeling anything in here." So
we want to avoid this as well, too. The third thing that high value people do
not do with their ex is that first of all, high value people always hit that like button,
it doesn't hurt, right? So go ahead and hit that like button. But the third thing is that
high value people also let others violate their boundaries, right? So this kind of feeds
into that whole collapsed thing a little bit, but it also is a separate, independent thing
as well, too. We all have certain boundaries, whatever that might be. You have your own
boundaries based off of your own values and your own rules for yourself and all of that.
I'm not here to just blindly give you some random boundaries that you should take on
and be like, "Okay, I'm not going to sleep with anyone until we're married or until we're
in a relationship or something." If that's your boundary, cool. Go with it.
But don't just arbitrarily take it on because someone on YouTube or someone on the internet
said so. If you genuinely believe it, okay, great. But if you don't believe it, whatever.
We all have certain boundaries and we want to make sure that we enforce those boundaries,
right? So whatever your boundary might be, if your ex, or if someone else starts to bump
up against that boundary, that's one of those opportunities to kind of choose between collapse
and posture. And it's not like you necessarily need to pick one or the other, it's actually
a false choice because when you collapse, you're kind of saying like, "Okay, yeah, it's
totally fine that we're doing this thing that I feel uncomfortable with. It's totally fine
that something is happening that violates my personal values or something like that."
Whereas posturing is like, "Hey, how dare you do this?" Granted, certain extreme things
might justify that sort of response, like abuse or something like that. But generally
whenever someone violates a boundary, they probably don't even know that's your boundary.
And so we don't necessarily want to have this very sharp reaction to it instead, just calmly,
let them know. Again, that false choice between posture and collapse there's actually a third
option, which is to stay rooted and anchored in your own values and just simply go for
those values and let others decide if you're pleasing to them or not, or if you're meeting
some sort of performance standard or not, okay? That's really what we want to do. But
just first start by calmly expressing whatever the boundary might be, because chances are
they probably don't know that they're violating some sort of boundary.
If you have expressed that, then you might just want to start saying like, "Hey, just
so you know, once again, that is a boundary of mine. And if this continues, it's not cool
with me and there's going to be some consequence." Whatever that might be, I'm going to go home
now or I'm not going to put up with this. We're not going to be able to be together
or whatever the case might be. So that's the third thing. The fourth thing is to focus
on unimportant things, people that are high value focus on what is truly important. And
so many people focus on unimportant things, honestly, when it comes to their acts. So
when it comes to anyone that they're really interested in romantically, they might focus
on, this is a really common one, but social media activity like, "Oh my goodness, he's
following attractive people on Instagram." What does that mean, Clay? Does that mean
that he's not interested in me? Does that mean that he's moving on? Does that mean that
he'd rather be with them or whatever? I don't know. We don't know why he's following attractive
people on Instagram. Maybe he's just bored, maybe he actually met one of these people
and they're I don't know, networking or something like that, just in some sort of professional
capacity. And it just happens that this person is an attractive person of the opposite sex,
or there could be anything. Maybe he is trying to move on. I don't know.
But unless you have some concrete evidence, then it doesn't help you to actually go down
these sorts of thought processes and start to invest too much in something trivial, like
what's happening on social media. It's been four hours since I texted her and I haven't
heard a response yet, or whatever the case might be. We don't want to focus on these
unimportant things, because generally when we do it, it means we're not focusing on our
own values. We're not focusing on what's truly important because at the end of the day, you
don't just want to be with a guy who doesn't follow attractive people on Instagram. You
don't just want to be with someone who texts you back right away all the time. I mean,
I don't know, maybe that is a real big thing for you, but most people, it's probably not
that big of a deal. And that means that you're focusing on this instead of probably something
else, that's a lot more important and a lot bigger.
I know that some people that watch these videos are very young, but at least me as a 38-year-old
guy, and probably people that are also older than me as well, and maybe a little bit younger
as well. We had this sort of unique experience of growing up in a pre connected world where
we weren't always wired into the internet or social media or whatever. And as the result
of that, we kind of remember this period of time in the past, maybe it was your childhood,
maybe it was your young adulthood, whatever, but we remember this time where we couldn't
just jump on Facebook or we couldn't just text someone we had to just call them up on
the phone. And we had to wait for them to show up at school the next day, when we could
actually talk to them, or if we were bored, we'd have to actually go play outside or something
like that. So people were probably doing a lot of similar
things to what they might be doing now on social media. It's just you weren't able to
see it. You weren't able to see him checking out attractive women before. You weren't able
to see her talking to that guy before. You weren't able to see this happening. And the
problem is that you're able to see it now and you're focusing on it instead of what's
actually important. Whereas before in a pre connected world, maybe you were just focusing
on what your actual experience was, which was, "Okay, great. We had this excellent conversation
a few days ago." And you wouldn't be able to see everything that happened between them
and the next time that you interacted, but now you can. So what we do want to do is to
not read too much into these little smoke signals. Okay. And that brings us to the fifth
thing, which is we want to take our focus onto the big picture and take our focus off
of these unimportant things. So high value people keep their focus on the
big picture things that are important to them, the value. And that is for most of you, probably
going to be the emotional connection that you have with your ex or with your partner,
or with that special person. If you are connecting with them emotionally and creating a strong,
meaningful bond and a strong, meaningful connection, then you are doing what you need to do whatever
they're doing on Instagram or Facebook, or when they're just walking down the street
or in the privacy of their own mind that's all up to them. As long as you are connecting
on an emotional level, I promise you, you are doing what you need to do. The truth is,
is that most people have a very difficult time connecting on an emotional level largely
once again, because of the internet and social media, that is a conversation for another
time, but it's making a bit of a crisis of empathy in our society if you ask me personally.
So if you can just show up as someone who's willing to actually connect with someone on
an emotional level, in a meaningful way, you're going to probably stand head and shoulders
above anyone else that they just might happen to have this paper thin social media surface
level communication with. And if that is something that you want help with, we do of course have
our course called Effortless Connection. If you want to learn more about that, you can
go check out our website, modernlove.life/ec. That's a dot life domain name because the
dot com domain name last I checked was $15,000 if I wanted to buy it. And although that would
be really cool. I don't know if I want to pay $15,000 for three letters dot com at least
not yet anyway. So we're at modernlove.life/ec. E as in effortless, C as in connection, check
it out if you want to, it's our communication course that helps you to connect more on that
emotional level and to actually have good, strong communication.
Again, don't get too caught up in all of these external things. What we want to do is we
want to focus on our own values. Are we staying anchored in them? And are we not getting kind
of pulled off course by trivial things, by getting caught in that false dichotomy of
posture collapsed by all these other little text messages, how long it takes them to respond?
Do you have read receipts on your messages? Oh, my goodness. They read it, but they didn't
respond. Don't worry about that stuff. Just focus on the emotional connection. That can
be all sorts of reasons why they don't respond to these things. Maybe they're thinking of
a thoughtful way to respond, and they just need a little bit of time to do it.
Maybe they accidentally opened the app, and it detected it and logged it as okay, I read
it, but they didn't actually read it. Or maybe they're in the middle of doing something and
they can't respond to you in a thoughtful way right now. And so they have to finish
driving home and all of that stuff before they can actually get it back to you. I don't
know. Don't overthink this stuff. Just focus on what is important, which is your own values
and creating that high quality, emotional connection. Anyway, I hope this helps you
out. And once you can hit that thumbs up button, I'll talk to you next time.