and I'm not exaggerating with that. It's also the most personal because for the insights

that I'm sharing, there's no way for me to communicate them to you without letting you

know it's been going on in my life for these last couple of weeks. So, if this is rambling,

I apologize. I'm putting my thoughts together on this, still, but it is incredibly important,

and that's why I want to share it with you.

So here's the personal part. About two weeks ago, I broke up with my girlfriend of a year

and a half. And if you've ever been in a relationship with someone for that long or longer, you

know, and you've broken up, it's not a fun feeling.

So the reason that it occurred was not because we didn't love each other, because we didn't

like each other. The reason that it occurred is because our values for what we wanted in

a relationshp long-term which is not in line. And there came to be this moment of realization

and acceptance that she wasn't changing and I wasn't changing, and for the both of us,

the best thing that we could do was separate, not because we wanted to but because it was

the right thing to do.

So it started off completely fine, like we're both logical, rational. She started packing

her things. She lived in this house, this studio, in my bedroom, and started packing

her things, started putting them in the car, and by the time we get all the things and

put the stuff into the car, and the last thing is in there, she is bawling. And I see her

like this and I'm numb, right? I can't even believe this is happening. We've been talking

about it because we think it's the right thing, but in that moment, I'm just like freaked out.

I want to show her that I care but I don't want to fabricate and manufacture these tears

so I feel guilty about the fact that I'm not crying, and I, eventually, sent her off. I

gave her a hug and a kiss and I tell her that I love her, but she drives off for another apartment.

I come back inside and that numbness stays with me for a couple of hours into that night.

And that sort of numbness shifted into loneliness and sadness, and I bawled my eyes out, right?

I held a voice recorder up. I talked my feelings out into my phone, which I need to delete

if that's on the iCloud; don't need that getting out there. But I just bawled into this phone

for, probably, 10 minutes, said everything that I felt, everything that I regretted.

I typed it out. I felt miserable, but even at the end, I felt better, a little bit relieved.

There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach I felt even though that I knew

that I did the right thing. I felt incredibly lonely because this is the bedroom that I

shared with her. So, what happens after that is a couple of days go by. I still have this feeling,

with my friends, they're trying to-- They're amazing, right? They take me to Escape rooms,

all the things that they know I like, trying to keep me busy.

But in-between these events, this feeling comes back and I'm thinking of her, and I

eventually go to her Facebook, which is the dumbest thing that you can ever do if you've

had a breakup, do not do this. I go to her Facebook and before I can even scroll down,

I don't know why I reflexibly did this, I saw a picture of her that I hadn't seen before.

There was of her in a dress with a group of people near a club and I booked it off that

page, but not before my adrenaline shot through the roof. My blood pressure started pounding.

I felt my heart beat. I felt myself get angry and jealous, and my head just started to go

into this crazy spirals of, you know, I can't believe that so soon after, she would go out.

I was angry at her. I felt silly that I had wanted to be upset on her behalf. Here I am

a night and a half ago, or even the previous night, crying in my bedroom. Maybe she'd gone

out that night. I didn't know when this was taken. I start wondering if there was a guy

there from her past or that maybe she met someone at the club, she kissed him drunk,

how that would be like low standards and this guy couldn't compare, blah, blah, blah.

So, now, I'm comparing myself to this person and imagining how I'm going to go become better

in every way that matters to me, meaning, I'm going to go work on my business, I'm going

to try to get more talented with music, I'm going to try to be a better friend, a better

person, I'm going to travel more, become more worldly.

I'm comparing myself to this person who doesn't even exist. An imaginary guy that she might

have seen and kissed at a club I'm in a death fight with in my head. And 5 minutes later,

I realized, what am I doing? But I can't snap the streak. For the rest of the day and the

next couple of days, I feel divided. Every time that I'm with my friends, I'm wondering

what is she doing now? And I know a lot of you that have felt this, but it tends to happen

with a friend, a family member, someone close when there's a falling out.

Sometimes you wish that they're not having a good time, right? Or even people that you

don't know well that who, maybe, you're jealous of, you start wondering what they're doing

comparing your life to theirs, and it becomes impossible to live your own life in a happy

way, and that's where I was.

So I'm still trying to get my work done. The videos, I know I got to get to work to create

these breakdowns, I need focus. So I start doing whatever I can to get there--all the

exercises I did and then some. And one of the things on this list that I created that

I have to do is something I've been interested in which was a hypnotherapist. I'm going to

go to hypnotherapy and would have him sit me in a chair, just knock me out, and make

me feel amazing.

So I've never done it but that's kind of what I'm looking to--sign up for this guy in town,

drive in, get to the office, and I see he's got the plush black chair, and he's got the

desk with the chair there, and I'm ready to go sit into this giant black chair, and just

be put to sleep, and made to feel like a million bucks at the end of it. And he kind of goes,

"That's not how it works. I'm not really gonna do too much hypnosis today. Just sit down

on this chair next to the desk and tell me what's going on."

So I start to tell him and I get to the story about Facebook, that how I saw her, and my

blood pressure rise, and it just felt terrible, these triggers for me. And he said, you know,

something similar happened to me. There was a girl. We haven't been dating as long as

you guys had but there was real connection there, and it didn't work out. For whatever

reason, I wanted to date her, she didn't feel the same way, a few days later, weeks later,

I see on her Facebook that she is in Hawaii and she posts this photo, and it's with her

and this tanned, huge, handsome, stunning set of pearly white teeth guy, on this beautiful

island in Hawaii with the sun setting in the back, and she's wrapped around him with the

biggest smile I'd ever seen on her face. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, "Man, that's,

I know, that's rough. I hope you're okay."

And he goes, "Yeah, yeah, all I could think about in that moment was how grateful I was

to that guy for making her smile so big." And that, for me, was a complete plot twist.

I could not have seen that coming from a million miles because when I got sad, I went to myself.

How does this affect me? And what he thought me that I want to start to teach you guys

that has been, perhaps, the most pivotal shift is how to get to that point of sharing in

the happiness of other people, even when you don't necessarily feel it. Because in that

moment, what he made me realize is that even though I did love my girlfriend, I had a very

limiting concept of what love was.

First off, if you look back at my story, love meant to me that you need to be able to negatively

impact the person, right? So when I saw her cry as she drove off, I went "there you go,

proof that she loves me." And I felt guilty because I wasn't crying in that moment. I

went, "Oh man, she might not know that I feel that way about her." So when I did finally

cry that night, I was like "Crap, I want her to see this. I want her to know that I care."

Now that's all nice and that's how we often times perceive love, but guess what? A part

of your definition of love is that you need to be able to make someone feel terrible,

you will have to make them feel terrible at times to feel loved.

Another part of my definition was that I want to make her happy, right? If I love her I

want to make her happy. Now that's nice and it made me do a ton of nice things for her,

right? It made me be a better person because I wanted to spread that to her, but it also

made me very self-centered in where her happiness came from. It wasn't that she should be able

to go out with anybody and her friends the day after, and I was happy for her that she

was happy, I was jealous and upset that shortly after our breakup, she'd gone out and had

been happy with other people.

By the way, I later find out, that photo was taken weeks prior when we were still dating,

and this entire episode in my head was completely manufactured. But the point stands that I

couldn't feel happy for her because my definition of love was that I needed to be the one that

made her happy. And, of course, the third piece of my definition was that love means

you need the other person, and if she's out there not needing me, or if I was getting

over her quickly, that meant that we didn't truly love each other. So I was stuck in this

negative spiral to prove to myself and trying to get out of her that she love me, and the

only way that we could demonstrate that to one another was by continuing to stay_. That's

a really screwy definition and it will guarantee pain in your life if you want love, which

we all do.

A much better definition, and the one that I had been trying to go for, and I will teach

you guys how to implement it into your own life, is that love means truly wanting the

happiness of someone else no matter what. So the definition that I'm driving for would

have had me see that photo of her, with that smile on her face, and went "Thank god, she's

not sitting at home crying about this." I'm so happy and grateful to whoever it is in

her life, whether it's family, friend, or someone else that she met, that they're making

her feel that way because I care about her and I love her.

And, for myself, if I expected her to love me, I would know, you know, what? She doesn't

want me to sit in my room crying to a voice recorder. She would want me to be happy and

I want that for myself too. So rather than do that, I'm not going to have this predermined

grieving period. I'm going to try to feel good immediately. That doesn't diminish how

I felt about her and how important she was to me. That is just what love should look

like and the shift, though, and it sounds nice, and I go, "You know what? If I really

love her I should feel that way," but then, I'd imagine thinking of her out with another

guy, and that is not how I felt. Immediately, a trigger came back and I would be jealous.

So I said, "How do I actually get here?" And this is the crux, I hope now, of this video

now that you kind of understand where I'm coming from, which is how do you feel that

genuine feeling of love for someone else? Well, it starts with the fact that in order

to do that, you need to feel loved first. This is a human trait. Babies, if they don't

get touched, will literally die. Humans thrive on the affection and the love of other people.

If we don't get it, our lives go out of whack. Everything starts to break down. Our health

breaks down. We start being mean to other people. We stop achieving our goals. We need

to feel that.

And so, the metaphor that I think of is that our well-being is kind of like a table top,

and as long as it's supported with legs, it's fine. So what we spend a lot of our time doing

in our lives are getting, okay, I've got my friends supporting me, making me feel loved.

I got my family who makes me feel loved. I got my girlfriend who makes me feel loved.

And everyone has different ones. Think now, who are your legs that provide that love,

that sense of well-being that you have?

The problem is that these legs are inherently unstable because life happens. I mean, take

this one, for instance, right? I got my friends, my family, and my girlfriend, and we break

up. And my well-being just goes to crap. It's awful. I'm no longer not only feeling good,

but I'm certainly not being very fun for the people around me. And I'm bitter, right? I'm

not very nice, I'm not very concerned with how things are going for other people. So

what do most people do in a breakup, when their table has been knocked off?

Well, they spend more time with friends, and they spend more time with family, and then,

they go get another girlfriend, boom. After a month or whatever period of time, they're

completely back to their old self because they've built another leg there, or they strengthened

some of the other legs. All good, wonderful, and great, but that doesn't solve the problem

that this table is so wobbly because the legs underneath it are not.

For sure, the truth of life is people can die, people will leave. Even my friends who

I have complete confidence who will be with me for a long time are going on a vacation

for two months to the other side of the planet that I don't want to participate in. So that

leg, for me, is going to be shaky. What we try to do and what I try to do was to reinforce

these legs, right? So we go, I need this well-being here, how can I lock this in?

We try to build braces around the legs, and that brace can look like a couple of things.

For some people, it looks like threatening. They say, "If you leave me, I'll hurt myself."