Do you attract emotionally unavailable people? Or maybe you have a pattern of meeting good people and pushing them away because “something doesn’t feel right.”

If this sounds familiar, you may struggle to trust your own decisions when it comes to love. This often leads to us looking to others to validate our choices and tell us we’re doing the right thing (which can be dangerous for many reasons).

So how can you get out of this cycle? In today’s new video, I share 7 simple steps you can take to make better decisions in love and start building self-trust again.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

What weird reason could be responsible for us continuing in our lives to attract emotionally unavailable people? And what does going out to dinner and asking everyone else what they want from the menu before deciding ourselves what to get have in common with the phenomenon of attracting emotionally unavailable people? In this video, we’re going to find out.

Before I go any further, have you liked this video yet? Have you subscribed to this channel? Have you hit the notification bell? The one that means that the next time I release a video, you get notified first. If you haven’t, well, I would very much appreciate you doing all three of those things right now.

I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. For the last 17 years of my life, I’ve been helping people all over the world find love. I am the author of this, The New York Times best-selling book, Love Life. If you haven’t got a copy, go to LoveLifeBook.com and grab yours either on hardback or audio narrated by the author.

Today, we are talking about emotional unavailability, specifically the weird reason why a lot of us might be continuing to attract emotionally unavailable people in our lives. So, I got a question recently from one of my members saying that she was struggling to trust herself, that her whole life she had struggled with indecision over small things like what to order for dinner. She said she would literally have to go around the table and find out what her friends would get first before she ordered her own dinner. She talked about how all her life she had picked men who were wrong for her, men who were players, men who were time-wasters, men who had no intention of ever taking anything through to a long-term relationship; and that this pattern of attracting emotionally unavailable people is something she had had for a very long time.

In fact, when she dated someone she described as a good guy, she said her friends would point out that she always found a way to sabotage it. Like, anytime there was a guy actually treating her well, there was something about it that felt inherently uncomfortable or unsafe, she said she would always find something wrong with these guys. So, she came to me and said that she wanted to disrupt this pattern once and for all, because she felt like if she didn’t, she would never, ever find happiness, not just in her love life but in any part of her life where this lack of self-trust plagued her.

So, I said at the beginning of the video that there was a real link between not knowing what to order for dinner and needing everyone else’s opinions first and our propensity to keep attracting emotionally unavailable people. What is that link?

Well, it all stems from a lack of self-trust. If we don’t trust our own decisions, then we look for other external sources to decide for us what is valuable. If someone is deemed to be popular by everyone else, it feels like, “Oh, everyone’s decided that this person is popular so I don’t have to think about it. I just have to go for this person because their value has been pre-determined by their popularity.”

Another way we feel this is if a friend is telling us this person is amazing, this guy is amazing, or we hear people at work talking about how attractive someone is. We then feel like we have a green light to find them attractive because other people have said they are so. The same phenomenon takes place when someone is hard to get, because even if no one else in our world knows this person that is being hard to get with us, our brain makes a connection that if they are hard to get, they must be valuable. In other words, they’re not choosing me, they’re off somewhere else doing something else. They are rare, they are valuable, they have a status, and that’s why they’re hard to get.

Very dangerous connection to make, by the way, that someone being hard to get is an indicator of their value.

But when we’re not trusting ourselves, when we’re only looking for external validation for our decisions when someone is hard to get, we instantly think they must be valuable and we start chasing them. Meanwhile, someone who is actually choosing us is scary because we’re not choosing ourselves. So, what is wrong with you that you’re choosing me? I’m not a thing to be chosen. I don’t have an inherent value. I attach myself to the value of things on the outside. I am a gray, amorphous matter that chameleonizes itself to everything else. Why are you choosing me? I’m nothing.

If you choose someone who chooses you, you have to trust your own opinion, not who the world tells you is valuable. And that is the biggest struggle for those of us who don’t trust our own opinions, who have learned not to trust our own intuition or not even to trust our own needs.

Now, look, many of us suffer from this indecision, from this lack of self-trust. And I think a lot of us feel almost ashamed or find this difficult to speak about, because if you don’t necessarily know where that comes from, especially if you associate it with having been loved in your life, then you don’t really know where does this lack of self-esteem even comes from. And it could have come from anywhere. It doesn’t have to have come from abuse. It could come from someone constantly invalidating your decisions or someone bringing you up to think that they were always the smartest person in the room and that you had to go to them for their help, you couldn’t just trust your own judgment. Maybe you weren’t empowered enough growing up. It’s not essential that you go and do an excavation of your past to learn where these things come from for you. What’s important is to know that progress can be made by training a new muscle–the self-trust muscle. So, how do you do that?

I’m going to show you how to do this in seven specific ways.

Number one: Stop giving everyone else so much credit. When we have struggled to trust ourselves—and I know this because I’ve fallen into this trap many times in my life—we start to put everyone else and their opinions on a pedestal as if they are all-knowing about what is right and wrong instead of realizing that everyone else is kind of just making it up as they go along as well. Some of them may appear to be more sure of themselves than others, but ultimately, we are all just pioneering in our own lives. None of us have all the answers. None of us have all the answers for our own lives, let alone for somebody else’s. So, be very wary anytime you think greater wisdom lies outside of yourself than inside yourself for what you should do next in your life, especially when it’s in an area as personal as your love life. The core belief here that we have to dismantle is that everyone else knows what they’re doing but me. Instead, we have to replace it with, we’re all just trying to figure it out. So, how do I train the muscle that makes me better at making decisions for myself, especially if my decisions for myself aren’t going to be inherently worse than anyone else’s choices for me.

To follow on from that point, number two, do not let a committee of your friends tell you what to think about someone you are dating. Look, I’m an advocate in situations that are potentially abusive or disrespectful—one where you really don’t feel like you’re being treated right or you’re experiencing really negative emotions because of someone. I’m all for in that situation going to your friends and family and people you trust for an objective opinion. But if you are just experiencing good feelings with a person and you’re seeing where it goes, you do not need to go to your friends and look at every text they have sent, every conversation you have had, allowing them to break it down and project their stuff on to it. You know, he texted back a little quickly there. That’s a little bit much. Is it? Is that too much? Or is that just, he likes you so he sent a message back faster than someone who doesn’t care?

Don’t let everybody else project their stuff onto your situation. Only you need to like this person. And the way that you know whether you like this person is to connect with how this person actually makes you feel. Do they make you feel safe? Do they make you feel peaceful? Do they make you feel more like yourself? Do you laugh around them? Do you feel you could be more vulnerable around them? Do you like the version of yourself that you are when you’re in their company or speaking to this person? You don’t need everyone else’s opinion on that, so do not allow your love life to be decided by committee.

Now, obviously, if you feel like someone is behaving in an abusive or disrespectful way, that’s a different thing. And sometimes the objective opinions of friends and family can matter in those situations when we’re too close to it. But if someone is making you feel good, if someone’s making you feel safe or more peaceful and you’re having a great time, don’t feel that you need everyone around you to also think that this person is hot and sexy and awesome in order for you to continue liking them.

Number three: Know what you’re optimizing for. What is actually important to you? You know, we just talked about some of these things, whether it’s peace, safety, feeling that you’re really understood by someone, feeling that you have this very deep connection with the person, feeling like you can be everything you truly are around someone or feeling like you’re growing around someone. What is it you need in order to be happy? If we’re not careful, we just follow what everyone else on the outside thinks is valuable, which are often the most superficial qualities—charisma, charm, how much someone lights up every room they walk into, can dazzle a crowd, can tell a great story at a dinner table, how they dress, what their job is, how well-regarded they are in the world. We look to these things instead of the things that are actually going to make us happy. We must not allow our ego to drive because our ego often wants to impress other people or to go after and get what other people find impressive. Our soul is going to be driven by what actually makes us happy. So, connect to what you, you, you are optimizing for in your love life.

Now, look, I’m not saying that some of these things aren’t important to us or that we don’t need a baseline level of attraction with someone. I’m not denying chemistry as a crucial factor. But how you end up feeling chemistry or the way someone looks that might turn you on or the sexual connection between you may not come in the form that will naturally impress the people around you. That may be something that’s very unique to you.

Everyone has been attracted at some point in their life to someone that wasn’t their type or someone that on paper they feel like they shouldn’t be or wouldn’t be attracted to, and yet here I am feeling this incredible chemistry or sexual connection with someone I never would have thought. People have that experience all the time, but then they get thrown off because their friend says something like, “Have you seen the trousers they’re wearing? Have you seen the shoes? I mean, their hair is a little bit crazy, isn’t it?” We start hearing these things going, “Oh, maybe I don’t find them as attractive as I thought I did, maybe I don’t have the sexual chemistry that I’ve been feeling.” We start second-guessing ourselves.

So, those things are important, but it matters that they’re derived from within, not from without.

Number four: Give yourself permission to make wrong decisions because we do that all the time. Anytime you’re out there aggressively making things happen in life, making decisions, you have to make peace with the fact that you’re going to make some wrong decisions. Now, people who have a story that says “I can’t trust myself” will, anytime they make a wrong decision, attribute that to their own poor decision-making. They will say, “Here I go again, I never get it right. I can’t trust myself.” Whereas people who don’t have that story will make a wrong decision and they’ll say, “Well, that’s just one of the hazards of living a life of action. That’s one of the hazards of making progress in life, of being aggressive about living is you’re going to make bad decisions or you’re going to make decisions that are wrong.”

What people with that more empowering story do is just self-correct. They realize that the price of success in any area, including our love life, is being able to make decisions and then correct course along the way if we’re wrong. Now, that might mean that we commit another two weeks to seeing someone; and if it ends up not making us feel the way we want to feel, if it doesn’t feel right, if it doesn’t progress in the ways that we want, then we correct course and put our energy into someone else or being single again. We don’t stay the course indefinitely if it’s wrong.

But we recognize that good leadership is not making the right decisions all the time. Good leadership is the ability to make a decision, and that’s no less true in our own love lives. Good personal leadership in our love lives is making decisions knowing that we’re not always going to get it right but also knowing that we reserve the right to correct course and change direction any time.

And, by the way, know that since you’re gonna make some wrong decisions, it’s important not to bet the house, metaphorically speaking, with every decision. That’s why we don’t quit our jobs, sell our house, and move across the country for someone we met a month ago. We make decisions, but because we know we’re going to make some wrong decisions, we make calculated bets where the losses or losses we can afford.

Number five: If you want to build self-trust in big ways, like, who you decide as your life partner, start building the muscle in small ways like deciding what you’re going to eat on the menu for dinner. So, if you go out with your friends, maybe you’re the one who picks the restaurant tonight instead of asking everyone else what they want to eat. When the menu comes, you decide what you want to order without having to ask everyone else what they’re ordering. Or maybe you’re planning a vacation this year, decide where is piquing your interest and book the tickets instead of having to get the validation from everybody else about where you’re deciding to go. If we train ourselves to make empowered decisions, knowing that our decision is not inherently more wrong or worse than anybody else’s, then we’re starting to send a very clear message to our brain that we can make good decisions, and, maybe most importantly, that there is no such thing as an ultimate right decision, which brings me on to point number six.

Leaning into something or someone is very often the thing that makes it great. When we actually start to apply our energy to something instead of being divided by indecision, we start to see what the potential for that thing really is. It’s, like I said, if you pick a vacation spot for this year, and then between now and leaving, you spend the entire six months deliberating about whether that was the right place to go on vacation, you’re not going to have a good vacation, you’re not going to bring great energy to it. But if instead you say that’s where I’m going, now, let me just make the best of this vacation, then it can be as good as any vacation you have ever been on.

What we have to recognize is that something being revealed to be a good decision is something we actually have agency over. We are empowered to make something a good decision by how much we throw ourselves into it with a beautiful energy, with an aggressive attitude of I’m going to make the best of this.

Now, the same is true of our love lives. Have you ever known anyone who spends their whole time debating whether the person that they’re dating is the right person or not, instead of actually being really present with that situation, going 100% in, and allowing that situation to either become great or reveal itself to not be capable of that greatness. I know that there are times in my life where I never even knew how good something could be because I spent my whole time living in this state of paralysis about whether it was right or not. And, as a result, I never even threw myself into it. I never even tried. Can you relate to that? Standing on the sidelines and just questioning it instead of actually going all in and seeing what it could become?

The best relationships are actually co-created. They are the result of two people giving their best energy to the relationship and seeing what it becomes when they do that. That’s the true one plus one equals three of any relationship. Best relationships don’t just come ready-made, they come from two people actually leaning into them and giving them their all.

And sometimes we’re afraid to lean into something because we think, “Well, I don’t want to give more to something if it’s not right.” But very often we find out more by leaning into something than we do by standing on the sidelines deliberating. Have you ever had a relationship where it felt like you wasted months and years, with half of you in, half of you out, never really getting any answers? Well, when we lean into something, we do get answers, right? They either succeed, in which case the argument is put to bed and we go, “Oh my god, this is amazing;” or they fail faster. They reveal themselves by us throwing ourselves into them.

That’s true of relationships, it’s true of business decisions. How many times do businesses go, well, should we do this? Should we not do this? Should we try this new product? Should we try this new service? Will the customers like it? And we learn more by just getting it out there in some way and getting the information so that we can then make another decision. This is just as true in our love lives. This doesn’t mean that leaning in is about going all in for the next year, right? We haven’t got that amount of time to waste. But it might mean I’m gonna give this my all for the next 30 days and see what it could be. And at the end of that, I might have more clarity either way than constantly debating within myself whether this is right.

You’re not going to get all the answers about someone right away, you’re not going to know exactly how you feel on every level in the very beginning. This idea of love at first sight and when you just know, you know I think can be quite a destructive one. I think what’s more true, for most people, is that you have to give an amount of energy and investment and curiosity to a situation to get to the next stage, at which point you can decide whether to continue or not. But if you never get to that next stage because you never invest appropriately, you never actually lean into something, then you’ll just spend your life in deliberation, waiting for a feeling of certainty that is actually earned through investment and trying and two people co-creating not from the sidelines.

And, by the way, remember, you reserve the right to change your mind at any time. If you lean into something and it doesn’t become great by leaning into it, you can leave. That’s also data. But I think we learn more by investing in something and seeing if it can become great. And, by the way, seeing if it just reveals itself to not be able to be that, because that’s information too, then we do by standing on the sidelines, debating it with no information.

Lastly, number seven, remember that people take their cues from us. When you are dating someone, if you have decided someone is amazing and awesome and you go and communicate with that energy to the people in your life, that is going to be infectious. That’s going to do more to determine what they feel about this person than any casual observation they make of this person in watching how they are around you or what they’re like in their life. Because, remember, they don’t really know this person, but you do. So, they are looking to you to tell them how great this person is.

Think about it when someone comes to us and does the reverse and keeps complaining about their partner and keeps saying that, “Oh, I’m dating this person and I’m not really sure because they keep texting me and they’re suffocating me or they’re being really annoying and they did this thing the other night that I didn’t like.” Eventually, your friends don’t know this person at all, but they’ll hate them. They’ll be like, I can’t stand this person. They’re so annoying. But really all they’re feeding off of is your energy about the person.

I know couples who everyone thinks are the greatest couple in the world. But the reason they think they’re the greatest couple in the world is because of how that couple speaks about each other. They’re constantly singing each other’s praises; they’re constantly talking about how the other one is the best person in the world. And so, everyone on the outside of that relationship. Of course, no one knows what that relationship is like on the inside behind closed doors, but everyone on the outside is like they’re the greatest couple because of how they speak about each other. People take their cues from us. 

When you lean into something, you make that thing the best it can be and you communicate to the outside world that that thing is right now the best thing you could be choosing. And when we do that, it has the effect of making more things great. It has the effect of colouring positively the perception of everyone else for what we have chosen so we have agency.

And we have to get out of this mindset that is the disease of lacking self-trust. That is that, there is one true right answer in life, whether it’s for what to have to eat tonight, where to go on vacation this year, or what partner to choose to spend our lives with and that other people have more information on what that right answer is than we do and instead realize the truth that there is no one answer, that there are many great vacation spots in the world, that there is no one right cuisine to eat tonight, and that there is no one partner that could make us happy, and that we have the best information to make these decisions, because we know what we need and value for our own happiness, and that once we’ve chosen if we lean into the decision and if we give it all we’ve got and if we talk about it with excitement, that that decision will be the one that people look at and go, “Wow, you chose really, really well.”

But we will have orchestrated the success of our decision. It won’t be that we objectively made the best decision in the world and know that, at any time, if you make what is clearly the wrong decision, which you and I will many more times in our life, we can correct course. And the ultimate self-trust is not built in having a perfect record of making great decisions, it’s in the knowledge that you make decisions and when you get them wrong, you’re able to correct course any time you need. And guess what? When you remove all of this power from everybody else about knowing what’s right for you, or even in determining objectively what is valuable in the world, you will stop valuing people simply because they’re the most popular person in the room, because other people tell you that they’re eligible, or because they are hard to get when you try to reach them. You’ll start to see that those are at best subjective markers of value and at worse than more dangerously fake markers of value, and that the real value is in what’s going to make you happy. You will no longer choose someone because they’re unavailable, you’ll choose the person you feel the best around. And I can tell you who that will never be—the person who is not available to you.

Before you go anywhere, I have a brand-new free guide called Spark and Connect that shows you nine effortless ways to start up a conversation and connect with someone new. It is at WhatToSayNext.com. It’s easy, it’s practical, and you can use it today to go out there and meet someone new. So, go create some great options for yourself—WhatToSayNext.com is the link. And if you want to continue your video journey with me, right here, right now, then go check out this video because we have picked a recommended video for you to watch after this one. So, check this one out and enjoy. I’ll see you soon. Don’t forget to leave me a comment on this one as well. I will be reading them. And I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much. Be well, my friends, and love life.