Love Me? Love Me! 13641v

Table of Contents

PART 1 LOVE YOURSELF

Chapter 1 THE BIGGEST REASON YOU STILL HAVEN’T FOUND THE ONE

Chapter 2 MANIFEST YOUR SOUL MATE

Chapter 3 LOVE YOURSELF

Chapter 4 FORGIVE YOURSELF

Chapter 5 A STATE OF GRATITUDE

Chapter 6 FIND YOUR PURPOSE & BE IN SERVICE

PART 2 FIND THE ONE

Chapter 7 UNDERSTANDING THE RELATIONSHIP NEEDS OF THE OPPOSITE SEX

Chapter 8 SMASHING YOUR BOXES

Chapter 9 WHO HOLDS YOUR MISSING PUZZLE PIECE?

Chapter 10 SEARCHING FOR MR. COMPATIBILITY

Chapter 11 THE DATING DREAM BOARD

Chapter 12 LISTEN TO YOUR SOUL, WHEN IT’S SPEAKING TO YOU

PART 3 THE SECRET ART OF FALLING IN LOVE

Chapter 13 MR. RIGHT, MR. RIGHT, WHEREFORE ART THOU, MR. RIGHT?

Chapter 14 THE QUEEN OF FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Chapter 15 HELP HIM TO FALL TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY IN LOVE WITH YOU

Chapter 16 EVERY EXIT IS AN ENTRANCE TO SOMEPLACE ELSE

Chapter 17 PRESERVING YOUR PRECIOUS TIME

Chapter 18 A GOAL WITHOUT A PLAN IS JUST A WISH

Chapter 19 ONE STEP CLOSER TO I LOVE YOU

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

First edition

Published by Spark Productions

www.serenadc.com

Copyright © 2017 Serena de Comarmond

The right of Serena de Comarmond to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the copyright – designs and patents act 1988

A catalogue record of this book is available from the Australian National Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced – stored in a retrieval system – or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and / or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. The book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by the way of trade in any form binding or cover other than that in which it is published without the prior consent of the publishers.

Printed in the USA by Book Baby

ISBN: 978-1-370850-68-6

Limits of liability & disclaimer.

This document contains business strategies, marketing methods and other business advice that regardless of my own results and experience may not product the same results for you. I make absolutely no guarantee expressed or implied that by following the advice below you will make any money or improve current profits, as there are several factors and variables that come into play regarding any given business. As with any business endeavour you assume all risk related to investment and money based on your own discretion and at your own potential risk. It is your responsibility to conduct your own due diligence regarding the safe and successful operation of your business if you intend to apply any of my information in any way to your business operations.

To the ones who love me, thank you. To the ones that I love, you’re welcome.

“Never knew I could feel like this. It’s like I’ve never seen the sky before”

~ David Baerwald, Moulin Rouge

Part 1

LOVE YOURSELF

Chapter 1

THE BIGGEST REASON YOU STILL HAVEN’T FOUND THE ONE

“And all I ever needed was the one, like freedom fields where wild horses run When stars collide like you and I, no shadows block the sun You’re all I’ve ever needed, Baby you’re the one”

~ “The One,” Elton John

MATCHMAKER, MATCHMAKER

As a matchmaker, the number one question people ask me, literally every single day, is “Why haven’t I found the one yet?” Women and men across the world are walking around in disbelief. They cannot believe that they haven’t found the one. They’ve been on so many dates, and they think that they’re so funny, and they’re so charismatic, and they’re so cool, and they’re so cute. They just don’t understand why. They get multiple dates through dating sites. The dates transpire. And they wait…. They wait for the phone to ring for date number two, but it never does. They sit, completely disillusioned, wondering, ‘What did I do wrong? Was it me? Was that guy a player? Why on earth have I not found the one?’ And so, we live in this strange seesaw type of reality, where on the one hand, we talk to our girlfriends, saying, “Oh my God, I was so cool, and so funny, and so adorable. He was clearly so into me and we were flirting. We kissed and it was amazing. So I have no idea why he hasn’t called because I’m

great and I am such a catch. Right? It just doesn’t make any sense.” On the other side of the seesaw, when we’re alone in bed at night, we have self-talk, which goes something like this, ‘I’m not lovable. I’m not attractive enough. I’m not cool enough. Right? I must have done something really weird and that’s why he doesn’t like me.’ And so forth and so on. We truly can’t fathom why we haven’t found the one. Another sleepless night, you reason.

Well, your sleepless nights are over. I have the answer. I have the secret you’ve all wanted to know. The reason that you haven’t found your person, the man of your dreams, is because you are not the woman of your dreams yet.

If you want to attract the most amazing man in the world into your life, the man of your dreams, Mr. Perfect, then I’m sorry, darling, but you’re going to have to do a little bit of work on yourself. If you want to attract somebody who’s equally as awesome as the picture you’ve painted of Mr. Right into your life, then you’ve got to be their mirror, you’ve got to be as awesome as the person you want to attract into your life because like attracts like. You’ll need to look at all the different types of people you’ve been attracting into your life, because I’m sorry, sweetheart—here’s the reality check for you—you’re attracting someone of equal caliber into your life. Let me say that again, so it really sinks in. You’re attracting into your life the same caliber of person as you are. So if you’re attracting into life a person who has a poor work ethic, and is a little bit scruffy, and is quite frequently not on time, and doesn’t always pay the bills, and sometimes has a bit of body odor, and isn’t very nice to his mom, and you keep attracting the same person over and over again, then maybe you need to look at yourself because the attributes that you’re demonstrating are only allowing you to attract somebody of that level.

If you want to attract a 10, you’ve got to be a 10. There are no 7s that ever got themselves a 10. If they did, it was through manipulation and lies and ended in tears. If you want to attract a 10, you’ve got to be a 10. If you’re running around being a five and you expect to attract anything more than a five, you’re crazy. And so, if you want to attract a 10, you need to be 10. And your number has to

do with a lot more than just your looks. The reason that I called this book Love Me! Love Me? is because you’ve got to love yourself first before you can expect anybody else to love you. The first ‘love’ in Love Me! means ‘I love me.’ You need to love yourself. You need to answer that question with a resounding ‘yes.’ Once you get to that point, then you can go out and find yourself a 10 and ask him to love you, because the second Love Me? means ‘love me, please love me, I’m worth it.’ Until you’re a 10, you’ll never attract a 10.

And so, how do you become a 10? Well, lucky you, this is your guide. This is the way that you get to a 10. The first half of this book is dedicated to helping you learn how to love yourself, to help you to forgive yourself for any of the shame and embarrassment and poor judgment that you’ve ever had in your life. It’s going to teach you how to live in a state of gratitude and to see all the things that you have around you from state of gratitude and love and joy. I’m going to teach you how to share yourself with the world by giving back to society and raising your vibration—good vibration—by adding a little bit of light and happiness into this world. You’ll find out who the perfect person is for you. Often, in life, people base the image of the perfect person on the superficial, on how he’ll look. And even though we all have a type and need to be sexually and physically attracted to our partners, at the same time—apart from the way that someone looks—we also need to find out who we’re most compatible with on an emotional level. Are the two of you compatible on an intelligence level? Are the two of you compatible on a soul level?

We’ll need to explore who you are and with whom you’re most compatible. We’ll also work out what your love brand is. That is, how do you love a partner and how do you want to be loved by your partner? I’m going to teach you how to understand the needs of the opposite sex. And then we’re going to find out what types of people are going to offer you the absolute best match. We’re going to create a dating dream board and a dating plan. We’ll use that plan to bring the best possible partner into your life. We’re going to learn about where to meet a potential partner outside of online dating, how to present yourself on a date, and how to make your date fall absolutely, madly in love with you upon meeting him. And lastly, I’m going to set you a on task, a task to manifest the man of your dreams into your life, and finally find the joy of loving yourself. You’ll

create a 10/10 love, a love expressed by somebody who deserves you.

So I invite you over the next few days as you read this book, to wallow in your loneliness and to what it was like to not feel 110% down about yourself all of the time, because soon the feeling of being unfulfilled, soon the feeling of living your life the wrong way, the feeling of being lonely, the feeling of not being on track with your life—all of those feelings are going to dissipate. Soon you will only what they used to feel like. They’ll be a vague memory slowly receding into the past because from the moment you start reading the next chapter, your life is going to change dramatically. You are going to feel more content and at peace with yourself than you’ve ever felt in your entire life. You’re going to be one step closer to attracting the man of your dreams into your life and creating a 10/10 love affair that the people around you will envy and ire. Are you ready for your new life? Well, here it comes, ladies. Here it comes.

Chapter 2

MANIFEST YOUR SOUL MATE

“Maybe it’s intuition But some things you just don’t question Like in your eyes, I see my future in an instant I think I found my best friend I know that it might sound More than a little crazy, But I believe I knew I loved you before I met you I think I dreamed you into life I knew I loved you before I met you I have been waiting all my life”

~ “I knew I loved you”, Savage Garden

THE UNIVERSE IS INTERESTED IN YOU

You’ve heard of the law of attraction before, but what actually does it mean? What it means is basically whatever you think you are you, you are. So if you think that you’re dumb and you’re stupid, then you’re going to be dumb and stupid. If you think that you are fat and ugly, then the more that you think about it, the more you are going to manifest yourself into looking and feeling fat and

ugly. If you think that you’re unlovable, the less you’re going to be able to attract love to yourself. And so, the obvious thing to do if you want to attract something good into your life is to start thinking and manifesting good things into your life. What does the law of attraction mean? It’s highly important that the way you look at yourself, the way that you look at others, and life in general is always in a positive manner. You’re never going to be able to attract an amazing guy if you keep talking about the fact that all you ever get are terrible guys or the only thing that you are ever going to be worthy of is somebody who’s useless and terrible.

And so, if you want to start using the law of attraction as a tool to help you to improve your life and to find love, then there are five key principles that you’re going to have to embrace. It’s always important to that the element that you need to be attracting and manifesting into your life isn’t physical—it isn’t this item or that item—it’s a feeling. Several feelings. Feelings of happiness, feelings of joy, feelings of fulfillment. You want to attract and manifest a feeling of purpose and intention in your life. Yes, of course, a fast, flashy car would be lovely, but it is more advisable to be manifesting a feeling of success and a feeling that you’ve achieved all of your goals, instead of vying for a turbocharged, leather-clad driving machine. If that car costs $100K then you would be better off manifesting the thought, ‘I want to be in a job that pays me a fantastic wage because I’m excellent at what I do. The more that I work, the better I perform on the job and the more people recognize the great work that I’m doing, then the more I’m compensated appropriately for doing that work.’ So what you want to try to do is manifest the thoughts and feelings that are going to help you to attain the physical stuff. Don’t pine away for the physical stuff. Work at manifesting the thoughts and feelings you’ll need to be successful. The universe is much more interested in your spirit and your soul than the vehicle it’s physically driving around in.

So here are the five key principles in manifesting the type of life and type of relationships that you desire:

STEP ONE: CLEARING LIMITING BELIEFS

A limiting belief is the belief that you have within yourself that prevents you from moving forward within your life. And so, what you can do is begin every day by asking the universe to help you to set you free from all of the limiting beliefs that are blocking you from achieving the goals you desire. Set some quiet time aside, you alone, just asking the universe to have your back, to help you to move forward from dwelling on all of the negative thoughts that you’ve been hindered by in the past. Breathe. Throughout the rest of the day, you need to stay open and look for signs from the universe that you can act on to help you to clear out any of those old, limiting beliefs.

I have always held dear to my heart the numbers 1111 or 1, 11. When you start asking the universe for assistance, you will start to see 1111 or 1,11 show up. All the time. If you’re not seeing those numbers, you’ll be seeing a certain pattern of numbers or a certain color or a certain symbol or sign, but you’ll be starting to see a pattern repeated frequently in your life. When you start seeing that pattern frequently, for example 1111, it is a message from the universe reminding you to manifest. And so, if 1111 is the thing that shows up for you, then every time you see it—on a clock, at the game, on the receipt—you need to stop whatever it is that you are doing and start to think of the feelings that you want to have in your life, and the accomplishments that you want to achieve. I like to pick a couple of feelings and a couple of goals that I have and I become slightly fixated on them over the course of a month. Every single time that I see 1111 or 1, 11, I’ll ask exactly the same thing over and over and over again. I try to stay on the same feelings and goals because the more that I repeat them—the more that I put them out into the universe—the more power I’m giving them and the stronger the likelihood of them manifesting and happening will be. Start looking for the challenges, start to recognize the challenges that the universe is throwing towards you. It’ll take some time and effort, but try to understand why they are there and why they’re in your life.

When you have limiting beliefs floating around in your head, sometimes it takes a large event to occur within your life for you to be able to recognize that you have an issue with a limiting belief, which is holding you back. This event will

help you recognize that limiting belief and be able to clear it out. For example, you might have, of late, started lying to people, just little white lies here and there, lies that you don’t think hurt people. It’s become an incessant habit. You’ve recognized in the back of your mind that these little lies are starting to show through the cracks and it’s starting to come back and haunt you. Paranoia creeps in and you assume people will uncover your falsehoods. You lie because you don’t think that your life is good enough, and you can’t stop. Now, one lie that you have told about a good friend comes out and your friend is furious. The two of you have a huge fight, and the injured party decides she doesn’t want to be your friend anymore. She walks away and you feel completely heartbroken, lost and alone, and you wonder why this has happened. It’s painful for both of you.

It’s only when you sit back and realize that you brought this upon yourself with your predilection for lying that you can recognize that lying—over time—has become for you a limiting belief. It is a behavior that is affecting you, hurting you, causing you pain and anxiety. It’s a behavior that you have to get rid of. If you can get rid of it, then all of a sudden, you’re going to start feeling a lot happier about your life and about all the things that are going on in your life. And so, by recognizing the tasks that have been set for you by the universe and by learning from the mistake that you made, you will be able to clear a limiting belief which will get you one step closer to manifesting all of your goals and all of the feelings that you want to experience within your life.

STEP TWO: FINDING CLARITY

Step two in manifesting and observing the law of attraction is finding clarity. You need to be absolutely 100% clear on what it is that you’re trying to manifest. So let’s use this relationship example. If you want a boyfriend—a long term boyfriend that you’re going to date for a year or so—a boyfriend you eventually marry, then the way that you should manifest it is very important. Simply saying, “I want to find a man who’ll love me and I want to get married within the next year” isn’t really enough. You may find a husband who will love you, that you

can get married to within the next year, however, that husband may not be the right person for you. You may be incompatible. He may love you, but you may not love him. He may not look at you the way that you want him to look at you. He may not act the way that you want him to act. He may not give you the things that you need to feel happiness and you may not be able to give those things to him in return.

And so, if you are going to successfully manifest the love of your life, then here is an example of how you would do it. You would say, “Universe, I am ready to settle down and get married. I would like to marry a man who is kind and gentle and generous, who is at least six foot tall and has brown hair, blue eyes. I would like the man to have a good job that he works hard at. I would like the man to enjoy traveling all over the world. When I’m with him, I’ll feel pure, deep happiness, contentment and fulfillment. When he’s with me, he will feel pure happiness, contentment and fulfillment. Ours will be a love that people could only dream about. I would like to meet him in the next two months.” The picture is clear. Manifesting with such detail and clarity will lead to greater fulfillment. There’s no mistaking what kind of man you want in that example. You talked about his physical attributes. You talked about what he does for a living. But more importantly, you talked about how he’s going to make you feel. He’s going to make you feel amazing. You’re going to make him feel amazing. You’re going to have a relationship that will last and people will be in awe.

Saying that over and over again every single day, two times a day, three times a day, continually manifesting that, is going to do a couple of things. Number one, obviously you’re going to be putting out for the universe whatever it is that you’re wanting. If the law of attraction is true, then you will attract that kind of person to you. Not only that, what you’re doing is you’re actually programming your conscious and subconscious mind to understanding what it is that you need in a partner. The more that you program your subconscious mind, the more your subconscious takes what you’re saying as complete and honest truth. Soon you’ll be in a set of circumstances where you will never be able to settle for a man who isn’t going to give you all of the things that you desire; you have programmed your mind into only being satisfied with accepting somebody who is the type of man that you want and, more importantly, need. The way that you manifest

somebody into your life is twofold: one, by attracting them through the law of attraction and the help of the universe, but also, two, by literally programming your brain into accepting nothing else, but exactly what it is that you want and need.

STEP THREE: FEELING THE FOCUS

The third principle of manifesting and observing the law of attraction is to feel it —emotionally, mentally, physically—feel what it’s going to be like when you are in that situation. In order to be able to aptly feel what you are manifesting you’ll have to spend some time alone, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes with your eyes closed. Think about how you’re going to feel when you’re dating the man that you described previously, when he’s holding you and kissing you, romancing you, when you’re lying in bed watching Netflix and giggling together, when he’s carrying you on his shoulders as you walk on the beach. Imagine the feeling that you have in your heart as he kisses you. Drum up in your brain and your whole being the feeling that you have every time he leaves you, the way that you miss him because you love him so much. Think of the feeling that you have when you look in his eyes and all you can see is him looking back at you, being completely besotted and in love with you. Yes, men still become besotted. Thank goodness! Focus on how that feels physically, mentally and emotionally, and sit in that feeling for a few minutes and enjoy that feeling, embrace that feeling. Feel it with every inch of your being because if you start feeling that emotion and recognizing that emotion, you’re going to start manifesting those feelings towards you. The more you can feel that feeling, the more you’re going to believe that that feeling is real. The more you believe it’s real, the stronger your power of manifestation is going to become. So think it, feel it, and believe it.

STEP FOUR: GOING ZEN

You’ve been clearing those limiting beliefs; you’re finding clarity among your goals; and you’re imagining the feelings associated with attaining your goal. The next thing you’re going to have to do is principle number four of manifesting. Principle four says to chill out. You’re going to have to chill, girl. Easier said than done. When it comes to relationships, you want to manifest Mr. Right, right now. In fact, if you could have manifested him yesterday, that would have been a much better scenario. Unfortunately, the universe has its own timing and you cannot rush God. You’re just going to have to wait and you’re just going to have to have absolute faith that you are going to be able to manifest the man of your dreams into your life soon. And so, all you need to do is keep the faith and keep manifesting every single day. Every morning when you wake up, clear your mind of any limiting beliefs that are going to limit you from finding the partner of your dreams. Every day, you are going to need to think about who that partner is, what attributes you’re looking for and keep them the same, try not to change them. Keep your vision solid. Then spend a minute every day sitting with your feelings, actualize them. Imagine how amazing you’re going to feel when you are finally able to share time with this amazing man that you’re manifesting into your life. Just understand that he’s out there somewhere right now and he’s probably manifesting you into his life as well. He could be anywhere. He could live right around the corner. He could be in a relationship that isn’t working currently, that’s still going to take him another six months to get out of. He could be deployed in the Army overseas. He could be living in Brazil, for all you know. He could be absolutely anywhere, doing absolutely anything, and you’re just going to have to wait until the time is right and the universe places you both in the same place at the same time. When it does place you both in the same place at the same time, and he looks at you and you look at him, and he says hello, or maybe you did, too, if you’re feeling a little bit confident that day, then and only then will your manifested relationship begin. No sooner. So chill.

STEP FIVE: BELIEVING DEEPLY

Step five is knowing that the universe has your back. When I say knowing, I mean you need to have a deep knowing. You need to stop hoping or wishing. You need to stop vibrating in negative energy. Wipe away those feelings of disbelief and feelings of self-doubt. You need to start actually believing. In what,

you ask?

believing that the things that you are saying are going to happen

believing that you deserve them to happen

believing that you’ve been able to clear away any of the shame or the embarrassment or the issues or the problems or the securities that you’ve had in the past

believing that you are lovable and you are deserving of love

believing that you’ve been able to forgive yourself of all of the issues and problems you’ve had in the past

believing that the life that you’re living right now is great just how it is, and what you’re hoping to do or what is going to happen, is that you’re going to manifest a partner who’s just going to make that even better

believing that you have wonderful things to give in this world, and that to receive happiness you need to give happiness as well, putting light into this world and easing pain, and bringing joy and happiness to the people around you

believing that he really is out there because once you start to believe all of the words that are coming out of your mouth and all of the thoughts that you are

having in your head then that energy will attract him to you and attract love, happiness and joy into your life

Then you can sit back and you can start to watch the magic happen.

Once you love yourself, the love of your life will appear. And so, are you ready to learn how to love yourself, forgive yourself, live in a state of gratitude, share yourself with the world, find out what the love of your life looks like, and how to attract him to you? When he comes into your life, how will you make him fall in love with you? Well, sit back, girl because I’m about to take you on the ride of your life. The life that you know right now is about to change. It’s about to change dramatically and it’s about to change for the better. You’ve got this far in life. Well done! You’re still alive. You’re a bit battered, broken and bruised, but still alive. This book right here, right now is going to be your turning point. It’s going to be the shift in your life that you’ve been looking for. First of all, you’re going to fall in love with yourself and then you’re going to be able to attract Mr. Right into your life. You’re going to be able to attract the absolute perfect person for you into your life. I’m going to teach you how to figure out who he is, how to find him, and how to keep him wanting more once he finds you.

Chapter 3

LOVE YOURSELF

“If I asked you to name all the things that you love, how long would it take for you to name yourself?”

~ Anon

THE GREATEST GIFT IN THE WORLD

I when I was in high school and one of the biggest insults you could receive was that you “loved yourself.” Back then if you loved yourself it meant that you thought you were good—so good—and that you were better than everyone. ‘Snob’ rolled off the tongues of your classmates. It was seen as a very negative thing and so when we hear people going on and on today about loving yourself, it is easy to hear the term and still view it in a negative light. But honestly, it’s not ‘loving yourself’ that is negative. Nowadays, there are so many people on this earth who do not love themselves. They suffer from incessant self-talk where they tell themselves over and over again that they are ugly, fat, dumb, unlovable, and not good enough. They walk around with a dark cloud above their head, spreading negative energy wherever they go. When you are spreading negative energy around, people pick up on that. Trying to find a man when you are in the headspace of not loving yourself makes finding anyone above a 5 out of 10—a 5/10—pretty darn difficult. If you don’t love yourself, why would anyone else?

If only there were a way for you to see how beautiful and important and intelligent you really are. Imagine walking around everyday and believing that

you looked great, thinking you were beautiful. Imagine if during your quiet alone time, when you were reflecting on your life—say before falling asleep— that your thoughts about yourself were positive. Imagine that you were proud of what you did during the day, that you thought you were a kind and loving person, that you believed that you look great and have much to offer the world. Imagine the positive energy you would exude in your daily life. When you love yourself, it shows. You become lighter, more easy-going, more accepting of others, and more kind. People notice a happy person who is at peace with herself.

People will be drawn to you. Men will be drawn to you, and most importantly 10/10 men will be drawn to you. How do I know this? Well, it’s because I love myself. That’s right, my name is Serena de Comarmond and I absolutely love myself! I think I am pretty. While I still want to drop a dress size, I think I have a great body. I love my body because it’s, well, it’s my body and it lets me live on this planet, giving and receiving hugs on a daily basis. I am not the smartest person on Earth, but I work hard everyday to provide a good life for my kids and myself. Kindness is my middle name. I like helping people, so I love myself for being a nice, giving person. I drink too much, and I swear too much, that’s for #%@! sure, but I forgive myself for that. I’m only human—a young one at that —so I’m still learning. I am good at loving people. I love hard! Crying through every romcom proves what a hopeless romantic I am and I love that about myself. I love my big, soft heart. I am ‘cool’ with me and because of that, it has made me such a happy and easy-going person. I spent so many years of my life hating on myself, so now to be in a state of love for myself is the most amazing space to be in. Men fall at my feet. No, really. They’re hopelessly in love with me; so much so that it can be a bit tiring. Oh, woe is me! But it’s because they see me as honest and relaxed, hang-up free. And I want this for you. I want it for you more badly than you will ever know because I love to make people happy. Being in love with yourself and then falling in love with someone worthy of wonderful you is the greatest gift in the world. So are you ready to love yourself? Well, let me show you.

FALL IN LOVE WITH YOURSELF AND HE WILL FALL IN LOVE WITH YOU

I want you to look into the mirror, and what I want you to do is see yourself exactly how you are. If you’re wearing your war paint already, that’s fine. If you’re not, that’s fine, too. Now are you standing in front of the mirror? Good, then let’s go.

The first thing I want you to do is to stare at your face. I’m pretty sure the first thing you’re going to do is to start making a mental list of all the things that you don’t like about your face. Your nose is too big; your eyebrows don’t match perfectly. You’ve noticed a couple of zits on your cheek or you’ve decided that one of your eyes is definitely higher than the other. Basically, when we look at ourselves critically, it’s all just negative. We’re thinking of all these negative, horrible things about ourselves and so it’s no wonder the results we get when we go out on a date. We sit down in front of somebody, and when we are paid a compliment the first thing we do is say, ‘Don’t be silly!’ If a guy says your hair looks amazing, you might respond, ‘I didn’t have time to get it done today,’ or ‘it doesn’t look half as good as it normally does.’ Unfortunately, it is the standard human response—well, female response mostly—to put ourselves down. Selfdeprecation. It’ll get you every time.

The problem occurs when you do this enough, the message you send to your partner is ‘I don’t think that I am good enough’ and ‘I have a low self-esteem.’ Truly. You are not being humble. Believe me when I tell you, there is nothing humble about insulting yourself. By putting yourself down you are showing your partner that you are unhappy with who you are as a person and that you believe you are not living up to your own potential. You are also showing him that you have a negative view of yourself. Your date is now left in the awkward situation of either accepting that ‘Yes, you do not look as amazing as I just said’ or feeling pressured to offer another compliment such as, ‘Well, um, your teeth are pretty straight. There’s something.’ Wrong move entirely. Already you have placed your date in a situation where he feels slightly uncomfortable and uneasy. ‘Waiter, check please.’

How can you spin this situation around to make it positive?

Look at yourself again. Pick out a feature of yours that you deem attractive. Yes, it is possible. Don’t tell me no. I’m watching you.

It may be your eyes, a deep coffee color with specks of gold; it may be your lips, soft and bee-stung; or it may be the way that your eyes light up when you smile. Pick out just one feature of your face that you love. It that’s too difficult, we’ll say, pick out a feature of your face that you really, really like. If it’s your eyes, look deeply into them and, while gazing, say to yourself, ‘I have beautiful eyes. I can understand why in the past people have told me that I have beautiful eyes. They are beautiful!’ Look at the color of your eyes. The flecks of light and dark that highlight the depth of color in your eyes or the beautiful intricate patterns that decorate your irises. Your eye lashes, how delicate. Smile at your face. Smile at yourself and then say to the mirror, using your name: ‘You are beautiful, __________.’ Hey, you might not look like David Beckham or Angelina Jolie, but you are still absolutely beautiful! You are beautiful because you are totally unique. There is only one like you in this whole, entire world. From that perspective, you are priceless and your look is mesmerizing. it it!

There will never be another human who looks identical to you ever again nor was there ever one identical to you before. Ok, a doppelganger or two aside, you know what I mean. Every time you meet a person for the first time, you go out on a first date, what you are actually doing is showcasing the beautiful, unique and original specimen of a human being that you are. Be proud and excited about giving your date his first ever experience with someone who looks like you. , there will be some people in this world who’ll look at you and your face and your eyes and they’ll think, by their own definition of beauty, that you are probably not a 10. Probably not an 8. Closer to a 5 maybe, but that’s because they have their own perceptions about what they find beautiful. Some people find Caucasian men or women attractive. Some prefer black men or women. Some like their partners short and others like them tall. Every single one of us has our own definition of what we deem attractive, but there will come a

day in the future, as there has in your past, where someone has looked upon the beautiful, unique, individual that is you and they’ve seen your beauty. They will see your true essence. They will understand it and fall in love with it. This has happened before and it will happen again. You may not encounter people who see your true beauty thousands of times in your life. It may not even happen to you hundreds of times, but it’s those few magical times when it does happen that you need to focus on. That’s where the true magic and beauty of a soulful connection come into play. Add a dash of chemistry and voilá. Some one person will look at your face and find you to be the most beautiful person in the world.

There are over 7 billion people in the world. At some point the universe is going to direct one of those people into your path. They will see you and connect with you. You need to say to yourself, “I am beautiful. I have beautiful eyes (or earlobes or wrists or dimples or toes or calves or shoulders). I am unique and I am wonderful.” If you hold those thoughts in your head and you believe it with every single inch of your being, then when sit down in front of your next date and your date says to you, “Wow! You have the most beautiful hair. You look amazing!” Instead of putting yourself down, depreciating yourself, projecting negativity and low self-esteem, you will now respond to your date by saying, “Oh, wow! Thank you so much for noticing. I actually spent about half an hour on my hair today getting it ready, because I wanted to look good when we met. My hair’s been a scruffy mess this entire week, so I’m glad you noticed, it was worth the time. Awesome!”

How do you think a response like this is going to make your date feel? Your date is going to instantly think, ‘This person took my compliment and it made her really happy! I feel good because I made somebody else feel good. I just made you smile and making other people smile makes me want to smile myself.’ Straightaway, your date is already feeling good. You have made your date feel appreciated. Not only this, but your date is going to feel flattered to know that you actually spent time making yourself look good just for your date. You are showing your ability to be vulnerable by itting to your date that you normally walk around with a ‘scruffy ponytail’ but today because of your date you’ve said, ‘I did my hair’ so now your date is going to imagine you’re at home fluffing around and spending time making yourself look beautiful just for him.

How do you think that is going to make your date feel? It’s going to make him feel amazing because your date now knows that you cared enough to make a good first impression on him by spending time on your appearance. Even before meeting him, you have tried to make your date feel happy. Isn’t that a great way to begin your first date? Much better than putting yourself down. You are showing your partner that you are unhappy with who you are as a person or that you believe that you are not living up to your true potential when you focus on the negative. Ella Fitzgerald sang it best when she crooned, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive.”

Let’s go back and reflect on what we have discussed in this chapter. In the first instance when your date gave you a compliment about your hair, the first thing that you said, in a negative context was, “My hair looks terrible today. It normally looks a lot better.” In this instance you have rejected your date’s compliment. You have said something really negative about yourself and you’ve basically painted the picture that you don’t think you look good. Not exactly a Renoir. You show, unintentionally, that you could’ve prepared a bit harder for this date and you could’ve looked better, but you kind of didn’t bother. Oops.

In the second instance, you choose to accept your date’s compliment by saying, “Thank you, it actually took me about 25 minutes to get ready today, because I wanted to look nice for our date, normally I had a pony tail, but I think I look pretty good, thank you very much!” You’re smiling and blushing and thanking your date for his compliment. Your date feels good, because he knows he has made you ecstatic. He also feels really good, because he knows that you are excited about being on this date with him. So much so, that you spent 25 minutes getting your hair ready just for him. Accepting a compliment is like dropping a little pebble into a pond. Waves of good feeling ripple out like concentric circles on the water. And after the first go round, it’ll get easier and easier each time you hear a sincere word of praise.

Start the date off on the right foot. Accentuate the positive. Accept that compliment. Hopefully you fallen a little in love, with yourself. Your beautiful,

unique self. By echoing back those good vibrations, your partner has been filled with positivity and excitement and you have just set the foundation for an amazing night!

Oh, and once you have thanked your date for the compliment, make sure you return the favor.

HOW TO BUILD YOUR SELF-CONFIDENCE

You labor over it for hours, begrudging the delete button and exercising more caution as your fingers move over the keys than that time you had to walk through the dark basement alone when the lights went out at age 10. The dating profile. Ugh. You sit, staring at the dating website. A rather formal one with profiles and such. You are not going to let one measly, little profile stop you from meeting ‘the one’. And so you begin writing it. You could almost call it a profile in courage.

It’s a funny thing though. When people write their profiles, they’re actually—not generally—humble. What could as confidence is running high. Your profile-writing experience might have gone like this:

You write all of the wonderful, amazing and brilliant things that you know about yourself, all the little things you love about yourself, showcasing why you’re so brilliant. Once you finish doing that you look back on your profile and read it over. Then you read it again and edit it. And then you read again and edit again, over and over. One more time, you intone, and then, eventually, after a millennia or so, you press go.

In the meantime, you have found the best possible picture of yourself in the entire world that was taken in the most perfect light, with the most perfect makeup where you’re looking absolutely amazing. You had to search through a few thousand shots, but hey, it was worth an entire afternoon, you reason.

Basically, you go through that process, sitting there, thinking, “I’m amazing. I look great in that photo. I look good and hot and sharp and men are going to love that. My profile is awesome. It’s on point and amazing”, and so you unleash it to the world, onto the 2 million website subscribers and you wait and wait and wait. Surely the messages and the invitations will start rolling in. Any minute now. Any day. Soon. Very soon. You drift into the land of the egocentric, where everything revolves around you.

Perhaps it’s RSVP or eHarmony. You’ve paid good money—what was it, $50 bucks a month—to become a dating website member. That’s $50 dollars that could have gone to that new pair of Bellini heels or at least to some sake and a plate full of spicy tuna rolls. But no, you’re determined. You’re hopeful. You ed that dating website with your dreams hung out on a line, like damp clothes from the dryer. Cue the sappy love songs.

Initially, you might get a big confidence boost, which you need. After all, you’ve invested a fair amount of time, energy, and money into this endeavor. The first couple of messages roll in: “Hi, how are you going? Great profile pic. I read your profile. You sound amazing. How are you tonight?” With each comment, a world of realities bounce off each other in your brain: this could be the one. You start chatting it up. The messages volley back and forth, maybe 10 a day. You check your phone relentlessly and all of these awesome, little boosts keep your spirits high. What a rush!

But then, reality shifts and things change. The messages will go from 10 a day to 3, to one a day to ‘marked as read,’ but no reply. What’s happening?

If you’re honest with yourself, then deep down you had a shred of suspicion that this guy’s comments were maybe-possibly-OK-plausibly-yes-actually insincere.

What else is a guy going to say to you on a dating website: “Hi! Saw your profile pic. I don’t think you’re that attractive. I read your profile. You sound pretty boring, but I’m desperate for a ruse and I think I’m going to you anyway.” Not likely. And so you shouldn’t take these compliments from dating website banter as gospel. These potential partners don’t know who you are. They’ve never met you before. These are different than the first date compliments we discussed earlier in the chapter. Those were genuine. Trust me. But as for dating website compliments, you must take those words with a grain of salt. Not all compliments are created equal.

This kind of exchange and experience on a dating website destroys your confidence, because you sit there and think, ‘I’ve been talking to this guy. He’s seen my photo. He’s read my profile and he just doesn’t like me. I must’ve done something wrong. I must be not attractive enough. He must’ve found somebody else who is better than me.’ We start saying all of these incredibly negative things to ourselves and then it doesn’t only happen with one person; it happens with 2, 3, 5, 10 or 20 and so forth. When you’re not getting asked out on any dates, it can be really quite upsetting. Your mindset twists into these negative downturns spouting, “You are not good enough” and “Your dating profile isn’t good enough” and “No one wants to be with you.” But here’s what’s really happening behind the scenes of all those negative thoughts. They will start to be reflected and projected into the responses that you give when you’re chatting to people online. You’ll start becoming a lot more cynical and therefore less charismatic, which will make your chances of success even less. It’s so important for you to be able to build your own self-confidence before you hop online. You must truly own a sense of confidence, not a false bravado, but a true armor of self-confidence before stepping into the dating world. So that when you do get rejected and negativity gets thrown towards you, you will be able to recognize it for what it is.

Consider the law of averages. I’ve sold various products over the course of my lifetime. I’ve owned my own companies and my employers and staff would often say to me, “You could sell ice to Eskimos! You’re the best salesperson in the entire world,” which is true. But the reason I was so great at selling was because I grasped one very important idea: every single ‘no’ leads you closer to a ‘yes.’ It’s called the law of averages. The more no’s you get, the greater chance yes becomes a likelihood. It’s just like rolling dice. The more times the roulette rolls on black, the more likely it is that the next spin will land on red, so you bet on red. And you win!

Dating is no different; it is the law of averages and the law of numbers. With sales you’re always selling exactly the same product and so you get the opportunity to sit down in front of a lot of different people and make your same sales pitch, and if you keep it consistent all of the time, then you know that it’s just going to be a matter of getting in front of the right person. For example, if I were selling timeshares, selling holidays, selling a week in Hawaii once a year, I might be doing a union presentation. Let’s say I have 10 union presentations booked, I’m selling timeshares and each costs $2,000 for a week in paradise, a week in Hawaii every year.

Knock, knock, knock. I’m at house #1. I sit down with a couple; the house is run down. They have three screaming children, bills coming out of their ears and even though they love what I was presenting, they can’t afford it. It wasn’t for them. Well, not at the time, it wasn’t for them. My next potential customer is a single guy. He works 50 hours a week, and is a very shy fellow. The idea of going away on his own and spending time in a foreign place, having to communicate with other people and make new friends is abhorrent to him. Again, even though the product is amazing and the cost is fine, the timeshare is completely wrong for him. And so forth and so on, until finally I go to a family home in the suburbs, meet a nice middle-class family, 2 parents and two teenagers. The parents know that the kids are getting older and both will leave home soon for college, so spending time with their family is of the utmost importance. They’ve never been to Hawaii, would love the idea that every single

year they can go, meet up as a family and reconnect with each other in a place that could become a second home for them.

For that family, at that moment, the timeshare was absolutely perfect. There was no way in the world they weren’t going to go ahead and purchase this product. And so they did. They purchased the timeshare in Hawaii and absolutely loved it. They kept going again and again, sharing new experiences with the family and creating great memories. See what I’m saying about the law of numbers? Two no’s and a yes. Whether it’s sales, dating, or negotiating with your child about if he’s going to eat his veggies today or not, eventually the world will answer you back with a resounding yes.

Was the timeshare a different product when it was shown to the hard-working, shy man or the young couple with money woes? No. The timeshare in Hawaii was the same; it just wasn’t for them. Remind yourself that you’re not for everybody. Still, this doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. You’re like that Hawaii timeshare...ready for new experiences and great memories...just with the right person.

Can you being in high school? You might revel in the thought or cringe with angst, but I suspect that you had your key group of friends. Your friends loved you and you loved your friends. You might have been the life of the party, the class clown, or the quiet one prone to giving great advice. Yet even though your friends thought you were cool, your teachers thought you were bright, and your family thought you were sweet, there were a few, just a few, who thought otherwise. Crazy as it seems, a few kids hated your guts. You never did anything to them—no lackluster gossip, no mean remarks; they just didn’t like you. It’s just the way the world works; not everybody is going to like you and that’s okay. There are lots of people who annoy you. Why? Who knows? They just do. Maybe they take the last doughnut at work. Maybe they always nominate you to scribe notes during the meeting. Maybe they leave the copier jammed for the next person to fix when the deadline is near and there’s a conference call in 10 minutes and it was raining on the way into work that day.

Not that I speak from experience or anything.

Understanding the concept of the law of averages and understanding that you’re not right for everybody is vital to moving forward to finding the right one. If you actually did get that insincere excuse for a man to go out on a date with you, you wouldn’t have had fun, you wouldn’t have enjoy it, you wouldn’t have found Mr. Right because people don’t like people who do not like them. Period.

If people don’t like the way you act and the things that you say, the way you look and the things you’re into, then they’re not compatible with you. You’re not going to like them either; it’s as simple as that. They are actually doing you a favor. When a guy stops chatting with you online, he’s done you the biggest favor of all. He believes that because you’re a woman, you’ll find it hard to disengage. He’ll do that for the both of you: disengage. He’s already come to identify that you’re not made for each other. Is he right? Well, if he isn’t into you, then he’s right. You are not meant to be together. You might have had little bit of fun, friendly banter at the beginning, but you’re not made for each other. If you were made for each other, you would’ve already gone out on a date, you would’ve talked on the phone till 4 o’clock in the morning about eight and half times, your heart would be skipping a beat every single time you saw his name pop up in your inbox. But it isn’t, so he’s done you a favor. Looking at the situation like this, square on, will serve you well as you move upward and onward, forward to your next step in finding the one.

Know that it’s not you and it’s not him; there just wasn’t any chemistry. Chemistry is rare. Rare but necessary to falling in love. He recognized you weren’t compatible and, as a consequence, did you a favor by letting you go. It wasn’t anything that you did to make this guy stop ing you. But now you’re free. You’re basically able to have a little bit of extra time to find somebody else to fill that slot. And who knows? That somebody else could be the one. Sometimes letting go is the greatest gift of all. Have the confidence to know that when a possible partner stops communication, it isn’t you. It’s a lack of chemistry. And that chemistry has to flow both ways.

Chapter 4

FORGIVE YOURSELF

Oh, she may be weary Them young girls they do get wearied Wearing that same old shaggy dress But when she gets weary Try a little tenderness

~ Otis Redding, singer

THE SHAME GAME

There are many times when we’ve done things that we’ve been ashamed of. Unfortunately, when you feel the emotion of shame, unless you truly forgive yourself for the action that you took and are gentle with yourself, understanding that not everybody can be perfect all of the time, then you will carry around that baggage and that shame for your entire life. Life is long and as you move into your teenage years, through adolescence, into adulthood, you go through a myriad of relationships, platonic and romantic. Lots of really great things tend to happen and lots of really bad things tend to happen, too. You might have just had a chemistry lesson in chapter 3, but this isn’t rocket science. The definition of shame is a regrettable or unfortunate situation or action, a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the unconsciousness of wrong or foolish behavior. Been there, done that. And when you throw alcohol, drugs, depression, job loss, or stress into the mix, you find that some of your actions towards your family, friends, and lovers can be shaming. It’s time to get rid of shame.

Let’s go right back to elementary school. There might have been a situation where you peed your pants in class, fell down the stairs, or bullied someone and made her feel so bad that she grew depressed. There could be a situation where a girl had fallen in puppy love with you and you had laughed in her face, rejecting her. Being the good person you are, you know the way that you acted had caused her to feel deep pain, stress and anxiety. And so, as you got older, you reflected on your behavior as a child and thought to yourself, ‘Wow, how could I have been so mean. I really hurt that person. I wonder if she’s still walking around with pain that I caused.’ It’s only in hindsight that we look at our actions and realize the damage we can do.

Fast forward to your teen years. Clocking shame skyrockets during this period. You might go on a date with a boy for the first time and when he tries to kiss you, you get a little bit embarrassed and pull away, and then he starts calling you a prude. You may hold hands with one of your girlfriends walking down the street one day and then the next day when you go to school, everybody is calling you a lesbian, insinuating that being a lesbian is a bad thing. You might have had really bad fashion sense, and so everybody teased you at school for looking like a dork and not fitting in, or you might have hurt somebody else’s feelings. You may have been the person picking on somebody because they dressed poorly, only to realize five years on that the reason that the clothes they were wearing was so old fashioned and uncool, was because their mom and dad had split up when they were a baby and the father didn’t give any child . The mother was stringing together two jobs just to be able to put food on the table. The person that you had been teasing about having bad clothes was in a deep depression herself. And so, you start to feel shame about the way that you acted. You start thinking to yourself, ‘Is there something wrong with me? Why have I acted this way? Why haven’t I acted like I believe everybody else acts?’ You start to feel shame. You start to feel embarrassed about who you are, what you do, and how you act.

Skip forward again. Now you are a young adult. You’re all of 19 or 20. Suddenly, you are out of your parental home, off the leash so to speak, and the

drinking starts, maybe even drugs. Once this behavior begins, get ready for the biggest shame spiral you’ve ever felt in your entire life. Drinking alcohol to excess is a recipe for shame. It’s a shame factory: going out clubbing with your friends, drinking so much that you can’t what you did the night before when you wake up, head spinning, feeling sick, head pounding. All you know, in the pit of your stomach is a feeling of dread because you know, deep down, you’ve done something really embarrassing. You’ve run around screaming stupid statements; you’ve called an ex-boyfriend, expressing how in love with him you are; you’ve called another friend to tell her off; you’ve kissed five different people on the dance floor. There’s a million different scenarios for why you now feel ashamed. You think to yourself, ‘What is wrong with me? Why can’t I act normal? Why can’t I just be like everybody else? Why can’t I fit in? Why do I keep doing these embarrassing things?’ The shame factory has been running around the clock.

Fast forward again. We’re jumping about 10 years ahead in time. You’re in your late ’20s, heading into your ’30s. You’ve been in one or two relationships. They may have been fantastic, but in most cases, they ended pretty badly. You’ve either been cheated on and dumped, or you’ve been the cheater and dumped. Perhaps you’ve had arguments where you have belittled your partner that you brought her to tears. You’ve done things in your life that you look back on and think, ‘Why did I do that? Why did I make that move? Why did I make that choice? What was wrong with me? Why aren’t I normal? Why don’t I fit in? The questions keep mounting. You carry all of this shame around with you in your head, in your subconscious, every single day of your life. It is not until you let go of that shame, pain, and anxiety you’ve caused yourself over the years, that you’ll truly be free, you’ll truly be happy and you’ll truly be able to be yourself and to give yourself 100% to your future partner.

Little did you know that you are wearing an invisible backpack, every day of your life. That shame you felt at four, peeing in your pants, it’s in your invisible backpack. And so is the shame you felt at being called a prude for pulling away from a kiss. Those blackout episodes from nights out on the town, they’re in there, too. The shame of abusing your former partner with snarls and rants, that’s in the invisible backpack as well. All of this pain and anxiety you wear on your

back every day as you walk through life. And so, when you get into a new relationship, you still have all of this baggage that you’re carrying around with you. You’re not walking into a new relationship as a clear and clean empty vessel ready to be filled up with joy and happiness and love, and, on the flip side, ready to give joy, happiness and love. Instead you’re somebody that’s filled with insecurities and worries and fear. You’re worried that something is going to go wrong in this relationship, or that your partner is going to find out about all the bad things you’ve done in the past and find out about who you really are. The shame escalates; it weighs you down, heavier and heavier with each ing year.

But carrying around this shame is an absolutely pointless exercise. I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying, “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift and that’s why it’s called the present.” It’s such a powerful saying. Yesterday is history. Yesterday is finished. Yesterday is gone. All of that stuff that you did in your past, whether it was good or whether it was bad, it’s over. You can’t go back to it no matter how hard you try. There are no time machines. The only time machine that exists is the one that you have in your mind, and the only person that it serves is you. Unfortunately, it serves you badly. So you need to commit to getting rid of all of the shame that you feel for all of the negative actions and all the negative encounters that you have had in your past.

How, you ask? I’m going to give you an exercise that you can use to help you to get rid of some of the shame that you may be feeling now. I want you to get out pen and paper. I want you to write a timeline. I want you to write 3 years old, 10 years old, 13 years old, 19 years old, 22 years old, and 30 years old. I want you then to spend a few minutes reflecting back to those times, trying to think about who you were at that time, where did you live, who were your friends, what did you do with your days, did you go to school, did you go to work, did you play at home, were you unemployed, what were you doing. I want you to flash back to that period of time in your life and I want you to write down anything that you can think of that happened during that period of time in your life that you were ashamed about. Anything that happened during that period of time that hurts or makes you feel pain or anxiety. I want you to do that for when you were 3 years old, all the way up to when you were 30. And then I want you to look at how old

you are now. Maybe you’re a little bit older than 30, maybe you haven’t hit 30 yet, just adjust the timeline accordingly. I want you to be very, very detailed about all the things that you’ve been ashamed about. Take some time to do that now and do not read beyond this chapter until you have written all of those things down. Give yourself half an hour to do it. Use it as a meditation to really help you get out onto the page every single thing that you have been ashamed about. Go.

Okay, great. Now that you have done that exercise, it’s probably been a very interesting and introspective look at your life. You probably weren’t aware of all of the things that you’ve been carrying around that have put into your invisible backpack of shame. It’s no wonder. We tend to push shame down deep into our subconscious whenever we get the opportunity. Unfortunately though, our subconscious is something that lives inside our head, inside our soul. It is something we can’t get rid of and it’s there tugging away at our conscious mind, every minute of every day. So now you can see all of the things that you are carrying around, things that you think are shameful. It’s time to rid yourself of that shame, to unload that invisible backpack. It’s time to move into a state of forgiveness.

TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS

Now look at what you wrote down from when you were 3 years old. You were just a little child. You had only been in existence for 3 brief years. You knew nothing about the world. Think about all the 3-year-olds you have known. Think about what a bundle of ridiculousness they are, toddling around, can barely even put a spoon in their mouth to eat their food. A 3-year-old is not able for his own actions. Think about what you would do if a 3-year-old did what you did. Would you feel resentment toward him 30 years later? What would you want to say to him? You might wish to say, “That action that you just did, don’t worry about it. I forgive you. Nobody cares. It’s nothing. You’re stressing about it, but it’s all right. Just let it go.” Of course that’s what you’d say to him. And so now, I want you to look in the mirror and say that to yourself. Look in the mirror

and say, “I forgive you for…” inserting the issue, the problem, the shameful situation that you’ve written down for when you were a tiny, wee little 3-yearold child.

Now we’re going to look at when you were 10 years old. Think about any 10year-olds that you know now. A 10-year-old is a child who’s heading into fifth grade. They’re starting to learn a little bit about the world, but looking at them from your age and viewpoint now, they’re just little kids. They’re beautiful children. If you know anyone around that age, it’s such an amazing time. They’re still kids, but they starting to have adult thoughts and feelings. They’re about to start going through puberty and that has an amazing set of interesting feelings that comes along with it. Girls and boys are noticing each other. They’re bodies and brains are changing; things are growing in places they never were before, for goodness sake. It’s a time of feeling totally confused, totally alone, totally isolated, and just completely vulnerable. Forgive yourself for your 10year-old behavior. You’re excused.

As a parent to a child that’s going through puberty at the moment, I can honestly say that I just love my son more than ever, because I’ve been watching the internal battles and struggles he’s going through. I can tell you that nothing that he does as a young teenager should induce him to carrying around shame for the rest of his life. And neither should you. Look back at your 13-year-old timelines events. If you ran away from kissing a girl, if you were teased because of the clothes that you wore, or if you teased somebody because of the clothes they were wearing, forgive your young 13-year-old self. You were learning how the world worked and your place in it. You were learning how to interact with others and trying to figure out this adolescent thing. It’s just all part of growing up and fitting in. So many kids, pretty much every kid around that age has been through something similar. It’s so normal. It’s just so, so normal. You were growing up during a rough phase in your life and you were trying to figure out who you were in the process. I forgive you for your 13-year-old behavior. Now forgive yourself.

I want you to look into the mirror again and tell yourself that you forgive yourself for whatever shame or anxiety or embarrassing situation you went through at that age. Talk to yourself in the mirror, repeat what the shameful situation was, and remind yourself that you were just a kid. It happened. It’s gone now. It’s in the past. Nobody else re it except for you. Let it go. On that note, if there is a situation where you think maybe you have affected somebody and you worry whether or not they still think about that situation 20 years on, reach out to them. Ask them. Apologize. It’s never too late. Facebook, and other social media, make it extremely easy to reach out to people from our past. So if you did hurt somebody when you were young or if they hurt you, reach out to them; talk to them. You’re adults now. If you did something wrong, apologize. Let them know how you feel. You will be amazed to see the reaction that you get. Either way, it’s a great exercise in letting go of the shame, getting rid of it, and getting it out of your life because it’s just so unnecessary.

We’re up to the 19-year-old on the timeline, you party animal, you. This kind of shame is going to be different from the shame that you experienced in childhood. Now again, we need to have pity on ourselves just a little bit. We need to be gentle with ourselves because even though we were technically adults, we were just basically big kids. We thought we knew absolutely everything. We were out of the nest. We were so excited to be exploring the world. We were the coolest people in the world. We knew absolutely everything. Guess what? If that was the kind of person you were, then you were pretty much just like every other person in that age group. Everyone at 19 just thought that the world was their oyster and they were going to take it on, no matter what. Most were going out and drinking. Most were going out and dating. Everyone was getting into sticky situations, waking up the next morning and thinking, “Oh no, what have I done? What have I done?” Usually, you find that the shame that occurs during your early ’20s isn’t shame you have caused another, but shame you’ve caused to yourself because you’re loose and free and wild. You’re so unruly, in fact, that you have put yourself into situations that cause you embarrassment and shame. That’s okay. We all do it, and you know what? There’s nothing wrong with the actions you let happen when you were that age.

If you went out and got drunk, big deal. If you had a one nightstand, big deal. If

you got really drunk and fell down the stairs and people saw your undies when you were sitting on the ground, and while you were sitting on the ground, grabbing all of the items that have fallen out of your purse, there were several people standing around, all shaking their heads at you, all thinking that you looked pathetic and terrible, who cares? Those people don’t you. They don’t know who you are. They don’t know how amazing and kind and sweet you are. They don’t know about all the wonderful things you’ve done for your friends and your family. They don’t know about how hard you work. They don’t know about what a great friend you’ve been when your other friends have needed a shoulder to cry on. They’ve moved on with their lives. They don’t give you even a fleeting thought. And so, you just need to let that shame go. Just let it go. You are the only person in history that is still holding on to that memory of that strange situation that happened. It’s also, I think, important to say here, that life is a roller coaster. In order for you to enjoy the amazing highs that you can feel in life, you really do have to feel some lows. If everything in life was always happy, happy, happy then you would cease to enjoy the happiness because there would never be any peak. Your life would start to become quite neutral and flat without the highs and lows. And so, sometimes it can actually be good when you’ve had situations where you felt shame and when you felt pain and anxiety. When you are feeling a high or when you are doing a good deed for somebody, you really do get a sense of such deep satisfaction and gratitude for the situation. It’s just such a polar opposite from being in that situation of shame.

Return to the mirror. Yes, really. This might be a painful situation for you, depending on the level of shame that you’ve experienced during this period of time. Tell that person you see in the mirror about all of the events that happened at 19 and your early ’20s that make you feel ashamed. It might take you 10 minutes, it might take you 2 hours, but I want you to say them all to the mirror, out loud. Don’t think them in your head; say them all out aloud because you need to get them out into the open, out into the world. You need to say them. As the words come out of your mouth, you will realize just how trivial and how silly and how small these shameful situations really are.

For instance, I would look in the mirror and I would say, “When I was 19, I went out drinking with some friends. I drank so much alcohol that I wasn’t very

steady on my feet. We were walking toward the exit of the nightclub, which had 10 stairs on it. There were heaps of cool people around hanging out, people whom I thought were much cooler than me, really good looking hot guys, hot, gorgeous girls. I had to walk down the stairs. What did I do? I fell down the stairs. I literally tripped and fell and rolled, and all my stuff flew out everywhere onto the floor. I really hurt my leg. And then as my friend was trying to help me up, I fell over again. I could feel people looking at me. I felt so embarrassed. After that, I didn’t want to go back to the club because I thought everyone would want nothing to do with me. Every time, for the rest of my life, they would look at me and think, “Oh my God, what a loser.” In reality, what happened was everybody at this nightclub was drinking. Everybody was drunk. I fell down the stairs. When they looked at me falling, they probably thought, ‘Oh my God, I hope she’s okay.’ They probably thought, ‘Oh that poor girl. She must feel so embarrassed.’ And after those 10 second, they completely forgot that it had happened. Their night continued. They had their own joys, their own drama. And then the next day happened and the next and the next, until they completely, absolutely put out of their minds the image and thought of me falling down the stairs. The next time they saw me, they probably didn’t even realize that I was the person who fell down the stairs. And even if they did realize it, with their own set of circumstances going on, they couldn’t care less. No thought. No worries. No judgment. No shame.”

I would continue, “And so, Serena, I want to tell you that I forgive you for falling down the stairs. You don’t need to feel ashamed about falling down the stairs anymore. You fell down the stairs. People fall down stairs all the time. Everything’s okay. Just let it go. In fact, when you really think about it, it was pretty damn funny that you fell down the stairs. You really got drunk that night. You were living the life of a typical 19-year-old and you disgraced yourself. It was funny. Let it go.”

I let go of the shame that I felt when I fell down the stairs at a nightclub when I was 19. I know now that nobody who saw me do that ever thinks about it and if they do, it would be with pity and concern, and not with disgust or embarrassment. You have let go of that shame. That shame has gone from your life. This, my friend, is what you need to do.

Now we’re going to fast forward to your dirty ’30s. Again, I’m going to relate this back to relationship shame, because anyone who’s hit 30 has most likely been in a relationship that has ended. If you hadn’t been in a relationship that had not ended, then you wouldn’t be reading this book. So I can surmise that you have been in a relationship that has ended and that means that you’re probably carrying around shame, embarrassment, sadness, and, perhaps, anxiety from a breakup. Now if you were the person who got dumped, you could have gotten dumped for a multitude of reasons. If you’re feeling shame about the situation, it’s probably because something bad happened at the end of the relationship. “Everything ends badly, or else it wouldn’t end,” so says Brian, Tom Cruise’s worn out friend, who has failed to find true love from the ’80s film, Cocktail. You could have been cheated on, your partner could have been emotionally abusive, or your partner could have just decided that you have drifted apart and didn’t want to be with you anymore. A lack of self-worth or feeling like you aren’t good enough gets conjured up. If you were good enough, why did he cheat on you? If you were good enough, why was she so mean to you? If you were good enough, why did she decide to break up with you?

, it’s not about you. The situation isn’t about you at all. Anything bad that has been done to you whilst being in a relationship has to do with your former partner’s own personal issues. First of all, if your partner cheated on you, then he has massive issues with monogamy. Either he doesn’t want to have a monogamous relationship or he’s incapable of doing so. Our childhood upbringing has a way of rearing its head on our current reality. Perhaps he saw his father cheating on his mother, or vice versa. Maybe he was cheated on by girlfriends several times growing up. He may not be the type of person who’s suited to being in a monogamous relationship, but it has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t mean that the sex was bad. It doesn’t mean that you weren’t pretty enough or you weren’t nice enough. It means that he wasn’t man enough to sit you down and say a) I need to be in an open relationship because I need to sleep with different women, or b) I have had a terrible past where there’s been a lot of cheating in my family and I am prone to cheating. I am really worried that it may happen in our relationship and I need to be very open with you about that, or c) I’m a jerk who couldn’t care less and I want to play the field. That’s got nothing to do with you. You should never feel ashamed if a partner has cheated on you.

The partner has his own life, his own agenda, his own morals and values, his own set of standards that he has set for himself. Never feel guilty. Never feel ashamed if a partner has cheated on you. Just understand that it was a blessing in disguise that you found out because now you’re able to move on and move into a new relationship, hopefully with somebody who is going to be more monogamous with you. You deserve that.

If your partner has yelled and screamed at you, there should be zero tolerance for abuse. This one is a no brainer. Your partner has got anger issues and it is plain as day. It has nothing to do with you. If you talk to any of his friends or any of his family, all of them will tell you that he’s always been like this. He’s always had a mean streak. You can’t blame yourself for being in a relationship where you’ve been yelled and screamed at and abused. It’s not your fault. You don’t need to feel ashamed by that situation at all. In fact, you need to feel very proud of the fact that you’re no longer in that relationship and you’ve had the strength and power to walk away.

If your partner has just left you because your relationship has fizzled, then honestly, again, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You would have had an inkling that your relationship wasn’t going well, right? It ended because your partner was courageous enough to bring to light something you already knew. Your heart may have been broken at the time. You may have been very sad, but the bottom line is that if your partner wasn’t madly in love with you. He wasn’t giving you the level of love that you deserve. The full out, nonstop, overwhelming, all or nothing kind of love, oozing from every pore. When someone isn’t in love with you, the love you receive is paltry. It’s small and leaves you wanting more. He’s giving you only a tiny portion of what he’s capable of. And only the person who he’s truly, madly, deeply in love with will receive his ‘oozing from every pore’ kind of devotion. So if your partner leaves, he’s had a realization that the two of you, as a couple, are incompatible. And he has the courage to voice that. It’s nothing for you to be ashamed about. People leave. People leave all the time. The divorce rate still hovers around 50%. Your married friends and relatives can attest to the fact that they, too, have had several relationships that ended— meaning they didn’t work out—before finding the one. It’s rather normal for relationships to not work out. In fact, if you looked at all the relationships that

have ever happened throughout the course of time, more of them have not worked out. So you are more than normal. If you’re in a situation where something that’s happened to you is completely normal, then why would you feel any shame for it or why would you feel any embarrassment for it? There’s no need for shame and every reason for understanding.

And so again, I ask you to look in the mirror and talk about the situation that you’ve been through with your ex; talk about how it made you feel, why you felt shame, what in particular it was that you felt ashamed about. And then let yourself let go of that shame. Look in the mirror and remind yourself that you did not cause any of these situations to happen to you. Let yourself know that it’s completely normal for you to have been in a relationship that didn’t work out. It’s completely normal that you were cheated on because that happens all the time. It’s completely normal that your partner was mean because, unfortunately, that happens, too. It’s not nice, but it’s definitely typical. It’s completely normal that your partner decided he wanted to break up with you because you two weren’t compatible and deep down, you knew, as well. Let go of the shame. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. These are life experiences and we learn from them. We take from them the gift of knowledge and carry on, looking for love around the next corner. Forgive yourself and try a little tenderness.

Finally, the last reason we feel shame is because we think other people are judging our lives. Think about a time when you have had a friend, one of your good friends, maybe even your brother, whose wife cheated on him. You don’t think, ‘My brother should feel so ashamed. I can’t believe that his wife cheated on him. How embarrassing for him. My brother is such a loser.’ No. You think, ‘My poor brother. I feel terrible. I wish I could remedy the situation.’ If your friend’s boyfriend cheats, you don’t sit there, thinking, ‘Oh, what an idiot. I’m so embarrassed to even be her friend because she got cheated on.’ You’re definitely not thinking that. If your friend or your brother or whoever gets cheated on, you’re thinking I’m going to kill that person who hurt them. That person is awful and has some issues to work out. You sit there, thinking, ‘I feel really bad for her. I want to do anything I can to make her feel better. I want to be closer to her. I want to build her back up. I want to encourage her. I want to make her understand that I care for her. I want to make her feel confident again.’ You’re

definitely not judging your friend, your brother, whomever, in a negative way, emitting unhealthy negative vibes. And they’re not judging you. People generally want to build each other up, not tear each other down. Know that if you’re upset, others are upset for you. There’s no shame in going through a difficult time. We’ve all been there and will be there again. It’s the carousel of life.

And so, look at yourself in the mirror and remind yourself of that. Talk to yourself. Talk out loud. Get all of the shame out, every single little piece of it, whether it’s relationships, whether it’s things that you’ve done in the past, whether it’s thoughts that you’ve had that you think are shameful. Just get it all out. Verbalize it. Let it out into universe and then look at yourself one last time and say to yourself using your name, “Serena, I forgive you. Serena, I love you. Serena, I’ve got your back. You do not need to feel shame anymore. The shame is gone. I forgive you.” Once you let go of shame, you are going to be one step closer to becoming the absolute perfect partner. Not only that, but you will start to manifest people in your life who are in a similar headspace, people who are free from shame, people who are much more open and optimistic to all of the great things that life has to offer. They want to live their lives in a state of gratitude and happiness and generosity, rather than in a state of fear and pain and anxiety. And you should, too. Once you let go of shame, you open yourself up to a world where you will be able to attract people who have forgiven themselves and are living happy, positive lives. They have closed the door on the shame game. You should, too. You’ll be one step closer to finding your real true love, the perfect partner just for you.

Chapter 5

A STATE OF GRATITUDE

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”

~ A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

COVERT OPERATIONS

Sometimes in your quest for love, it can be quite easy to look at your life, look at your past relationships, and feel really unhappy about the way things have panned out so far. You look at your life and think of how all of your past relationships have ended, some amicably, some badly. When it comes to relationships, life has not been very good to you. You have zero gratitude for the relationships that you’ve had because, let’s face it, you don’t have them anymore. You look back on them and think: what the hell went wrong? Why did I go through that? Why am I still single at this age? Why did I waste so much time with the people I was with before? And then you look enviously at all of the friends who are in relationships and think about how lucky they are. They seem to have it all. They have someone to come home to at night, somebody who’s madly in love with them. They have someone to cuddle in bed, someone to go on vacations with. The green-eyed monster, Envy, appears. You watch as they have one, two, then three children. Their family unit becomes more and more solid. Your thinking muddles and your brain get sluggish. You opine: I’m lonely, I don’t have kids, or I’m a single parent and it’s really hard, I’m not achieving my goals, my job’s mediocre, my life’s rotten, if only I were in a relationship, life would be better. You reason why your life just isn’t any good, but what if all of a sudden, you could pull your head out of the sand and start to look at all of the things in your life that are positive, all the things in your life that you should

be grateful for? No, I’m not dreaming. And neither are you. A paradigm shift in your mind will alleviate the tight grasp envy has on you.

I used to be somebody who saw the glass as half-empty. When things didn’t go my way, I fixated on them. I perseverated. I was never able to see all of the small blessings I had in my life, and it made me feel very depressed. In fact, it took a rock bottom experience that dropped me lower than I’d ever been before to actually be able to flip myself from a state of ‘poor me, poor me’ to a state of complete and utter gratitude. When you live your life in a state of gratitude, everything changes. All of a sudden, you’re able to see the beauty in everyday things, the beauty in the relationships you do have, the beauty in the work you do, the beauty in the home you have, the beauty in the world you live in, and the beauty that you have, which is yourself. The glass is no longer half-empty for me. It’s as if a magnum of champagne has been uncorked and I’m first to receive a full flute of the bubbly. Want to me? Then it’s time for some covert operations.

THE SLIDING DOORS IN JANE’S LIFE

In 1998, Peter Howitt made the film, Sliding Doors, about a woman and the two divergent paths her life could take. Let’s through one set of sliding doors and peek in at a mediocre life. We’ll call our subject Jane. Jane lives in a one bedroom apartment. She has second-hand furniture that’s been handed down to her from her parents, some from her brother. IKEA is her idea of splurging. She goes to work every day on her scooter. Did I mention, that’s also secondhand? It’s about four years old. She’s a hairdresser, and when she gets to work, the first thing that she does is check the appointment book. She’s completely booked. She sees client after client after client—all of them her regulars. She does their hair. Some of them tip; some of them don’t. She’s makes an average wage, neither high nor low. When she finishes work, she goes home. She doesn’t have a partner or any children, but there is a cat. She feeds the cat some food, who then jumps up on her lap. They watch some TV. She orders some UberEATS, whatever she feels like for the evening, has half a bottle of wine and then goes to

bed alone.

If Jane were the ungrateful type, she would look at her life and think, ‘My house is average, my bike is average. My job is average and monotonous. I don’t bother making myself look good much anymore since I am in a state of Groundhog Day. My cat is my only company. I’ll be lying in bed tonight, alone, with nothing to cuddle, but a pillow. Poor me. Isn’t my life terrible? Isn’t is the worst?’ Jane feels depressed, isolated, and alone. Her life feels like it’s in repetitive ruins.

She’ll walk around with an aura of negativity. She might try to find herself a partner, a guy in a cafe, that dude walking down the street or someone online, but he picks up on her negative attitude straight away. He sees that Jane is unhappy and embarrassed about the place that she lives in, and unfulfilled by her work. He sees that Jane is a lonely person. And so, if he bestows any attention on her, Jane will become very needy and reliant on him, causing Mr. Right Now to run the other way. Jane isn’t close to projecting the type of aura that is conducive with attracting an amazing partner. If anything, what she’ll be attracting is someone very similar to herself. And two depressed people don’t make for a happy home. Jane would probably be better off with more cats instead!

So let’s flip it around. Back through the sliding doors. Let’s take a look at Jane’s life again, but this time, we’re going to look at it from a state of gratitude. We’re going to look at it with our glass half full, maybe even a little bit rosy. So Jane lives in a one bedroom apartment. She’s been given hand-me-down furniture from her parents and her brother, and her other furniture comes from an IKEA. Lucky Jane. First of all, she’s lucky because she’s got a roof over her head. This girl has an apartment, a one bedroom to call her own. She doesn’t have to live with 5 other people, where she has to share the bathroom every day. Nope, she’s got her own space. She’s got her own “boss girl” cave, where she can retreat whenever she wants, where nobody can bother her. She’s got her own little spot of paradise. When she moved into that place, she had hardly any money at all,

and what happened? Her awesome mom and dad and her brother looked around, looked in their houses and their garages and found furniture they could spare, and they gave it to her. Not only that, but they brought it around to her house. So now she’s got somewhere comfy to sit instead of sitting on some milk crates. After saving a few dollars, she had enough money to buy some furniture from IKEA. She was actually able to buy something for herself, something of her own. It may not be the fanciest dining table in the world. She may not have had enough money to furnish her whole house, but she didn’t need to because her parents are generous and loving, and so is her brother. She already had most of the necessities. So with the little money she had saved, she was able to buy that last piece of furniture that she wanted, her very own dining table. Honestly, that dining table is her pride and joy because it’s actually hers. She earned it.

She goes to work every morning on her second-hand moped. It’s four years old and you know to look at it, it’s not the niftiest bike in the world, but it runs okay. Because she has that bike, she doesn’t have to catch the bus; she doesn’t have to catch the train; she doesn’t have to walk. Plus, because it’s not a car, she doesn’t have to look for a parking space every day. She can just hop on her scooter straight from her front door and fly to work, parking straight out front. It’s like the easiest, best way to travel. Not only that, but it’s pink, her favorite color. So she has got the coolest pink scooter in town. It’s even got a little spot in the back where she can store all of her shopping bags. She saves on gas and maintenance costs. She’s a saver at heart. Besides, she looks crazy cool on that scooter.

Walking into work, she looks at the appointment book, and sees she’s completely full. That’s the best. If you aren’t fully booked for the day on a regular basis, your shift will start getting cut. Fewer shifts equals less pay. Jane doesn’t have to worry about that. Heaps of clients crowd the salon Jane works at. She’s cultivated relationships with her regulars, seeing them every 5 weeks or so. Having gotten to know them well, they’ve become like friends to her. Anticipation builds every 5 weeks or so until they walk back through the door. When it’s her birthday, they celebrate with a card and presents.

Work flies by because it’s busy; the day zooms past super quick, and Jane is straight out the door when she finishes. In a small apartment, nearby, there’s a hungry cat. If she’s not home by six o’clock, the meowing starts, but she loves that cat regardless. She’s a single girl and needs something to cuddle with, and that little cat loves her. It jumps up on her lap, keeping her warm. It meows, and she talks back. It’s the sweetest, little thing in the world. She loves that cat. After putting in a full honest day’s work, Jane’s got good money in the bank and can order takeout. UberEATS is über fast, über easy, and über wonderful. She can order anything that she wants to eat in the whole world. Indian, Chinese, Italian. It’s at her fingertips. Yup, she’s still single, doesn’t have a partner, doesn’t have any kids. Some people could look at that negatively, but the positive is that she doesn’t argue over whether to have Lo Mein or Chicken Parmesan or Curry for dinner. She can choose whatever she wants to eat and someone will bring it to her door in about 40 minutes. What luck!

The day has ended. She hops into bed. Yes, she’s still single and she still doesn’t have a partner, but what she does have is a big, double bed all to herself where she can lie like a starfish right in the middle. She doesn’t have to deal with anyone snoring or stealing the covers. Rolling around, enjoying her space, she can say to herself, “My life’s going really well. I’m proud of where I am right now. I can’t wait to have a partner, but when I do, I know he’s going to be hogging the bed and hogging the sheets and snoring. And so I’m going to enjoy these last few days, weeks, months as a single person because once they’re over, they’ll be over forever. So I’m going to embrace my big bed and cuddle my cat and my pillow, and close my eyes after having an amazing day on this beautiful planet we call Earth.” Drop the mic. Lights out. The sliding doors have shut.

MOVING TO A NEW STATE (OF MIND)

Now that’s what Jane’s day looks like if she’s living in a state of gratitude. It’s all perception. In both scenarios, Jane had exactly the same things. Jane walked through exactly the same day. What was the difference? The difference was that Jane just chose to look at all of the fantastic things about her life, all the exciting

and positive things about her life, instead of the negative. So now if Jane goes out on the weekend to a bar or a nightclub or down to a cafe and she meets a guy to go on a date, the first thing he’s going to see bumbling through the door, after parking her four-year-old beaten up, pink moped out front, is bubbly, happy Jane, who’s going to come in and tell him about what an awesome day she had at work and what great clients she saw, and about the delicious meal she ordered on UberEATS. She’s going to tell him about how he can come back and see her place if he likes. It’s pretty old, and the furniture is pretty shabby, but she loves every single piece because people whom she loves gave every single piece to her. While it’s not much, it’s home. And it’s sweet. What do you think that guy is going to think about Jane? He’s going to think that she’s sweet, she’s honest, and she’s happy with the person she is. She loves herself. She’s proud of her mini kingdom no matter how meager it is. He’s going to see this girl and he’s going to think, ‘If she isn’t so serious about her life and if she’s happy with her shabby chic things, then she’s not going to be somebody who’s going to judge me. So when I bring her into my house and my house isn’t completely perfect, I don’t need to feel self-conscious because she’s not that kind of person. She is grateful for what she has and she’ll be grateful for what I have, too.’

The guy who’s on a date with this version of Jane is going to be excited about learning more about her and spending more time with her. He’ll be more willing to reveal more of himself to her. Who do you think’s going to get the second date with Mr. Wonderful? Ungrateful Jane or Jane in gratitude? Obviously, it’s Jane in gratitude. So reflect a little bit on your life. I want you to think about your home. What does it look like? Who do you live with? What is it furnished with? Where is it? I want you to think about your mode of transport, whether it’s your feet, a bike, a motorcycle, a car, a train, a plane. I want you to think about the friends in your life. I want you to think about the family that you have. I want you to think about where you work and what you do every day. I want you to think about what happens when you come home at night and what you get to eat for dinner. Finally, think about the place where you go to sleep every night and how it feels to lie down, how it feels when you finally get into your bed. Ahh. Peace and contentment, that’s what I hope you feel. Oh, and grateful. Gratitude is a gift you give yourself. Be yourself, but be your better self. Be you “in gratitude,” just like Jane in gratitude.

I know you’ve already studied your life in a state of ungratefulness multiple times, over and over again. You’ve done that, so you don’t even need to do that exercise. That exercise is old. You need to look at your life in a state of gratitude. So with all of the scenarios I’ve just mentioned, look at each one and think about what it is about that scenario that you’re grateful for. For instance, think about your home. Think about your favorite piece of furniture or the most comfortable spot to read a book. Think about your most treasured ornament or the softest pillow you own. Think about the hot steam rising from your shower or the view from one of your East-facing windows. Think about the thing that you like the most. Your current digs may be quite meager, unattractive, and uninspiring, but there’s still going to be something in your home that you love. And that’s what you need to start fixating on—those positive things—the things in your life that you’re grateful for because I want to become a person who lives her life in a state of gratitude. Declare it official, sew a flag for it, and move there permanently. You’ve moved past the state of Groundhog Day and you’ve moved through the Sliding Doors. The state of gratitude is the state to be in.

When you live your life in a state of gratitude, your entire aura will change and people will gravitate toward you. You will start to attract people into your life who also live in a state of gratitude: happy people, grateful people, kind people. You will naturally repel people who are ungrateful and mean. And the reason for that is that ungrateful, mean people can’t bear to be in the presence of people who are happy, positive, and grateful. These two different types repel like positive poles on magnets. Think back to relationships you’ve seen play out in school and at work. Can you identify who the grateful people were? Can you how annoyed the ungrateful people would be around the grateful people?

You’ll start attracting the type of partner who’ll bring a positive influence into your life. That partner will help build you up instead of pull you down. That partner will help you to see the beauty of the world around you and the life that you have. Flipping your mindset from a state of ungratefulness to gratitude is one of the most important steps into transforming yourself into the perfect partner for someone else. This flip is a paradigm shift where you look at the world and your place in it from a new vantage point: one of gratitude, not want.

When you’re the perfect partner for someone else, you will attract the perfect partner for you.

Chapter 6

FIND YOUR PURPOSE & BE IN SERVICE

“Helping others is the way we help ourselves.”

~ Oprah Winfrey

THE GIVER

When we are in self-help mode, we spend a lot of time trying to change things about ourselves to make us feel happier. But in my quest for happiness and on my journey toward loving myself I have discovered the greatest gift. It is the gift of giving myself, my time, my efforts, my talents to someone else. For some, it’s a difficult gift to give. We might doubt that our gifts are worth giving. They are worth giving. Believe me. And giving comes in many, many different forms. You can give money. You can give presence. You can give knowledge. You can give your time. You can give your love. The list goes on.

With every single type of gift that you give, you will always find that what you receive is much greater than the expense of time and energy that you invested in the first place. When you give a gift to a child, a child is usually so excited. You give them a nice, brightly packaged toy—a remote-controlled car, a marble run, a Lego tower—and he rips open the paper with such glee and happiness. When he sees what’s inside, he jumps up and down and gives you a great, big hug, and then he starts playing with his brand new toy. Straightaway, your heart is filled with joy. It’s filled with joy because you know in that instant, a sweet little boy smiled after your act of giving. You’ve been able to make him giggle and laugh. His happiness brings you happiness. That’s one emotion that’s extremely contagious. And aren’t we the better for it!

Let’s examine another scenario. You’re walking down the street and encounter a homeless man. He jangles some coins in a paper cup, asking for spare change. You stop, retrieve a five dollar bill from your purse and drop it in his cup. He thanks you and says, “God bless you,” nodding his head in esteem. You feel a small amount of happiness because you know that you’ve been able to provide him with enough for a bite to eat. But any homeless person you speak to will tell you that if he could have even just 10 minutes of happiness in a day, he would gladly forego a meal. The next time you see him on your way to work, you’re reminded of that good feeling and go further. You ask him how he’s doing. You smile; you talk to him, asking him how his day is going. You even shake his hand—10 minutes , maybe more. You lose track of time. The longer you talk to him, the better he feels about himself. He feels validated, worthy, and—best of all—seen. The amount of happiness that you give to him that day is great, the impact on it has ripple effects that will possibly change his life.

In making this homeless person feel more confidence and reminding him that he’s still a part of society, you’re also changing your life. He’s not separate from you in any way. The only difference is that he has less money in his pocket than you do, but he’s still a highly valued, highly interesting, worthwhile human being. The more happiness that you’re able to give to the homeless, the more happiness you will receive in return. You’re happy in the knowledge that you have made a profound effect on that person. When he goes to sleep that night, he’ll be thinking about the amazing conversation that he had with you, a stranger, and how happy it made him feel to be included in society again. Who knows what impact that could have on his life and how his next encounter with another stranger unfolds.

Is that too far out of your comfort zone? Growth happens when we’re out of our comfort zones. Still, there are other ways to give: be of service to somebody. For instance, you know somebody who’s elderly and suffers from an illness that prevents her from doing physical activities, you decide to visit her at her home and ask her if there’s anything that she needs done. You could mow her lawn, wash her dishes, or pick up some groceries. You could do any manner of things.

It doesn’t help to go and hire her a cleaner. Go around and do it yourself. She loves seeing you and any excuse is a good enough reason for her. You’re not looking for money. You just want to lend a helping hand. Again, it’s just giving your time to see the smile on the face of your elderly neighbor who’s able to provide you with a cup of tea after you picked up her prescriptions. For you to able to have a chat with her and give her some more of your time, it makes her feel so unbelievably happy. You feel the happiness radiating off of her; she has a little glow back in her cheeks. It’s in experiencing those feelings of happiness that you’ve roused in your elderly neighbor that ignite those same feelings in you, as well. You start to feel more fulfilled. You start to feel happier about who you are as a person, because all of a sudden, you’re turning into somebody who is selfless and humble, somebody who isn’t completely self-absorbed in just looking after herself day after day.

THE RECEIVER

In life, it’s very, very easy to become self-absorbed. You wake up in the morning, primping and priming your way out the door, making sure you look fantastic. Why? So that everyone will look at you and think that you look beautiful. Off to work you go so that you can earn money to buy, buy, buy. You are a thoroughbred consumer, through and through. You go out after work and socialize because you want to have interactions with friends who make you happy. You want to meet somebody who’s going to fall in love with you. Why? So that you get to feel love. By the end of the night you return home, watch the television shows of your choosing, eat the food that you want, and retire to your comfortable bed. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with giving yourself a pleasurable life that is filled with pleasure-giving activities that make you happy, but amongst those activities, you need to start giving back to other people, too. You need to find spaces of time every single day where you can give back to people who are in need and people who genuinely don’t have the level of happiness and contentment that you have in your life. Amazingly, when you do this, you are also giving yourself a gift. Sharing who you are with others, lending your efforts and talents to help others is a way of showing love toward yourself. You reaffirm that we’re all connected and we all have value. We’re all worthy of love—the giving and the receiving.

You will also gain a much deeper level of fulfillment and a feeling of living your life with a purpose, if you give. Giving can be more formally arranged as well. We should all find a charity or charitable organization for which we can volunteer. So many people and so many groups in this world are in need of assistance: physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially. When you’re looking for a charity or a charitable organization that you can volunteer with, you need to really sit and meditate first on what type of charity most deeply resonates with you. Because if you find a charity to work with that you are ionate about—whose cause you care for deeply—then you will work that much harder for that charity. You will also gain a much deeper level of fulfillment and a feeling of living your life with purpose because the work that you are doing is directly helping people whom you feel most compelled to help.

Before you start volunteering, it’s a good idea to think about how you want to volunteer. Many people just bumble along to any old charity that they happen to have stumbled across, and turn up saying, “What do you need to have done? I’ll just do whatever you want me to do. Just put me wherever you want me to go.” And so, you might start working for a homeless shelter and when you’re working there, you are helping to make beds, but homelessness has never been something that’s particularly resonated with you. You have never had any experience with homeless people. You’ve always led a pretty comfortable life, nothing too extravagant though that you would feel the need to compensate by helping people who are homeless. Not only that, but you’ve never been a rather clean person. Your house is always a mess. And so, making beds and cleaning up bedrooms is something that is really not enjoyable for you. If you find yourself in that circumstance, then you’re not going to be able to stick around and volunteer for very long. Choose wisely and you and the charity will both benefit.

Think about what you’re ionate about—potentially, you had a grandmother whom you loved dearly and spent a lot of time with as a young child. She had a huge impact on your life. When she ed away, it absolutely devastated you. You were sad because many miles separated the two of you in the years before her death and you hadn’t spent much time with her in the last couple of years of

her life. She had died feeling isolated from her family and a bit lonely because she just wasn’t able to see the people that she loved very often. Not only that, but for a living, you are a chef. You’re not only good at cooking, but you love cooking. More than anything. You come up with amazing, creative dishes all of the time. Cooking and watching people enjoying your meals give you immense joy. And so, in that scenario, you would go and volunteer at an elderly care facility or you would volunteer at an assisted living facility. When you go to this particular organization to volunteer, you would say to them, “I have a skill set. I am very good at cooking. I’m a great chef. If there’s ever some situations where you require somebody to come along and cook for your residents, I would love to volunteer to be able to do that.” You could offer to do a cooking class for the residents. No one can be lonely when they’re cooking food together. Your cooking would entertain them and your time would be appreciated. By doing this, you’ll not only be giving back and be serving people, but you’ll also be in a situation where the two things that you care about will be brought together: food and fond memories with your own Grandmother. And you’ll be able to do that over and over again.

For myself, I contribute to a charity near and dear to my heart. My best friend has an amazing charity that helps women who are homeless to feel more dignified by providing them with beauty and sanitary products. When a homeless woman turns up to a Women’s Refuge or Shelter, she’s presented with toiletries to help her to look beautiful again and feel clean again. She’s given sanitary products so that she can have some dignity when her time of the month comes around. She’s given little gifts and little affirmations to help her to feel a little bit better about herself and to give her some added comfort. Once every year, I hold a huge charity event for this particular charity. I do that because it gives me a great sense of joy and fulfillment. I love planning events. And I also do a lot of presenting and public speaking. So I decided that I could help this particular charity by approaching them and saying that I would love to put on this charitable event for them, a fundraising event. At the event, I was the MC and spoke publicly. I entertained the crowd. I would get together lots of exciting entertainers to be able to put on this show, and now I do it every year. We raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for these women. That’s how I contribute to charity.

And yet, I yearn to do more. After purchasing the beauty and sanitary products, I visit at some of the homeless shelters and speak with the women there. After hand delivering the gifts, we talk and I try to mentor them, inspiring them to feel better about themselves. I stress that where they are now isn’t necessarily where they’re going to be six months from now. All they have to do is start to set goals and make plans and manifest a new life into existence for themselves. It makes me feel that I’m adding value to these people’s lives. I get great joy from serving these women because I see the happiness in their faces. I see the relief in their smiles as they receive these products that they cannot afford, but they desperately need. And so for me, volunteering at this particular charity the way that I do, is absolutely perfect for me. That’s what I do.

THE RESULT

So I’d like you to sit and think a little about what is it in this world that pains you. When you watch the news, there will be particular news stories that stick out for you all the time. When you’re walking down the street, you’ll see particular things that hurt you. You want to pick a charity or a charitable organization to work with that s something that you are very ionate about, something that causes you to feel and express empathy for the pain that you see in the world. It could be homelessness. It could be child abuse. It could be childhood hunger. It could be animal cruelty. Find something that hurts your soul. That’s your soul’s voice, speaking to you, saying, “Look, you can do something about this. This is wrong. You can do something about this. You were meant to do this.” You need to listen to your soul’s voice. You need to find a way that you can volunteer. Find an organization that you can volunteer with that will help you to have an impact with this cause. Don’t let the fact that you’re only one person stop you. You do have power. You have power to make changes in this world and to heal some of the brokenness that you see. It takes a village sometimes, and you are a member of one of those villages. It takes you.

Once you’ve decided on the one thing that greatly sparks your sense of empathy and you have found a charity that helps to relieve that pain in the world, then

you need to think about what it is that you can contribute. You need to think about all of the things in your life that you’re good at or that you enjoy. Some people do enjoy cleaning. They love it. So helping people in a practical, physical sense could be something you could do. Perhaps you’re good at sales and marketing, so you’d be great at selling raffle tickets or gaining sponsorships for fundraisers. Maybe you’re really good at cooking or building. Lend your hand through other charitable organizations. There are so many different things that you can do. Combine what your best attributes are (organizing, deg, baking, crunching numbers, entertaining, selling, gardening, etc.) with what pains you the most to have to watch someone else endure (homelessness, hunger, abuse, sickness, loneliness, loss, etc.). The way that you will be able to impact this world and be in a state of service most effectively is if you unify your talents and your torments. Use that fire in your belly for good. Volunteer your time and see how your happiness quotient rises, while you’re helping others.

Once you’re able to do that and you start to volunteer, you will almost immediately find that you have started to finally live your life with purpose. When I say ‘with purpose,’ it means that everybody has a purpose in their lives. Everybody has a reason that they’re here, which is greater than themselves. If you can find that purpose and if you can make manifesting that purpose part of your life every single day, then the joy and the happiness and the contentment that you will feel will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. There have been times when it’s taken me months to plan an event and it’s been hard going, lots of brick walls and barricades, lots of issues and problems, and a hell of a lot of hard work. But then the event comes around and it’s usually about an hour or two into the event where I’ll find myself alone, I’ll be backstage or I’ve gone to the kitchen for five minutes to grab a cup of tea in between activities, and all of a sudden, I’ll have this wave of absolute pleasure and joy and ecstasy wash over me. It’s a feeling of—it’s that feeling, the feeling of living life with purpose, on purpose—knowing that right now, this very second, I am doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I am doing exactly what I was put on planet Earth to do. I have figured out whom I need to help. I’ve figured out how I can help them and I’m doing it. I’m not doing it for any money. I’m not doing it for any praise. I’m not doing it for any other reason than knowing deep within my soul that this is something that has to be done and that I’m the one to do it. It is the most unbelievable and amazing feeling you can ever experience in your whole life.

Finding your purpose needn’t be a mystery. This book is here to help you do just that. If you share yourself and your universal talents with those less fortunate than you, at this point, you are close to ready for the one. You’ve learned that once you love yourself, then you’ll be ready to love, and have somebody else love you in return. You’ve also learned to forgive yourself. In this chapter, you learned to share yourself, your time and your talents so that your purpose will rise up to meet you like cream in your coffee. Now it’s time to move into a new state: a state of gratitude.

Part 2

FIND THE ONE

Chapter 7

UNDERSTANDING THE RELATIONSHIP NEEDS OF THE OPPOSITE SEX

“Eight letters, 3 words, One Meaning.”

~ Gary Barlow, Take That

WHAT MEN WANT AND NEED FROM A PARTNER

Men are a very interesting breed and I’ll say ‘breed’ because that’s what we humans are; we’re animals, after all, evolving over millions and millions of years. But one thing has stayed true throughout all of these years and it is that men have always perceived themselves and, generally, have always been, up until recent times, the provider for a whole group initially, and then, in the smallest sense, the provider for their family, for their wife, and their children. Men have always taken on that role and that role has been instilled upon them from father to son on down, even to our generation in 2017. The fathers of the men that we would date were born in the ’60s and the ’70s when it was still highly important for a man to be a provider for a woman. Those values have been instilled into the large portion of the male population from birth. That’s why it’s important to recognize that even though women have the right and the ability to be successful, if not more successful, than any man, a woman still needs to respect and honor her man’s deepest sense of needing to be the provider. When a woman takes that away, it is the number one reason why a man will withdraw.

First and foremost, a man needs to feel wanted; he needs to feel needed, required and relevant; he needs to feel as if he has something to offer a woman other than

kisses and cuddles and sex. He needs to feel masculine. He needs to feel like...the hunter. And let’s face it, a woman wants to date a real man. But what about your independence, you ask. It’s about finding a happy medium between being looked after while maintaining your independence.

Let me give you a couple of analogies. First of all, let’s look at the stay-at-home Mom. The stay-at-home Mom has chosen the path of raising her children, which is the hardest job of all and probably the most worthwhile and rewarding. Ultimately, she shapes the next generation. For this woman, finding a man who has a decent career and is able to provide an income that will look after her and her children is a fantastic thing. This woman is never going to feel like she’s in competition with the man, and the man will definitely feel the sense that he is the provider. In this sort of situation, it’s very easy to make a man feel masculine. It starts to get a bit more difficult when a woman has a career or is a businessperson or entrepreneur. Rather than being somebody who is more dependent financially on a man, you become somebody who is either equal to a man or better when it comes to income. When this happens, a conflict is going to arise because if a man feels as though he isn’t able to provide adequately for his family and the woman is now providing for her family, unfortunately the caveman instincts kick in and this can make a man run.

So what do you do? Because there’s no way in hell if you’re a powerful woman that you’re going to change that, but you could. You could say, “Right, my partner feels the need to lead and I’m doing better, work-wise, than him, so what I’ll do is I’ll quit my job, and I’ll get a lesser job to make him feel in power. Now is that going to work for us? Is that going to be sustainable? Is that going to make us happy?” No, it’s not. Unless you are able to find a partner who has the mindset where he doesn’t feel the need to compete with a woman, and he’s excited and honored to be in the presence of somebody who is kicking goals and moving forward as a trailblazer in what you’re doing, then you’re going to have a big problem.

One thing that you can do if you are a woman who has quite a high-power career

is find a man who is in a very different industry from the industry that you’re in. For instance, times will be tough if you’re both in the pharmaceutical industry, if the two of you are both kicking along, working away and you keep kicking goals, earning 200 grand a year whereas he earns 150, your car is nicer than his and then it comes time to go on vacation. You’re trying to book a vacation for 10 grand and he’s sort of saying, “Look, I don’t know if we can afford it,” what will start to happen is that he’s going to feel very emasculated. When men feel emasculated, they pull back from the relationship, they start feeling much less sexually and emotionally connected to you and eventually the relationship will fizzle and they will withdraw.

If you can at least look to be with somebody who’s in a very different industry than you, then it takes away from the competition. As an example: if you sell cakes and he sells cars, even if you’re selling more cakes than he sells cars, it doesn’t matter, because he can still be proud of you and say, “Look at my lady, she sells cakes and she’s kicking butt, selling even more than me,” because he isn’t in competition with you now. He’s not making cakes, he’s selling cars. This is a great way to get around occupational incompatibility and a great way to make sure your man doesn’t feel emasculated.

Another thing that you can do is be very proactive in understanding that these sorts of things can happen. If you have more money than your man, be proud of that, incredibly proud and never try and make allowances because you’ll put yourself down and try to play down your achievements because if you’re with the man who truly loves you then you won’t need to downplay your achievements. However, what you can do is build up his masculinity and tell him how handsome he looks more often, tell him that he is a fine specimen of a man, give him jobs to do around the house that you can’t do yourself (and when I say ‘can’t’ I mean ‘don’t want to do’). Make him feel needed; make him feel useful. There is nothing that makes a man feel more like a man than when you say, “I need your help.” Your words say much more than ‘I need help.’ They say, ‘If you were not here, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m trying to do.’ As long as you can find a way to make him feel masculine and feel like a man, he will want to stay with you.

Secondly, a man needs somebody who’s going to take an interest in him. Goodness knows even if he’s got lots of friends, unless they’ve had about half-adozen beers apiece, they’re not going to be having any meaningful conversations anytime soon. It’s just the nature of the beast. This means most male friends will walk around telling each other that everything is okay. Their work could be falling apart, but everything is fine. Their relationship could be in tatters, and all they will say is ‘’having some issues with the old lady.’’ When we go back to looking at childhood, a lot of men have had childhood issues that continue to affect them in adulthood: parental divorces, people dying, life-changing events that occurred, shaping who they are as a person. It’s no doubt they’ve a lot of pain and a lot of hurt inside. They need someone who’ll listen to them, someone they feel they can be vulnerable enough with to share have these conversations.

As women, we’re lucky. Every time something happens whether we are breaking up with the boyfriend or lost a job, we have our mothers and girlfriends to lean on. We call them and we tell them everything, they give us advice and we tell them the story again and again. By the end of several conversations we’ve basically healed ourselves. Men don’t get that opportunity. Men never get that chance, leaving loads of thoughts floating around in their head. A gift that you can give to your partner and one that will make him fall madly in love with you is the gift of your ears, just listening to him. I suggest that when you first start dating somebody, you ask them a lot of questions, not questions about the present, not questions about ‘how’s the job going?’ or ‘what do you like doing on the weekend?’ Ask questions about their life.

A great question to ask is, ‘What were you like when you’re 17?’ The reason this is a great question to ask is because for any boy at the age of 17, life is pretty good. They are out dating; they are out drinking. They’re in school; there are no rules or responsibilities. They’re on the eve of adulthood, interested in girls and parties. It was a great time for most men, so taking them back to that time and getting them to talk about it will bring them so much joy, excitement and happiness. On the flip side, you might bring out some sadness for them and if they are able to share with you a bad time that they went through, be there and

validate their experiences. You might be able to give them some advice, empathy and understanding on the situation, again that’s an equally brilliant gift. Asking men questions about themselves and getting them to talk about their past is a really powerful gift you can give.

SEX AND THE SINGLE MAN

Men’s sex is an interesting phenomenon. Unfortunately, we’ve been brought up by parents from the ’70s and ’80s—and many Catholic parents from the ’70s to the ’90s have all these rules and regulations about sex, so we were brought up thinking that it was a taboo. We were told to cover our eyes when sex came on the TV. There were no talks about the birds and the bees. It was just embarrassing and we had to figure it all out ourselves. We tend to put a lot of weight on sex, but if we understand that we can take ourselves out of the equation and start to view it a little bit differently, the heavy weight of sex is lifted. Women will often say things like ‘he just wants to get me into bed,’ and although that may be true—he would like to get you into bed—that may not be all he wants. If a guy likes you, a guy likes you. If a guy doesn’t like you, he’s still going to want to have sex with you either way. He wanted to have sex with you before you even met. He wants to have sex with you when he saw your profile picture on the dating site. In his mind, it has been a given from the very beginning and there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s beautiful. Thank God men want to have sex more than women do, because if they didn’t, there would be a lot less children on this planet. In order to have a good sex life, you need to be really honest and upfront about your feelings when it comes to sex.

Set realistic expectations with your partner so that you don’t feel partial and he doesn’t feel let down. If you do go on a first date and things are going really well and you think you’re going to see the guy again and for you, you don’t generally have sex until you’ve been on four dates, tell him, let him know. Why?

He’s going to stop trying as hard to have sex with you and not feel any rejection and relax and enjoy your dates more.

It’s going to take pressure off of you, because now you know that you’re not going to be forced into trying to do something every single date until you’re ready.

You’re also telling him that if he lasts four dates he’s going to get sex, so either ways it’s a win-win situation. Now you might feel a little bit uncomfortable and embarrassed bringing up sex or talking about it, but let me tell you, guys do not. It’s at the forefront of their lives and every morning when they wake up it’s probably the first thing they think about and likely the last thing that crosses their mind when they go to bed. Therefore, when men talk about sex, to them, it’s completely natural and not embarrassing at all.

It’s so important to try to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. If you can see the way that men think and understand what it is that they need and what makes them happy, then it will make you a much better date. You’ll understand how to give them what they need. On the flip side, it’s also equally important for men to understand what women need, which is actually pretty simple: basically...just everything.

WHAT WOMEN WANT AND NEED FROM A PARTNER

Women can be very different from men when it comes to their needs and desires. The number one thing that a woman will tell you about being in a relationship is that she wants a man who will listen to her. Women love to talk. They love to express their feelings through words. They love to be listened to. So if woman comes home from work at night and she has a long story to tell her man about

the day that she’s been having, the man needs to listen. The man needs to understand that every day that he’s in a relationship with a woman, he’s going to need to sacrifice some of his precious ‘me time,’ which he spends thinking about —I’m not even going to pretend to understand what he would be thinking about —dedicated to listening to her. He can’t just sitting there, staring at her blankly while thinking about something else. Men need to learn how to actively listen to women because we know when men aren’t. There’s nothing more hurtful for a woman to experience than when her partner is pretending to listen to her and isn’t listening to her at all. It makes her feel as though her thoughts and her feelings are not worthy of being listened to, and that her partner doesn’t care about what it is that she’s thinking and feeling. The primary element that a woman needs in a relationship is a man who is going to listen. It’s going to demonstrate to her that he loves her, and he’s interested in everything that she’s going through. It’s going to show that he’s willing to find ways to help her with any problems or issues that she might be having. He’ll want to share in her joys.

A woman wants her man to be proud of her. So if a woman achieves something at work or on a personal level, she wants to have a man who’s going to be comfortable enough in his own masculinity to be able to compliment her, sing her praises, and tell people about how great she’s doing, without it making him feel like he’s inferior or making him feel that somehow it diminishes his offering to the world. That can be a tall order for a small-minded man. The woman wants to be able to be celebrated by the man. She loves a man so much and so dearly, that the person’s approval and compliments that craves the most are her partner’s, not her mother’s, not her father’s, not her children’s. Her partner, that’s who she craves her praise from. And so, if a man can praise a woman and compliment her for all of the amazing things that she’s doing, then that is really going to go a long way to helping a woman feel loved and wanted in a relationship.

Women love little surprises. Contrary to popular belief, most women are not particularly materialistic, or even if they are materialistic, they don’t associate love with being given trinkets. However, if a man does buy little gifts for a woman or has picked some flowers out of the garden, bought a $5 box of chocolate, cut of an article out of magazine that she may like, women love not

the gift, but the thought. The thought that their man was walking around during the day without them and with zero prompting whatsoever, their man started to think about them and think, ‘Oh, I love this woman...I want to do something to make her smile,’ will make her smile. Women love receiving small gifts from men because they know that it means that the man was thinking about them without being told. To know that someone has been going about their day and thinking about you, without you being there, is one of the most romantic and beautiful things that a woman can ever experience. So if a man can to buy something or find something to give to his partner at least once a week, then that is going to go a long way to making this relationship very healthy and very successful, and making a woman feel loved and wanted.

Women love affection. The way that women look at affection can be different from woman to woman. Some women only like to be cuddled in bed. Some women like to be cuddled all the time. Some women like to have sex every single day. Some women only want to have sex once a week. Some women associate sex with love. Some women don’t associate sex with love and just think of it as a completely primal act that they can do with their partner, but not one that makes them feel loved; it just stimulation. So it’s really important that a man is able to ascertain pretty early on the way in which a woman likes to be given affection and to be touched. If a woman shies away from you every time you try to kiss her in public, stop doing it. If a woman tries to kiss you in public all the time and you feel comfortable, then do it all the time. If a woman says ‘I love you’ when she’s having sex with you, then you know that she associates sex with love. You can use making love to her as a way of expressing the way that you feel about her, as often as you like. If she acts like a dominatrix in the bedroom, then understand that while she loves having sex with you and will have sex with you because it feels good, you having sex with her is not a way of you telling her that you love her. You’ll have to find other ways to show her that you love her outside of the bedroom, such as cuddling her, kissing her, giving her little gifts, or doing nice things for her. Affection is a means of showing care. A man will have to be studious and get to know a woman’s wishes if he is to show his affection for her.

Women like to be told that they’re loved. Saying ‘I love you’ is one of the most

profound things that anybody can hear from the lips of somebody whom they love as well. You can’t say ‘I love you’ enough to a person. Every time a woman hears the words ‘I love you,’ what she’s really hearing is her man saying, “You are important to me. I’m so happy that you’re in my life. I’m so lucky that you’re by my side.” That constant reminder is what’s going to keep your relationship and your love alive. Sometimes men are not very open individuals (I know, big surprise) and they find it hard to express their love. But if a man is truly in love with a woman, then sometimes pushing himself and doing things that he’s uncomfortable with to make her happy is worthwhile. Saying ‘I love you,’ picking a flower, kissing in public, it’s not going to kill him. It’s not going to make his life any worse. It’s going to make his life only better because the person that he loves feels loved. If you truly love somebody, then all you want is to be able to know that you’re giving them as much love as you possibly can. Saying those 3 little words is like a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket. It’s the key to the candy store. And women will say it right back: I love you.

Women like help. We don’t like to ask for help, we just want to be given help. We want you to help us to cook. We want you to help us to clean. We want you to go out into the yard and do the yard work without us having to nag you, without our house being overrun by bushes that look like Jack and the Beanstalk. We want you to clean the windows once every six months and clean out the gutters. We want you fuel up the cars every Sunday afternoon and to wash our car while you’re at it. You’re men; you like time alone. You like time to think without being bothered; you like time when you don’t have to talk. Use these moments when you go out and do your odd jobs around the house and in the yard, to spend some time on your own, thinking about whatever it is that men think about while pruning hedges. It’s a good way to keep fit and it’s a very good way to keep your relationship happy and your home functioning and working well. Be a great role model to your children and teach them the value of helping out around your home, pulling your own weight, and taking care of business.

And so, if all of these attributes can be combined and offered to a woman, she will feel very happy in her relationship. Being taking care of without being made to feel like a simple, little woman matters. Being cared for, being loved and worshiped, being adored...all these actions matter. That’s all that women want.

Insert raised eyebrows here. We’re pretty simple creatures. Watch any romantic film, duplicate that, and we’re good. There are many different types of women. There are women who are homemakers and love to stay at home with their babies. There are women who go to jobs every day and work very hard, but then can’t wait to get home and cook dinner for their families. There are women who are trailblazers in their field, who are changing the world and shattering glass ceilings. They’re powerful and they’re independent. They’re wealthy and they’re strong. There are women who are philanthropists. They spend a lot of time trying to change the world and helping other people, coming home at night and having nothing left to give to their family on most nights. We’re all so different. We’re all so unique, but we all have one thing in common, and that’s that we just want to feel loved and respected, listened to and looked after when we are finally home.

Chapter 8

SMASHING YOUR BOXES

“Beauty isn’t about having a pretty face. It’s about having a pretty heart, a pretty mind and a pretty soul.”

~ Anon

TICKING THE BOXES

Without cupid nearby, finding the right person for you might seem like an impossibility. It isn’t.

Have you ever been in love before? It’s the best feeling in the world, isn’t it? That feeling when you can’t stop thinking about your partner. You know the first second you see this person that he’s going to be the one, or at least the one for a little while. So you’re absolutely, madly in love. Actually, you’re absolutely, madly in love with love. One of the main reasons stopping us from finding true love is this little thing that I call ‘the boxes.’ We create these little structures, the boxes, which we feel we need to fill in order to be happy and find a partner. So for example, if I were to lay bare my superficial boxes, they would be filled with a few details...he’d be 6’2”, he’d have rippling muscles, he’d be rich—really rich —and have a great job...oh, and did I mention good looking? Basically, my boxes stack up to reveal Harvey Specter from Suits. That man is amazing. You might want your boxes filled with different details: he’d be creative, he’d have a beard, he’d dress well, he’d have dimples. These are the boxes that you pile up for yourself.

So when you hop on dating sites like Tinder, Bumble, and Plenty of Fish you look at the photos. You don’t even read the profiles, do you? Let’s face it, you’re looking at the photos and if the photo is absolutely gorgeous then you may bestow your attention on this man. But unfortunately, the fantasy often doesn’t match the reality. So when talking about someone like Harvey Specter, yes, he’s absolutely good looking and very, very rich, but the problem with Harvey is he’s a lawyer and he’s very hard working. So he gets up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and he goes to the gym. He’s at work by 6. He works until about midnight. When he comes home, he’s in a bad mood because he’s lost a case and he’s thrashing around. He jumps into bed, rolls over, doesn’t even hint at sex, and goes to sleep. His day is on repeat for six, probably seven days, a week. So even though he’s ed out, snoring in bed, you get to gaze at his rugged perfection. What most women want is a man who’s going to shower them with affection, who’s going to compliment them all the time, who’s going to be there to have dinner with them, who’s going to give them cuddles. Unfortunately, my boxes aren’t going to get me what I want. Yes, he’s amazing to look at, but when you want to go out and meet friends for dinner down at the local pub, he’s sitting there with his phone and has no desire to engage in any conversation or seductive looks across the table. No affection. No attention. His looks tick the boxes, but his actions and thoughts do not.

So it’s important that before you actually meet somebody—you’ve been chatting online. If we actually meet somebody, it’s important that you basically find out who they are by asking the right questions because these are the boxes that you need to tick. It’s important for you to be with somebody who basically enjoys doing the same thing that you do on a weekend. Let’s say that you had been dating this guy online for a while, and in your mind, he was the man of your dreams. You went on a few dates and you started to enter into a bit of a relationship. But when the weekends would roll around, he was obsessed with soccer, and I mean obsessed: his friends, soccer, and beer. And not necessarily in that order. This posed a bit of a problem because you wanted to go out. You love going to markets and going to wineries. Some smoked Gouda and a Pinot Grigio. For him, visiting a winery was an exercise that would just encourage yawning. So when you start developing feelings for this man, but you’re not compatible on most things, then you’re going to have a problem. You saw your life laid out before you: alone on the weekends or hitting up your girlfriends for company, their third wheel out and about or babysitting for their 2-year-old

twins. And your man? Your man would be nowhere in sight. Not the vision you had in mind. Here’s a note from Captain Obvious: that man is not your perfect partner. He doesn’t tick the right boxes.

Kick him to the curb, however politely you wish to do so. Follow with that glass of Pinot Grigio and then ask yourself questions like, ‘Where do you want to live in five years time?’ Here’s another example. You’re a jetsetter. You want to move in a couple of years and live in Los Angeles, California. That’s your dream. That’s what you want to do. Now if you have a partner who has absolutely no desire to move somewhere new and far away, you have a problem. Do you stay with this guy and sacrifice your dream or do you beg him to come with you? Problems arise. You’ll have to ask yourself more questions: Where do you see yourself in 10 years? If you’re dating a guy and he says, “Look well, I’ve been here for the last 10 years, so I will probably be here for the next 10,” he’s not the one, no matter how good the sex is. He does not tick the right boxes.

It’s great to find out early what your partner’s intentions are. I always say to people to ask your potential partner what his relationship is like with his mom and dad, and his siblings. If you’re a very family-oriented person and your partner says, “I can’t stand my mom and I hate my dad. My brother is a jerk…,” he’s probably really a great guy, but he’s not the right person for you if being close to your family matters. Don’t rearrange or change your values and priorities to make someone else fit into the box you’ve styled for Mr. Right. It’s important to fall in love with somebody who shares your values and clearly communicates what those values are.

LOOKING FOR LOVE ONLINE

First of all, you’ve got to pick the right dating site. If you’re looking for love, Matchmaker’s not for you. And if you’re looking for sex, RSVP probably isn’t for you. You won’t get the desired outcome that you want. Try to match what

why and what you’re looking for with the dating website’s goals. Read through their website and read testimonials. This will give you a sense of whether one site is geared for a particular type of person or purpose, like rodeo cowboys searching for love partners who wish to start a family pronto. That’s pretty specific. The next thing is it’s important to set up a really honest profile. If you start a relationship based on lies, it’s only going to go downhill from there. Putting up unrealistic photos of yourself on your profile is basically lying right from the start. So, yes, it’s probably okay if you’re a size 14 to Photoshop yourself to a size 12, but I wouldn’t go to a size 6. You know what I’m saying? Everyone wants to improve a tiny little bit, but be as honest as you can.

You need to base your boxes on relationship outcomes. What do you want to get out of the relationship? Don’t just base your boxes on the aesthetic and on looks alone. Chatting online will help you to start to get to know this person. But...and there’s a but...I have a rule. Here’s the rule: if you’ve been chatting with someone for more than seven days online and he hasn’t asked you out on a date, or you’ve asked him and he’s declined, then it’s time for you to cut it off and stop. Basically, if a guy isn’t into you enough to want to see you after chatting for seven days, then he is probably never going to be into you. Don’t be fooled. If he asks you out on a date 26 days into this chat relationship that you have, he’s been trying out other women and it hasn’t worked out and now he’s lonely and desperate. He decides you’re okay so he may as well give you a go because it’s better than being alone. Sometimes it’s really tough. Are you on day 14 of your chat relationship? Well then, breaking news: he’s just not that into you.

I’ll let you in on my little secret. One thing that I like to do before I ever meet a guy I’ve been chatting to online is to get something that I like to call the “tourist selfie.” I’m a bit of a tourist in pretty much every photo, if you’ve ever seen a photo of me, they all look fairly similar. That’s just how I roll. I don’t mind making a fool of myself and what you see is what you get. So consider this point: if you’re talking to a guy online and he sends you a rather ridiculous picture of himself, acting like an Asian tourist, with his fingers making the Vfor-victory peace sign, two things have happened. Number one: he actually cares about you enough to make a fool of himself and send you a photo. And number two: it means you’ve actually seen him, the real him. You’ll be able to tell before

you go on a real date who you’ve been talking to. You’ve been talking to someone with a sense of humor, and someone who’s willing to reveal his authentic self to you. Be prepared to reciprocate as well and send back an equally ridiculous photo. This man will appreciate it and consider it an adorable move.

And lastly, make sure that you talk offline at least once before meeting. Consider this scenario: You meet someone on a dating site and start to chat online. You share what you would call ‘fairly big conversations’ and even exchange some sexy selfies. You plan to meet, but wait. Hold up. Talk offline first. When you actually get on the phone to speak to him, he might be an absolute idiot. How awkward. You’re thinking, ‘thank goodness I spoke to this guy before I actually went out to meet him.’ You can save yourself a lot of heartache that way. What may seem charismatic on chat, is very different on the phone. Hearing his voice makes all the difference.

Within 2 seconds, you can search the actress, ‘Emma Stone,’ and find over 43 million websites relating some information containing her name. Why is it that you haven’t found the one on the Internet by now? It should be easier and quicker, you insist. In reality, Internet dating can take a long, long, long time. It can take time and and a whole lot of dates until you find somebody that you really like. So what you need to do if you’re really serious about getting into a relationship is try to spend two hours a day online focusing on online dating. If you spend two hours a day every single day for a couple of weeks, you’re really going to up your chances of finding Mr. Right. You might say, “Oh, I’ve been doing internet dating for years,” but you go online for half-an-hour once a week, or two hours one day then nothing for two more weeks. You wonder why you’re not getting to your goal. It’s similar to everything in life, the more you put in, the more you’re going to get out. If you are focused on an outcome and the outcome is finding and building a relationship, you will get one when you put forth greater time and effort. Devoting more time in a condensed period of time will actually free you up. It gets rid of all the trash and all the rubbish that you’re wasting time on to free you up for a real relationship.

Consider focusing your energy on singles parties and singles vacations, as well. Instead of waiting three or four weeks to get one date, you can attend a singles party or a singles vacation, and you’ll actually get to meet people face-to-face straightaway, not just one person but all sorts of people. And you know, correct me if I’m wrong, but if you stand in front of somebody and you had a conversation, even if it’s just for a minute, you know whether or not you’ve got a start. You can feel that connection and that tickle; it’s exciting. It’s a sort of Malcolm Gladwell-thin-slicing kind of process. It’s also a bit of trial and error, until you find one whom you really like. So the trick is to get in front of as many people as you can. Hi, my name is...

NICE TO MEET YOU

Now when you’re going to meet people face-to-face, these are the top four ways to meet up. Each requires a different confidence level. When you’re talking about speed dating, your confidence level needs to be ridiculously high, ridiculously, ridiculously high because normally you go on a date with one person, which spikes nerves enough. You’re going on a date with 10 guys, so you basically have to be awesome 10 times in a row. Know that with speed dating, there is a lot of pressure put on you. Then we have singles meetups or singles parties. They still require a fairly high level of confidence because you will have to go up and introduce yourself and say hi and step out of your comfort zone. The third way to meet face-to-face is the Meet At. Let me explain what they are by example. Say you’re a lawyer. Somebody will organize a dinner just for lawyers who are all single and you get to go to a dinner. There are only about 20 people and basically you get to know the people that are sitting around you. Now this doesn’t take as much confidence as the other two because you’re in a nice, intimate, relaxed setting having dinner. It’s quite casual. Then you have singles vacations. So singles holidays are amazing because they require the absolute lowest level of confidence at all. Basically when you’re taking yourself out of your environment and going on vacation somewhere. They typical vacation may involve a tropical island with a relaxed attitude and plenty of singles. The great thing about the singles vacations is that they’ve actually paid $2500 dollars to meet someone. That’s why going on a singles vacation means that everybody there is definitely going to want you to approach him or her and

be very approachable as well. There’s been a greater investment up front. Most people want to see some return on investment and will put their best foot forward to do so.

, you were meant to find a partner. Spending that time and putting in that effort is going to get you that result. Most people go into dating halfheartedly. Take it seriously and the universe will respond. When you’re going on dates, look your best, present yourself well. Only go on dates with people who you think could potentially be the one. Respect yourself enough to walk away if there is no chemistry. Don’t waste time on somebody that you know you don’t have a connection with. You’re wasting your time and you’re wasting his. And last of all, love yourself enough not to settle for second best because you are absolutely awesome.

If you are still searching for the one, don’t give up hope. Continue reading to find out more about what type of person would make a good match for you.

Chapter 9

WHO HOLDS YOUR MISSING PUZZLE PIECE?

“You are the answer to every prayer I’ve offered. You are a song, a dream, a whisper, and I don’t know how I could have lived without you for as long as I have.”

~ Noah to Allie, The Notebook

THE TOP 2 LISTS TO MAKE IN ORDER TO FIND MR. RIGHT

When you try to work out what type of partner would be perfect for you, look at the people around you who you care about most. I don’t mean lovers and exboyfriends. I mean your best friends, the people with whom you work and enjoy spending time with, people that you’ve met in your lifetime that have made an impact on you and made you happy, and people who you call family (those family with whom you get along).

Recall your deepest friendships and your closest friends. If you think about your best friends or the person that you spend the most time with, what things about them do you love? What attributes about them keep you around, keep you interested and bring you pleasure? Do they make you laugh, laugh to the point of crying, laugh to the point that it hurts, laugh ’til you’re on the floor, OTFLMAO? Do they love to talk on the phone for hours on end? If you’re a guy you’re probably thinking no, that’s not an attribute that I like, but if you’re a girl

you’re probably thinking yes. Do they cook for you? Do you cook for them and revel in their appreciation of your osso bucco? Do you do DIY projects together, donning safety goggles and glue guns alike? Do you go for walks? Think about all of the activities that you do with this person, your friends. Extend these kinds of thoughts to your family, and the people with whom you work and enjoy.

What do you do with these people that gives you pleasure? You need to write these activities and ideas down. You’ll start to realize some valuable lessons about yourself, about what makes you happy, what makes you laugh or cry, what you enjoy doing and what you dislike with a vengeance. It’s interesting because when somebody asks you to describe your perfect partner, you will generally say they’re good-looking, funny, smart, kind—but they’re just adjectives that we use to explain in a very high level sense what a person’s personality is like, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the type of person who›s going to be a good match for you and make you happy. If you›re thinking about careers, a doctor is an amazing career title to have. If you›re a doctor, it means you are very intelligent, smart, and caring. You want to help other people; you make a really good income and you save lives. Your career speaks about what you, but doesn’t necessarily describe who you are.

From a character point of view, the title, Doctor, has says absolutely nothing about who you are as a person. If you’ve got 10 doctors in a room and sat down and spent an hour with each of them, each person will have similar attributes in some ways. Their intellect may be similar, the ion to help people may be similar, but their personalities, their interests, hobbies, and desires would be completely different. One doctor might love fishing, reading books and going on vacations in places like Scotland, where they can roam around the countryside spending time at wineries. Whereas you might have another doctor who loves hanging out in L.A., going to movie premiers and spending a lot of money on his appearance and the clothes he wears. Still, you might have another doctor who loves to just go home after a hard week’s work, get into the scruffiest clothes possible and go out to work on some machinery in the barn. Even though these doctors have similar traits as a result of their job, who they are as people are significantly different. You need to search within your friendship groups, your family and the people that you spend time with, look at the personality traits that

they have that you love and write them down. It’s about re-education. You need to re-educate yourself so that you can truly understand who it is that you are most attracted to and who will make you most happy. If you’re able to do that then when you do hop online or when you start getting out there and dating you’ll have a much better understanding of the type of person that you want to attract as well as the type of person you don’t want to attract. It’s not only focusing on who would be a good match for you, but also about who could be a bad match for you.

There’s a certain friend we should focus on, who is not a friend at all. I speak of the paradox called the frenemy. Frenemy, for those of you who don’t know, is a person that you used to spend time with, somebody who probably started out as a relatively decent friend, but over the months and years has grown to be a bit of a pain in the backside. They put you down, complain every time you’re together doing something, and talk about you behind your back. A frenemy is generally annoying and can be specifically backstabbing as well. Whether it’s chewing too loudly when they’re eating food at the dinner table or shouting at the TV when they’re watching sports and their team is losing, frenemies often are enemies within your friend group who might act out of spite, just to set you off. Have a look at all the people who are in your life and look at the things that they do that really bug you. Look at the activities that they’ve asked you to participate in, such as going to a soccer match or even going to a charitable event at a local museum. Think about all the activities you’ve done with these people that you didn’t enjoy. Think about all the characteristics in these people that really upset you and don’t make you happy. Frenemies are just one source of data that informs us about what we don’t want in a partner.

Every ex was once your one and only boyfriend, your love, your life: goodlooking, fun, and exciting. They make your heart skip a bit, but it was only after getting to know them for a few weeks that you started to see the cracks, the issues and the problems. Think about all the things that your ex did that drove you crazy. Put those onto the list of things that make somebody not a good match for you. You need to take things one step further because if you’re looking for an actual relationship, you’re looking for a set of circumstances where maybe not in a year, maybe not even in two years, but eventually you’d like to think that this

relationship could turn into something more long-term. That might mean finding a life partner as well as finding somebody with whom you can start a family. As we get older in life our friends may dwindle and it is then that having children and a family around you that becomes so important. I’m very lucky to have two beautiful children. I became pregnant when I was 26. I felt that I was very young; now, more than a decade later, I feel blessed that I have these two children around me. Whether my relationship with my partner lasts a lifetime or lasts for one more day, whether my mother and my father live for another forty years or they die tomorrow, what I do know is that I’ll have my children around me and that I’ll never be alone. It gives you a sense of belonging and a sense of peace.

Consequently, when you’re looking at exploring or entering into a new relationship, you want to be looking at somebody who could potentially turn into a long-term life partner for you. So what makes a good life partner? You know you can’t just wonder all the time; you need to look at attributes that are going to make your partner worthwhile and worthy of you for the long haul. For example, if you have aspirations to live overseas, to live in England for example. You always wanted to live in England, more than anything in the whole world. Since you were a little child, your life plan was going to take you over to England. You were going to have a set of standards you wanted to live by, you knew the type of house you wanted to live in, you knew the type of lifestyle you wanted to afford and you know how much you could contribute financially. If that’s the case, then you need to make sure that a potential new partner would be flexible with the vision that you have for your own future. You know it’s probably pretty unlikely you’re going to meet a guy in a bar and tell him you want to move to England and have the guy instantly say, “Oh my god, me too!” and bang there you go. But you can look for a partner who will be able to say to you, “Look, under the right set of circumstances, I would be willing to try anything.”

If you are dating somebody who has an entirely different life plan from yours, a plan that he’s firmly sticking by and adamant that he’s going to achieve, then it’s going to be a very difficult road for the two of you moving forward. If he wants to move to America in two years’ time and settle down there and it’s been his lifelong dream and you want to do the same, but in England then you’re going to

be in the situation where you’ll be in a constant state of compromise and potentially one partner in the relationship would never be completely happy. Asking questions about where a person sees themselves in the future very early on in the relationship is so important. Other questions will follow. The question of children is important, too: would you like to have children? When? How many? How would those children be raised? Your ideas may not be etched in stone, but the possible answers can create a profound conversation with your partner about compatibility. The two of you are trying to create a puzzle together. Is he your missing piece?

If you’re a staunch traditionalist, whereas your partner is very bohemian then it can cause the potential for a lot of toxicity in your relationship. It’s important to pick a good match not just for yourself, but for your future self and for your future children. If I met a man who told me that he could not stand being around a lot of noise and chaos, even though I thought he was the sexiest man alive, I’d have to give him up because having two children means that my life is filled with cacophony. Once one issue is addressed, another will pop up. Confront the questions and your relationship will either improve and move forward, or be cleared from your life to open up new opportunities to meet Mr. Right, the missing puzzle piece.

THE LISTICLES

Now I’m going to give you a task to complete. You’ll need a pen and paper and if it’s possible, get some music around you: your favorite song or style of music from when you were 18 years of age. Put that on and then we can start thinking a little bit about what makes a good match for you. These lists are an important way to move forward in your quest for Mr. Right. Lists help you to conceptualize, categorize, and analyze pertinent information to your life. And there simply fun. If anything, you’re making a time capsule for the future! “Oh, look,” you’ll say, “Here are my lists from when I was looking for you, honey. Weren’t they useful?”

I need you to write down numbers from 1 to 10 in order to list the top attributes of the friends and the family that you have around you that you love and adore the most. You can even give it a catchy internet title, such as, Top 10 Attributes You Must Have in Your Next Partner. I don’t mean ‘he’s a good person,’ ‘he’s kind to people,’ what you need to be writing down are the things that the people around you do that make you the happiest. For example, you love going to a movie when a friend will sit next to you the entire time the movie is on and the friend will be whispering in your ear how terrible it is. That’s pretty specific, but it’s also pretty revealing. You don’t take yourself seriously (or your films, for that matter!). On a new list, from 1 to 10, I want you to make a list of what is not a good match for you. Think about all of the people around you in your life who annoy you, who frustrate you, who irritate you and write down the attributes that they have and the things that they do that bother you to your very core.

Once you have these lists together you need to read them over and over again at least ten times each so that you can really take on board the things that you like and find important in a person’s personality and the things that you can’t stand. If you think you’ll program your brain to these positive and negative attributes every time you’ll be on a date, or screening for a date for that matter, you’ll notice some of these positive attributes come up, straightaway you will be thinking. ‘I’m going to be putting 110% into this particular date; I’m going to see where this moment is going to go because this person has the attributes that I love.’ And on the flip side, if you’re on a date or you’re screening for a date and you’re looking at someone who’s gorgeous and seems charismatic, but starts to exhibit some of these characteristics on that list of ‘Absolutely Not’ then you need to say to yourself: ‘If this is what’s happening on the first date, it’s not going to get any better. If anything, it’s going to get any worse’. Cut your losses and run. Be ruthless. This is your life we’re talking about. If you were sitting on a plane, cruising over Dubai (you jetsetter, you) at 46,000 feet in the air next to a child, an unaccompanied minor, oh, we’ll call her “Your Love Life,” and the cabin suddenly loses cabin pressure, the oxygen masks dropped down, everyone becomes panicked, what should you do? That’s right, you your inflight announcement: Please attend to yourself first, then to your child. Breathe normally. Did you hear that? Attend to yourself first, then to little Miss Love Life. In the classic words of Pretty Woman’s prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold, Kit

DeLuca, aka Laura San Giacomo, “Take care of you.”

Like I’ll say a hundred times in this book before we reach the end, ‘’If it doesn’t feel a hundred percent right now, it’s never going to get any better,” you may as well cut your losses, and move on to the next potential partner. This one guy wasn’t your missing puzzle piece, and you know how aggravating it is to work on completing a puzzle knowing that there’s this one piece that you’ve yet to find. Keep on looking and preserve your precious time.

Chapter 10

SEARCHING FOR MR. COMPATIBILITY

“I take 2 steps forward I take 2 steps back We come together Cuz opposites attract And you know, it ain’t fiction Just a natural fact We come together Cuz opposites attract”

~ Opposites Attract, Paula Abdul

THE SPIN DOCTOR

Paula Abdul might have sung about it, but don’t be fooled. Relationships last because of a commonality between two partners. Yes, embracing each other’s differences can allow for personal growth, but if you don’t share similar values, you’ll have a rough time getting along for the long haul. And yet, couples that are so similar that they’re practically identical will have their own set of difficulties. So which is it? Who are you compatible with?

First of all, common interests are important. Say you meet somebody who loves football, loves going to football matches and watching the game on television in the house with the boys every weekend. Meanwhile, you despise football. Don’t expect your partner to change. His love of football will remain. He will always love football and if you’re not willing to become a football fan, then straight off the bat you need to decide whether you want to persist, despite your differences, or if you’ll just let this one go.

If you don’t share common interests with somebody, you’re really going to struggle when you finally get into relationship mode. Of course, you can always develop new interests in order to share in a hobby. For instance, if a guy loves soccer and you go to a token soccer match then you’re making effort to bond with him. You don’t necessarily love soccer, but you go because he does. You might even enjoy yourself and have fun. You start to realize that a soccer match can be a good time, especially now that he’s teaching you about some of the players and the rules of the game. It works both ways—you might absolutely love scrapbooking. Every Saturday all your friends come over and you chat and do your scrapbooking because that’s what makes you happy. Your partner sees that and respects your time with your friends. It’s about a shared sense of respect. You also like traveling overseas; you want to travel at least four times a year. You love swimming; you’re a great swimmer; you’re always at the pool. You want to get a pool in your backyard when you finally settle down and have kids and by the way the kids—you want four. Whoa, hold up. did you know this about yourself going into the relationship? Did you share this with your potential partner for life? If you are conscious about some of your wants and needs, and cognizant of your values, you can be more transparent with a partner. You can begin a relationship and move forward with clarity.

If you meet somebody who doesn’t have a similar outlook on life, you’re going to face a host of problems, so the first thing that you need to do is work out what parts of your life are fundamental to you, what aspects of your life will you never change.

Grab a pen and paper or start typing. You’re going to reflect on who you are and how you see yourself and your partner living life. You might want to bullet out your answers or capture your answers in full sentences. Be honest and reflective. Don’t try to put a spin on it that makes it sound ‘better.’ This exercise isn’t about presenting the version of yourself that you think others might want. It’s about learning about your authentic self and presenting that version of yourself. You might not know the answer to every question, but think on it. Try to answer each question to the best of your ability. There is nothing wrong with any of the answers that you give, but you’re trying to define who you are, so be ruthless. Who are you? What makes you tick? Who’s going to be the perfect fit for you and be able to slide into your life, perfectly complementing you?

Write down the things that you do in your life that you love, such as traveling. How often will your wanderlust hit? Where will you go?

What are your goals are for the future? You don’t need to be very detailed, but outline the big picture, and give a general overview of where you see your life going. Will you always live in the city, for instance?

If you have plans to move and you know where you want to live out your days, put it on the list. Knowing that it will bug you for the rest of your life if you don’t move, that needs to go on the list, too.

Write down what other things that you do in your day-to-day life that are important to you that you would likely never change. Going to the gym or calling your sister?

Where do you see yourself in the next 15 years with your partner? What does life look like for you? Are children in the mix? Pets?

What are your professional goals? Do you have plans around your job and career?

How important is your career to you? Would you be happiest if you were a stayat-home mom looking after the family, the kids, cooking and doing yoga? Or are you driven to stay in the working world?

Are you an employee or your own boss? Is your time your own or do you have set hours? Does your work take you away? Do you have varying shifts and an uncommon schedule?

Does work come home with you? Do you have take home work that must get done in off hours? Or are you free as a bird on your daysoff?

Are you driven to get ahead in your field? Are you willing to work long hours? Are you career-focused, even obsessed?

Are you still not sure what you want to be when you grow up? Are you thinking about going back to school? If so, what interests you?Why?

Do you have a need to be a provider? Are you comfortable with both partners working when and if kids come along? Or not?

Do you see yourself sharing expenses with your partner? How will your financial life be blended with your partners? Do you have outstanding debt or

savings? What plans do you have that involve money?

How important are friends to you, do you like to spend a lot of time with them? How often each week would you talk or see your friends?

What would you like to see happen in your relationship? What will you do with your partner in your social life? Would you love to have dinner parties every weekend, entertaining all the time, sharing those experiences with your partner? Are you up for going out on the town every weekend or just every now and then? Or would you rather stay home snuggling with your partner, watching a movie, and getting a pizza on a Friday night?

How are you going to be sharing your personal space with your partner? Do you sometimes need your own physical space during the week? Is the kitchen your domain or do you like sharing your space for regular routines, like cooking?

Hopefully, you have a clearer picture of who you are, how you live your life, and how you want to live your life with someone else. Might your ideas morph, change, grow, or alter as you wind your way through life’s path? Of course, but at least you’ve made an attempt to nail down your life right now. You have a certain point of view on friends, family, work, home, and money. That perspective affects your choices and your day-to-day existence. When you’re clearer about what you value, you can be clearer about who can fit into your life. You have a greater sense with whom you are compatible. You may want to live a storybook life, but you’re not a fictional character. Get real and up close with your values, and finding the perfect partner will become that much easier. That’s the facts.

Chapter 11

THE DATING DREAM BOARD

“Dream lover come rescue me Take me up take me down Take me anywhere you want to baby now I need you so desperately Won’t you please come around ‘Cause I wanna share forever with you baby”

~ Dreamlover, Mariah Carey

TOP BILLING

It’s a love-hate relationship. No, not you and your Mr. Right. The dream board and I. The dream board is something that I’ve used throughout my career, but I’ve struggled with it. Many moons ago, I used to be in the personal help industry, which was an industry where you believe that if you could dream it and if you could focus your dream strongly enough then you’d be able to manifest these dreams and turn them into reality. One of the best ways of documenting your dreams was to put them down onto a dream board and then look at that dream board daily and reinforce those dreams every single day, not just once every couple of weeks, but constantly. The more that you tell yourself you would drive a Mercedes-Benz, would live in a mansion, and you would travel the world, and do whatever else it is that you wanted to do, the more likely it was that every single day you would make, even if it were small baby steps, movement toward achieving that dream. While the visual of the dream board

which is generally a large-sized cardboard with magazine cutouts or digital printouts stuck to it. It might sound a little bit immature, a little weird, a little bit embarrassing even, but the truth is the dream boards really do work and a testament to that is the fact that they have been around for many years. Some of the world’s leading minds in the personal growth and self-help industries use them in their seminars and books.

The purpose of the dating dream board board is for it to be up on the wall inside your home. It should be specifically on the wall that you’re going to be staring at for a long period of time, so generally that would be in your bedroom. If you’re reading this book it means that you’re currently single, which indicates that you can put whatever you’d like up on your wall. Hopefully by the end of this book that will change and you’ll need to rip that embarrassing dream board down. A lovely little watercolor would be a sweet addition instead.

But...it works and you can use it for finding Mr. Right. On this dream board you need to find pictures of people: couples, specifically, that are doing activities that you think that you would really enjoy doing with your partner. If you really enjoy going on a picnic by the ocean, find a picture of a couple going for a picnic near the ocean. Then find 10 words that describe the attribute about the partner that you’re looking for and, again, we’re not going to talk about ‘a good job’ or ‘good-looking’ or ‘very tall.’

I’ll give you some examples of better, more finely nuanced attributes:

One would be ‘hilarious.’ You know somebody who’s hilarious is going to make you laugh all the time, so write that down on the board.

Another attribute might be ‘foodie.’ If you want to find somebody who loves going out to cafés and eating food as much as you, write that down.

One might be ‘music lover’ because you want to find a partner who loves music and loves going out to concerts or shows.

You might even want to put random pictures on a pin board or a whiteboard with magnets. These would be pictures that appeal to you, speak to you. Anyway that you do it, it’s about getting the images and the words all into one place. You want them in a place where you can look at them every single day so that each morning you can remind yourself about the right type of partner for you, the type of partner that you deserve, the type of partner that’s going to make you happy and make your life complete. Do not settle for second best.

When you know the type of partner that’s going to make you happy, it is so much easier for you to find that person. When you meet new people you’ll be able to recognize within just a few moments spent with this person, whether they tick those boxes or whether they don’t, it’s going to help to take the guess work out of whether or not you’re going to be compatible. It’s also going to save you a lot of headache and chronic pain because sometimes we are blinded by appearances and charisma. Even though a man is displaying many attributes that we straightaway start to think aren’t right for us, we will be blinded by appearances and will still stick around even though we know we shouldn’t. Once you can program ourselves through the repetition of looking at the dream board, rating all of the good matches and bad matches, the data that you’ve generated over the last couple of chapters will be able to save you a lot of headache and pain. Repeat after me: ‘There is absolutely no way within 2, 3, 4 weeks that we’re going to still be together, because it’s ultimately going to end in pain. This person has so many of the negative characteristics that I find undesirable and intolerable, I just need to let this person go for me and for him. It’s time to move on to the next potential partner.’ Little did you know, but you’re in the movies and Arthur Abbott from The Holiday taught us that “you’re supposed to be the leading lady in your own life.” Thank you, Eli Wallach. If Kate Winslet can learn a thing or two about not settling, so can you. Don’t settle.

Chapter 12

LISTEN TO YOUR SOUL, WHEN IT’S SPEAKING TO YOU

“Before you find your soul mate, you must first discover your soul.”

~ Charles F. Glassman

A.I.: AUTHENTIC INTELLIGENCE

Gut feelings are an interesting thing…although it’s a terrible name for a feeling. A gut feeling is the feeling that you get when something’s being said to you or when you’ve seen something or heard something, and straight away, your body has a physical reaction to it. If you’ve been chatting to somebody online and you can see that they’re clearly interested in you, you might be able to tell that he’s about to ask you out on a date. But wait. You start having feelings that something might not go well on this date. This person doesn’t sound like someone who you’re probably going to fall in love with. This person is telling me things about what they enjoy doing that I don’t enjoy doing. You start feeling within yourself that perhaps this date isn’t going to be great for you. Then here’s my advice: listen to your gut and do not go. Gut feelings never lie. Ever.

I’d like to redefine the term ‘gut feeling.’ I’d like to call it your ‘soul feeling’ because your soul is something that resides deep inside and throughout your body. Your soul knows what is best for you. Your soul has your back. Your soul allows for the hairs on the back of your neck to rise up if you’re concerned. Your soul picks up on the subtle words, phrases, intonations in voice that you receive from other people. Unlike your subconscious mind, which likes to give you

reasons to justify something feeling off, your soul feelings are never wrong. When your soul hears or feels something that isn’t right, it’s going to tell you straight away. It’s only that you have the gatekeeper, aka your subconscious mind, which sometimes won’t listen to your soul feelings. You do what you shouldn’t, which goes against what your soul is trying to tell you.

Here’s a scenario. You’ve been out on a date with somebody and the date was okay. He’s asked you out on another date and he’s clearly into you, but you’re just getting strange feelings from him, strange soul feelings from him. This is a clear sign that you need to run away as fast as you possibly can. An example of this can be if he said something to you that you didn’t agree with, if he had thoughts or feelings about a specific topic that you were ionate about that were opposite to yours, if the way that he touched you or the way that he looked at you makes you feel uncomfortable or nervous, turn and run. If any of these red flags start waving, then you need to listen to your gut feeling, your soul feeling. It is your soul’s way of telling you that this person is incompatible with you. You are an amazing, wonderful, beautiful, intelligent person who is worthy of love. You don’t want to waste your time receiving love from somebody that you aren’t going to be able to love in return. Doing this is a waste of your precious time and it’s also a waste of his time as well. If you’re with somebody and you can already feel that you may be incompatible, you stringing him along and going on a second date or a third date with him is not only holding you back, but it is holding him back as well. To hold somebody back from finding love for themselves and finding true happiness is a terrible thing. You wouldn’t like somebody to do it to you. So you definitely should not be doing that to somebody else. You’re not being ‘nice’ by going on the second or third date with this man. The exact opposite actually.

When your gut speaks to you, when your soul speaks to you, listen. It is the truest form of communication that you will ever receive in your entire life. When your soul speaks to you, its only mission is to speak the truth, to guide you into positive situations that will serve you well, that will move you forward, that will keep you safe, that will bring you love. If you speak to anybody who is in tune with her body and her mind and who always listens to her gut feelings and acts upon them, you’ll find a person whose life is very fulfilled. This person knows

that they are on the right path, making good decisions frequently, getting in a lot less trouble than the person who doesn’t listen to their soul feelings. That’s because your soul feelings are there for a reason. They’re not a coincidence. They’re not just your mind playing tricks on you. Your soul feelings are real. The more that you listen to them, the closer that you will get to living a happy and successful life filled with love, filled with real relationships, filled with good decisions, and filled with peace. You’ll experience peace knowing that your spirit and your soul guide not only by your conscious and subconscious mind, but the decisions you are making also. The universe may be shouting at you, but your mind and body are whispering. Follow the signs.

The amazing thing about soul feelings is that we’ve had them with us our entire lives. Generally, they only show up in times of great need or in times of change. They’re there to help guide us. Have you ever been walking down the street late at night on your way home from being out to dinner or at work, and you just get a sense that somebody is walking behind you? Something within your body starts to create a fight or flight type of panic and anxiety within you. Instantly, you know that you need to get to somewhere safe quickly, to get yourself out of the situation that you’re currently in. And so, you may hop on the phone and pretend that you are talking to a friend or a police officer. You may run into the first building that has a light on, the first shop nearby and call a friend, or you might hop into a taxi and ask them to drive you home. It’s in those instances, you sensed fear and you acted upon that fear. You got yourself out of that situation as quickly as possible. Thank the heavens and your soul feelings.

There may be a situation where you’ve been asked to lie to somebody and you know straight away that you shouldn’t lie to that person. There’s a physical reaction that starts to occur inside your body and you start to feel anxious and worried about telling a lie. Now if you start feeling anxious and worried, it’s because your soul is telling you not to tell that lie. It’s telling you not to tell that lie because it may hurt somebody and you’re fully aware of the fact that it will most definitely hurt somebody. It’s telling you not to do it because you may get caught telling that lie and cause yourself unnecessary pain. It’s telling you to be honest because the person asking you to fib needs to learn that you can’t be dishonest without having to face up to your actions and speak the truth. And so,

you start feeling a physical reaction inside your body. You’ve got two choices here: You can decide to listen to your subconscious mind which will be telling you things such as ‘do what your friend is asking you to do,’ ‘what’s the problem with lying anyway,’ ‘no one’s ever going to find out,’ ‘don’t worry about it, just do it, just lie.’ The subconscious mind likes to rationalize its way out of a sticky situation. Or you can listen to your body that’s emphatically telling you, “If you do this, there are a boatload of negative things that could happen to you. You’re going to be in more pain if you lie than if you don’t. So don’t do it. You know, as well as I do, that telling a lie, and then getting caught, is going to cause you tremendous pain and anxiety. Don’t even get me started on the amount of worry you’ll have between telling the lie and the time of its discovery. This will only lead to a spike in cortisol levels in your belly—not good—and on and on. Your soul feelings like to talk, so listen. Turn up the volume and listen.

Listening to your gut will get you out of that situation. If you’re working in a job and your gut tells you that your boss is doing shady dealings behind your back, listen to your gut. You know that it never lies to you. That feeling, you didn’t ask for that feeling to come up. It just magically appears. It’s your soul’s way of showing up for you. She’s a real winner, your soul. But she can’t speak to you directly. If she did, it would scare to death. You’d probably think that you have to see a psychiatrist because you are hearing voices. Therefore, it communicates with you on a physiological level. Have you ever heard about the study of kinesiology before? Kinesiologists believe that all of the pain and the anxiety that you feel in your body, both physical and mental, is created by situations in your life manifesting in your body and causing your body physical pain. For example, it’s commonly thought that if you’re feeling pain in your lower back that it means that you are—in the mental realm of your body—carrying around a lot of baggage. You’re carrying around a lot of pain and anxiety and worry and stress. If you can relieve the pain and the things that you’re stressed about, and get rid of the anxiety from your mind, the kinesiologists believe that your back pain will disappear. The pain that you feel mentally manifests physically throughout your body. And so, with this in mind, it makes complete sense that once you start to feel that gut feeling, once you start feeling a physical reaction to a situation inside your body, again, it’s your body speaking to you. It doesn’t have a voice that you can hear, but our senses clue us in: smell, sight, touch, sound, and taste. Your body carries around in it a wealth of knowledge and a myriad ways of expressing that knowledge.

So the next time you’re chatting with potential relationship material or you’re on a date and you feel that something just isn’t right, turn around and walk away as fast as you can. Not only for you, but also for them. Life is short. We only get so many chances of finding love and falling into a relationship that will satisfy us and fulfill our dreams of getting married, having children and living an amazing life. So the faster you get rid of Mr. Wrong, the quicker you’re going to attract Mr. Right, and you’re finally going to be in a situation where you are blissfully happy and satisfied. So listen to your soul’s voice. What is she telling you right now about the person that you’ve been seeing most recently? Was she right? I’m sure she was. She’s not artificial intelligence. She’s authentic intelligence.

Part 3

THE SECRET ART OF FALLING IN LOVE

Chapter 13

MR. RIGHT, MR. RIGHT, WHEREFORE ART THOU, MR. RIGHT?

“My sister was with two men in one night. She could hardly walk after that. Can you imagine? Two dinners!”

~ Sarah Silverman, comedian

Online and app dating really did change the way society approaches dating. For the last 10 years people have virtually stopped trying to find ‘the one’ the old school way, and instead, we now rely almost entirely on trawling dating apps and websites, looking at photo after photo and profile after profile until we find someone that we find attractive. Messages ensue and we spend hours going back and forth, texting away, until hopefully after hundreds of texts, we get a date.

We have taken away the elements of natural chemistry and sparks. We have removed the universe’s ability to set us up with chance encounters. We have robbed ourselves of feeling the rush that we get when we bump into a stranger and instantly feel a physical pull toward them. We have taken away the rush of excitement that we feel when a cute boy comes up to us at a bar and offers to buy us a drink.

Guys don’t have to try anymore. Why put yourself out there and face potential rejection when you can hide behind a screen? Well, I have had it! I am sick of this new way of dating. So I am calling you out to me in the new dating revolution. It’s time to start kicking it old school, girlfriend! It’s time to get you

back into the real life dating game where you meet people face-to-face and feel the sparks and chemistry racing through your body! I want to take you back to a world where a man will approach you at a bar and ask if he can buy you a drink. And so I would like to introduce you to the world of face-to-face dating again. I am about to show you where you can go to meet like-minded singles face-toface and what to do when you get there.

SINGLES PARTIES & MEETUP GROUPS

Singles parties are generally held at bars, nightclubs or group dinners. They are a place where even the shyest of characters has the opportunity to meet some likeminded singles and have a chance at securing a future date.

When you first arrive at a singles party, if you have decided to be brave and turn up alone it can be an awkward experience for the first few minutes. You don’t know anyone and so you just sort of sit by yourself for a little while and try to get the lay of the land. If you want some help with meeting your first person because you do not feel confident walking straight up to some and talking to them then a great way to get an introduction is to ask around to try and find the organizer of the party. She will know everyone and be ionate and excited about introducing you to the other singles.

People tend to hang around in groups at the beginning of singles parties. They avoid immediate intimacy and putting themselves out there by sticking to groups so that they can enjoy the safety that numbers brings. It’s also a good way to learn about the other people in the group without being in a one-on-one situation. If someone strikes you as interesting in that group you can go and stand closer to him or perhaps offer to buy him a drink then lead him away from the group so you can talk.

If you are not lacking in confidence, then first grab a drink before taking a few minutes to survey the room, so that you can get a good look at the other singles. Try to look at as many people as possible before you approach your first person. The reason I say this is because it would be such a shame for you to approach the first person you see that you kind of like the look and feel of, only to notice someone you deemed more suitable 10 minutes later. The person you are currently with may have started to form a bond with you so it would be a shame for you to have to shatter his dreams of being with you by running off to talk to someone else.

Once you have picked the person you would like to approach, go in for the kill! Introduce yourself and then start to ask him questions about himself to get him talking so you can learn very quickly if he is someone you have a connection with. If it feels awkward and uncomfortable tell him that it was nice to meet him and then head to the bar where you can start to survey the crowd again, hopefully finding someone new to approach.

Try to talk to as many people as you can over the course of the night. You never know who you are going to click with, so work the law of numbers until you find someone you like!

CHOOSING WHICH PARTY TO ATTEND

Single parties are an interesting thing to attend. There are many benefits, but if you do not choose your party carefully you can run into a little trouble. You see, picking the right singles party is almost the same as working out who your perfect partner is before you go on a date. If you have not researched the singles party you are going to before you go, you may end up sorely surprised. The first thing you need to do is find out what type of party it is. Are the attendees singles who are looking for a relationship? Are they looking for casual dates or are they just looking to hook up? If you are in the market for a relationship and you turn

up to a singles party where people are just interested in one night stands, then it is highly likely you are not going to find Mr. Right. So before going to a party, call the organizer and ask her to tell you a little bit about the type of people who come to her parties. You also want to make sure that the people attending are in the right age group for you and a similar demographic. Turning up to a singles party filled with lawyer who love playing golf and are over 50 isn’t probably going to find you Mr. Right if you are a 30-year-old singer in a punk rock band. Your time is precious and there are literally hundreds of singles parties and singles meetups going on in every city, every week so take your time to pick and choose the right one for you.

HOW TO TURN A MEETING AT A SINGLES PARTY INTO A DATE

So you have met someone at the party and things are going well. You like them and they seem to like you. He’s a tad cute and by the way he is looking at you it is pretty clear that he approves, but he just wants to keep on chatting away and having more drinks, so how do you turn meeting at a singles party into a “real” date? Well the first thing you need to do is make sure that you do not turn your night out at the singles party into a sleepover. Sleeping with someone the first night you have met him is a sure fire way to put a dagger through the heart of any budding new relationship, so if you are drinking alcohol make sure you stay in control and know when you have reached your “I can still say no to sex” limit!

Before you head to the singles party, set yourself an alarm on your phone at a designated time to leave. A curfew. You will also need a rock solid reason for leaving, too. Now when this time rolls around for your alarm to go off and you announce that you have to leave, for whatever important reason you have decided upon you are going to be sending you new friend 3 strong messages.

1: You are a person who has places to go and people to see. You have your own life and you stick to your commitments.

2: That if he wants to see you again, he is going to have to ask for your number or ask you out on a date.

3: He will not be getting into your pants tonight!

Now if the person you have been chatting with is worth your time at all then all 3 of these messages will make you look more appealing to him. He will desire you more and definitely be asking you for a date. If he is not worth your time then he will get annoyed with you and try and convince you to stay.

He may not bother to ask you out on a date either because he is looking for a hook up tonight and you aren’t offering one. If this is the case, then thank God you found out tonight and not 3 dates in! Either way, using this exit strategy is the best way to find out your new friend’s true intentions and hopefully if you have both felt a real spark between one another, he will be positive and you will have snagged yourself a date!

SPEED DATING & MEET AT DINNERS

Speed dating is an interesting phenomenon that many people have heard about, but not many people have actually done before. You’ve seen it on Hollywood movies and on TV shows, and of course on Sex and the City. It seems sometimes to be a little bit awkward and strange, weird and chaotic. It’s often made a little bit of fun of in TV and on movies, but that’s because movies and TV are trying to be entertaining and are trying to make things look funny for comedic value. I

have been to many speed dating parties before and I’ve held speed dating parties through my matchmaker company. I do them because I think that they’re a fantastic way of a) refining your social skills, and b) putting yourself in front of as many people as you can, as quickly as you can, working the law of numbers and relying on the law of attraction to be able to bring you the men that you have always dreamed of. A lot of people don’t really understand what happens in speed dating parties, so I’ll explain.

Usually at speed dating, you have 10 to 20 tables set up in a circle. At those tables sit 10 or 20 women. We’ll say 20 for the rest of the book. So 20 women are the sitting at these tables and they remain seated the entire time. The men are the ones that get up and move around and come from table to table to table. I mean chivalry isn’t completely dead yet, is it ladies? And so, you sit at your table and when speed dating starts, the person that’s hosting the speed dating will say, “And the speed dating starts now.” Your first man will sit down in front of you. Now each speed dating date time will vary depending on the event and how many attendees there are, but usually, you get between five and seven minutes to sit and talk to the person that you’re having speed dating with. First of all, your first potential match sits down. Let’s call him Romeo. What you’re supposed to do is introduce yourselves, first of all. So he might say, “Hey, I’m Romeo. I’m 21 and I’m from Los Angeles. Where are you from?” You’ll say, “Oh, my name is Serena.” I’m not even going to mention my age. We’ll say 21 as well and I’m from Hollywood. (A girl can dream, right?) And then you’ll sit and chat away. You’ll talk to each other about things that you’re interested in, what you enjoy doing.

What I always like to do is ask deep questions very quickly and very early on to find out the things that I really want to know about somebody. Don’t be afraid of this strategy. It’s eye opening. So I’ll ask things like ‘tell me when was the last time you laughed so hard that you cried’ or ‘when was the last time you saw your mom’ and ‘what did you do when you saw her,’ or ‘when was the last time you quit a job and why.’ Asking those questions is going to help your partner or the person that you’re speaking to, to become very animated and to start telling you funny stories and anecdotes from his life or maybe sad stories. Instantly, it’s going to take away his mask. It’s going to stop him from giving you all of the

superficial answers that will normally happen when you first meet somebody. I like to call it ‘playing tennis.’ When you first meet somebody, you tend to go back and forth, back and forth. Hi, how are you? Good. How are you? What do you do for a living? What do you do for a living? What was the last book you read? What was the last book you read? Boring, boring stuff that isn’t telling you anything about who the person really is, what his values are, or what he’s into. So asking some deep questions when you’re doing speed dating is a fantastic way of going real deep, real quick, and learning very early on whether or not you have a connection with this person.

Five minutes and the speed dating MC will say, “Okay guys, time to move to your next date.” Your date will get up and he’ll move on. What happens to this guy now that he’s got up and moved on? Well, you usually will have a little sheet next to you, and next to his name, you’re going to write a couple of quick comments before the next person sits down. You’re going to write whether or not you want to see him by ticking a box yes or a box no. Your next date will come and your next and your next, and so forth and so on. Some of them will be great. Some of them will be terrible. Hopefully one or two of them will be a massive click for you. As they go along, you’re going to keep ticking or crossing out the box and writing comments about them.

At the end of the speed dating, when you’ve dated every single person that you’re going to date for the night, you’ll actually have a few minutes to have a look at all of the things that you’ve written down and reflect on all of the people that you liked, and had connections with and all the ones that you didn’t. Now if you had connections with three or four of them and you’d like to actually see them again, then you mark them down on a piece of paper. That’s given to the speed dating MC. The speed dating MC will then cross reference the people that you liked with you. If there are any matches, if there any people that you liked that liked you back, then you will be given their phone number and they will be given yours. At that point, you’re able to each other and hopefully a date will come from that. Hopefully, you can meet up straight after speed dating and go out on a date. Go and have a chat. Go and have a drink and have some fun. Maybe, just maybe, you might meet the one.

Now speed dating and the meetup dinners are a little bit different from each other. With speed dating, it can be quite quick and hectic. People get up, people get down. People get up, people get down. Whereas, at a meetup dinner, it is exactly that: a sit down dinner where you meet new people. Basically, it is you and about 20 other people sitting down at a table to have dinner, just as though they were all your friends and you had all decided to go out to have a celebration for someone’s birthday or an anniversary. All of you are gathered at a restaurant, sitting around a table and chatting with each other. The difference with speed dating and meetup dinners is definitely the timing. At meetup dinners, the male guests are encouraged to move around every 20 minutes, half an hour or so, so that again, like speed dating, they are working the room and they are going around and meeting all of the other women. However, you are getting to have a more in-depth conversation and its just not as rushed. Often, you find as well that conversations will break out on the table, so a topic might come up. For example, people might start talking about whether they like going on cruises for a vacation. And so, when your partner sits down next to you, you may just be continuing that conversation with them. So it is a little bit more relaxed than a speed dating session.

However, you generally don’t get to meet as many people as you would like to. Also, sometimes you can have someone who sits next to you that you don’t really like and for the next 20 minutes or so, you’re going to be stuck with him. The benefit of the length of time that you spend sitting with somebody at these meetup dinners is that, if you do find somebody that you like, having 20 to 30 minutes to sit down and really talk to him and start making a connection with him can be profound. It’s a huge amount of time for you to really start to feel the physical & mental chemistry between you and this other person. Quite often at meet up dinners, unlike with speed dating, if you do find someone that you click with pretty early on, after about half an hour if you’re really vibing with them and you’re really thinking ‘wow, this person and me, we have got some serious chemistry,’ then you can excuse yourself from the group dinner. You can leave and go off with each other and continue the dinner on your own. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that at all. At the end of the day, you’re basically at these dinners to meet new people and make connections. If you’ve made a connection, then your job is done.

So whether you choose to go to a speed dating or to a meetup dinner or both, just to always be honest and open about who you are as a person. that instead of asking boring, fluffy questions, go deep real fast and real quick. Here are some examples of questions that you can ask when you’re doing speed dating or meetup dinners that will help you go real deep, real quick.

When was the last time you sat down with your mom and had a conversation, and what did you talk about?

When was the last time that you cried?

When was the last time that you laughed so hard that you cried?

When was the last time that you had to say goodbye to somebody that you really loved?

When was the last time you were away on holiday and you saw something that absolutely took your breath away?

What is happening in the world that you are not happy with, that you wish that you could change?

Who was the first person that you ever fell in love with and can you how it felt?

What happened on your very first date that you ever went on ever in your whole life?

Who did you have your first crush on?

These questions all allow the person that you’re asking them to reflect back on his life, to reflect back on times that were happy, that were meaningful, that were powerful, that may have even been sad. Normally when you ask these questions, people don’t answer them very quickly. They don’t just go, “Oh…” No, instead what they do is they sit quite quietly sometimes for a few seconds or even a half a minute, thinking, going back through the archives of their mind, rewinding back to when they were younger or when they were in that situation, ing it and then sharing it with you. That’s just such a powerful thing because you’re giving them a gift. They’re sharing a story with you, that’s great, but you’re giving them the gift of helping them to relive and a time in their life that brought them a lot of joy or that made them really deeply feel. That’s not something that people get to do on a daily basis. It’s going to show your potential partner that you are somebody who is a lot deeper and less superficial than a lot of the other girls and a lot of the other dates that he may have been on before. It’s going to make him feel good about himself. If he can walk away from you feeling good about himself, then when they think about you later that night, it will only be positive. So go forth. Go out. Speed date, go to a meetup dinner, and have a ton of fun. This ain’t your momma’s dating scene anymore.

OUT AND ABOUT

Saturday night has rolled around and it’s time for you to go out with your

girlfriends. You’re going to be heading down to a club or down to a pub or out to dinner or out on the town somewhere. For the sake of this particular part of the book, we’ll say that you’re going to head out to a bar. You’re going to a bar and you’ve got your three favorite girlfriends with you and you’re all dressed up and you all look amazing. You do this all the time, but you seem to find that even though you’re going out to these bars, you’re just not meeting anybody. You and your girlfriends look great and you’re all bubbly and funny and drinking and open and having fun, but you just don’t seem to be meeting anybody at all and you’re wondering why. Well, let me tell you why. There are four different things that you can do and if you do them every time you go out, you’re definitely going to be able to start picking up dates.

The first thing that you need to do is make sure that you and your friends look approachable. If you’re standing around in a tight circle staring at each other and laughing and talking and being loud and excitable, then you’re not going to be projecting an aura of approachability to a potential partner. He’s going to look over at you and your girlfriends and straightaway, he’s just going to think they look busy; they look like they’re having a lot of fun. Also, because you’re with a lot of friends, it can be quite a threatening situation for a man to consider entering into. I mean he can potentially come up to you and ask you if you’d like a drink and he could feel incredibly embarrassed in front of everybody if you turn him down. And so, they will tend to shy away. What you need to do when you’re out with your friends and you’re drinking, is every now and then, make excuses or make a plan, but go off on your own. That might mean if you are sitting away from the bar, that you can go up to get the next round of drinks and be standing at the bar on your own for a few minutes. Or you can go over to the DJ booth to request a song or you can walk over to the restaurant to order something to eat. Try and take yourself away from the group every half an hour or so, just so that if someone has been watching you and he’s interested in you, you’re giving him the opportunity to approach you on your own.

Number two, don’t get too drunk. Sometimes when we’re out, we get a little bit carried away. When we haven’t gotten picked up and we’ve been there for a couple of hours, we start to feel a little bit depressed and we start to selfsabotage and tell ourselves forget it, we’re not going to find anyone, I’ve been

here for two hours, nobody’s interested in me, I’m going to self-sabotage, I’m going to drink and drink and drink until I out or until it doesn’t hurt anymore. And so, you get really drunk. Now half an hour has ed and you’re really quite drunk and Mr. Right walks in. He takes one look at you and he just thinks nope, no, that girl might be really pretty and she’s probably really nice, but there’s no way I’m going near her because she is drunk right now and she’s not the kind of person that I want to hang out with for the rest of my night. Or on the flipside, Mr. Right might decide to come and hang out with you, but because you’re drunk, you’re going to be very loud and very crazy, and you might end up being very sick. All you’re going to do is just disgrace yourself in front of him. So if you have gone out and about, and you would like to find a man, my suggestion is that you don’t drink as much alcohol as you would normally if you were going to just be going out with the girls and focusing only on the girls, having no desire in finding anyone at all.

Number three, when you’re sitting down, make sure that you’re sitting facing outward toward the other people, not sitting facing inward toward a table or toward a bar. If you’re sitting facing toward a table or a bar, the only thing the men in the bar are going to see is your back. Honestly, your back just isn’t really that appealing or entertaining. So make sure that you’re always sitting side on or front on, facing the rest of the people in the bar so that people can actually see you and will want to approach you. Your smile and your sparkling, shining eyes will attract the attention of others.

Number four, and this is the most important one of all, don’t be afraid to approach a man. If you ask any man on this planet how they would feel if a girl approached them at a bar and asked them if they would like a drink, they will at the top of their lungs screaming that they would absolutely love it and that they wish that it happened more often. So if you’re at a bar and you’ve been checking out a guy for a while and you’ve noticed that he’s been checking you out as well, get forward. If you think that there might be a bit of a spark there between you, if he hasn’t come up to you yet, maybe he’s a little bit shy, maybe he’s intimidated because he thinks you’re too beautiful, maybe your friends have been a little bit too crowding around you and he’s afraid that if he goes over to you, you might not want to talk to him because you’re just having a girls’

night...be the one who initiates. Get up, walk over to him, and say hi. Just introduce yourself and say hi. Ask him if he’s having a good time at the bar, ask him who he’s here with and just let the conversation flow. Now you’ll know pretty much straightaway whether or not this guy’s interested in you. He’ll either be completely engaged or he won’t be engaged at all. If he’s engaged, you don’t need any advice from me, just have as much fun as you can with the guy and enjoy your night. If he isn’t engaged, if you can tell straightaway that the guy isn’t interested, just simply say to him, “Anyway, I promised myself I’d be super friendly tonight and I’d go and say hi to 10 complete strangers. So I’m going to tick you off my list and keep going. Have an awesome night.” Just walk off and that’s it. He’s not going to think anything bad of you. He’s not going to think anything good of you. He’s just going to think, ‘oh yeah, that was a reasonably nice character, off she goes.’ No embarrassment. No shame. No reason to feel bad at all. The connection wasn’t there and you exited without making a fool of yourself. You’ve got guts.

These are the rules. When you’re out and about, you’ve just got to put yourself out there. You can’t just expect to do what you normally do and have a flurry of guys fawning over you. If you follow these four steps, I guarantee that the next time you go out, you’re going to meet lots of new people and lots of potential 10/10s.

SINGLES HOLIDAYS

Singles holidays are without a doubt one of the best ways that you can meet a man, get to know him really, really well, and find out whether or not there’s a love connection. Not only that, but they are one of the most romantic and exciting and heart pounding ways that you can experience this crazy little thing called love. So what is a singles holiday? Basically, a singles holiday company will construct a vacation that has been designed to help you to meet people, make new friends, and maybe fall in love. The singles vacations company, iHeart Matchmaking, is the singles vacations that I run. What I like to do is create situations where you can interact with lots of single people, where you can go on

dream dates, but also where you can experience really fun and exciting activities while you’re on vacation, things that you may not have experienced if you went on the same vacation by yourself.

I’ll run you through a typical day on a singles holiday. First of all, you’d wake up in the morning and you would go and have a group breakfast. So a group breakfast is just basically a breakfast at a restaurant or around a big group table. So at the table, you would be able to start mingling with the other singles that are on the trip with you, talking about your expectations for the trip and what you’re hoping to have happen, and just basically getting to know people whilst enjoying your breakfast. After that, you would go off and you do a really exciting activity. So if for instance we were holding the singles holiday in Cabo, in Mexico, you might go out in a group and go jet skiing or you might go out on a cruise for the morning. You might go out fishing. You might go to the local safari park and have a look at the wild animals. You might go and do a dancing class. Something interesting. Something strange. Something unusual. You might go and look at some ruins. But you go out adventuring, and while you’re adventuring, you’ll be with a group of single people. You’ll be out sharing the experience with them, doing fun, exciting activities that you never usually do, that are challenging for you and that really push your boundaries and break your boxes.

And so by doing this, you’re doing these activities with people that are also doing them for the first time. And so, you’re able to share the joy of a new experience with them. Or you’re doing it with people that have done it before, and so they’re able to help you with the activity that you’re doing and vice versa. All the while you’re starting to look at the men that are on the trip and finding out which ones you like and which ones you think you’ll be compatible with. You’ll start to see the way that they act in certain circumstances which is a really great way of getting to know somebody, because sitting down at a dinner and just talking to somebody back and forth, back and forth, is purely conversation. It’s not showing you how they move, how they think, the way that they act around other people, how caring and loving they are or how distant they are. By doing these activities with them, you’re able to see those attributes straight away.

Next you’ll go on a dream date. So once a day, you’ll actually go on a date with a compatible match. So the matchmaker for the trip will have worked out which five or six people you’re going to be going on dates with for your trip. All of those people will be people that you are compatible with, that have attributes that you desire. And so, you get to go on a dream date and each day the dream dates are different, but they’re very exciting. One dream date could be riding an elephant. Another dream date could be exploring a waterfall. Another dream date could be cocktails made by an amazing mixologist in front of you at a bar or by the pool. When you’re on these dates, you’ll have at least a couple of hours where you’ll get to have one on one time with a compatible match. With that match, you’ll be able to start learning about them more, who are they, what are their dreams. You’ll be asking the deep questions that we discussed earlier on in this chapter, questions about what last made them cry or what excites them most in the world or where they’d like to be in 10 years’ time. You’re really getting to get a sense of who these people are. Also, you’re in an incredibly romantic setting. You’re in Cabo or you’re in Bali or you’re in Hawaii. You’re somewhere where romance is in the air even if you’re sitting down with the most basic of characters. And so, it really is conducive of falling in love. You do find on singles holidays that men do tend to fall for women quicker. They do tend to become more infatuated a lot faster. It could also have to do with the fact that the weather is quite warm, and so they are seeing a lot more skin that normal, but that’s another story.

And then after you’ve had your dream date, you get some time on your own so you can relax and unwind. Then in the evening, comes the singles get together. So that is usually in the form of a party or going on a cruise of some sort or going out to see some live music and some dancing or maybe even something as crazy as karaoke or a talent show. It’s going to be a night where you’re going to have a whole heap of fun and you’re going to be able to let your hair down, have a few drinks, dance around, let go of all of your inhibitions, and just start to approach some of the single people that you’re interested in, and no doubt start being approached by some of the single people that are interested in you. So a singles holiday really is going to guarantee that you’re going to have a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. You’re going to feel a lot of romance and you’re going to be put in situations where you might be able to have some very powerful romantic moments, walking hand in hand on a beach, kissing as the sun sets, walking with your toes in the sand, sailing on a beautiful yacht. There are just so many

moments that you could have on a singles holiday that will simply take your breath away.

When you go home, not only would you have made friends with some men and hopefully found the one, but also, you would have made friends with a lot of the other girls that have been on the singles holiday as well. I mean the girls are all just like you. They’re all going on a singles holiday because they’re looking for love. Girls on singles holidays are very respectful. If they know that you’ve had a spark with somebody and that person has had a spark with you and that you two are starting to develop a relationship, they’ll back off. They’ll walk away. Those are part of the rules of going on a singles holiday; respect the new bonds and the new relationships that are being formed.

And so, on a singles holiday, you really are going to have the opportunity to meet people, make friends, and maybe even fall in love. So if you have the money, if you have the means and the time to be able to take a singles holiday, give yourself the gift of love, give yourself the gift of going on one of these trips because it will be an experience you will literally for the rest of your life. Hopefully, you will it because it will be the place where you met the one.

BLIND DATES

What is a blind date and how do I get one?

Believe it or not, you have an untapped resource available to you when it comes to finding a date, and that is your friends, your family, and your work colleagues. You’d be absolutely surprised at the reaction that you get if you ask one of your friends, “So, tell me, do you know anybody that you think I might be interested

in dating?” Being set up on blind dates is often a great way to find a date that is quite compatible with you, because you’re asking a friend or a family member, who knows you quite intimately, to think about somebody that they know that they believe may be compatible with you. They sit there and they scour through their list of friends and associates, and suddenly one or two people pop out of their heads. Of those one or two people your friend or family member has thought, “Yes, this person would really suit my friend. He has the attributes that she’s looking for. He’s nice. He’s kind. He’s good-looking and they have similar interests.” And therefore, you know that if you go on this date, at least your friend will be sending you to see somebody who is going to be nice, and kind, and polite to you, and already has your friend’s stamp of approval because your friend is friends with him.

It’s important if you are going to ask one of your friends or family to set you up on a blind date, that you set some ground rules and parameters for them when they’re actually making the appointment. First of all, you need to let your friend know what you’re looking for in a relationship. If you are looking just to have fun and have a quick fling they need to know about it, because if it’s a long-term relationship they need to know about that, too. Make sure the person they are setting you up with is going to meet your criteria. You want to make sure that the guy has a job. Or it’s important to you that he does or doesn’t have children. All these questions should be asked beforehand, to make sure that when you go on this date you’re 100% sure it’s really going to be set up exactly the way that you want it to be. And, it’s just such a fantastic feeling because it’s going to take all the worry away from you and you’re just going to be able turn up the surety and feel more confident going into this blind date.

A lot of the times in Internet dating we get fooled by false profile pictures. We have absolutely no way of checking and so we don’t know whether or not the profile pictures are accurate. However, if you’re being set up by a friend and you go through the photos, you’re going to be able to ask them, is this really what he looks like? So, that you’re really going to be able to get an idea of what he looks like. You can ask, ‘Can you show some other pictures?’

Blind dates are fantastic and it’s very rare that you’ll go on a blind date and not have an amazing time. You may not find a love connection, because after all those can be quite rare, but you might find—you are at least going to find yourself a new friend. So, get on the phone, call your friends, call your family, speak to your workmates, and start going on some blind dates. And please, that you’re not going to be putting your friends out by asking them to fix you up on a blind date. Instead, they’re going to get really excited and they’re going to really enjoy thinking about who they can fix you up with. Take it from me, I’m a Cupid for a living, and I absolutely love what I do. Give your friends and family the opportunity to help you find love by playing Cupid with you, too.

Who the Blind Date Suits

Blind dates are perfect for you if you are the kind of person who likes to be very prepared when walking into a date, with your eyes wide open.

It’s funny that they’re called blind dates, because, really, a blind date is the type of date where you’re going to have the most intel and the most accurate and realistic information about your potential partner before you meet them. I mean, the way the blind date is organized is by your friends and family, or people that you are very close to who have your best interest at heart and who care for you. And they’re fixing you up with their friends, and their colleagues, people that they know really well and that they also care about and have very deep and insightful intel about. So, if you’re the kind of person who likes to be very well prepared, going on a blind date is definitely for you.

And, I mean, they’re not blind dates anymore, are they? The second that we know the full name of the person we’re going on the date with we’re going to be straight onto Facebook and Instagram, stalking them to see every single photo and look at every single message and look at every single interaction we possibly can about them. These blind dates really aren’t blind dates at all.

How to Prep for a Blind Date

Preparing for a blind date is an interesting thing because generally, what we’ll be doing is going onto their Facebook profiles and their Instagram profiles to learn everything that we can about them. Once we learn everything we can about them, we will then decide to mirror and shape ourselves to be the type of date that we think that they’re going to want. This can be a bit of an issue because going on a date with a person and being the way that you think they want you to be isn’t necessarily the best thing to do.

Again, even though you may think that they want to have a girl that’s going to turn up in a short miniskirt and high heels with pig tails, if that’s not who you are authentically, then that’s not the way you should be presenting yourself on a date. You have to maintain your authenticity, no matter how much intel you’ve been able to gather about your potential date. So, we’re going to keep our appearance exactly how we normally look. However, if we do find out, for example, that our blind date’s favorite color is blue, and we do like blue as well, and we do happen to have a little blue dress that does look really attractive on us, then yes, it’s okay to wear that blue dress. In the same way that if you looked at all of the books that your blind date likes and one of the books that he likes is a book about girls wearing stilettos, and you own a pair of stilettos and you like wearing stilettos, wear those shoes, too. You know, you’re going to be given the opportunity where you can learn about your date, and you can find out different things that he likes and he enjoys, so if it’s authentic to you, incorporate them into your look and also into the things that you talk about on your date. But, please, I can’t stress this enough, only pick things that resonate with who you are genuinely. Do not lose sight of the fact that you need to maintain 100% authenticity when you are on your date.

Reaching Out to Your Blind Date

There will come a time before your date commences that you will need to reach out to your potential partner. You’re going to need to arrange a date and a time and a place to meet. And so, you are going to need to interact with each other. This offers you a fantastic opportunity to be able to break down any insecurities and awkward and uncomfortableness before actually meeting on a blind date. Traditionally with blind dates, you would actually not speak to the person that you are being fixed up with, and you would just turn up out of the blue, looking for the red rose in the lapel, and then sits down and says “hello” to them. You wouldn’t have had any time to research them online, you certainly wouldn’t have had any time to talk to them, and so, you really were being dunked into the deep end, but that’s not the nature of blind dates today. As I said earlier in the book, you’ve already done your research. You already have a good understanding of who this guy is, and now you’re actually going to get to interact with him before you get to meet him on the date.

Now, the natural response would be to reach out via a text message, and that text message is going to be crucial, because you don’t want to start getting into a long-winded conversation over a text, where you’re going to learn everything about his likes and his dislikes and what his favorite color is and what you have in common and what you don’t have in common. The reason you’re going to be reaching out by text is to say hello, introduce yourself, say how excited you are about meeting the person, and then arranging a time and a place for you guys to meet. Do not get into lengthy conversations with your blind date before you meet. If you do that, you’re going to find the same situation that you get if you’re chatting to somebody for any length of time through online dating. You’re going to get in a set of circumstances where you’ve already had those crucial and bond-forming conversations before you’ve met, which means that when you sit down with them on the date, you’re really not going to have very much to discuss in the first 15 minutes and you’re going to feel quite awkward.

Limit your interactions with your blind date to being very friendly and bubbly and lush, just asking how their day was, and then saying how excited you are for the date, and then fixing up the space and the time. Now, if your date does start

trying to engage with you in conversation, then the best thing that you can say is “I’d like to leave all those questions up to your imagination, and I’ll discuss them with you in depth when we meet. Can’t wait to meet you. See you on Tuesday.” You cheeky little vixen, you.

Where to have your blind date

Now picking a good place to have your date and an appropriate time for your date is important, because it’s going to really set the scene for the evening. You need to decide on the place you want to go and the time you want to have your date so it fits in with your lifestyle and it doesn’t cause you any stress. If you have children, you want to make sure that the date is going to be at a time when you’re not going to have to be responsible for them, so that you’re not constantly looking at your clock worrying about where they are and what they’re doing or what time they’re going to get home. Make it—the date—as easy on you as you can. I mean, if this guy is interested in you, he will make the time to come and see you where and whenever you please.

I like to say that having a blind date somewhere that is quite open and quite public is advisable, so going to a restaurant, obviously, or to a bar, is a good thing to do. There are many reasons why you want to be in a place where there are lots of other people. Firstly, there’s a lot of background noise going on, so if there are some uncomfortable silences, at least they’re filled in with other voices and music and other white noise going on around you. There’s also always a flurry of activity going on when you’re in a restaurant or in a bar, so if you run out of things to talk about, then you’re able to potentially look over at a couple that are laughing at the bar and comment on how you wonder what it is that they’re talking about. You’ll be able to talk about the food if you’re having a meal and how good it is. You’ll be able to compliment each other on their drink choices or insult each other in a joking way, depending on what the case may be and your date’s sense of humor. But there are lots of little things that are going on around you that will help you to carry on a conversation, if the conversation’s moving slowly. And if it’s moving at a glacier speed, smile, nod and take a sip of

your drink until the next topic pops into your head.

Another great thing about being in a public place, too, is that if you are in a circumstance where you really aren’t connecting with the person you’re on the blind date with, you can sneak off to the bathroom and initiate a “Getaway call!”

It’s ok to leave a date early if you just aren’t feeling sparks. The guy is just going to have to get over it. Maybe it will inspire him to lift his dating game a bit! If that does happen, don’t let it sour you against blind dates completely. Just learn from your mistakes. Think about the questions that you probably should have asked your friend that you didn’t, so that next time you set up on a blind date, you can be much more prepared.

Ten Great Get to Know You Questions

When you’re out on your first blind date, here are some questions you can ask that will help to open up your partner, and help him feel more relaxed and at ease with you. Asking a question like “Where do you live?” is a common question, and it’s not very in-depth. They’re going to probably give you a one word answer, for example, Brighton. Once they give you that answer, though, it’s the follow-up question that’s going to really help to open up your partner and to learn more about them. So you can ask things like “Why did you choose to live there?”

Your next natural question would be, “What do you do for a living?” Again, when they tell you what they do, let’s just say a doctor, if you’re really lucky, what the next question you can ask is “What interested you about that particular career path?” Again, that question is going to open up your partner and get them to really come alive and talk to you about why they do what they do. “Do you

have kids?” is an important question. If they say they do have kids, asking them what’s the best part about being a mom, or being a dad is a good question. If they don’t have kids, ask them “Is that something that you can see in your future?”

“What do you like doing in your spare time?” And if they say something like football, ask them “What do you get out of playing football? What are your team like? What was your best memory from playing football?”

One of my favorite questions to ask is, “What is your favorite country?” The reason I like to ask that is because if this person that you’re on a date with has traveled before, generally most of our travel experiences are mostly positive, and some of the most amazing memories we’ve ever created have been overseas or out traveling, and so by asking this question you’re able to help your date to reflect back onto a time when he was really happy and really enjoying himself. Not only that, but it’s going to let your date have the opportunity to show how worldly he is, and to talk about experiences outside of his every day, mundane life, and to describe experiences that he’s had that really changed his life and made him the person that he is today. If your date answers their favorite country was America, you can then spend hours talking about different areas of America, “What states did you go to? What food did you eat when you were over there? What shows did you go and see, what games did you play, what were the people like?” Asking questions about travel and being overseas opens up an absolute floodgate of stories, questions, and conversational topics. That one question alone will have you talking for hours.

“What do you like doing at home when it’s raining?” This question is a great question because it’s going to get your partner to talk to you about what they like to do when no one’s around, when they’re stuck at home and all they have is themselves to entertain. It’s going to give you a real insight into who they really are as a person and what they’re going to be like if you start dating them. It’s one thing to say what they’re like when they go out, but let’s face it, how often do we go out, especially when we hit 27, 28, 29, we definitely start slowing down our

‘going out time’ and start spending a lot more time at home. It’s going to be a great opportunity for you to be able to relate to your date, because a lot of the things that they say are definitely going to be things that you do, too—watching TV, listening to music, reading, cooking, relaxing, sleeping in, all the things you’ll be able to relate to and you’ll be able to tell your date that you do yourself.

“What do you like to read and what was the last book that you read?” This is a good question because it’s going to tell you a lot about the person you’re with, straightaway. They’re either a reader, or they’re not. If they are a reader, it’s going to tell you that it’s somebody who has quite a creative mind, and who has a mind that is stimulated by visualizing things. It’s going to tell you that they like to hear stories and to go on journeys and they like a little bit of fantasy in their life. If somebody isn’t a reader and doesn’t read books, it probably means they’re more of a realist, somebody who likes to live in the present, and somebody who is more of a storyteller than a story reader. This will give you an insight into their personality. Now if they are a reader, the next question would be “What sort of genre of books do you like?” and from there, just like with asking about their favorite country, it’s going to open an absolute plethora of questions that you’re going to be able to ask. It’s a great opportunity for you to talk about the books that you read as well, and by telling them about the books that you read, you’ll be giving them insight into your life.

Let’s look at different genres of books. If people are into reading crime novels, it means that they’re into finding answers and finding solutions to problems. All crime novels are about a crime occurring, and then the processes that go on behind the scenes to help that crime be solved, and so people that enjoy reading crime novels are generally people that enjoy solving problems. If the genre they selected is romance, then you are in, my friend, because anyone who reads romantic novels is an absolute hopeless romantic, hoping that one day they’ll be put in a set of circumstances where they can have a mad, completely head over heels, enthralling love affair, and if that’s what you are looking for from a date, then you are in, my friend.

If they say they like reading novels about history, then this clearly tells you that these people have a mind that is very interested in history and it definitely opens up the floor for asking many more questions about what parts of the world they’re interested in learning history about, what eras they’re interested in. It also shows that the person that you’re talking to is somebody who has the ability to think big, and enjoys learning about other people and their experiences. He is someone who gains a lot of pleasure from learning about other people’s experiences. When you read books about the past you’re reading about experiences that you will never be able to experience yourself. The world has changed so that life as they knew it back in the era of these books just doesn’t exist anymore. Nostalgia surrounds this person. This means it opens up the floor for you to be able to ask a lot of questions about the person’s personal history. Does he know much about his great-grandparents? Where does his bloodline come from? How far back has he looked at his own personal history? Where did his family name originate? He’s likely to ask you some of those same questions in return.

If you’ve read any books from any of the genres that your date is saying he is interested in, then why not suggest a book for him to read? Or with your next date, why not bring him one of your favorite books for him to read? Ask him to bring one of his favorite books for you to read. That way, you’re able to share each other’s ions, but it also means that you now have his book and he has yours, so there’s definitely a reason to have another date. It’s a literary love connection. How novel!

“What were you like in high school?” We all know that unless we were unfortunate enough to have been bullied in high school, our high school years were some of the best and some of the worst we ever had. They were our training ground. They were the place where we made friends and lost friends, where we fell in love and had first kisses and many, many first times, and our teenage years were also a period of time that we’re very nostalgic about. Most people even say that the music we love most and that we listen to most as we move into our ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and even ’60s will be music that we heard and listened to when we were at high school in our teenage years. They were the last moments in our life when we were completely footloose and fancy free, and

we’ll always look back on those times really fondly. Recalling high school when you’re on a date will bring lots of laughs and nods in agreement. You’ll often be able to relate and that’s a sure way to build rapport in a budding relationship.

And so asking your date to go back to that period of time, that period when they were footloose and fancy free without a care in the world, when life was filled with potential and the world was at their feet, is always a fantastic thing to do. It’s going to bring your date a lot of joy as he walks down memory lane with you. When you’re asking him what he were like in high school, he’s going to describe a person that he really loved, or somebody that he really felt pity for, but either way, you’re going to get a lot of insight into where this person has come from, and it’s also going to be a great situation for you because he’s going to ask you that question as well, and you’re going to have the ability to talk to him about all of the fun and excitement you experienced as a teenager. I think when you learn about what it was like to be a teenager or to be at high school; it really gives you insight into what the person’s life has been like from then on, until this point. You’re going to see if they were a person who had made a lot of mistakes and is now come really far, or if he was a person who was very straight and is now trying to rebel a little bit and break the rules. One thing’s for sure. Pretty much 99% of the population is absolutely nothing like the person that they were in high school. You’ll have a lot of fun with this question. There’ll be a lot of laughing, and a lot of relating, and by the end of both your answers, I’m sure that you’ll both be starting to feel a connection, if there is a soul connection there for you two to discover.

“Who is your favorite band?” If your partner says they don’t have a favorite band, you can change the question to being, “What is your favorite song?” But we all love music. Music is a universal language, whether you’re from Africa, the Philippines, England, Malaysia, or Los Angeles, it makes absolutely no difference. A good song is a good song, and music unites us. It unites the world and it will unite you two, especially if you both have similar musical interests. And I think it’s important not to underestimate the power of having music as a common interest, because if one of you loves heavy metal and the other loves pop music, in a long term relationship, you’re going to have a lot of clash, banging and clanging at home, and a lot of people walking around wearing ear

phones instead of enjoying music together. If your partner likes the same music as you, then that’s a fantastic thing. You’ll spend a lot of time talking about your favorite songs and interactions you’ve had with the band, be it through a concert or being a fan or watching a DVD. If you like different music then it can also be very interesting, too. If your partner likes heavy metal and you’ve never listened to a heavy metal band in your life, then it’s a good opportunity for you to learn about the mind of a heavy metal music lover. Ask them why they love the music, which songs they like, what lyrics stand out for them, how has the music affected their lives, have any of the songs that they love the most been present during important moments in this person’s life, like during the long ride out a wedding, a funeral, a party.

There are a lot of songs that we all have that will trigger memories, trigger emotions for us. I have a song that, whenever I hear it, it takes me back, way back, so I’ll share this memory with you now. It was 1994 and it was the evening of my debutant ball, and my best friend Hannah Solven and I had splurged. We had rented ourselves a limo and we were on our way to pick up our two dates, and I got into the car and Hannah was very excited because she had created a playlist. And the first song that came on when we got into that car was This is How We Do It by Montell Jordan. Now—every single time I hear that song—I flash back to being in the back seat of that car with my best friend in our frilly white dresses, looking ridiculous, looking actually like we were about to get married, very angelic, but rapping at the top of our voices, “If you were from where I’m from, then you would know that I’ve got to get mine in a big fat truck, you can get yours in a ’64.” It’s funny, even though that was more than 20 years ago, I still it like it was yesterday, and that song still runs chills down my spine—happy chills, every time I hear it.

“Who was your first kiss and what was it like?” This is my favorite question of all because our first kiss was a moment in time where we felt extreme emotions. Maybe not love, certainly lust, fear, excitement, joy, embarrassment, happiness, There were many emotions; our bodies were literally feeling every single moment of that kiss, our skin tingling, our hearts skipping a beat. Bringing your date back to that moment in time where he experienced his first kiss is going to help re-awaken and reignite those emotions and those feelings inside him, which

can only be a positive thing for you. When you talk about your first kiss, make sure that you are honest and authentic, without being too over the top about how too madly in love you were with this person. At the end of the day, we don’t want your date to think you’re going to become some kind of crazed-stalkerbunny boiler after the first kiss. My apologies, Glenn Close; you rock.

So now you have a big suitcase full of questions that you can ask on your first blind date or at any face to face date for that matter. And so, you’re ready to take the plunge. Before continuing to read any more of this book, perhaps you should put it down for a moment, pick up the phone, and boldly go where you’ve never gone before by calling one of your best friends or your family , and telling them you’re ready, and you’d like them to fix you up on a blind date. Hop online and start looking for singles parties, singles meet up groups or singles vacations. Call your single BFF and invite her out to go to a bar or meet at dinner this weekend with you. Don’t waste a second. It’s time for you to kick it old school and put yourself back into the reality dating game. Mr. Right is out there waiting for you!

Chapter 14

THE QUEEN OF FIRST IMPRESSIONS

“You will never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

~ Will Rogers

THE SPIN CYCLE

So you’ve done it, you have been able to use your charisma and your amazing personality to attract a guy to the point where he wants to go on a date with you. The time has been set. The place has been arranged. Now all that’s left is for you to get ready. And so now, we’re going to spend a little bit of time in front of the mirror and inside your wardrobe. We’ve all heard the old cliché term, “first impressions are everything.” And you know what? They really do help set the scene.

Now when you’re thinking about what you’re going to wear on your first date, it’s important to do two things. Number one, make sure you wear an outfit that shows your date that you have spent time and effort getting ready for him. An outfit that’s going to show him that you care about his opinion of you enough that you’ve spent time making yourself look as good as you can. The second thing you need to do is make sure that you dress authentically. When I say authentically, I mean you need to wear clothing that is going to show your true essence and your true style. So what does that mean? Well, first of all, when we’re talking about dressing to impress, there’s nothing better than when you walk up to a date and the person sitting opposite you is looking really good. His

shirt is ironed; her dress looks like it’s never been worn before. You can clearly see that he’s stood in front of the mirror and made sure that they have spent an hour getting ready instead of just five minutes, that he’s put forth time and effort into their appearance. While he’s been getting ready and getting dressed, he’s been thinking about ways he can impress you.

So when looking through your wardrobe and you’re getting ready for your first date with this new individual, make sure that it’s not something that you’ve gone and rushed through. If the date is after work, prepare the clothes before you leave the house in the morning. Have them all laid out on the bed, ironed and looking absolutely beautiful because not only are you going to be able to impress your date by your well-prepared attire, but you’re also going to help yourself. As we all know when we are dressed to the nines and when we have our war paint on, we’re always feeling more confident. Crazy confident. I liken it to going to a job interview. If you’re going to a job interview for a job that you really, really want, you’re not going to be putting on just any old outfit. You’re going to be finding your absolute best outfit, your best suit. It’s going to be prepared to absolute perfection so that when you walk into the interview you’re going to impress the interviewer. Besides which, you’re going to feel completely confident because you know you’re portraying the best version of yourself. And so why would a date be any different? A job is a job, but love is love. So if you’re going to go the extra mile with a job interview outfit, then technically, you need to be spending just as much, if not more, time on the outfit that you’ll be wearing on your date. Think of it as an interview with the possible Mr. Right.

Now let’s talk authenticity. Wear an outfit that’s going to show your true personality and your true character. If you are a bubbly and quirky person, don’t be afraid to style your hair in a way that’s going to reflect who you are every single day. If your date doesn’t love you straight off the bat for being the person that you actually are, then there is no point being with that person at all. I can a couple of dates that I went on in the past. There was one guy in particular that I had flirted with online for a while. He was gorgeous, a businessman, very well-dressed, always in a suit and a tie, amazing job, earning beaucoup money. The hobbies that he had were all very sophisticated. He enjoyed playing golf and going to the races. His photos often pictured him in

front of media boards at hot spot launches.

When we meet I should dress up, I thought. I wanted to mirror his personality. I wanted to make myself into the person whom he would want: fancy-shmancy. So I getting dolled up in a dress that I had bought for the races a few years earlier. It had cost me $450 and was fairly conservative. I looked amazing. Let’s face it, I looked great. But I wasn’t being me. I’m kind of eccentric. I like lots of crazy colors. I love clothes that are tight fitting. I enjoy showing a little bit of skin. I’m a sexy, flirtatious person by nature. And so, when I turned up to this date, even though I looked attractive, I didn’t feel like myself. I sat down at the table and started acting differently than I normally would have. I felt like I needed to be incredibly well-mannered. I needed to speak in a very articulate fashion when I was ordering my Pinot Gris instead of getting my normal Toblerone Cocktail. Basically, about a half an hour into the date, my date turned around and he said to me, “You know what? You are not at all like I expected you to be. Looking at your profile pictures, you were just so fun and exciting and crazy. From chatting to you online and from looking at your Facebook profile, I really thought that you are quite an outgoing and excitable character. But sitting here with you now, you’re actually quite conservative and I’m really shocked. You’re very different from what I thought you would be.” Now I was the one who was shocked. And added, “Look, I think you’re wonderful, but honestly, I really had started to fall for your crazy and quirky personality. I mean that’s what got us here to come on this date. I guess you’re just very different from what I expected.”

I spoke of trying to impress him because I had looked at his profile and I had seen the way that he was in his profile pictures. I had decided to try and be the girl that I thought he would want me to be. He responded, “Look, can we just drop the act? Can you just act like yourself? Just be completely normal, completely chilled out and the rest of the date is going to be really good.” And that’s what I did. I let down my guard and I acted like myself. I ended up pulling the hairpins out of my hair and letting my hair down and swapping my Pinot Gris for my cocktails. We ended up having one of the most amazing dates I’ve ever had in my entire life. His photos were all work related because they were practically the only ones he had that were recent. And so the next time that we

went on a date, we ended up going to a bowling alley and we both sauntered up in what we would normally wear which was our scruffy jeans and a T-shirt. I had my hair in pigtails. Our second date was phenomenal because we were both being completely authentic.

It made me realize that the clothes that you wear are really like a mask. They are a mask that you can either hide behind, or use to embrace your beautiful personality. You have to that there is no point going on a date with somebody and dressing in a way that isn’t authentically you. By doing that, you’re basically just playing a role and you’re showing your date that you don’t think that your actual, real personality and the real way that you dress is good enough. You don’t think you’re good enough for this particular person. The other thing that you’re showing them is that you have an almost dishonest side because instead of going on a date and saying to the person that you’re on a date with, “This is who you are on a date with. This is exactly who I am. This is what I look like. This is what I wear. This is how I roll,” you’re basically deceiving him by showing him somebody you aren’t. You’re showing thim a person who doesn’t exist.

FOR HIM

Let’s go through some wardrobe basics. First of all, some tips for the men. The first thing we want to talk about here men—beautiful, wonderful, amazing men —is how to dress to impress while still remaining authentic. So first of all, we’ll talk about the casual guy. If you’re the casual guy and your normal attire is wearing jeans and a T-shirt and having your hair a bit messy and scruffy, then that’s basically what you’re going to need to wear to your date. The only thing that you’re going to have to do though to help the girl realize that you’ve made an effort when you’re coming to see her is either buy a new pair of jeans or make sure that that pair of jeans you’re going to be wearing has been washed the night before and has been ironed to perfection so that when you do turn up, you look well put together. You look like a man who is authentic and wearing clothes that he loves, but also somebody who knows the value of being clean and well-

groomed. You want to impress somebody. It’s the same with your T-shirt as well. If you’re going to be wearing a T-shirt, find your absolute best favorite T-shirt, the one that makes your eyes look amazing. Take that T-shirt, wash it, iron it to perfection, and then wear it. Wear some nice aftershave, make sure you’ve actually shaved, brush those teeth. Wear a nice watch. Make sure your shoes are clean and never wear sneakers on a first date. I don’t care how authentic you’re trying to be.

If you are really dressing down and you’re not able to use your clothes to impress the girl because you’re trying to be authentic and the authentic you is very laid-back, then make sure that you’re able to give the girl a gift to help her feel as though you did spend some time preparing for this date with her. It doesn’t need to be an expensive gift. In fact, if you know anything about girls, it’s that we would prefer a gift that’s either been handmade or handpicked and that comes from the heart, rather than something that’s been purchased in a store. So picking some flowers on the way to a date, drawing a picture, a single red rose, chocolate—absolutely anything. Your gift will say, “Listen, I have been thinking about our date all day. I’ve been thinking about you and ways to make you happy and I have gone out of my way to get something for you because I’m so excited about meeting you and I want to make you happy.” That’s what you need to do as far as dressing to impress is concerned.

Now if you’re a man who likes to wear a suit, if you’re somebody from more of a corporate world, again, it is important to make sure that you take time to prepare for this date and to wear the right clothes to show the girl that you have dressed to impress. If you’ve been to work and you’ve been wearing a suit all day, that’s great but it’s not good enough for you to wear on your date. You need to go home and you need to get changed, a nice fresh shirt that’s completely uncreased, then add a dash of some sinfully sensational cologne. Wear your absolute best outfit, but at the same time, make sure that you’ve really gotten to know the girl and you understand the type of person she is, too. If you’re going to turn up in a suit, but you know that she’s a very down-to-earth person who’s going to be wearing jeans and a T-shirt, then you might get yourself into a set of circumstances where the girl will feel really uncomfortable or inferior because you were so much more well-dressed than her. So it’s important for you to gauge

those signals as well. If you are a suit-wearing man, but you know that the girl will be wearing a more casual outfit, then perhaps try to dress down just a little bit. Now dressing down doesn’t mean being scruffy and unprepared and poorly groomed, but what it does mean is instead of wearing the suit, jacket and the tie, maybe just wearing the suit pants and a shirt. So that way, you’re still being authentic, you’re still wearing an outfit that you would normally wear and you’re still being you, but you’re just being a more casual version of you so that you can be more accommodating to your partner. This is an art and a science.

You know clothing on a first date is important. If you pick your outfits correctly, then what you’re going to be able to do is a) impress her, but b) make her feel really comfortable being around you because if she’s feeling comfortable and relaxed, then your date is going to be amazing. When you’re getting dressed, when you’re in your wardrobe just before your next date, think about two things. One, make your date feel as though you have been thinking about the date you’re about to go on, that you’re excited about meeting her and you really want to show her that you’ve put effort into your outfit because you want her to like your appearance. Two, make sure that you make her feel completely comfortable. By wearing an outfit that is going to set her at ease, to let her know that you’ve tried to impress her but at the same time, she’s still in your league, is important. You don’t want her to feel embarrassed or underdressed. The more positive you can make the girl feel about you by the clothing that you wear, the smoother your date is going to go, and the smoother your date is going to go, the more likely it is you’re going to be able to have a second date.

A side thing, fellas, and this is something that needs to be said. Grooming goes beyond your hair and your clothes. One thing that girls are often obsessed about is looking at a man’s hands. If a man has dirty nails, broken nails, extremely dry skin, calluses, cuts, or excessively hairy hands, which can be a real turnoff for women. It’s the same with your face, as well. However you choose to wear your facial hair is fine, but if you do have a beard or moustache or a 5 o’clock shadow, make sure that it’s manicured so that you look neat and clean. Make sure that your eyebrows don’t have any crazy, curly, loose hairs flying off from the left and the right. If you’re a man who has nostril hair, make sure that those hairs are clipped. If you’re a man who gets hair in his ears, make sure that those

ears have been waxed and plucked to perfection. Yes, plucked. When you’re on your first date, this is the opportunity to make an great first impression. But girls are funny creatures and if we see one little strange thing that we don’t like, it can ruin the entire date, even if there is chemistry. If there is one strange scraggly hair sticking out of the wrong orifice, it could make all the difference between second date and never-ever-going-to-see-you-again date. Spend that extra time, not just for your date, but also for yourself, so that when you walk into that restaurant, you are feeling 100% confident. You know that you’re looking good because when you look good, you feel good. Furthermore, when you look good and you feel good, you feel confident. When you’re confident, you are your best self and when you are your best self on a date, only good and positive and amazing things can happen. You’ll see.

FOR HER

Ladies, ladies, ladies. When you’re trying to get ready to go out on a date, you go about things very differently from a man. First of all, you’re thinking how can I make him want me, what can I do to myself to make me so absolutely, unbelievably irresistible to this man that he will do anything and everything he can to jump across the table and want to be with me. We tend to lean toward the sexual to make that happen because let’s face it, women, we all know that at the end of the day, men focus on sex. Even though they may be looking for love, they are also almost-always-constantly-pretty-much looking for sex. We women know this. And so we might use it to our advantage to get a man’s attention. We might dress in a manner that’s going to make a man want to rip off the clothes off our bodies, even though that’s not actually what we’re going to allow him to do.

I’m going to challenge you now to completely change the way that you have been dressing when you go on dates. Again, there are two things to consider here: 1) we need to dress in a manner so that a man will realize that we have spent time and effort getting ready. Although, and this is different than with men, we don’t want them to think we’ve spent too much time and effort getting ready

because men tend to shy away from women who will spend an hour plus doing their hair, doing their makeup and getting their outfit ready. Men see that as unnecessary. They also view it as being excessively vain. So when you turn up to this date, you want to look well put together with a nice outfit that’s clean. You want to have your hair and makeup done, but you don’t want to have them done to the point where you look as though you’re about to pose for a Cosmo photoshoot.

Authenticity applies to the ladies as well. If you’re the kind of girl who likes to be a bit funky and spunky, then that’s the way that you need to present yourself on this date. You need to wear an outfit that’s the type of outfit that you would wear if you were going out to drinks with friends at a nice bar. There’s absolutely no point in wearing an outfit that doesn’t represent the person that you are because if your date doesn’t like the person that you are, then there’s absolutely no point in going on another date with him anyway. That being said, you need to make sure that the outfit you choose is one of your better outfits, one that is quite new, that you can wash and iron, that’s going to look crisp and clean and well-fitting. It’s nice to have an outfit that is figure-hugging. Men are visual creatures, but know at the same time, showing too much cleavage sends the wrong message. You want to show a little bit of cleavage because you want a guy to know that hey, while we’re not going to be having sex on the first date, sex will definitely be on the menu and let me tell you, sex with me is going to be good. That’s what you want to convey, but you certainly don’t want to say, “Hey, let’s have sex tonight” because that’s not how you forge a new and lasting relationship.

It’s always important to show a little bit of skin, truth be told. Men love to see skin. They love to feel that connection to the female body, but showing skin doesn’t mean showing an excessive amount of cleavage. Showing skin can be your arms completely exposed in a dress, maybe your top is backless, maybe the top half of your outfit is completely covered, long sleeves, the neckline is quite high, but then you’re wearing a mini skirt so that your legs are showing. As long as there is some skin that’s showing and available, you’re going to be able to turn a man on sufficiently without turning him off by being overtly sexual. A man wants to be able to reach over at some point during the date and touch some

skin. So make sure that there is some skin available to him, but make sure it’s the right patch of skin and not in an area that is overly intimate.

When talking hair and makeup, consider these points. If you’re a girl who likes crazy, funky hairstyles, give yourself the more laid-back version of crazy and funky. Make sure you’ve washed your hair that day and you style it as well. Trust me, men can tell when you haven’t washed your hair for three days. Even if it’s kind of styled okay, the dandruff and the grease is starting to seep through. If you’re like me and if you have a tendency to do your hair and your makeup in a slightly dimmer room because you look good in that lighting, trust me, when you’re sitting in front of a guy, or walk into a restaurant with the lights beaming down on your greasy hair, you’re going to thank me for giving you this advice. So make sure that it’s clean. In fact, use a shampoo and a conditioner brand that has a really strong smell so that if he does lean in close to you, he will get a beautiful whiff of your amazingly clean and bouncy hair.

Now if you love to glam up a little bit and get $60 blow dries twice a week, just go for a more conservative style. When I say conservative, I don’t mean “Little House on the Prairie” conservative. I just mean you don’t need to have 50 million extensions in and have hair the size of Kim Kardashian and Beyoncé when they were at the VMAs. You want to look beautiful but you want to look understated. You want your hair to look as though you were really good at doing your own hair and you’ve done it yourself, in 20 minutes. You want to look like a natural beauty. You don’t want to look like a complete glamazon. Also, apart from the fact that men tend to like women who present themselves more naturally, you don’t want to set yourself up for a set of circumstances where you feel compelled for the rest of time to make sure that, on all of your dates, you look like a complete glamazon. You want to be more authentic and you want to be more real. So look beautiful, get your hair done if you want to, but just don’t go over the top. Minimal hair extensions, if any, is recommended.

Now when it comes to your makeup, again, obviously we want to look our best and no matter how much we are told that men prefer women who wear no

makeup, we just can’t help ourselves. We want to put on our warpaint and that’s okay because you need to walk into that date feeling confident. For most women, not wearing makeup doesn’t imbue confidence. It may make you feel shy and it may make your confidence levels plummet, which is not something that you want. So what you need to do is put on the minimum amount of makeup that you can put on that won’t adversely affect your confidence. So when you’re in front of your mirror and you’re putting on your makeup before your date begins, by all means apply, but apply as sparingly as you can without it compromising the way that you feel. So you need to put on your foundation the way you always would and your lipstick and your blush. When it comes to your eye makeup, just try and tone that down, try to shy away from doing your own makeup in a way that you would if you were going to a nightclub or to a red carpet event. Do it one level up for what you would be doing if you were going to work because you want to look pretty, you want to impress the guy but you don’t want to look like a Barbie doll. You want to look natural. You want him to see your real face. Nine out of ten men will tell you that they fall in love with a woman after they’ve seen them with their makeup off and that they really just don’t like women who have too much makeup on their face. It’s so sad that we live in a society where we believe that we need to put on a makeup-induced mask to be found pretty or socially acceptable. Women can be brutal warriors with each other. They can be judgmental and harsh. It’s no wonder that it’s sometimes called ‘warpaint.’

So , men & women, these two key points when you are getting ready for a date. If you these and stick to them, you will be able to present yourself impressively, as well as authentically every time you go on a date. Number one, make sure that all of your clothing, your hair and all of your personal grooming are neat, clean, pressed and perfect. Number two, remain authentic. Wear an outfit that you would normally wear if you are going out to a bar or to dinner with friends, but just step it up that one little level by making sure that it’s extra clean, extra pressed, extra neat. And lastly, with your grooming, make sure that you’ve taken care of every single path of the grooming on your body and your face. Don’t overdo it when it comes to changing your appearance by applying too much makeup or styling your hair in a way that’s too grandiose. If you stick to those two rules when you’re getting ready for your next date, not only will you feel completely confident and ready to march into your date knowing that you look like your best self, but you will also be setting

yourself up for a date where your partner will feel instantly at ease with you as well as touched by the fact that you put in an effort just for them.

Chapter 15

HELP HIM TO FALL TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY IN LOVE WITH YOU

“Everywhere I’m looking now I’m surrounded by your embrace Baby, I can see your halo You know you’re my saving grace You’re everything I need and more It’s written all over your face Baby, I can feel your halo Pray it wont fade away”

~ Halo, Beyonce

TRULY

You have a date. Congratulations. Here’s your chance. It’s a golden opportunity. The timing is right. He could be the one. All you need to know is how to make your first date fall in love with you. If you’ve been online and if you’ve been internet dating and you’ve actually managed to get yourself a date, we’re talking about how to make that date really count and how to turn that date into date three, four, five, and six. Maybe even forever. So why do I know about dating? What makes me such an expert? Well, I actually own a company called iHeart Travel. We hold travel vacations for singles and host singles parties. I get to have

a front row seat at watching people meet, make new friends, and fall in love. When people come on my vacations, when they go on dates, which I’ve generally created and matched for them, I’m able to talk to them. We talk before they go on the date; we talk after they go on the date. Sometimes I even spy on them a little while they’re on the date. Shhh, don’t tell anyone. So what I’m able to do is something very unique. I’m like Jane Goodall of the dating world. I could sit for hours and watch a couple meander their way into a date and come out the other side, soul mates.

I’ve been able to gain what I think is some valuable insight into what makes you a good date, ensuring you will get date number two. There are a few concepts associated with the dating game. First of all, before you walk up your date, it’s really important that you get your pre-date mindset right. What I mean by that is a lot of people, before they walk into a first date, freak out. They’re really into the guy that they are about to go and see and they are nervous and worry if he is going to like you. Will he think I’m funny? Do I look okay? Are my spanks hiding all my lumps and bumps sufficiently? These are questions we ask ourselves. And so women worry all the day even though we’re smiling, generally we’re feeling very uneasy. As you’re aware, if you’re around somebody who’s sad, you can absorb that energy and it upsets you as well. If you’re around somebody happy, their happiness is infectious. So if you walk into a date and you’re feeling nervous, people really pick up on that and they feel it and straight off the bat, it’s not getting off to a very good start. So before you walk into a date, remind yourself that out of all of your friends, tonight you actually have a date. Somebody actually liked you enough to ask you out and that person sitting there is just as nervous as you, and really excited about you walking in. So feel confident in yourself, be excited and tell yourself just before you walk in, “You know what? I’m an awesome person. My best friends and my family love me, this person is going to love me too.” And if you do that, you’re going to adopt the energy that is positive and healthy and start the day off on the right foot.

Now once you sit down at your date, there are generally some questions that we tend to walk through for pretty much every interaction that we have with a new person. For instance, we’ll say “how are you,” we’ll say “what did you do

today” and we’ll say “do you come here often” if we’re at a restaurant. Unfortunately when you ask questions like “how are you”, they generally respond in one word answers and the responses don’t develop into meaningful conversation. When you say “how are you,” the only response you can give is good or I’m okay or not very good. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help the conversation to move forward, in fact it slows the conversation down. It’s like your partner threw out a bone, “How are you” and you basically caught it and said “I’m fine” and that ended that particular string of conversation. So instead of saying “how are you” what you could say is, “So what was the best thing that happened to you today?” Because if somebody asks you what was the best thing that happened to you today, you can’t answer yes or no or not really or maybe, you have to give an answer. That answer might be, “Oh well, I helped an old lady cross the road. She was really happy.” There it goes, the conversation has begun, but also getting a real sense of who this person is who you’re sitting with. Now when you say something, “What did you do today?” the common response will be, “Oh, I went to work. It was pretty boring.” That’s pretty much what everyone will say. It’s similar to “I dropped the kids off at school; it was a pretty boring day.” So instead of saying what did you do today, ask, “So apart from work, what was the most exciting thing that happened to you today?” What you’re basically doing is eliminating the obvious answer and you’re making them think and you’re also getting them to tap into what they’re actually interested in, because even if you’re ionate about your job—I’m very ionate about my job, I love my job, I’ve got the best job in the world. But even if you love your job, it’s not really who you are, who you are is what you do outside of your job and involves your belief system and your expression of feelings.

Let’s face it, we’re more interested in learning about those aspects of a person rather than what they do 9-5 sitting at a desk. Don’t use “do you come here often.” It’s the most cliché line that we’ve all uttered a few times. So instead of saying, “do you come here often” for which the answer will be yes or no, an open question would be “So why did you pick this place tonight for us to come here?” Because that’s going to be the interesting one. For instance, if you’re at a Japanese restaurant, your partner might say, “I went to Japan last year. I absolutely love this rice, it’s my favorite food in the whole wide world now.” And again, now you have a conversation; you can take it somewhere.

Keep in mind, your answers to questions are vital, too. So if someone says to you “how are you,” and your answer is ‘I am well.’ What you’re doing is you’re making them work hard because basically they are throwing out a question, and your answer of ‘I am well’ basically ended that line of conversation. Now your date is wondering, “What else am I going to ask?” You’re making him think. You’re making him work hard. If someone has to work really hard for during the date, you’re not going to have a really rosy outlook. Instead of saying ‘I’m well,’ you could say something like “Well, I’m great now sitting opposite you.” You’re giving them a compliment straight off the bat and making them feel good. Don’t underestimate the power of a compliment. There’s nothing better than telling somebody that you’re excited to be around them.

Now if somebody says to you, “What did you do today?” and you give the standard response which is “Nothing much, just went to work.” Again, you’re shutting them down; you’re making them work hard. So instead, you could say something like “Well, I did work, but at lunchtime, I popped into this little bookshop. I bought a really cool book about the moon landing which I think, by the way, is a conspiracy.” You wink. Two points for you. You made an interesting conversational start. Similarly, if someone says “Why did you come here?” instead of just saying “The food is good here” and making yourself look a little bit like Miss Piggy, you can say something like, “I went to Italy when I was 18, and I absolutely fell in love with the culture. It’s always a treat to eat Italian.” Again, you’re showing a part of your personality and you are inviting a conversation to begin. Not to mention validating one of the best cuisines in all the world. Take the cannoli!

You can ask an interesting follow-up question. Sometimes people will ask a question, they will get an answer and then that’s where it ends. So if somebody says to you, “Where do you live?” If somebody says, “Granby,” you might follow-up with “Why did you choose to live there?” or “What do you like about it?” The conversation will keep flowing. When somebody asks what you do and you say, “I’m a nurse.” Then you can have a follow-up question, “So what is it in particular about being a nurse that interested you?” And because I’ve been on

a lot of dates as part of my research, refining the book that I’ve written, traveling with iHeart Travel singles vacations, and it just really is true. People just go down these paths, “What do you do?” “I’m a nurse.” “Oh yeah? Cool.” Greater conversation would be stimulated through follow-up questions. You’re just left there hanging and it’s like what am I going to talk about now. Working hard, not going to want to go on another date with you. Another question, “What do you like doing in your spare time?” So if somebody says, “Oh, I love football.” The next question would be “What do you like about football? Do you play? Do you like keeping fit? What aspect of football do you like?” Because saying I like football is very general, too. Fifty percent of the people in this room could say that, but why they like it is a very personal thing and that’s what you want to find out about.

So we’re asking these sorts of follow-up questions. You’re getting your date to take questions one step further and really open up about himself so you can learn the true essence of who he is. It’s important to as well, we want to impress this date, we presumably want him to fall in love with us, and we want him to ask us out on another date, but at the same time, you’re on a fact-finding mission yourself because you need to make sure that you want to go out on another date with him.

MADLY

Now why isn’t your date falling in love with you? This is the second most asked question that I get and I work with singles each and every day. They say, “I went on a really great date and I thought that we had a really cool connection and everything was amazing. Then he texted me on the way home and now he’s disappeared. I haven’t spoken to him in three days. What went wrong? Why isn’t he falling in love with me?”

These are the main reasons that I believe people don’t fall in love with you after

a first date. So first of all, there’s nothing worse than being with somebody that can’t hold a conversation. So what we’ve been talking about, these statement and questions, “Hi, how are you?” “Good thanks. How are you?” Awkward silence. Hmmm. It’s important to ask those probing questions that stimulate good conversation. If you keep asking somebody about themselves and they keep talking about themselves, they will fall madly in love with you. You’ve expressed interest and care, two essential needs for every human being. If someone gets to talk about himself and he feels that somebody has actually listened then they actually understand who you are, and that’s the greatest gift in the world.

The premise for your date was an interest and a possible attraction based on the pictures you saw on his profile. Giving people unrealistic expectations when you’re chatting online is a huge no, no. Be proud of your appearance and the way that you look because otherwise all you’re doing is basing your interaction on a lie. What would you do if you went to your first date and you sat down, and the first thing that your date did was tell you a ive lie. You say to them, “What color are your eyes?” And you’re staring at their eyes and their eyes are blue, but they say, “My eyes are brown.” You’re going to say to yourself, “This guy is unreliable and shady. He just lied to me!” It’s the same thing when you lie about your appearance before meeting your date. You sit down and even though they might keep their poker face on, in their head, they’re having a conversation with themselves and it goes a little bit like this, “Oh, my God. I can’t believe this is happening to me again. How the hell am I going to get out of this date? In 15 minutes I’ll text my sister to tell me that my mom is really sick and I’ve got to go home.” That’s what he’s thinking. And then you’ve got to work so hard to convince him that you’re an amazing person, doubly hard because it’s like you are here but now you’ve put yourself back a step You’ve got to work hard just to get up to mutual ground again before starting to impress them. Please have realistic photos, or else you’re simply playing poker with your date and you’re losing. Lady Gaga will attest: he’ll use his poker face and then make like a tree and leave.

Now talking about yourself all night also isn’t going to get you a second date. Nobody wants to hear you sitting there, saying, “Oh, my God! I’m so amazing.

I’m so great. I did this the other day. All my best friends think I’m amazing. I’ve got the best job. I have so much money. I’m really going places. I don’t even need a man. I don’t need a girl. I’m fine, but I thought I would go on a date with you anyway.” So many people will do this. When you get nervous, you have a tendency to try to make people think that you’re bigger and better than you really are and somehow that helps you to increase your armour, but all that does for the person sitting opposite you is intimidate them. So men will tell you this-women are great saying, “Oh yeah, I’m really independent. I’ve got a lot of money. I’m doing great in the world.” And then you’ve got the man there who was born a natural protector and provider sitting there saying, “That’s great. What the hell have I got to offer this woman if she’s so amazing and she’s got so much money and she’s doing so well? I’ve got nothing to offer her. She’s going to think I’m useless.” That’s not the truth. She couldn’t wait to go on this date with him and she’s falling in love with him by the second because we women...give her a smile and a compliment and we’re off basically, at least for the first few weeks. There’s no need to be vain. Carly Simon has decreed it so.

Women need to understand that they don’t need to work so hard. Show your vulnerability because that’s what people fall in love with. No one ever fell in love with a checkbook or with your accolades. Who cares? What we fall in love with is the quirky smiles that they give us, when they bring us breakfast in bed, when we tell them they are good-looking and they blush and are completely embarrassed. So just try to that: be yourself. Let people find out how amazing you are by being amazing, don’t tell them that you’re amazing. Show them in how you interact.

And lastly, do not check your phone. There’s nothing worse than when you are talking to a guy and he just asked a question, “So what do you like doing on the weekend?” And your answer is, “Yeah, I really like going to—sorry, just one second. Yeah okay, sorry. Right, so I really like going to…” There’s nothing worse in the entire world and we’re all guilty of it. Yes, kindred spirit, it’s true. But it’s actually an addiction. You need to just put the phone down. A really good strategy that a friend of mine told me that when he walks into a meeting or into a date, he’ll actually turn his phone off and put it in his pocket or in his bag. That way, you have no distractions, no excuses and you give that person your

full attention. Because there’s absolutely nothing worse than talking to somebody and knowing that they are distracted. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that before, but it’s awful. It just makes you feel ‘less than.’ It’s also a great reason not to win a second date.

DEEPLY

Finally to answer your burning question, the number one question that I get asked pretty much 20 times a day: how do I make my date fall in love with me? How do you make your date start falling in love with you? So when you’re actually on a date, there’s a few little things that you can do that will drive your date completely crazy. Now the first one is to utter the word that drives every man and every woman nuts and that’s their own name. So by saying somebody’s name when you’re talking to them, by just dropping it into the conversation, again all you are showing them is you are interested in them and only them. The words that just came out of your mouth were meant for one ear to hear and nobody else. It’s so powerful to mention somebody’s name. So instead of saying, “I’m really glad that we’re on this date today,” say, “You know what, John? I’m so glad that we’re on this date today.” It just reels you in, hook, line, and sinker. It pulls you in and it’s very, very powerful. And it’s the same when you are in bed. There are two ways that you can be vocal in bed. Number one: moaning, breathing, screaming, crying, laughing. The other way is, “Peter, you’re amazing. Oh, my God, Peter, that feels so good.” Peter is now putty in your hands. He’s going to fall in love. So , say their name even if it feels awkward, do it. Trust me, try it on your next date.

The next thing to do is to compliment your date. So I’m of the opinion that most people are idiots and they are idiots because they think that by giving somebody a compliment, it makes them feel weak. By saying to your date, “You are really attractive,” “You are way more good-looking than your profile pics,” you aren’t making anyone inferior or superior. You’re appreciating the other person. It seems nobody compliments anybody these days. It’s such a rare thing to do. And so, if somebody sitting opposite you says to you, “You look amazing. You look

way better than your profile pics.” You’re thinking, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” And he’s building up your confidence. If I’m wrong but if you went out to dinner with somebody and he complimented you four or five times, you would be over the moon. Each time he complimented you has made you feel good inside, deep inside and it’s lifting your mood and your endorphins, just really making you feel amazing. When you leave that dinner, how are you going to be feeling about that person? You’re going to be feeling great. You’re going to be walking on air, just saying, “Yay, I just spent time with that person. I feel beautiful. I feel smart. I feel interesting. That was great!” Some people think maybe if I insult someone else just a little bit, he’ll think I’m better than him. Wrong! You say to a guy, “Gee, I don’t really like this restaurant that you picked. It’s a bit beneath my taste.” What did you just accomplish? You didn’t raise your likeability quotient, you didn’t raise his esteem of you. You lowered his interest in you. Don’t focus on insults. They’re destructive. Build people up, compliment them. Notice something kind of wonderful about your date.

Ursula, the sea witch, from The Little Mermaid had it right when she spoke of the importance of body language to Ariel. Body language makes us practically bilingual! Keep your body language open. It’s a sign of being welcoming. You can even parrot or mimic the similar positions of the your date in order to show that you understand and agree with him, in order to show that you are engaged and interested in your date. And don’t be afraid to reach out and touch somebody. I’m a very touchy feely person. So I’m lucky, I get to experience the joy of touch every day. But imagine that your mother and father don’t live anywhere near you, they live in a different state, and you don’t have any siblings and you’re single. When was the last time that somebody touched you, that somebody hugged you? Many people don’t get touched very often. But it’s a necessary part of well-being. Now if you actually reach out when you’re in a date and you touch him gently on the arm or you brush him on their shoulder or lightly touch his knee, it will send his nerve endings crazy, and give him an absolute rush. This is accomplishing two things: one is saying again, you are my complete, total and utter focus. I’m here for you and only for you, but two, what it’s also doing is it’s saying probably not tonight and maybe not the next night, but I reckon we’re going to come together physically at some point because you start getting those feelings of chemistry and interest. Make eye . When you have eye , you know that that person is specifically speaking to you and that they care about the fact that you’re listening. Without eye , trust

wavers, confidence falters, uncertainty lingers. Fix that. Make eye .

And lastly, my favorite. The lips are a very erogenous zone on the body. I think most people, when they are on a date, want to know am I in the friend zone or am I moving over into the more-than-friend-zone. Here is a great way to show a date that he’s not in the friend zone. Draw attention to your lips; lick them. So for men, licking your lips is probably a bit weird, but doing this after getting a compliment is very simple—just a tiny little bit. Try it. It says, “You’re not in the friend zone; you’re definitely in the datable zone. In fact, the thing that you just said made me kind of go zing! And for women, licking the lips, in a subtle, tiny kind of way, just a small flicker of the tongue or parting of the lips will do. People know the friend zone is over when these signs are seen.

Now how do you assure a second date? Well boys, it’s pretty simple for you: offer to pay for the meal. Chivalry isn’t dead. Now 9 out of 10 times, a woman will pay for her own meal. She’ll insist. We are independent women now, and all that rubbish. Personally, I will quite happily have everything paid for. But most women on the first date will gladly pay, but you just have to offer because women want to know that you are the man, the provider and the protector. It’s matters. What it also does is it sends this message and the message is dinner was great, you’re great, I want to pay for you to show you my appreciation. And again, if a woman offers to pay, let her pay. Let’s face it, money is scarce these days, she shouldn’t have to have you open your wallet every single time you go to dinner. Men, offer at least once, it will make such a huge difference. She will go home. She will ring up her best friend and she’ll share, “Oh, my God, it was so amazing and he paid for dinner. He’s such a gentleman!” Instead of, “Yeah, the date was going pretty well, but then when the check came, he asked me if wanted to go dutch. Not good, not good at all.” Gor for the former. Offer every once in awhile.

Now I always recommend that you arrange your second date before the first one has ended. That way you’ve already got something locked in and you don’t need to worry about the whole, “I haven’t heard from him for a day. Is he interested in

me or not?” Don’t be afraid to go in for the kiss, guys. Do not be afraid. Women love kissing. We love it more than anything in the world. I don’t mean big French kisses, don’t ick her face off, but going in slowly and gently and closing your eyes and giving her a little peck on the lips, not on the cheeks—that’s the friend zone. On the lips, and I tell you, she’ll go home floating. Girls, if you’re going to say goodnight, I don’t know if I would go in for the kiss. With guys, definitely. As you’re leaving, make sure that you say to your date that you can’t wait to see him again. Show him enthusiasm. Move all of this ego garbage that we’ve built up within ourselves. Give people compliments, say that you’re really excited about how the date went, say that you can’t wait to see him.

And lastly, and this is the most important thing of all, the second you get in your car and you shut that door. You grab your phone, you send them a text and you say to them, “Thinking of you. Thanks for an amazing date. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Hug, hug, hug.” That will tie the ribbon and put the icing on the top of what is possibly the date of your life.

It’s imperative that you protect your heart. You need to respect yourself enough to walk away. What I mean by that is this: a lot of people find it very hard to get a date. They find it really, really hard to get a date. So when you finally actually get somebody to go on a date with you, even if it didn’t go that well, because you don’t want to be lonely and alone, you may choose to cling to that date. I mean really cling to the date and try and milk it for three or four more days to see where it’s going to go. Let’s face it, if you haven’t had a spark on that first date, you’re never going to have a spark. So you’re better cutting it off and moving on to the next person than wasting your time with the same person over and over again.

P.S. If a guy doesn’t text you back after two to three days, then they’re just not that into you. So many of my girlfriends who ring me up, say “Oh, he hasn’t texted me for two days. I’m really worried about him, maybe something has happened to him. Maybe he has lost his phone.” I say, “He’s just not that into you, babe! He hasn’t lost his phone. He’s not busy. And even if he has lost his

phone and he was busy, he would find time to call you or text you if he was into you.” So if he hasn’t, say that with me, “He’s just not that into you!” It is the most important rule in dating. If he doesn’t want you anymore then he’s not going to want you, so cut it off and move on. Also, the hardest bit of advice to take unfortunately is to love yourself enough not to settle for second best. You want to be with someone who makes your heart skip a beat, make your toes tingle and if you’re not doing that right upfront at the beginning, it’s never going to happen. Relationships are brilliant and then they can fizzle. They don’t go the other way. It’s a one way street.

Chapter 16

EVERY EXIT IS AN ENTRANCE TO SOMEPLACE ELSE

“I’m not here for your entertainment You don’t really wanna mess with me tonight Just stop and take a second I was fine before you walked into my life ‘Cause you know it’s over, before it began Keep your drink just give me the money It’s just you and your hand tonight”

~ “I’m not here for your entertainment,” PINK!

THE WAY OUT

Unfortunately, not all first dates turn out the way that you want them to, and sometimes you may find quite early on in your date that the knight in shining armor has not arrived and sat down at your table. Instead, it’s the knight in a brown paper bag. There is nothing wrong with telling your date that you don’t want to continue the date any more, and that you think it was lovely having a quick coffee with them but now it’s time for you to go home. However, if you’re like most of us, you’re going to feel way too uncomfortable to be able to be completely honest with your failed blind date and excuse yourself, and so thanks to the magic of technology and BFFs, we have what I like to call the Get out of Jail cards.

Get out of jail card #1 – The Emergency Text

If you are on a first date and it is not going well, then using the “Emergency Text” is a great way to get yourself out of there fast! If you are out at a restaurant or in a public place, first you politely excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, and then mysteriously disappear, sending a text a few minutes later saying that there was a family emergency and you had to leave. If you were invited to a first date at a guy’s house and you got into a circumstance where you didn’t feel comfortable and didn’t want to be there anymore, excusing yourself and getting out of the house would be a lot more difficult. The same would be if you were in a theater-type setting, sitting down in close quarters with somebody and you’re unable to leave, that would make things a little more difficult for you. Therefore, if you are going on a first date and you are unsure of the person you are going with then going somewhere very public, with lots of opportunities for a quick getaway is definitely your best option.

“Thank you smart phone, for getting me out of there!”

Get out of jail card #2 – The Getaway Call

So, the getaway call is something that you need to set up before your first date. Speak to one of your best friends and let them know that you’re going out on a date. If the date starts at 7:30 then arrange for your best friend to call you at 8 p.m. Now when they call you, all they need to do is say hello and not say anything else. Your date is not able to hear what’s going on on your phone. And this is when you are going to have to start a little bit of acting. Now, if you’re having a great date, you can just say to your friend, “Hey, thanks for calling. I can’t talk at the moment because I’m out on a date with a really amazing guy so I’ve got to go.” Your friend will know that you’re having a good time on the date

and you can end the phone call. If you’re not having a good time, a little bit of acting’s going to have to come into play. First of all, have a look of surprise on your face, and then a look of worry. You can say things to your friend like, “Oh no, that’s terrible.” “Okay, is it an emergency?” “Can you wait a little bit longer or do I have to leave right now? Okay, I’m leaving right now.” Then you can hang up the phone and make up any excuse that you want for your date, basically letting him know that you’ve had a good time but you’re going to have to go because your friend really needs you. You can then pay for half of the bill and you can go, and the awkwardness is gone. You don’t need to feel guilty about leaving your date, because you’ve made them believe that you were leaving because you needed to help somebody. Now, in essence, you’re not actually lying, because there was an emergency going on. The emergency was that you were on a date with somebody you could not stand being on a date with. When you said you had to go and help your friend, the friend you were talking about was yourself. You had to help yourself get out of a bad experience and get out of a bad date.

“Thank you BFF for being the perfect accomplice to my great escape.”

Get out of jail card #3 – The Allergic Reaction

So you are out at dinner on a first date and it’s not going well. This guy is chewing your ear off talking about topics that you have no interest in. He has dandruff all over his shoulders and he has belched twice. Things are looking dire and then your food comes and you take your first bite. This is the perfect opportunity for you to stage your terror that the food must contain MSG because after one bite you already feel light-headed and woozy. It seems as though you may be having a light allergic reaction to the food. It’s your fault, you should have checked with the waitress, but now unfortunately you are going to have to leave your date, IMMEDIATELY, as you need to run home to take your allergy medication before you start to get really sick! At this point I would throw down some cash to pay for your meal (unless your date was rude to you anyway, then there would be no cash throw down), get up promptly and run out of the

restaurant. Dramatic? Yes, but drastic times call for drastic measures! This guy’s has been sucking the life force out of you for the last 30 minutes. Don’t waste a second more!

It’s always a nice gesture to give the restaurant a call 15 minutes later to let them know that there was nothing wrong with their food but that you had to get away from your date and had to use the allergy as an excuse. It will give the staff a good giggle and save them worrying that they may have made you sick.

“Thank you to my senior Drama class teacher for giving me such brilliant improv acting skills!”

Get out of jail card #4 – Tell your date the truth

For some reason, sometimes the simple truth is the hardest, most awkward, uncomfortable thing you can do, but it is also the best scenario for both you and your date. Though telling your date that you don’t think that you would like to continue your date with them as you feel you are incompatible can feel super awkward and even mean, I can assure you that if you are able to be honest, you will walk away from your dismal date feeling empowered and proud. Here are a couple of ways that you can end an unsuccessful date, successfully.

The Scenario: You have been on a date with “Phil” for 30 minutes and he has not stopped talking about fishing. You do not like fishing at all. Your interest level is zero. What’s more, he has drank 3 beers already (it’s 1pm on a Wednesday) and the more he drinks the louder his voice gets. Oh, and let’s not even start on the half a bottle of “Brut” he drowned himself in before arriving at your date. The fumes from his cheap aftershave are giving you a rash! So after excusing yourself for a bathroom break, you return and deliver your exiting monologue…

THE OPTIMISTIC APPROACH

“I was just in the bathroom reflecting on our date so far and honestly, I just feel that we are not connecting very well. I am so grateful that you asked me out on a date and it was so nice to meet you, but I think I am going to cut our time short today because you seem like an awesome guy and there is no point is us wasting any more time together trying to find a connection that isn’t there. There’s plenty more fish in the sea and I hope you find one perfect for you one day. Thanks for spending time with me but I have got to go.”

This approach will leave your date feeling as though they did nothing to upset you and thinking that it was nice that you could be honest with them. This approach will cause him the least amount of anguish but he will also probably not learn from any of the mistakes he made on his date, as you didn’t give them any .

THE REALIST APPROACH

“I am really sorry to do this to you but I am going to cut our date short and head home as I don’t think that we have anything in common and I don’t see the point in either of us wasting anymore time chatting together when clearly we don’t have any chemistry. It’s great that you are so ionate about fishing, but I can’t stand it and I want to date someone who enjoys the same things I do. Also, you seem like you love a drink, which is great, but I don’t drink much, especially on weekdays and so we just seem really opposite so I am going to leave now, but thanks so much for spending time with me today. All the best!”

This approach will leave your date feeling a little hurt as you have ive aggressively made them aware of a couple of their flaws. You have called them on their bad behavior, but is a gentle and constructive way so while he may feel a moderate level of anguish they also have the opportunity to learn from it and improve his dating game.

THE PESSIMISTIC APPROACH

“This isn’t working out for me. I hate fishing and all you have talked about for the last 30 minutes is fishing. You have downed 3 beers in 30 minutes and are already pretty drunk which isn’t a turn on, and I have to say that your aftershave stinks! You really need to think about laying off the booze and changing up your fishing monologue if you want to impress a girl on a first date or find someone who loves fishing, boozing and the strong scent of cheap aftershave. I’m leaving now. Thanks for coming out to meet me even though we clearly were not a match!

This approach is in a word, brutal! You gave your date the cold hard truth. It is going to sting, but you may have given them the wake up call they need. They may have been going on a string of dates, all of which had been ending badly, leaving them wondering why. Well now they know! This approach may provoke some negativity from your date, but if you are prepared to give it, then you need to be prepared to take it!

All 3 are your truth, but which approach you pick will depend on your personality and on how bad the date really was. A happy life is one that is filled with more light than darkness, more kindness than nastiness, so wherever possible, sticking to the Optimistic or Realist approach will serve you best.

Chapter 17

PRESERVING YOUR PRECIOUS TIME

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of”

~ Bruce Lee

TIME FLIES, EVEN WHEN YOU’RE NOT HAVING FUN

Time is such a precious commodity. I mean from the day that we’re born, we only have a very limited time left to spend in this world. And so, spending that time with people who bring us down and don’t make us happy is the biggest disservice that we could ever do to ourselves personally.

When we start dating, it can be hard to get a date. It can take a lot of time to actually secure yourself a date. And so, when you go on the date, you really want to make it work. You really want it to be a success. You really want to find a potential partner. But you go on a date and the date is not great. I mean the guy’s funny, he makes you laugh, but you just don’t really have a strong connection with him. You can tell that his intellect doesn’t match yours; the way he looks isn’t exactly what you’re looking for. You just get a vibe that he’s not the type of person that’s going to be particularly kind all the time or you feel like you just don’t have very much in common, but you do think he has a nice smile and he seems to really like you. And so, you decide when he asks you that you’ll go on a second date. You go on the second date and it’s average, but you’re lonely. You don’t want to be on your own. He’s a pretty nice guy and he bought you dinner this time, so you decide to go on another date. This pattern continues for weeks,

months, years, and sometimes for a lifetime. Some people just decide to settle. And what a disservice you are doing to yourself if you become one of those people, because if you spend time with a partner whom you know from the get go is not the one, then all you’re doing is preventing yourself from having new opportunities where you could actually meet the one.

You see, when you fall into a relationship with somebody who isn’t fulfilling— even though you probably have an underlying sense that you won’t remain with them long term—you end up staying with them. When you’re dating somebody, the world knows that you’re dating somebody. You give off those “I’m taken” vibes and they prevent you from having new interactions with new potential partners. If you go out to a pub one evening or a nightclub or out for dinner with your partner, there are no men in the entire building that are going to come and approach you because they will say that you are taken. Your friends will stop thinking about fixing you up with somebody because you’re taken. Your family will talk about you as though you’re taken. Basically giving an announcement to the entire world that you’re off the market, but unfortunately, you’re not off the market with somebody that you’re madly in love with. You’re not off the market with the one. You’re off the market with somebody that’s just basically wasting your time. You stopped going on to dating sites because you’re “kind of” dating somebody.

And so again, you’re missing out on opportunities where you could potentially be meeting the one. He could be ready to meet you right now, but unfortunately, you’ve decided to tie yourself up with somebody and waste time with that person, knowing that you’re not going to end up with them because you’re too afraid to walk away, too afraid to be alone.

I’m here to tell you that you need to get rid of that fear immediately because living a mediocre life with a man that you don’t love is a fate worse than death as far as I’m concerned. We only get one life in this particular manifestation. We need to do everything we possibly can to make it the happiest, most exciting, most fulfilling, most loving, amazing life that we can. The quicker that we get

rid of people that we know aren’t the one, the sooner we open ourselves up to being able to find the one.

It’s a very common thing that I hear from my matchmaking clients who are a female. Women come in and tell me that they have been in long-term relationships with a guy that they know that they don’t want to be with for the rest of their lives. They’ve wasted five years, sometimes ten years with them. Now they’re heading into their late ’30s and early ’40s, and they haven’t had any children, and they’re finding themselves single. They’re really worrying about what’s going to happen for them. Sure, they’re going to find a partner, but are they going to be too old to have children, did they wait too long? They wasted so many years with partners that weren’t up to scratch, that they weren’t meant to be with, knowing full well that they weren’t meant to be with these partners, but they stayed around because it was easier and it was comfortable. They were too afraid of being lonely. I always ask them: if you could turn back time and if you could break up with those people you dated that you knew were wrong for you, would you have done it? They say with a loud “Amen, yes,” they definitely would have. If these women could turn back the clock and say no to a second date with these substandard men, they definitely would have done that. It would have given them the opportunity to have an extra four, five, six, ten years to have actually found the one and started a family a lot earlier.

And so, I say to you, I beg of you that you love yourself enough to walk away from a relationship that you know isn’t worthy of you, a relationship that you know isn’t going to bring you deep, true happiness, and a relationship that you know isn’t going to last very long. So that you can clear the way for the one to come and find you, so you can fall head over heels in love.

Chapter 18

A GOAL WITHOUT A PLAN IS JUST A WISH

“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”

~ Tony Robbins, author and entrepreneur

THE PLAN

We know what we want. We want to find our soulmate. We want to find our 10/10. Just simply having the goal of wanting to find this partner and live in a happy, loving relationship isn’t going to be enough to help you to attract the man of your dreams. We can do all the manifesting that we like, but if we lock ourselves at home in a room and don’t communicate with the outside world, then it’s going to be virtually impossible no matter how hard we manifest, to find the man of our dreams. You’re going to have to put yourself out into situations where you can meet more and more people. The man of your dreams, your 10/10 is out there, but unless you are out there developing more and more human interactions, giving you more and more opportunities to meet new people, the harder it’s going to be for you to actually find Mr. Right. It’s the same with dating sites. If you’re going to subscribe to a dating site, log on, create a profile, and then only visit the dating site once a week or once a month, again, you’re not going to be putting yourself out in front of enough people to be able to find Mr. Right. It really is a case of the law of numbers. The more times you go out into the world and put yourselves into situations where you are around single people, the more likely it is that you’re going to bump into Mr. Right. The same with dating sites, the more times that you to a dating site and look at different profiles, the more likely it is that you’re going to stumble across Mr. Right.

And so, what we’re going to do now is create your dating plan because if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. A truism. So first of all, we’re going to look at faceto-face dating. You’re going to need to have a look at your current lifestyle and all of the commitments that you have every single day, and work out how much time you have spared that you’ll be able to utilize going out and seeking opportunities where you can meet new people and potentially find love. So if you’re like me, you wake up in the morning, you get your kids ready for school and you drop them off. So the morning is out. Hmmm. Next, you’re off to work and you’re basically working the entire day. So until five o’clock, doing anything during the day is out. Then three times a week, I like to go to the gym. So those three periods of time are out. But then the time that I do have, are the other four days of the week when I don’t go to the gym, and also every single night, because every single night I’m not doing anything. Now yes, I do have children which means that five nights a week I need to be at home. There are two nights a week that I’m able to go out which are on Friday and on Saturday night. And so for me, if I were going to create a dating plan for myself, what I would do is dedicate an hour at a minimum every single weeknight, hopping online and exploring dating profiles on dating sites. I would also make sure that every weekend, at least twice, and that could be during the day or in the evening, both in the evening, both during the day—whatever suits your lifestyle more, but I would make sure that at least twice on the weekend, I would get up and go out to a social situation where I would have the opportunity of meeting new people and potentially a new partner. A fundraiser. A museum event. A 5K road race. An outdoor concert. An open art studio weekend. A soccer match.

PART ONE

So let’s focus first on online dating. There are so many online dating programs available. There are programs that require you to have very detailed profiles. There are also programs that require you to have quite limited profiles. And then there are your apps on your phone, which basically require you to have no profile at all. Now let’s talk about good dating sites and bad dating sites. Now if you are looking to meet a man, to spend hours and hours trolling through

photographs of men, and then having hundreds and hundreds of text conversations with men, and then eventually be able to develop one of those text conversations into a date that has the promise of sex at the end of a date, then using online dating apps such as Tinder and PlentyOfFish, are definitely advisable. If you’re looking for casual sex, if you’re looking to make a new casual friend, no strings attached, no issues, no worries, then those dating apps are fantastic. If you’re looking to actually find a partner, somebody who is also looking for a girlfriend, who’s looking to go on dates and go to dinner, and enjoy spending time with you and doesn’t have the expectation of sleeping with you on the first date, then I would suggest avoiding Tinder, PlentyOfFish, Adult Match Maker, and sites like that. If you’re going to use a dating app, some of the great dating apps available are Happn, Bumble—Bumble is a fantastic because the people on Bumble are actually looking to go out on dates with you. The best type of dating when trying online dating is when you subscribe to websites like RSVP, Match.com and eHarmony. These dating websites are created specifically to help you to find love, to find a partner. The sheer fact that you have to invest at least two or three hours of your time creating a decent profile, helps you to weed out a lot of men that may only just be looking for a quick casual hook up. Men looking for a quick, casual hook up are quite comfortable spending 10 seconds hooking up their Tinder , which is literally how long it takes. Whereas, if a man’s willing to invest two or three hours of his life into creating a proper dating profile and answering all of the dating questions in the compatibility questions, and writing some meaningful content for his biography and ing some nice photos of himself, then it shows straight out the gate that this man is committed to finding a relationship.

I always say that when you look at somebody’s dating profile, the more care and consideration and time and effort that they’ve put into the dating profile, the more sure you can be that they really are looking for a long term relationship. I mean if a man has logged into RSVP or eHarmony and has spent his time filling out his biography, completing compatibility surveys, looking for nice photos of himself and putting those up, editing his words over and over again until he sounds articulate and funny or however it is that he likes to be portrayed, then you can really take from that, the fact that this person has a vested interest in really having a great profile so that he can attract great women and he can hopefully find himself a great partner. So what I suggest that you do is pick your poison, pick your favorite dating site, but pick one that is relationship focused.

Now if you have picked, for example, eHarmony, then the first thing that you need to do is spend a whole night, dedicate an entire evening, to completing your profile.

Find some photos of yourself that really represent who you are, photos that show you out having fun. To make a great dating profile, you don’t want to just see pictures of you taking selfies or pictures of you running around going crazy at nightclubs and bars with your friends. They want to see pictures of you on holiday, pictures of you having fun, pictures of you with your kids if you have kids, with your pets, pictures of you going about your typical day, and getting out there, smiling and having a wonderful time. When you’re going to fill out your biography, really think about what you want people to know about you, and be as honest as you can possibly be. People like knowing what you enjoy doing on the weekend. People like knowing what the last book you read was and what your favorite movies are. People like knowing what TV shows you like to watch and what makes you laugh. People like knowing what kind of food you like to eat, what countries you visited. People like knowing what your goals are, what you are hoping to do at the end of the year, what are you hoping to do at the end of three years. Share yourself with your profile.

Think of your dating profile as your new best friend, your best friend who happens to be a matchmaker. You want to tell your best friend all about the best of you, all of the great things about you, and all of the things you’re excited about. Reveal what you love about yourself and about the world, so that when somebody reads your profile, he can really gain a sense of who you truly are and get excited about who you truly are. Never lie in a dating profile, always be completely honest, because if you lie, you’re going to attract men who are attracted to your lies. Let me repeat that: they’ll be attracted to your lies. They’re not attracted to who you really are. You can never truly live your lies. You aren’t your lies. You are your truth. So be sure that your dating profile speaks your truth. After all, I mean you want to attract your soulmate and you’re just going to attract someone else’s soulmate if you start pretending that you’re a different soul. Make sure you take a lot of time when it comes to thinking about who your perfect partner is and describing who your perfect partner is. We’ve done a lot of exercises already in this book. So before you start your dating profile, it’ll be a

great idea for you to be able to reflect on everything that you have discovered about what your ideal partner should look like and who they are as a person, so that you are able to articulate those things in detail into your profile. Don’t be blasé. You know very well that when you have found a dating profile of a guy you like, it’s exciting and interesting to be able to read about all of the attributes that he’s looking for in a woman. So why not give him that gift as well? Let him get excited about looking at all the attributes that you’re looking for in a man and discovering that “Oh my goodness, that’s me.”

So now you’ve created your dating profile. That was day one. Now for the rest of the week, every day for at least one hour, you need to go on to dating sites. Obviously, first of all, you’re going to look at your bulging inbox and be replying to all of the people that you’re interested in. If you are not interested in somebody, it’s a great thing to do to actually send them a message back saying, “Thank you so much for taking the time out to look at my profile and send me a message. While I don’t think that you and I are going to be a match, I just wanted to thank you for spending your time messaging me and to wish you all the luck in the world in your quest for love.” Something along those lines. It’s always good to tie things off in a bow, to end them, and to not let people be hanging. Also, what could happen is if a guy has become quite fixated on you even though you are definitely not interested in him and you’ve made that decision, he might start messaging you over and over and over again. He might start getting annoyed that you’re not replying. This can actually cause a bit of negativity for you. It can really make your mindset when you enter your dating site every night, feeling quite negative or quite worried or scared, because you know that you’re going to be having a lot of grief and problems when you enter your inbox, and you don’t want that. So it’s better off just to tie things into a nice neat bow. Let the people that you’re not interested in go and move forward with the ones that you are interested in.

Once you’ve replied to all of your messages, and hopefully you’re starting to get a bit of traction and starting to find some people there that you’re interested in, then it’s time for you to troll. And so, every night, I want you to spend one whole hour looking at dating profiles. Now that seems like a lot of time, but is it really a lot of time if that hour spent every night is going to help you to find Mr. 10/10,

Mr. Right, your future husband, the man of your dreams, the man that will make you the happiest you’ve ever been in your entire life? Well no, I don’t think that’s a lot of time at all. I mean you invest that much time watching a TV show every night, you may as well filter that time away from sitting in front of the idiot box which isn’t going to be helping you improve your life any, and looking at dating profiles instead. When you’re looking at the dating profiles, you want to make sure that you are going to be reaching out to at least 10 people every night. So make sure that you are sending out messages. Be confident. Be bold. Find people that you’re interested in by looking at their profiles and reading their profiles. Don’t just look at their photos. If you’re even mildly attracted to somebody, read their profile. men are simple folk (sorry, guys), and when it comes to talking profile pictures, they’re absolutely hopeless. Also, they’re not one to be out often taking selfies or saying to their friends, “Hey, take a photo of me. Take a photo of me.” So photos of men are slim pickings compared to us women, who have literally hundreds of thousands of photos taken of us, stored in our phone. They don’t have much to pick from. So don’t write guys off straightaway based on their profile pictures. As as long as there’s some sort of attraction there, then definitely read on, and only if their profile is saying all the things that you need and want it to say. Then and only then should you respond by reaching out and sending a message.

Now if you do this every single night, then that means that by the end of your first week of doing this, you would have already ed 50 different men. Fifty different men whose profiles you’ve read, who seem to be quite compatible with you, who you think are moderately to very attractive, 50 men. If you’ve ed 50 men, then all of a sudden, you have really put yourself out there. You have put yourself out there hardcore. It’s only taken an hour of every day and already you’re in with 50 different men that are all seemingly compatible with you. Not only that, but your dating profile has been doing the rounds as well. It’s highly likely that you’ve been ed by 50 to 100 other men. So now all of a sudden, your inbox is flowing. You’ll be chatting away. You’ll be spending a lot of time making new online friends and developing relationships. If you’re exposing yourself to between 50 and 150 new men online every single week, all of whom are seemingly compatible for you, then finding that Mr. Right all of a sudden becomes a lot more probable, compared to the amount of men that you exposed yourself to last week which could well have been 0. Now if we make this plan a three month plan, then that means that

you’re going to be exposing yourself to literally thousands of men. You’re giving yourself the most amazing opportunity to get out there, to use the law of numbers and work the law of numbers to work through lots of different dating profiles and start meeting some fabulous men. You’re going to get asked out on dates. Some of them might not be very good. Some of them might be amazing, but you’re getting closer and closer every time to the one if you stick to your plan. If you follow this plan day in and day out, then finding Mr. Right will become inevitable.

PART TWO

And now when it comes to putting yourself out there, part two of your dating plan of course, is to get out and find Mr. Right by putting yourself into social situations where you get to meet single men and have fun with them, and enjoy the chemistry of having face to face communication with them. We’ll talk about all of the different places that you can go to meet single men, but I’ll name a few of them now because they’re very integral in your plan. You can go to singles parties. You can go speed dating. You can go to meet at dinners. You can just be out on the town with friends at a pub or a club, or even a singles holiday. You can also rely on friends to fix you up on blind dates. And so, what you need to do is you need to make the decision that every weekend, twice during that weekend, you will put yourself into a social situation where you’ll get to meet single people.

So for week one, find a singles party. Now to find a singles party is easy, believe it or not. All you need to do is to hop onto Google and type in “singles party” and then the suburb the city that you live in. There will be literally hundreds of parties available for you to go to. You can also hop onto meetup.com, and again, hundreds of singles parties in your area. Grab one of your single friends and go along to one of these parties. Get out there. Put yourself in a situation where you’re going to meet other single people. The great thing about singles parties is that you’re not going to have to wait very long to meet single people, because every single person there is single. They’re all there for the same reason as you,

to find love. So you’re putting yourself in a situation where there are many, many men who are all in a room, that are all really interested in meeting single girls. You’re putting yourself out there again. There is no way that you’re going to go to that single party and you’re not going to meet 5, 10, 20 different guys and click with 1, 2, maybe even 3 of them.

On the next day, for your next face-to-face dating task, why not ask one of your friends to set you up on a blind date? Or maybe you want to go to speed dating. Maybe you’d like to try and eat at dinner, or maybe you just want to grab one of your single friends and go out and about. Go to a pub. Go to a bar. Go to a sporting event. Go to a situation where there’s lots of people around, lots of single people around and they’re all in the mood for having fun and laughing and being happy and talking. When you’re putting yourself out twice every weekend into a set of circumstances where there are single people that like you, are looking for love, then you are bound to start meeting people that you connect with and that you click with. You’re going to be making so many new friends that are going to bring so much joy and happiness to your life anyway. Above and beyond everything else, you’re just going to be more social instead of sitting at home on your own in your bathrobe doing nothing, you’re going to be out. You’re going to be experiencing life. You’re going to be enjoying, improving all of the one on one human interactions and really refining your dating skills and your interpersonal skills as well.

And so, this is your dating plan: one hour Monday to Friday, two activities that put you in front of single people face to face twice a week. Now if you stick to this dating plan and you apply all of the strategies in this book, then finding Mr. Right is going to be inevitable. If you stick to your dating plan and you make it part of your daily routine, just make it part of your life, make it part of what you do every single day, then you’ll be absolutely amazed at the abundance of love and new friendships that start to flow into your life. So get out a big piece of paper. Write out your dating plan. Stick it up in your bathroom on the mirror or in the kitchen on the fridge or anywhere where you often look, so that you can keep your dating plan fresh in your mind and you can apply and use it every single day, day in, day out until you finally meet Mr. Right. And when you do meet Mr. Right and you are blissfully happy and madly in love, make sure that

you keep your dating plan and this book, and you it on to somebody who is single just like you were, to help them on their quest for love.

Chapter 19

ONE STEP CLOSER TO I LOVE YOU

“One step closer I have died everyday, waiting for you Darling, don’t be afraid, I have loved you for a thousand years I’ll love you for a thousand more”

~”A Thousand Years”, Christina Perri

PLANS

This book has taken on a journey, a journey of self-discovery. It’s taken you to a place where you’ve had to face some of the shame and pain that you’ve felt in the past and forgive yourself by letting it all go. It’s helped you to find out how to love yourself and to recognize all of the good that is in you and all around you. It has helped you to be grateful for the life that you currently have. It’s also called upon you to be of service to other people and to share your life purpose and your unique set of skills with the rest of the world. You are now able to understand the opposite sex a little bit better. You’ve been able to grasp what it is that you truly need and want out of a partner, what type of partner is really going to make you happy. You’ve also learnt about where to go to put yourself out there, to push yourself out of your comfort zone and into a situation where you can meet Mr. Right. You’ve learnt what to do when you get to go on a date with somebody that you’re excited about seeing. And so, you’re ready to do this dating thing right! You have a plan of action now and there is absolutely nothing standing in your way anymore from finding love.

PROMISES

So before you go out and start implementing your plan, I’d like to call on you to make some promises to yourself.

Promise number one: You promise that you will not waste any time on Mr. Wrong. If you’re out on a date with a person and you’re feeling that you’re not having that level of chemistry that is going to make you happy and sustain you in love and joy for the rest of your life, then you promise yourself that you will walk away.

Promise number two: If you do find somebody that you like, but you think that there are a few issues or problems with him, don’t try to change him. He’s absolutely perfect for somebody; he’s just not perfect for you. Let him walk away. By letting him walk away, you push him closer to his Mrs. Right and you free yourself up to receive your 10/10 lover.

Promise number three: You promise to always that to somebody, you will mean the moon and the stars. There is your perfect match out there waiting for you. He’s out there wandering the world just like you are. He, too, is manifesting the woman of his dreams. When he describes the woman of his dreams, he’s describing you. So he’s searching too, but he could be in another country. He could be deployed in Afghanistan in the army. He could be trekking across a mountain on his way to Machu Picchu. He could be right around the corner, just a couple of minutes away. You just don’t know, but please always that you are worthy of mind blowing, breathing love. There IS somebody out there who will love you with their body, their mind, and their soul. Your soul mate exists and now you have cleared a path to bring him into your life faster than ever before.

PERCEPTION

Now that you have your dating plan and you’re putting it into action and you’re manifesting the man of your dreams every single day, you are drawing him closer and closer to you with every waking moment. So just be patient, stick to your plan, and know that you are enough. I want you to spend a few minutes in the morning each day, reminding yourself about what it feels like to fall in love. Recall how amazing it feels to get goosebumps every time you get a text message from somebody that you’re in love with. Think back to how whenever you thought about your love or fantasized about your love, it made your heart skip a beat. how when you’ve seen him and he’s kissed you, you’ve actually thought that if the world exploded right now, you wouldn’t feel a single thing. Manifest the man of your dreams by thinking about who you want, what attributes he has, and how he’s going to make you feel. Say those manifestations out aloud every single morning without fail. Manifest your 10/10 love into your life.

PURPOSE

Love is effortless and when you find the one and he finds you, you won’t need to abide by any rules or try hard to please him. He will just love you, warts and all, everything about you. So you need to love yourself and you need to be true to yourself. More than anything, you need to be your best self. Work on the exercises you’ve been given about loving yourself more. Forgive yourself. Look in the mirror and remind yourself of all the things you’ve felt shame and embarrassment and anxiety over, and forgive yourself for them. Look at all the blessings and the great things that you have in your life, and thank the universe for them every single day. Reminding yourself of all the wonderful things you have in and around your life will help you to feel happier within yourself. I promise you, but it is something you need to do consistently every single day. Find your purpose. Figure out what it is that hurts you the most in this world and

then find a way that you can use your unique skills and abilities to help alleviate some of that pain. Even if you can help just one person who’s in need or suffering by your actions, then you have changed the world. You have literally changed the world. If you can inspire somebody to do the same, the ripple effect will be enormous.

And so, my friend, you beautiful, lovable, amazing person, go out into this world with a smile on your face a spring in your step and a twinkle in your eye, knowing that your Mr. Right does actually reside on planet Earth. Now that you have started manifesting him by calling out to the universe to bring him to you, and now that you have started to become a person that you are proud of—a more amazing, impressive, powerful, beautiful, kind, loving human being—you will start to draw towards you people who are similar to you. Know that the more that you give back to this world, the more joy the world will give to you. The more happiness you create, the more happiness you will feel. Life really can be just that simple. You are about to find your soul mate and receive the most amazing gift from the universe. Life’s most powerful lesson.

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Serena de Comarmond AKA Serena DC is an Aquarian who subscribes to the mantra that if you can dream it, you can do it. Over the years Serena has become a recognised part of the entrepreneurial community, creating business in the healthy & beauty industries and most recently in the travel and dating industry with her matchmaking vacation company, iHeart Travel.

iHeart Travel creates overseas vacations for single people looking for love. It is through this project that Serena has gained valuable intel on the dating world and has taken this knowledge and turned it into the book you are reading now. Like the singles on her iHeart Matchmaker Vacations she hopes to help readers to improve their self esteem, become more authentic and lift their dating game to help them find love faster and to fall in love with the perfect person for them.

Aside from her entrepreneurial ventures, Serena is a Reality TV Star in Australia where she is a lead cast member on the hit show Instant Hotel on Channel 7. She is also the producer of the reality show The Secret Art of Falling In Love which follows Serena and her team of experts on an iHeart Matchmaker Vacation.

Serena has 2 children (Lucian and Halo) and lives with her partner in Melbourne Australia. Her favourite movie is Moulin Rouge! Her favourite band in Take That and in her spare time Serena loves to sing (love ballads like “I will always love you” and “At Last” of course), read Crime novels and travel the world. She has visited 29 countries so far and hopes to add several more to the list in the next year.