How To Succeed In Life If You Already Love Yourself Unconditionally | (#015) The Masculine Psychology Podcast with David Tian

Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in dating, relationships, success, and fulfillment, and explore the psychology of masculinity. Now here’s your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast. I’m David Tian, your host, and I’m very excited to welcome you to Episode 15.

We started off a couple of episodes ago with the pathologies of success and I introduced the myth of value-based love that you should be loved for the value you offer and what you can do for her. I shared three main points about the pathology of success, how the achiever’s curse results in a kind of restlessness of unworthiness, where it’s really hard for achievers to be present in their personal lives. [00:55.7]

The second point being that all of this restlessness of unworthiness is actually rooted in a fear of not being good enough, specifically of not being good enough to be loved, of being unworthy of being loved, and that one way that that gets played out is in the worry about losing out to the bigger, better deal—to losing their woman, to losing their relationship, based on whatever metric they’re banking on, to be worthy of love or attention or affection or whatever it is—that there’s somebody else around the corner or behind them over their shoulder who is going to be the bigger, better deal, whether that’s a hotter guy, a funnier guy, a guy with better skills with women, a higher-status guy or a richer guy, or any combination of those, losing out to the bigger, better deal and this fear ultimately of not being good enough and not being worthy of love.

Then, the third point being that you can tell that you’re suffering under this curse of the achiever or suffering with this kind of restlessness or a pathology of success if you notice that you’re just really tired, if these protector or managerial parts are just overworked or burned out. [02:04.3]

Then asking yourself the question, When will it be enough? and noticing that even success, when it’s arrived at in this tortured way, actually ends up feeding your narcissism that you’re only good enough because you happen to at that moment or that time score highly on the metrics that you’re looking at, but that that kind of false self-esteem is actually rooted in toxic shame and these deep core insecurities.

That was Episode 13, and in the last episode, I shared three points about:

• The first one being the insecurity of achievements that the difference between performance-based and being-based self-esteem.
• The second point being asking the question, What makes someone worthy of love? and looking at the value system there. [02:51.3]
• The third question being what to do about it and the solution being unconditional love of your own higher for your own parts. In other words, the solution requires you to love your own self to meet your own needs for love, connection, and other emotional, psychological needs that are totally legitimate, but having to meet them, growing to the point where you can meet them in yourself and not requiring an external source to meet them.

Then, of course, I’ve covered this in other episodes, in a healthy long-term relationship of intimacy and love, of unconditional love, your intimate partner can be the secondary caregiver to your inner child parts, but cannot be the primary source of your own love.

That can only come from yourself and it’s all about then growing to the point where you can access your higher self and your higher self automatically is able to love those parts of you that are holding the vulnerability and require and feel the need for love most acutely. Then, of course, loving all the other parts of yourself, including the parts that have been coping with these protective mechanisms. [04:01.8]

I shared my own personal story about how I discovered this kind of life-transforming lesson through my relationship with my baby goddaughter and now we’re experiencing it with my baby son.

That was all in the last two episodes, and in this episode, I’m going to be getting into what it’s actually like to succeed in life when loving yourself, because that’s one of the achiever’s biggest fears and then kind of objection to it, if I actually love myself just for who I am, then I won’t work so hard at the law firm or I won’t stay up really late and sacrifice all of these things that I really enjoy just in order to attain this worldly goal. I’ll have nothing. I’ll just be a bum. Notice the extremes there, but I’ll be addressing that in this episode, because it’s really important that you do understand what it’s like to have that. [04:51.8]

Begin with that end in mind, another theme I’ve talked about a lot about in this podcast, to understand what it’s like on the other side—because, unless you do, you’re going to have this unconscious blockage to get there and then you’ll be just turning your wheels and wondering why you’re not getting anywhere—what it’s like to be at that point where you can love yourself just in who you are, not needing to earn love, not needing to base your self-worth on your performance, which has to be redone in every instance to be re-earned the next day.

But to actually just be able to be calm and be peaceful, to be fulfilled and settled, just in who you are, your very being, that your self-worth and self-esteem are based on your very being, and that just in who you are, you’re able to attract the right woman for you to succeed in a long-term relationship with. In that sense, it’s effortless because you’re not having to exert any extra effort. You’re just you. You’re just attracting somebody who is right for a relationship just by you being you. [05:56.7]

The love that you are craving you’re able to give to yourself just for you being you. It’s not something that you have to earn or that you have to go out and deserve, but just because you are you that you are loved—and to imagine, which is a real possibility for you and the reality, if you can go through this therapeutic process, that you will be able to, just by you being you, attract the right women into your life and to, just by you being you, grow that relationship over time.

Okay, so that’s what’s in store if you embrace this process. I’ve got three points to describe what it’s like having gone through or going through the process, because it never ends, of course, and it’s an enjoyable process that you don’t want it to end. That’s another sign of a toxic achiever that he’s just waiting to be good enough, so that he wants this to be over.

This is such a common refrain I hear all the time among achievers. “When is my self-growth over? When can I be done with growing, so that I can finally feel good enough?” That’s a sign that you haven’t understood the right approach or the right perspective, that you’re still stuck in the old paradigm, that you’re still stuck in the old value system. Review the previous two episodes and the entire podcast, actually, of what I’ve been sharing, but especially the last two episodes. [07:17.2]

In this episode, we’ll be getting into three points about what it’s like to actually succeed in life, having reached the point where you have unconditional love for yourself, for your inner child parts that maybe before you felt some shame around or that you thought were dark, or that were holding all of this other pain, and being able to love them unconditionally and help them heal and unburden them of these toxic beliefs and patterns and so forth.

What is it like then to succeed in life in this world where you still have to earn money and to pay the bills, etc.? The first point is not only will it be like effortless attraction, just because you’re attracting the right woman based on or just because of who you are, but your achievement will also be effortless. [08:03.8]

There’s actually a lot of science around this and it’s also a millennia-old philosophy that is built up around this very idea of effortless achievement or effortless excellence. In the Western world and the modern scientific world, it’s most accessible through the concept of flow, which was developed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the ’90s, and there’s a lot of research now on this and a lot of actually sort of a cottage industry to help you and your business, or you as a performer, a high-performer, achieve flow, and it’s kind of commercialized now.

But the original research around this concept of flow was based on and came out of a research about happiness, and, also, of course, of excellence, so they were looking at what creates excellence. They found that those who were excellent at whatever area that they’ve chosen also experienced quite a lot of happiness while they were doing their activity. [08:57.0]

The commonalities of that state, which later came to be known as flow, was one where you felt even happier doing it or felt even more enjoyment doing it than even sex, which was rated below it, which is pretty astounding for a lot of immature guys to even think of or conceive of. Then, of course, even above another very pleasant activity, which was long meals with good friends. Flow, being in flow, pursuing this activity when you’re in it, it’s not torture. It’s not discipline. There’s no discipline required. It’s not feeling like a grind or hustle. You actually really enjoy it.

Here’s an easy example for a lot of younger guys, like playing video games. It’s very easy for you, if you find the right video game, to achieve flow and you might experience or might have experienced flow in playing video games. There are three markers of flow. The first marker is you lose track of time. Have you ever lost track of time doing something you really enjoy? I’m pretty sure you have and it’s an easy one. I’ve done this with video games, losing track of time playing games, and it’s something that actually people nowadays are getting paid millions of dollars to do. You can actually become a professional video game player. That’s part of the amazing thing that technology has brought us now that was unthinkable for me as a kid growing up in the ’80s. [10:11.4]

But, anyway, you can achieve flow in almost any activity. Almost any. There are some other conditions that need to be met, but one of the markers of flow is that you lose track of time. You’re immersed in it. Okay, so time distortion.

The second condition or a feature of being in flow, to know whether you’re in flow, is whether there’s a challenge, in that you have the resources to meet that challenge. If you play a video game, that’s way too hard. As soon as you start, you die. It’s hard to enjoy that. It’s hard to lose track of time in that. It’s hard to achieve flow in that.

If you play a game that’s too easy, then you get bored, and again, it’s hard to achieve flow. It’s got to be right at that sweet spot where the difficulty level matches your current skill level or your current focus level, right? That’s a condition where you have the resources to meet the challenge, but the challenge is challenging enough that it requires you accessing all of these resources or skills, or experience, to beat these challenges. [11:05.8]

Okay, then the third condition is that you get automatic or immediate feedback of your performance and this is one reason it’s really hard for university students to achieve flow, doing activities that otherwise would be flow-inducing, such as writing a paper or reading, or studying for an exam or writing an essay. It’s because it takes quite a long time for the professors or the TAs to hand back the graded papers or exams, right, so you don’t know whether you’re actually doing very well.

Now, if you are smart students, you would already know whether you hit the mark, whether you did well and got a good grade, while you’re actually doing the essay or doing the exam. But it’s really difficult for somebody who’s just starting out, doesn’t know their way in the field. Maybe it’s their first course ever in that discipline or field, first year or two. It’s almost impossible because you’re literally learning what the standards are. You don’t know yet, and that’s unfortunate that the university system is set up that way that there isn’t immediate feedback on your performance. [12:02.4]

But there are some disciplines where there is immediate feedback, math, as an example. I experienced flow in my first class ever of symbolic logic because the answers were in the back of the book. We were assigned whatever chapter and there were all these problem sets, and it was my first time doing this and I bought an unmarked book. It was, I think, a brand new textbook. There were no clues as to what the answer would be and I just lost myself in and immersed myself in the summer, too, in Toronto, so the perfect weather outside, but I was stuck in this library.

Luckily, what we called the library had a skylight, so there was some sunlight in it, but I spent hours there just immersed in this enjoyment of doing symbolic logic problems, because I can always look in the back of a book for not just the answer, but the model answer. Then I would learn. I would be learning constantly as I was doing the homework.

This is a rare experience in academia. You’re often waiting for the professor to tell you whether you’ve got the right answer, right, or to get your grade back. In the activities in which you’ve lost track at the time in which you had the resources to meet the challenge that was there and it was requiring all of your concentration to beat that challenge, you probably had immediate feedback on your performance. [13:11.2]

You could see this in sports, like playing tennis with an opponent that is at your skill level and you know immediately whether you score it or not. This is a common feature of sports, but also of video games and almost all games. In socializing, you can experience flow doing that. That’s well-documented. You can also experience flow on a date. It’s a kind of socializing, right, and flirting. You know immediately, if you know what to look for.

A lot of guys don’t know what to look for, so it’s sort of like, for them, waiting for the professor to tell them whether they did well enough, and that could take a while and they don’t know until she leaves or does something drastic. It’s important to develop that emotional intelligence and those skills in dating and flirting to be able to read a woman’s body language and so on. If you are suffering from some version of Asperger’s or something along those lines, you’re going to have to spend more time learning to read these subtle cues, and they might seem subtle to you, of these sub-communications. [14:04.8]

But once you can, it’s relatively easy to get into flow in flirting, too, because you’re getting immediate feedback. Of course, you could have very challenging situations in which you don’t even get started, so you don’t experience flow, but you might also experience flow if you have the resources to meet the challenge.

This is one of the most pleasurable side effects of flirting, where on a good date, you just lose track of time, but you lose track of time, your partner, the person that is your conversation partner, your interlocutor, has the skills that to meet you or your challenge of your flirting back and forth with your banter and so on, and it’s enjoyable because of that.

You’re able to match each other on that score and you’ll get immediate feedback of how you’re doing. You see immediately how she takes your joke. If you went too far, if you could have turned it up a notch, and you just do it right there on the spot, because you’re able to read that feedback and you have those three conditions met, and then, boom, you’re into flow. [14:56.8]

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, where on a date or in an interaction with a woman that you really like, where everything you say just seems to work and you don’t really have to try, you’re just you, and whatever you think, you just say, and whatever you feel is the right way to go with it, sort of like you’re just surfing or emotions and everything seems so natural and effortless. That’s flow and that’s actually an achievable state in almost any discipline if you can work out those three conditions.

That’s the tricky part, making sure that you get immediate feedback on your performance, making sure that the thing is challenging enough and that you have the resources to meet the challenge, and then you’ll notice whether you are losing track of time.

Of course, a big part of it is whether you like the activity at all, and for you to actually reach that point where you have the skills to meet the challenge, you probably will like it. You might even be surprised that you like it. Then that will often create the liking and the enjoyment of the activity. But if you already like the activity that you’re predisposed to it, then it’ll be even easier to achieve or attain flow there. [15:58.7]

Imagine a life where every day you’re experiencing flow on a regular basis. Maybe not all the time. You’re not experiencing flow from the moment you wake up. I suppose there could be a day like that, but there are a lot of things that are outside of our control which we may not enjoy. I don’t know how many people have experienced flow, brushing their teeth, for example, or using the toilet or something. Those are all things that we, just because of our biology, need to do. But I suppose some people could experience flow, brushing their teeth, maybe a child who is just learning how to use their hands to hold the toothbrush or something, but there are a lot of things that we may not enjoy.

But if you can lifestyle hack, and I have a course on this called “Lifestyle Mastery”, where you can systematically identify those things that you are currently doing that you don’t enjoy, but that you could replace. A lot of people, most people in the world, I’d say, 90-plus percent of people, have never actually thought of life in that way, so they just go through life doing all these things that they don’t actually enjoy because they have this limiting belief that they have to do it. But if they are just a little bit more innovative, they could hack their way through and not have to do any of those things and not have to wait for society or technology to force them to innovate in that way. [17:03.8]

But there are ways of getting around that, things that you don’t enjoy in life, but even then, imagine that your workday, which is let’s take the average person’s workday, which is eight hours. Imagine, if six out of those eight hours, you can be in flow. Wouldn’t that be a much better situation than doing something that you hate?

If you’ve been grinding away at something, you probably have come to hate it. In order to just put off the sort of delayed gratification or delayed satisfaction in life for some far-off goal, like a pipe dream almost, like a billion-dollar exit or something. I’m not saying that’s not possible. I’ve worked with people, clients who have exited from billion-dollar companies. It’s possible. You’ve got to work really, really hard at it.

I really hope that you enjoy that work, because if you don’t, then you are probably for you to even enter it into that bargain, to take that bargain, you’re probably suffering under the achiever’s curse and probably have trouble accessing your vulnerability and loving your inner child parts, and probably have trouble in your love life. [18:05.0]

Maybe not in your sex life, especially if you have a lot of status and all that, all of those other superficial markers, that signal “Hey, good sex over here” or good manipulation “Use me to move yourself up the status ladder”, that kind of thing, which is why with most guys, their value system is just so low level that they’re stuck in that level of trying to get love. Of course, there can be no love in that value system. They may not realize that consciously, but that’s something I’ve been pointing out. There’s no unconditional love there.

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If you love yourself unconditionally, then you find yourself not even having to play that game. I’ll give you an example. I guess I can use this example of my client, James, to illustrate this point and the next two points.

James came to me when he was cheated on by a toxic, very desirable woman. She was a celebrity in that part of the world and she was on covers of magazines and all that, but she was also very intelligent, so she was plugged into this entrepreneurial world as well. It was his ideal mate because, as he came to later describe it, he wanted to be a part of a power couple. He wanted a woman who he could show off on his arm and have other people envy him.

All right, so this was his driving need. No matter what I started out saying, it’s not going to work for you, this is narcissism, he just wanted to be free of her and that was the first step, just being free of that burden, of letting go of that baggage from her, that relationship, and then doing some work with him. [20:10.8]

He got his confidence back and then he was feeling quite independent, and then guess what? Of course, his old patterns came back in because he didn’t do the family of origin work. He didn’t do the therapeutic work. He just did more of the life coaching work. He got that confidence, but it was confidence based on a kind of superficial self-esteem because his performance was doing well. It was performance-based self-esteem, despite if you’re doing it right, if you’re doing life coaching and you’re succeeding right, you would get all of it. You’d get your outward success and your inner success, but he was more focused on the outer.

What happened was, several months later, he started a relationship with another woman that, of course, if there were no signs, because I don’t meet the women that my clients work with generally, he made her sound like just this perfect ideal woman for him, in the sense that she ticked all the boxes superficially. Physically very attractive, had lots of status, was also very intelligent, also plugged into the entrepreneur world that he very much valued and measured his own self-worth based on their evaluation of him there, literally valuation. [21:14.3]

Lo and behold, about a year or so later, they broke up in spectacular fashion and then it came back to me, looking for help on how to get another trophy girlfriend or to be another power-couple coupling, and to have that woman on his arm that he can show off and be the envy of everyone in the room.

That’s what he kept going after and I finally was able to get him, because he was there and he felt like he was at rock bottom. I was able to get him to see and understand the approach that I was trying to lead him to all along, the therapeutic approach of bringing unconditional love to himself, that it’s not about succeeding or getting revenge, or success is the best revenge kind of approach. It’s not about that because that will never bring fulfillment and happiness. [21:59.4]

It’s, instead, bringing that unconditional love from your higher self, first of all, accessing your higher self, and then bringing that unconditional love of your own self to your vulnerable inner child parts that are hurting and in pain and needy, having these unmet needs not met consistently or reliably. Then, of course, lavishing appreciation and gratitude for your managerial or protector parts that have been trying to keep these exiled ones safe from feeling those painful emotions over and over, and going through the process. There’s a multi-step process that I led him through.

Okay, so that leads to the second point, which is choosing and finding the right activities that will lead you more consistently into flow, where you are enjoying the thing that you’re doing and able to achieve sort of effortless excellence around it.

A lot of people who aren’t yet at this point of finding flow in some activity that they can be rewarded for monetarily or haven’t found excellence in anything, this is a difficult place, and it might just be that you haven’t found the right thing, but it also might be that you haven’t kept at it enough. [23:12.5]

Maybe you haven’t started from the beginner level, and it might be that, when you started, the challenges were beyond your resources and you didn’t have the right coach or the right instructional methods or whatever. You didn’t find the right entry point to create mastery in that activity. But any skill, any skill can be cracked and hacked, so that you can actually achieve excellence at it in a relatively short amount of time.

Now, there are those obviously who are more talented because of their personality profile, those who are more extroverted, even genetically might be able to have this advantage of—we all have an advantage—to sales or networking, but even if you were an introvert, there are ways for you to master that and to overcome that handicap, just like there are ways for men who are shorter than average or shorter than average for an NBA player to do well in basketball.

There are plenty of counterexamples of all of those where you require natural talent to do well. You might actually have natural talents for that particular activity, but with the right mindset and approach, you can use your perceived weaknesses as an advantage. [24:16.8]

Anyway, there are plenty of ways and examples of this to achieve this, and it’s about choosing or finding the right activities, and then spending enough time at that beginner level where your skill level only matches a very beginner-level challenge, and then just keep putting the time into it, assuming you enjoy it, because if you can lose track of time doing it and you’ve already identified it in the capitalistic system in which you are living.

Again, if these are the 1980s, I would not recommend that you spend time mastering video games, though, I think, even in the ’80s, there were video-game competitions. I don’t think that the prize money was very high or maybe not, I don’t know, but nowadays it is. Esports is going to be huge, but it would not have been very good advice were very realistic and practical advice in the ’80s. [25:01.0]

But now I think almost anything can be monetized, but I’m sure there are things that cannot, so it’s important to choose with some practicality in mind, but with some creativity and innovation, and imagination and knowing what the real possibilities are and becoming excellent at that thing, because you naturally will if you are in flow doing it, because what will happen is it won’t feel like hard work or practice. You will lose track of time. When you lose track of time, you’ll put in the necessary hours and reps to get good at it.

Now, of course, you’ve got to come at it at a graduated way, so you’ve got to come at it with the challenge, and it can’t be too easy because if you’re coming at it too easy, then you’re not going to progress very quickly and you’ll get stuck in this kind of beginner’s hell and this could be from bad instruction, bad coaching, bad teacher or bad instructional system. You’ve got to find the right instructional system or the right way to approach or master that particular skill, and there’s always going to be some way to do that.

If you do it the right way, and there are plenty of books on this like The Talent Code, even just Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow, there are so many examples of this. Then, I would especially recommend that if you’ve identified a particular craft or skill that you want to master, there are craft-specific or skill-specific resources, and the best thing to do is to find a mentor. [26:15.5]

Whatever area of life you want to master, if you can just find somebody who has mastered it who kind of resembles you in terms of your handicaps and your advantages, and is about 10 years or so ahead of you on this road, this journey, or 10 years or more, then if you can get that person as a one-on-one mentor, that would be the quickest hack to doing it.

That’s how I did it in any area of life that I wanted to master, including being good with women and relationships, but also in business and so forth in my therapy practice as well. Whatever it is that you want to get really, really good at, if you can find a mentor for it, that would be the best. But if you can also get plugged into a good instructional system, that would be great, too.

Then, the number two point is choosing or finding the right activity. Returning to the example of James, he was driven to create these companies that he really didn’t care much about. They were really, for him, he was just sort of salivating at the prospect of making a lot of money out of it, and because he was really smart and driven and kind of cold and calculating, he was able to do that on multiple exits. [27:13.8]

But then he was never very passionate about any of those companies that he was working on, any of the projects he was building. They were kind of or some of them were actually kind of sleazy, but because they were going to make quick money, he threw himself into it and got out, in and out, within a matter of years pretty quickly and came out with a bunch of millions on those.

That was sort of his approach because it was more about significance, personal significance coming out of that, not a feeling of contribution. He was choosing the wrong activities because they didn’t feel meaningful to him, and because of that, his enjoyment of it was quite limited. Learning how to give love to himself unconditionally led him to end up choosing a different career path. [27:55.1]

He was still building companies, but now, and this now segues into Point 3, that if you’ve chosen and found the right activity for yourself to be in flow consistently, and it’s rewarding enough monetarily in the system, a capitalistic or economic system in which you find yourself, then the third point that I want to point out—for somebody who has reached the point where they’re able to give themselves unconditional love, what is it like to succeed in life—the third point being that they will find deeper meaning through contribution to others beyond themselves.

You notice you can be in flow in a kind of amoral way. You can also find flow immorally, but even just amorally, like it has got nothing to do with your value system memorials, right? You could be in flow as an assassin and this is one of the easy ways that you can illustrate how flow differs from the ancient Chinese concept of wu-wei or effortless action.

Wu-wei would never be applied to something that the ancient philosophers would consider to be a bad activity or an evil activity, or an activity that caused pain or suffering, especially suffering. But in flow, it’s amoral. You could find flow killing people or flow blowing shit up. Then what is good and bad? We want to go down that road later, but you can see how in flow, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because you can achieve flow in a kind of narcissistic way. [29:12.0]

Notice, then the second point about choosing or finding the right activity, you might find or choose an activity that is really self-centered still. It’s all about you, you making more money, you getting that trophy, you doing well, and that life focused and centered on you won’t actually lead to long-term fulfillment and will very likely lead to suffering.

Suffering often comes from an excessive focus on the self, on you, not specifically like from the IFS perspective, you are a multitude, right? You have many parts and all that that once you’re able to dig into that, then that’s it. You’re already feeling contribution within yourself. But now we’re cashing self out in a kind of multitudinous way, right? There’s your higher self and you have all of these different parts, and there’s a whole community of you in yourself, right? Notice that that contribution already brings such a great deep level of meaning and emotion in your life, because your higher self is loving your inner child parts, your protective parts and so forth. [30:09.7]

But even further, you’ll notice that the more mature you get, the more you derive meaning from contributing beyond even just your own parts, and now it makes sense to create a loving relationship because you want to love. You’re overflowing with love. You have enough love for all of your parts, including all of your inner child parts, and you’ve still got love coming out of you, so you want to love others. You want to help others. The easiest one is your intimate partner and then it extends into your children, and then extends into your community and that’s a natural overflow of your unconditional love flowing from you.

Coming back to my client, James, he started companies that he really cared about that had a deeper meaning for him that really he believed made other people’s lives better, not just a way of exploiting their consumer desires and creating that feeling of lack generates that need to buy it, but, instead, finding companies and contributing to companies and mentoring companies that he believed were actually creating good in the world. [31:09.4]

Then, on top of that, getting involved in nonprofits and really making that the central focus of his personal life, in fact, there finding a woman whom he found very physically attractive and they really clicked that he met in the nonprofit world. Now the two of them are happy and growing their relationship, and continuing to contribute to each other and investing through couples therapy and all kinds of other ways of growing their relationship, and ensuring maturation and growth of that in the long term.

As a recap of the three features I wanted to point out of what it’s like to live successfully in the world, loving yourself unconditionally –

• The first is kind of effortless achievements marked by flow.
• The second is that you will choose and find probably different activities versus what you were laboring at under the pathology of success or under the weight of the curse or the achiever’s curse that you will choose and find different activities that you find more meaningful. [32:05.0]
• The third being, then reach a point where you derive the most meaning through contributing, contributing to not just yourself or those parts of yourself, but also to others outside of yourself, most commonly. 

Okay, so those are the three points. Look, if this is still new to you, because this is pretty advanced and I’m sharing what it’s like at a more advanced stage, if you’re just still trying to figure out, How do I even discover my higher self? How do I give unconditional love to myself? I get it.

One of the reasons I have therapeutic courses at all levels of the journey, including even if you’re just trying to figure out how to get good at flirting, How do I achieve flow in the flirting context on a date? I have courses in that.

I’ve created actually over 21 courses now, many of which are therapeutic courses—I take you through the therapeutic process to discover and unlock your higher self and unconditional love for your inner child and for your other parts—but also courses that are practical when it comes to dating, socializing and creating a social life, and hacking your lifestyle and mastering your lifestyle. Actually, I have a course called “Lifestyle Mastery”. [33:08.6]

You can access all of these courses through the unlimited all-access pass called the “Platinum Partnership”. You can click the link in the description to check it out and get the details.

It’s really important that you understand what it takes to actually be loved for who you are to be effortlessly attractive for the right woman, for the right woman and to succeed in a relationship, how to attract that into your life. It’s got to be based on who you are, not the things that you do or the things that you have, and it’s this sort of effortlessness because you’re not doing anything or you’re not exerting any extra effort to create that. When you have that, you can rest easy and assured in who you are because that can never be taken away, because it’s who you are. It’s because it’s based on you.

I’ll leave you with a little ditty timeless lyric from Mister. Rogers, Fred Rogers. [34:00.8]

“It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys
They’re just beside you.

“But it’s you I like
Every part of you.
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like,
It’s you yourself
It’s you.
It’s you I like.”

For the purposes of our point here, over the last few episodes, if you swap out every instance of the word “like” for “love”, the lyrics would be even truer. I’d also like to change the “your skin, your eyes”, just in case you work really hard at getting a nice complexion or get a lot of compliments on your pretty eyes or something. As unpoetic as “your heart” or “your brain” would sound, it would be more accurate since you couldn’t continue to live without those. [35:07.0]

But, otherwise, this simple children’s song by Mister Rogers makes the point in a beautiful way that it’s not all the stuff you’ve achieved, but who you are deep down inside you. That’s what you want to be loved for, you yourself. You don’t want to have to do anything in order to be loved. You want to be loved unconditionally. All you have to do is to be. This love need not be earned and need not be deserved, and need not be achieved. This is unconditional love.

If you loved this podcast, please share it with your friends. Share it with anyone who would benefit from it. I’d love a rating on Apple Podcasts. It really helps us get noticed more and just helps people get into learning about these messages.

Thank you so much for your feedback, our episodes so far. I’d love to hear your feedback on this one. I’ll see you in the next episode. David Tian, signing out. [35:58.7]

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