Want to hear something that drives me a little crazy?

It’s when people say: “You need to be happy first, before you find a relationship.”

In my brand spanking new video, I call BS on this idea…

Before we even get into the video today, we have our Virtual Retreat coming up on the 19th to the 21st of March. If you haven’t got a ticket yet . . . if you like what we do here, if you want a much bigger journey than just simply focusing on your dating life, if you come to me because you like my life advice, because you want to be more fulfilled in your life, happier, have more direction, you want to make a change, you have deeper confidence issues you want to work on . . . My three day Virtual Retreat is three days of immersion coaching and it’s coming up on the 19th to the 21st of March. Get your tickets here, here, here, here, here, here. One of those places will probably be a link.

Let’s begin.

Let me ask you a question: When people say, “You have to be happy before you meet somebody, before you find a relationship. You have to be complete. You have to be fulfilled.” Does any part of that grate on you? Because it does for me.

It’s hard enough, by the way, to be on your own when you want to find someone, without being then kicked in the head with, “You really need to be happy before you find someone.” Usually said to us by someone who’s in a relationship who wasn’t happy when they met someone, whose life did get better by meeting someone.

So I have some good news for you today: You don’t need to be happy before you find a relationship, you just need to be happy enough. And I actually think happy enough is a concept that will serve us everywhere in our lives. So for those of you who don’t want dating advice in this video, and you want some advice that you can use everywhere, you’re going to get two for one. Everyone’s going to be happy with this one.

Happy enough. Why is “happy enough” so important? Because you want to be happy enough that you don’t settle for the wrong thing. You want to be happy enough that if you find the right thing, but that person ends up treating you badly, you can walk away from it. You want to be happy enough that the right thing doesn’t become your everything. That to me is what “happy enough” means.

So, whilst we may have aspirations in our life to be the happiest we can be, the most fulfilled we can be, in the meantime, how do we make ourselves happy enough that we make great choices?

Here are the three components to being happy enough.

Three circles that form of Venn diagram. These three circles, when they all intersect, create happy enough. One part is your communication. If you think about it, all of the Get The Guy programs that I’ve created over the years are about creating great communication. How do you, with the person you’re trying to attract, communicate your value? How do you communicate your needs? And how do you communicate your standards and expectations? Once you’ve learned this language, you’ll always know how to handle situations, good or bad in your love life—or, indeed, in any of your relationships. So communication is a competence that we need to learn.

The next one is confidence. Now this entails your relationship with yourself. What do you see as your value? How do you treat yourself, and how do you allow others to treat you? If you think about it simply, this is understanding that you have needs and are worthy of those needs being met. This is learning how to communicate your needs to somebody else. This is being able to walk away from something when you’ve communicated your needs, and you realize they’re not being met. That’s the interplay between these two things.

The third circle is your life. Having a rich and fulfilling life that means when someone meets you, they realize that they get an invite to this incredible world that is your world. You’re not looking to someone to create a life for you, you have an amazing life to share with another person. This is essential.

And I think of our life as a series of legs under a table. Our health, our fitness is a leg under the table. Our career, or our sense of purpose, is a leg under the table. Our passions, our hobbies, our friends, our family, all of these things . . . skills we’ve trained in our lives—the fact that we can play the guitar, the fact that we have certain knowledge, we know a language—these are all legs under a table that make that table more and more sturdy. And any time one of those legs breaks and needs replacing, all of the other legs support it. So if someone’s treating you poorly, if they’re no longer respecting you, if they no longer show they value you, then you can walk away. One leg breaks, the other ones all support until you’re ready to replace that leg of the table.

These three things are extremely important because when you have all three, you create a situation where you are happy enough. And happy enough is a more modest goal than blissfully happy, enlightened, 100% fulfilled in your life. Happy enough allows you to be strong. Happy enough, in fact, is a kind of invincibility. This, to me, is lifesaving. This isn’t about being blissfully happy all the time. I can’t coach on how to be blissfully happy all the time. I’m not. But I can coach you on how to have a personal power that means you never stay in something that you should have left a long time ago. You never allow people to treat you worse than you should be treated. You don’t stay in anything for too long that’s making you unhappy. And you drive after what it is you want.

I have, for 14 years now, run a Retreat that people have gotten confused about because they’ll say to me, “Matt, I like the idea of your Retreat, but I don’t want to do a love retreat.” I’m like, “What are you talking about? This isn’t a love life retreat.” The whole point of the Virtual Retreat or my live Retreat is to get people to a place of such personal power that they can always say no to the wrong thing, and they always have the courage, the drive, and the structure in their life to go after the thing that’s actually going to make them happy. When you have that, you’re invincible.

And that applies, whether it’s going after the right partner, instead of the wrong one. Whether it’s you need a change in your life because you’re not happy in your career, and you need to actually start building on the side, the career that you really want, the passion project that you really want, but there’s something holding you back, right? You’re not happy enough to where you can leave the thing that you’re in and feel okay about that. Or, whether you are just a person who, at this stage in their life thought, “With all the success I’ve had, I would be more confident by now.” And you’re not. You thought you’d be in a different place emotionally by this point in your life. If you are any of the people that I’ve just described, this Retreat is for you.

So if you want to get to a point in your life this year, not two years from now, where you are happy enough to make great choices and where you just want to be living at a more enjoyable level and have the tools to handle life, even when it’s unenjoyable, come spend this time with us. I’ll leave a link here, once again, come check it out. Book a call with one of our team, and I really hope to see you on the Virtual Retreat. As always, no matter what, I will see you in next week’s video. Thanks for watching.