I’ll keep this short so you can go straight to watch this video.

It’s not just essential watching if you’re single right now…

It’s essential watching in the context of the year we’ve just had and how to navigate being single in it…

Why are so many people unhappily single?

I had one of my members say to me on a webinar recently, “I decided nine months ago to start looking again for love, for a partner, and nine months in, I still haven’t met anyone. I’m starting to get frustrated, I’m starting to lose hope. And just…I start to wonder why I’m still doing this.” And in her tone I could tell that she was quite a goal-oriented, type A person and that, because she wasn’t getting the result, she was getting very frustrated.

Of course, our love life isn’t an area we can control in quite the same way that we can other things. We can have a huge degree of influence on the direction of our love life, but we can’t control if the right person comes into our life this week or next week, we just have to keep putting ourselves in the right spot, doing the right things, and know that at some point that will be a byproduct.

The challenge is how to enjoy the journey along the way whilst it’s not happening. And we have to go from basing our happiness around getting the result around meeting the person to expanding our lives in pursuit, perhaps – or not even in pursuit of, that makes it sound like that’s the only goal. We have to expand our lives knowing that meeting the right person may be a byproduct of expanding our lives.

I know this isn’t the greatest time in history to expand our lives when everything that’s been going on in the last year has sort of contracted our lives, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do. We have to still look for the ways that we can be creative in expanding our lives. And I want to give you three potential ways of looking at this, three things you could do.

One way to expand our lives is to look at the needs that we have to meet every week. You know, for me, I need to meet the need for learning new things. That’s like a real basic need for me is that I want to learn more, I’m curious, and I always want to be learning. I have the need to train. You know, I like training, I like working out, I like staying in shape. So I have that need. I have the need for connection with other human beings.

What’s a way to meet those needs that is outside my comfort zone? Or just something that I don’t normally do? In January, you know, my friend Lewis Howes, he invited me to go do that ice retreat with Wim Hof for five days with a group of 10 guys. Absolutely not my cup of tea, not something I would do for enjoyment, jumping into frozen lakes and doing 10-minute ice baths. That is not my idea of a good time – although I did have an amazing time and I’m so glad I went.

I could have said to Lewis, “You know what? I know this is going to be great for me and it’s good physical exercise, but, you know, I’ve got jiu-jitsu that week and that’s the thing I always do, that’s my routine, I’m just going to stick to that.” Sticking to that can be a major limitation. And doing that retreat with those guys has led to a completely new friendship group in my life as a result. And of course, a new set of skills, new knowledge, new neural pathways, it has so many benefits, but it’s led to the NEW. Ask yourself, “What way of meeting my old and consistent needs could lead me to the NEW?” I’m still meeting my needs but meeting them in different ways than I’ve become accustomed to.

Number two, start saying yes to the invites of people that you don’t normally say yes to, so that you’re not just hanging around the same people all the time. When that person you don’t see that often says, “Hey, this thing’s going on if you wanted to come.” Instead of being like, “Oh no, I don’t know, I’m kind of busy,” actually say yes. I know it’s uncomfortable, I know it can be a bit difficult to go and be a part of something where you don’t know anybody, but that’s when new friendship groups come from.

Explore a new world through somebody else. And if no one is inviting you to do something new right now, then you go to someone you don’t know that well and invite them to do something new. Be the leader in the process, take the lead.

And number three, the 90-Minute Challenge. Let me explain this. Travel, I think, is one of the greatest ways to expand our lives, but so many people can’t travel right now, travel has become more difficult. The 90-Minute Challenge is find the adventure, find the way that you can be a tourist within a 90-minute driving radius of where you live. Have you ever had that experience of going and doing something close to where you live and going, “I can’t believe this exists within an hour or an hour and a half of my house. I never knew this was here, this is beautiful, this is stunning, this is amazing.”? Go do that thing.

Now look, I’m not saying that when you go do that thing, you’ll meet the right person there. You might go there and there’s no one there. That’s not the point. The point is to expand. The point is to enlarge your world. If, in the next three years, you don’t meet anyone as a result of doing this, there is nothing that I’ve talked about that you will regret. You will still look at those three years as three of the most amazing, beautiful, mind-expanding, world-expanding, friendship-expanding years of your life.

But I also believe that if you take this approach to life, that it makes meeting someone as close to inevitable as possible. Do not allow your life to contract. Make a commitment to expansion, so that you can be one of those people who can be happily single, but also hopeful of who might come.