workbook - how to attract women, how to attract men · transcript - part 1 part 1 of the “how to...

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Workbook

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Contents

Video Course Transcript - Part 1INTRODUCTION 4

Video Course Transcript - Part 2LIMITING BELIEFS 9

Video Course Transcript - Part 3AFFIRMING BELIEFS 15

Video Course Transcript - Part 4UNDERSTANDING MASCULINE AND FEMININE ENERGIES 21

Video Course Transcript - Part 5GENDER ROLES 26

Video Course Transcript - Part 6LIVING IN LOVE 31

Video Course Transcript - Part 7LIVING IN THE NOW 36

Video Course Transcript - Part 8CREATING A PLACE FOR MEN IN OUR LIVES 41

Video Course Transcript - Part 9THE BIGGEST MISTAKES WOMEN MAKE WITH LOVE 47

Video Course Transcript - Part 10THE RELATIONSHIP LIFE CYCLE 52

Video Course Transcript - Part 11MAKING A RELATIONSHIP WORK THIS TIME AROUND 58

Video Course Transcript - Part 12LETTING GO 63

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Transcript - Part 1PART 1 OF THE “HOW TO BE IRRESISTIBLE TO MEN” VIDEO COURSE:

INTRODUCTION


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Part I Introduction

Amy: Hello, and welcome to How to Be Irresistible to Men. My name’s Amy Waterman, and I’ll be your host.

In this course, we’re going to teach you how to become more attractive to men. We’re not going to teach you to play games. This isn’t about “the Rules.” This isn’t about learning how to dress in a certain way or play certain games so that a guy at a bar will notice you.

What we’re going to teach you is how to give out radiant vibes, so that any man in your presence – whether he’s married, whether he’s old, whether he’s young – is going to look you and he’s going to think, “That woman is fantastic.” You are going to be able to attract men with your own just genuine irresistibility, and there’s no other course out there right now that can teach you that. That’s only something you can find here on How to Be Irresistible to Men.

I’m here today with my guests, wonderful Sue Edgecombe and Andrew Rusbatch, and right now I’d just like to have them tell you a little about themselves and how we met. Andrew, what is the first thing you remember about me when you met me?

Andrew: The first I remember was when you rang us actually applying for the job and I’m thinking, “Oh, great, it’s one of those nasal-sounding Americans. I hope she turns out better than she sounded on the phone.” I was pleasantly surprised to see she’s a warm, genuine person, and we’ve hit it off ever since, because she’s almost as loud as I am!

Amy: And, of course, it’s because I’m irresistibly attractive! We met Sue at our seminar in December on Advanced Dating Techniques. She was giving a talk with Richard Wheeler about “Healthy Relationships” and “How to Develop Unstoppable Confidence.” Andrew and I just watched that performance and said, “This woman has information that we need to know.” That’s why I invited her here to teach you some more about how to be irresistible to men. Sue, do you want to tell us a little bit about why you feel that becoming attractive to men and learning how to have better relationships with men is important?

Sue: Sure. Thanks for inviting me. It’s good to be here. I think the polarity is very important for health reasons. If we’re not having relationships with the opposite sex, then we’re missing a dynamic that’s fundamental to our emotional balance. I am pretty passionate about understanding people’s ways, and I find that the opposite sex is still very challenging, and in all of my knowledge I am still learning a lot. It’s a fascinating subject, and, of course, as you know, it’s not one thing that can sum this subject up.



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Amy: Sue’s had the pleasure of being able to go to a lot of the seminars and meet some of these great gurus on dating like David Deida, and we’ll be talking about his books today. She’ll be able to give us some insights into what other people are saying about dating and relationships as well.

One of the things that I just want to make sure you know is that we’re not going to teach you how to play games with men. If you want a product that’s going to teach you how to mess with his mind, so that he thinks he can’t be without you, you’re going to have to realize what that will do is that will make him attracted to you for the moment, but all it’s going to do is make him feel infatuated. The one thing that we have learned through our research is that infatuation wears off. That early glow of romantic love stops at a maximum of two years.

Yes, you can play games, you can follow the Rules – you can make sure you wait fifty seconds before saying yes to an invitation, you can make sure you never call him back, and that you never speak to him first and that you never ask him out on a date – but you’re just going to get a guy who’s infatuated with you and wants to conquer you.

What we want to teach you is to love men … and love men in such a way that they respond to your heart. They respond to that person inside, the genuine “you” that is not fake and is not playing games. As a result, the man who is right for you – the man who will love you the way you want to be loved – will be irresistibly drawn to you. That’s something again no other course can do. Only our course can teach you to love men such that the right man for you, the man who can give you the love you want, will see you out of a crowd, be drawn to you and want to give his real love, not infatuation, to you.

The Biggest Challenges Facing Single Women Today

Andrew and Sue, I just wanted to ask each of you to give an idea of what our perspectives, individual perspectives are on love. Andrew, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing single women today?

Andrew: I think one of the biggest challenges that single women face is that they don’t always know the most appropriate way to attract someone that they’re attracted to. They see someone looking across the other side of a bar and they’re like, “Wow, he’s interesting. I’m physically attracted to him. I want to get to know a little bit more about him.” In many cases, they have this conflict going on inside their mind as to, “Well, do I do the traditional ‘act like a lady’-type of thing and wait for him to come over to me? Or do I take the slightly more sort of Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City-type of thinking: ‘Well, that’s the one I like. I like the look of him. I’m going to go over there and introduce myself.’” I think some of this internal conflict leads to a lot of confusion and difficulty for single women today.



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Amy: Sue, let’s go to you. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing single women today at this point in time?

Sue: The biggest challenge I find with single women is finding the polarity match. “Polarity” being North and South Pole, left and right, masculine and feminine. It’s finding the polarity match that is equal to you. Essentially, you want to attract someone that’s at the same level as you are, which means that like attracts like, genuine attracts genuine, game players attract game players.

Amy: Exactly, which is why, if you play the Rules, you’re going to meet a guy who’s probably a player and is going to be playing games with you as well. We don’t want that. We want to get to a higher level so that, if we become more loving, we attract men who really know how to love. That’s where we want to go.

Personally, I think one of the greatest challenges for women today – and this is going to sound so easy that you’ll laugh at me – is learning how to love. I don’t mean leaning how to fall in love. We can all fall in love. It’s easy. You see a man across the room and think, “Gosh, he’s so good looking.” Boom! Instant attraction. That is not love. We’re going to teach you throughout this course what real love is. Real love is difficult. Real love takes time and is a conscious choice. It’s a very conscious experience.

What you’ll find is that the challenge of real love is that you’ve got to give up your defenses. You have to stop man-bashing. You have to stop holding grudges against men. You may even have to stop hating your exes for what they did to you. As you go deeper into yourself and as you forgive men, you stop protecting yourself against hurt, and you allow yourself to be vulnerable no matter what happens. As a result, you’ll find that what comes out of your heart is a love so genuine that other men can’t fail to respond to that.

Believe in the Possibility

I’d like to conclude this introduction by asking you to promise me something. I want you to promise me that you believe in the possibly of finding real love.

That’s it. You don’t have to do anything else. Whatever else has happened in your life so far – I’m sure you’ve had bad experiences, break ups, you may have been divorced or have had guys that you really liked who didn’t even notice you, or you may have all these negative conflicting feelings about relationships right now – forget about all that.

Just tell yourself, “I believe in the possibility that I will find real love.”



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That’s all you have to do. Just believe that it’s possible.

In our next lesson, we’re going to be teaching you about some of the beliefs that you hold about men and how they might be affecting your love life. Yes, this is about YOU. Amazingly enough, what you think actually affects your reality. We’ll be talking about that next time.


DO NOT READ UNTIL AFTER YOU’VE WATCHED THE VIDEO LESSON.

PART 2 OF THE “HOW TO BE IRRESISTIBLE TO MEN” VIDEO COURSE:


LIMITING BELIEFS


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Part II Limiting Beliefs

Amy: In this section, we would like to talk about beliefs that we hold about men and how those beliefs might be limiting our love life.

Many of us think is that all our problems with men come from the men. It’s their fault. They’re the reasons we’re not getting the love we want … or it’s because we’re not pretty enough, we’re not saying the right things.

Amazingly enough, one of the huge reasons that we don’t achieve the success we want with men is quite simply because we think ourselves into failure.

A lot of the beliefs we hold – e.g., that all men are jerks, that men won’t like us, all of those things going through our heads – actually affect how we behave and how we appear towards men. Men can sense those thoughts, even though we’re not saying them out loud.

So, in this section, we’re going to talk about four main points.

1. Man-bashing: why we need to stop.2. The Scarcity Mentality: the belief that there are just no good men

out there … and why that can actually mean that we won’t find those men.

3. Self-doubt: e.g., how we can go into a date and think, “Oh, no, does he like me? Is this working?” … and how that can actually hurt our chances with men.

4. Idealism: the belief that a man is going to solve all of our problems … and why that can actually negatively affect our love lives.

Man-Bashing: Why We Need to Stop

Sue, I would like to have you start out with the first topic, because we’ve talked about the topic of man-bashing before.

Sue: We all have our belief systems based on our past experiences, because that’s where our beliefs do come from: our past. I’m consciously verbalizing those every moment of every day. So, when we go out and we’re looking to meet someone of the opposite sex, we’re going to be projecting those belief systems onto them.

Whatever we believe, we will find. If we believe men are genuine, we will find genuine men. And if we believe that they are out to “use us and abuse us,” then that’s what we’ll find. It’s the Law of Attraction: whatever we believe, we’re going to attract to us.



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Then what we do is look to have our belief systems validated, so we go, “See, I told you: all men are bastards.”

Andrew: It’s the whole like-attracts-like thing. I was talking online to a woman the other day, and she was lamenting why she’s had so many bad relationships. She asked me for some insights, and I said, “That’s fine, as long as you prepare for me to tell you the truth.” One of those is that she’s one of those tall, blond, attractive girls. She was also very intelligent, but she would do the hair toss and the falsetto laugh and act like the “dumb blonde.” On some level, that annoyed me, because she was capable of so much more than that. What her belief system was telling her was that she had to act a certain way in order to attract the type of man she wanted. In doing so, she was attracting quite a different type of person.

Amy: That’s a really great point. Sometimes we think that there are no good men out there, so we buy books like The Rules. It tells you things like, “You should never ask him out on a date. You should wait before saying yes. You should never call a man – ever. You should always end the date first.”

If you follow the Rules, you’ll attract men, but you will attract a very specific sort of man. You’ll attract the sort of guy who likes women who play games, probably because he plays games himself!

If we look at Andrew’s friend, she’s doing the hair toss. Women who act very seductively are probably going to attract pretty shallow guys. Shallow behavior attracts shallow guys.

But I just like to get back to this other concept of “man bashing,” or talking negatively about guys. Sue, you had told me a story one time about going out with a group of women and you had a male friend that you had been talking to, and your female friends said, “Oh, don’t talk to him. He’s a player.” How did their judgment of that man, as a “bad” man, make you feel and act towards him after that?

Sue: Well, I really liked this guy, so I was sitting with four girlfriends, and he was about to leave, and they said, “Is that So-and-So?” I said yes. They said that their assumption of him was he was a player. I turned around and said, “Really? I never saw him like that.” I began to question my perception, if it was accurate.

Then I looked at the girls who were with me, and all of them had been single for a very, very long time. It dawned on me that their assumptions about men were usually what was stopping them from meeting men. I hadn’t had that assumption. I didn’t see him that way. Whether he is or isn’t a player was not relevant to me, I guess, because I saw something different in him.



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So we have to have a look at our assumptions or belief systems up front and say, “Well, is this the truth?”

Amy: It is so sad that when women meet a guy and their immediate assumption is, “Because my ex was a jerk – and he reminds me of my ex – he must be a jerk, too.” I think a lot of women find it very hard to trust men right away. They look at a man and they think, “He’s a man, so he’s going to hurt me.” That’s not the case.

The Scarcity Mentality: Is It True There Are No Good Single Men Out There?

A lot of women believe that there are no good men left. They say, “I just can’t find men. There are no good single men out there.” One woman on our bulletin board had a fantastic quote. She said that a friend had told her that if a man was a good man, he would be married already, which means that the only single guys out there are either jerks or they’re gay. What do you think about this belief that there are no good single men left? What does that do to our love lives?

Andrew: Immediately, it works against us, because we’re limiting our options. If all the good men are gone, and you have the belief that the only ones that are still single are all bastards, then that kind of working against you meeting men, doesn’t it? Your defenses go straight up, and what is that doing? If you’re approaching a guy, your defenses straight up like that, that’s working against you meeting men. That’s why Sue’s friends – and other people I know approaching the middle 30s, late 30s, early 40s – are still single. They’ve held that belief for so long, that there are no good men out there, that they’re still single. That’s why it stopped them.

Self-Doubt: Is It Attractive?

Amy: Moving on to the next point: self doubt. I see men do this all the time, but I know women do it as well. You go for a date, or you go out to a bar, and you see this really hot guy, and you think, “I’d love to know him.” But then you think immediately, “He won’t like me.” So even if he does come up to you, you’re thinking, “This is amazing! I didn’t think he’d like me!” He starts talking to you, and you say something, then immediately think, “I’m sure he didn’t find that interesting.”

What does that do to you?

Sue: First of all, if you’re doubting yourself, I don’t think that he’s even going to come up to you. I think that if you’re doubting yourself, he can sense that. Hay take that to mean that you’re doubting him.



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It’s all about attraction, so I don’t see how you can get past self-doubt. I just don’t see how you would even attract the person like this.

Amy: Confidence is very important, and I think it’s not necessarily “confidence” as much as it’s learning to silence that voice inside your head that’s telling you you’re not attractive. It’s learning to not listen to that little nagging voice inside your head saying, “Oh, no. But what if…?”

Andrew: One of the most destructive things about self-doubt is that, in many cases, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you look in the mirror and the first thing you see is, “I couldn’t possibly attract that wonderful man. The first thing I see is my big nose, not my beautiful eyes or my beautiful hair,” then that’s going to affect your body language.

A number of dating books and psychology textbooks will tell you how, when you have that negative self-belief about yourself, it’s going to work against you. One of my favorite sayings that I tell people when they’re in that destructive phase is that, “If you can’t love yourself, you can’t expect others to love you.”

That’s not going to the point where you become cocky or arrogant, but you do have to have a certain amount of self-confidence. You have to be your own biggest fan.

Amy: That’s so profound. If you don’t love yourself, how can you expect anyone to love you?

Idealism: Whether It’s Actually Helpful to Expect a Man To Make Your Life Perfect

The final topic we’re discussing in this section is idealism: the notion that a boyfriend is going to make my life perfect.

A lot of women say, “I need to attract a man, because that’s the last thing I need to make my life perfect. I’ve got a great job, a great career. Now all I need is this guy. And once I get this guy, we’re not going to argue; we’re going to live in paradise.”

What do you guys think about that belief? Does that belief do anything to your love life?

Sue: This is everything, everything! Because when you think about it … imagine a man coming up to you – that had absolutely no purpose in his life – that was looking for love to complete him. Would you feel needed? Would you feel a neediness? Would you be attracted to him?



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So you have to come from your place, your integrity, your space, and what your life is about … and from that place love flows into your life, not the other way around. If you’re looking for it the other way around, you’re going to be disillusioned.

Summing Up The Lesson

Amy: What we’ve learned then in this section is that, first of all, if you think men are jerks, you’re probably going to see a lot of jerks out there, not very nice men.

We also learned that if you think that there are no good men out there, or that there just isn’t a man out there for you, it’s going to be difficult to find them, because you won’t be looking. If you don’t think you’re going to see something, you probably won’t see it.

We’ve learned about why self-doubt can be destructive. If you doubt yourself, a man can sense that. All you have to do is just stop listening to that voice inside your head that says, “I’m not good enough. I’m not beautiful enough.” Don’t listen to it. Don’t pay attention.

The final topic we covered was idealism. When you have the expectation that a man is going to complete you or make you happy, men are going to run in the other direction, because they don’t want to be responsible for your happiness.

We’ve talked about beliefs that may limit your love life. In the next section, we’re going to talk about some affirming beliefs, good beliefs that you can hold that can replace these beliefs and actually make your love life more exciting, more abundant and more fulfilling.



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© 2006 All Rights Reserved www.000Relationships.com with Amy Waterman

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DO NOT READ UNTIL AFTER YOU’VE WATCHED THE VIDEO LESSON.

PART 3 OF THE “HOW TO BE IRRESISTIBLE TO MEN” VIDEO COURSE:AFFIRMING BELIEFS


AFFIRMING BELIEFS



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Part III Affirming Beliefs

Amy: In this section of the course, we’re going to talk about a very important topic. We have already talked about some negative beliefs that limit your reality. This time, we’re going to go to the other side. We’re going to talk about affirming beliefs that can completely change your reality.

If, right now, you can’t find any men, and when you do, you find they’re jerks – and you think, “Even if I do find a good guy, he’s not going to love me” – if you change those beliefs, you may very well find your love life completely transformed.

The topics that we’re going to talk about in this section are:

1. The Abundance Mentality: the notion that there are single and available men everywhere.

2. The Importance of “Celebrating Men:” How appreciating men can actually make us more attractive. I’m taking that term from Alison Armstrong’s program on “Celebrating Men and Satisfying Women.” They’re fantastic seminars that I really recommend.

3. Confidence: believing that you will find someone and how that can help

4. Living in the Now: how forgetting the past and not thinking about so much about the future can actually make you see the possibilities that exist in the present.

The Abundance Mentality

Sue, we talked a little bit about the scarcity mentality with you last time. The abundance mentality … are there really guys everywhere?

Sue: We’d like to think so! It’s the available ones you’re looking for.

Amy: That’s an excellent point. The abundance mentality is that there are men everywhere, but, more specifically, that there are available men everywhere. What does “availability” mean? Because there are emotionally unavailable men out there.

Sue: Emotionally available men are physically unavailable. So, yes, the abundance mentality is definitely something you want to adopt, because again, whatever you believe, you attract. There’s really not much else to the Law of Attraction that that.

If you have scarcity belief systems, you’ve mainly adopted those through experience. You’ve had enough experiences over time that prove to you that there are no good men out there, and so you hold on to these beliefs.



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The truth is, you can change that because you’re willing to, and that’s really where we would like to go with this program.

Amy: One of the important things that you said is that the scarcity mentality often is the result of our experiences. Our experience says there are no good men out there. But who says that reality always has to be negative?

That’s a fantastic philosophy adopted by this woman, Susan Jeffers, who writes about it in her book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. She talks about this belief that reality has to be negative, the belief that we have to be pessimistic about reality because the worst always happens.

She says, “You know what? It’s been proven that most of the stuff we worry about never actually happens.” If we believe that the worst is reality and we’re just being “realistic,” that isn’t an any more valid belief than believing that the best will happen.

I really recommend this book. It’s a fantastic way of overcoming some of the fears that you have.

The Importance of “Celebrating Men”

Moving on to our next point: celebrating and appreciating men. Andrew, would you like to talk about the importance of enjoying what men are all about?

Andrew: Where do I start? Appreciating men… David Deida on some level explores this idea. Deida is the author of The Way of the Superior Man, and he talks about the idea of masculine and feminine energies and how that interplays within relationships. What he says is that it’s okay for a guy to be a guy and to explore his dominant, competitive sort of nature within relationships. It’s okay for a woman to have that sort of nurturing, caretaking feminine role within relationships.

So part of the idea of “celebrating men” is identifying that they don’t have to be Sensitive New Age Guys. They don’t have to be metrosexuals. We can simply love men for who they are. Sometimes, if we go back to men-bashing, we men might be simple creatures. Men might not look at things the way women see them. They might not be quite as intuitive, but that’s okay.

I think that it’s changing that mindset and appreciating men and not judging them for their differences, but rather celebrating their differences … that is where we start to get ahead in relationships.

Amy: It’s quite important for women to realize men aren’t women. It seems intuitive, doesn’t it? But when we get into a relationship – we’ve always



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had great girlfriends, and we relate in a certain way to our girlfriends – and then we get a boyfriend and think, “Oh, he’s going to be my best girlfriend now.” We tell him everything. We pour out our emotions. We gossip. We think he’s just going to be like her … and when he falls short – which, as men aren’t women, they are going to fall short – we think, “Men are horrible, because he’s not as nice to me as my best girlfriend is.”

I think one important way to celebrate men is to educate yourself a little bit more about the actual gender differences between men and women. Not Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus! I’m talking about a little more of a scientific approach. Barbara and Allan Pease wrote a great series of books: Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Why Women Always Need More Shoes and Why Men Don’t Listen and Why Women Can’t Read Maps. I highly recommend these books to understand more about men.

Achieving Greater Self-Confidence in Dating & Relationships

Moving on to confidence, how can we change that self-doubt and instead replace it with confidence that’s going to attract men? What are some strategies that we can use?

Sue: First wet have to believe that it’s possible, and we have to learn to come from our own place of integrity. When we know who we are and what we want and we have the confidence to follow through with that, I think it just comes through. I think we spend a lot less time engaged in self-doubt and we spend a lot more time in being proactive.

You got 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day, and 70% of those thoughts are the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. So most of what you’re thinking is the same stuff over and over. It’s not until you stop thinking that you start to realize that most of what you’re predicting out there is a reaction to some past experience that you really are still hanging on to. It’s just really identifying and being conscious that you can change that. It’s being proactive and creative with your thinking rather than driving a car looking at the lamppost. But first you have to wake up to doing it. You have to be conscious that you’re doing it.

Amy: What I hear you saying is that the key to confidence is self-awareness.

Now, with that self-awareness, you’re not ignoring the negative parts about yourself. What you’re doing is merely observing them, not judging them. You’re saying, “I am a whole person. I have negative and positive aspects, but I don’t like the positive and hate the negative. I accept all of me. “

Sue: It’s a choice to be creative with your thinking and not reactive with your thinking. You just make the choice that that’s the way you’re going to be, and the confidence will come through.



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Andrew: As I was listening to that, I had an idea. Obviously, listening to your monologue and listening to that voice that’s going on inside your head is important. One of the exercises that I was reading about is to keep a thoughts diary. So, at different times throughout the day, you just sit down and actively listen to that inner monologue and just take some notes. It can be quite interesting, even after a ten- or twenty-minute period, to actually read what you’ve written and think, “Oh gosh, all of that’s going on inside my mind?” That’s where you really identify how much of your thoughts are either the positive or negative self-belief.

Sue: The movie that’s great to illustrate that is Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. When he repeated the same day over and over until he got it, he woke up and realized what he was creating, and he decided to create a new reality.

Essentially, we’re doing this every single day. If you don’t like what’s happening, have a look at the way you’re perceiving it and see if you can get a new reality from that.

Living in the Now and Letting Go of the Past

Amy: I think we’ve just moved into the final point, too. You’re talking about living in the now. You’re talking about not predicting the future, not living the past, but living right now in the moment and seeing what your thoughts are.

Sue: Absolutely. You can’t create if you live in the past. Well, you can, but you’ll recreate the past.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is a fantastic book for learning how to live in the now.

Amy: Yes, and my favorite book on this is Working on Yourself Doesn’t Work by Ariel and Shya Kane. It’s a bit easier for me than the Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now! It says that if we live today, so much is possible. Every morning we wake up, we can create our reality, but most of us don’t. As Sue said, we think the same thoughts. We repeat the same habits. What we’re doing is recreating the same past.

Summing Up the Lesson

That concludes our session this time. I hope you’ve learned a little bit about some affirming beliefs can change your reality.

You’ve learned about how you can appreciate men by understanding that they’re not like women and that’s not bad. That’s actually okay; that’s great. That’s why we’re attracted to them!


You’ve learned about the abundance mentality, the fact that just by believing there are a lot of great men, you’ll actually start finding them.

You’ve learned a little bit about how you can become more confident by being more conscious of your thoughts and more-self aware, and lastly you had an introduction to the power of living in the now.

In this next lesson we’ll build on the idea that Andrew introduced of masculine and feminine energies.


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UNDERSTANDING MASCULINE AND FEMININE ENERGIES



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Part IV Masculine and Feminine Energies

Amy: Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that you may not have discussed at length before. It’s the topic of masculine and feminine energies.

Now we’re not talking about feminism. We’re not talking about manly women or womanly men. What we’re talking about are energies, and how that actually affects who we are attracted to and why men are attracted to us.

Andrew, you brought this point up in the previous session on the book by David Deida on The Way of the Superior Man. Would you like to tell us a bit more about your understanding of what masculine and feminine energies are?

Andrew: It’s not just a case of butch and macho, and prissy and femmy. It’s exploring the idea of the different energies that people have. You can have both masculine and feminine energy and switch those roles throughout your day.

An example that springs to mind is the masculine energy that many women absorb into their workplace relationships in terms of their ability to be competitive and get ahead. But also, at the same time, women are at home and play out their feminine energy, in which there is a need to partake in that role of nurturing and caregiving.

So there is an ability to be both. That same sort of thing goes for men as well, in terms of being strong, dominant and competitive, both sexually and with their interactions with other people throughout the day. They also have the ability to switch those roles at times when it’s appropriate in their workplace and their sexual relationships, and absorb some of that nurturing and caretaking aspect as well.

I think it’s the fluidity of these roles and how they change throughout the day that makes relationships with other people so interesting.

What It Means to Attract Your Reciprocal Equal

Amy: But looking specifically how they affect attraction and sexual attraction … Sue?

Sue: We always attract our reciprocal equal, so your feminine match will be an equivalent masculine match. That’s why you often get very masculine men with very feminine women, and you get more women who are equally balanced between their masculine and feminine energies attracted to men



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that are more equally balanced between their masculine and feminine energies as well.

Today, in relationships, we’ve got new relationship of holism, which is where the shift is currently taking place. This is why people are a little bit confused. We have women that can do anything today, who have stepped into high powered roles, especially in my country where the top jobs are held by women.

So women have to adopt a real masculine energy to succeed in that realm, and, if they take that home, it’s like two men show up. That’s a real problem. There’s going to be no “play” there. Now, if your man is feminine, then at least there’ll be a polarity play, a sexual play.

And so we’ve got women today who’ve achieved the masculine and are starting to go back and bring more feminine back through. We’ve got men who have gone into the home and adopted more being more of the nurturer. The woman has gone out to work and has adopted more feminine energies, and we’re finding that that’s not working either. We’re starting to get a more balanced masculine-feminine perspective between the sexual energies.

You always meet your reciprocal equal, so your femininity will be matched with the masculinity and vice versa. So if you’re a masculine woman, you attract a feminine man, and if you’re a feminine woman, you’ll be attracted to a masculine man … and all the bits in between, really!

What It Means to Be a “Strong Woman:” Competitiveness and Vulnerability

Amy: One place that this becomes quite interesting is in America. Woman go out on dates and they’re very successful career women: they have this great resume, they’re very athletic, and they’ve got a lot of achievements. They go out on a date, and they try to impress the man. They say, “I scuba dive. I went to this country last year.” They try to compete with him about who’s the better catch. What does the man say? The man says, “She’s too dominant, masculine. I want a feminine woman.”

So we really get into some issues with successful career women who are very used to being competitive, driven, and focused. They go out on a date, and they’re driven and focused and competitive on their date. It flops, and they wonder why men aren’t attracted to them! They say, “Oh, men just don’t like strong women.”

Do you think that’s the issue? Is it that men don’t like strong women?

Sue: I think men love women who know who they are! I think that the definition of strong women is probably misused. I agree with you. I think it’s the



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competitiveness that they don’t like, because it’s like two men show up. Personally, I don’t like it when I’m competitive myself – and I can be, because I have both masculine and feminine energies – but I agree. I think it’s competitiveness, so I don’t think it’s that men don’t like strong women. I just think that you’ve got to know when you’re playing a game, another game of competition, and when you’re being yourself, like an authentic woman … just like women like authentic men. It’s just bringing it back.

David Deida talks about this in his books. It’s about bringing it back to the authenticity and dropping the games. You’ve got to know what game you’re playing before you can start to come back with authenticity.

Essentially, this is really the case of vulnerability, is learning how to be … where all of us to be vulnerable. All of us, because it’s the most beautiful thing there is and it’s learning how to just bring that through, I think. I think that’s my lifetime learning.

Amy: I think, too, that the reason books like The Rules work so well is that they force strong, confident women to act like their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, because, back in the day, courtship was pretty prescribed! Women didn’t do a heck of a lot. They had to sit there and wait for the man to come to them.

Now, we women today are used to being so strong that when we’re forced to play the polite, demure, mysterious creature, what men see is a very feminine woman.

What you’re actually doing is you’re forcing yourself into your feminine role by playing these games. A better way to do it is to say goodbye to the games and learn how to embrace your feminine side, which is being vulnerable, honest, soft, and nurturing.

Sue: But it’s not playing.

Amy: It’s not playing.

Andrew: From some of the feedback I give, a lot of women like embracing their feminine energy and turning it back a little, but it’s like allowing a man to “conquer” them. What are your thoughts on that?

Amy: It’s a personal issue for me, because I’ve found out that as I become more successful in my career, I’m starting to attract men who want to be submissive to me. I’m finding I’m going out on a lot of dates with men who are perfectly willing to let me take the lead, and they’re fascinated by this notion of me telling them what to do. And I think, “Why is this happening?”



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As we’ve learned in previous lessons, what you put out is what you get back. So what I’ve been doing is: I’ve been putting out a lot of this strong, dominant energy into the universe, and men with very feminine energies are responding to that.

Sue: It’s the polarity.

Amy: That is the polarity, but personally I want to find a man that I’m sexually attracted to, and, to do that, I want a man who puts me in my feminine energy! I want a man who is so masculine that, when I’m with him, I can relax, let him guide me, and be the loving, nurturing person … all those wonderful roles that I don’t get to play at work. And he can be the dominant one guiding me!

So that’s currently where I’m at. I’m trying to learn how to get into my feminine energy more during dating so that I can attract a masculine man who is going to be very attractive to me.

Allowing Yourself to Be Your Authentic Self

Sue: This is part of the problem with the next level of relationships: it’s learning how to be authentic.

It’s true, women can do anything, and they can be strong and capable of all these great qualities. You’ll never lose them. But we can also be warm and beautiful. And if we really check in with ourselves, we love our self mostly when we’re being like that.

It’s not to say that we’re not capable of making decisions. There’s no good or bad or right or wrong. It’s just what it is. It’s just being conscious of what you’re attracting and what you want to attract.

If you prefer a softer man, and if that’s what fulfills you, then that’s great, too. There’s nothing wrong with this. We’re just saying that if you’re a strong woman and you’re used to making decisions and you’d like to meet someone that you can relax with and trust to take the lead, he’s going to have to have more masculine energy than you.

Amy: In the next section, we’re going to be talking a little bit more about gender roles and about how we women, especially those of us who have been in stronger roles and have been used to being in control and being very successful in our careers, can awaken our feminine energy.

We’re not going to tell you that you have to strap on an apron and start whipping up the cakes for your man! That’s not it at all. It’s actually a level inside yourself.



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GENDER ROLES



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Part V Gender Roles

Amy: In this lesson, we’re going to be talking a little bit about gender roles. We had a discussion previously on masculine and feminine energies. It’s a really tricky concept, because a lot of people get confused and think “masculine” means “manly” and “feminine” means being like my grandmother used to act towards my grandfather. It’s not quite like that, so I’d like to talk a little bit more about how we can understand our feminine energy, what exactly it is, and how we can awaken it to become more attractive to men.

Feminine Energy and Power

Sue and I just had a chat previously about what it means to be feminine. One of the aspects of being in your feminine energy is that it’s not being competitive. It’s the opposite. It’s being humble and not worrying if you appear weak.

This is not a judgment, saying that weakness has often been considered a feminine quality, because in some Eastern cultures weakness is seen as a form of power. Sue, would you like to talk a little bit about how we can awaken our feminine through leaning a little bit about humility?

Sue: Humility is quite difficult for us, because we’re wired to play control games and egotistical games. Most of us are brought up in some form of ego satisfaction or ego competition, and humility is the opposite. Humility is coming from a beautiful space where you accept the person. You’re not judging the person. In order to do that, you have to really get out of your stuff. What I mean by your “stuff” is your past experiences. You’ve got to be very, very open to that person.

In today’s world, that could feel a bit like giving your power away, or it could feel a bit like you’re vulnerable to being controlled. But if we look at humility in a spiritual sense, we can see that it’s one of the most beautiful qualities of personal power that anybody can have. Take the Dali Lama, for instance, or someone of that nature.

I think, for myself, it’ll be a lifetime of learning. It’s definitely something that, when I came to it, I loved being that person, because I feel most authentic, most myself. It’s beyond my conditioning, and my conditioning is how I’ve learned to be in the world and how I’m going to compete in the world. I have learned to control in the world, and humility is none of that … I’d say that’s my true essence.

Amy: On a more practical level, we were talking about some ways in which women can act humbly and allow men to move into their masculine and then cause attraction that way.



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One of the ways is for women to ask for help when they need it. A lot of us women, especially in my generation, were taught that we had to be strong all the time. We had to do things ourselves. As a result, men don’t get to act like men.

But men love helping women! I’ve found out in my relationships that, when a man can feel like he’s protecting me – when I ask him for help, even if it’s something that I know I can do – he loves it. It makes him feel more connected to me.

I first came across this concept in John Gray’s book. He’s the author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. And one of his recommendations for women is to ask your man for help. Yes, you could stand on top of a chair to reach that box if it’s on the top shelf, but why not ask him to do it? According to John Gray, men feel so connected to you when they help you, that they will not feel as connected to you if you help them. If you think you’re being attractive to men by offering to help them out, reverse the situation.

Gender Role Confusion

Andrew: What that’s about is social conditioning. When a man’s able to act like a man and do the whole riding-in-on-a-white-steed and celebrate the fact that he is able to help you with something, on a very basic level it’s something he understands, because that’s something his father would have done and something his grandfather would have done.

On some level, where some of our relationships are going a little skewed is that we don’t always understand the gender role expectations. Being able to ask for help, being able to show weakness, and say, “Hey, there is something you can do better,” is not the same as saying, “I’m useless.” That’s simply saying, “You’re better at this than me.” That’s something that he can understand and validate his identify as a man. That’s celebrating the difference as a fantastic thing.

Sue: Absolutely. Celebrating the differences and honoring them and coming to know that they’re beautiful. Also, when a man shares his feelings, it’s just as beautiful as well. It’s just authentic.

Authenticity is what we’re talking about here. In today’s world, a lot of our roles models have broken down. We’re all a bit lost, really, and we’re trying to find this new way to love.

Amy: Feminine and masculine polarity was kept up in the past through gender roles. They were very strict gender roles that said that men should be men and women should be women and never the twain shall meet.


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Now, of course, we live in politically correct times, and men feel like they can’t offer to help a woman because the woman may take offense and say, “Do you think I’m weak?“ The men don’t feel like they can open a door for a woman, because they think she might take offense. As a result, they’re feeling emasculated. A lot of modern men feel like they don’t know what they can do, because if they try to act like a man, women will be offended, but if they act like a SNAG – a Sensitive New Age Guy – they find that women aren’t attracted to them. It comes back to this whole prejudice against nice guys, as men say that in their experience women don’t like the nice guys.

What should happen? You can make a difference. The way you can make a difference is, when you’re with a man, you can allow him to help you, allow him to push your chair in, allow him to open the door for you, and say, “With you, I’m going to relax, because I know you can guide me.”

You’re not giving your power away. What you’re doing is, you’re saying, “I trust you. I trust you to make good decisions. I trust that you know what you’re doing. I trust that you have direction and purpose, and I am going to go along with your flow.” You will find that instead of giving the power away, you actually find incredible empowerment through trust.

Sue: That’s beautiful. I think that sums it up, really. What men are looking for is to be trusted. Every man wants to be trusted, so if you give that away first, then he’s going to rise to that. There are always exceptions to the rule, of course, but if you’re looking for more of a deeper connection, trust is definitely one way that a man steps into his masculinity.

Learning to Be Vulnerable Again

Amy: The other thing is allowing yourself to be vulnerable. That, again, is a very feminine space. It doesn’t mean you’re “weak” to tell a man, “I’m hurt.” “I’m scared.” “You hurt me.” “I’m not sure what I should do.”

If you show your vulnerability, you’re in that feminine space, and men will be able to get into their masculinity and say, “I need to help you. I need to protect you. I need to be strong and solid and there for you.”

It’s amazing how great that feels.

Sue: Absolutely. Some tools for that are in Harville Hendrix book, Getting the Love You Want. It’s fantastic for going back and having a look at why you can’t be more vulnerable in the past because you’ve built up protective layers. Those protective layers are not your authentic nature, but this conditioning has created them, so use this book as a guide and go back in there and start to just go back to your essence. It’s a really good book for that.




Summing Up the Session

Amy: I hope this session has taught you a little bit more about masculine and feminine energies and maybe a different sort of language, the language of gender roles, and has given you some practical ways to awaken your feminine energy by being a bit more humble, by allowing yourself to be weak, and by allowing yourself to trust men. Trusting a man doesn’t give away your power. It simply gives him the confidence to be irresistibly attracted to the feminine you.

These are important concepts, but, again, they can be very confusing and misleading if you just see them at the surface level. We haven’t had much time to talk about them, so I do recommend that you check out the books we’ve talked about: Harville Hendrix ‘s book Getting the Love You Want and David Deida’s book The Way of the Superior Man. The latter is about men, but it will give you an excellent introduction to the notion of masculine and feminine energy.

Start taking a look at yourself and ask yourself if men see this beautiful, feminine, vulnerable, trusting person inside you … or if they see someone inside of you that’s going to compete with them, who won’t trust them, and who will constantly challenge their decisions. That very well may be the key to awakening your irresistibility.

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LIVING IN LOVE



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Part VI Living in Love

Amy: Today we’re going to talk about a topic very near and dear to my heart: living in love. We’re going to be discussing four points.

1. Defensiveness and self-protection: how those can keep us from falling in love. We all have baggage from past relationships, and often they keep us from opening up when a new relationship comes along.

2. Receiving love. A lot of us complain that we’re not getting the love we want, but what we often don’t realize is that when we get love offered to us, we push it away.

3. Letting go of baggage: the importance of learning what we could from our past, then forgiving our exes and letting that go.

4. Men’s need for love. Men need us. They don’t just need us to pick up after them and do their dirty laundry and wash their clothes. They need us because they need the sort of love that only we can give them.

Defensiveness and Self-Protection

Starting out with our first topic, defensiveness and self protection, I think we can all think of some great examples of women who will never let love in, because every time a man comes, they put up a barrier that says, “Stay away.”

Andrew: This continues from the idea of all men are bastards. I know a number of women who would never date a construction worker, for example, because they had a bad date with a construction worker, or never date a man who drives a motorbike, because they had a bad experience with a man on a motorbike.

What they’re doing is they’re putting their defenses up and saying, “Well, that man hurt me in the past; therefore, I’m not going to let that happen again.”

On some level, that’s self-protection, but that self-protection in turn works against you, because it doesn’t enable you to get past that and meet some really interesting people.

Amy: I‘d like to follow up on one thing you said. You said that women say, “I’ve been hurt in the past. I’m not going to be hurt again.” Sue, could you talk about that attitude?



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Sue: First of all, that’s never going to happen. You are going to get hurt? You’re destined to be hurt. That’s the price. That’s part of it.

What hurts you are your expectations and your attachments about wanting things to be a certain way, and then when they’re not that way you feel hurt.

You’ve got to look at that. It’s often less about what someone’s doing to you and more about what you’re doing to yourself.

In love, we all have to push into our boundaries and our resistance to what feels comfortable. And you can choose not to: that is a choice. But personally, I want the greatest love of my life, and if I have to do it another twenty times, I’ll do it another twenty times, because every time my heart opens more and I can give more.

Receiving Love

For me it’s about giving. It’s not about getting. I feel like I get a lot more reward from giving now than I ever used to. Sometimes I wonder if that’s really what I’m feeling is when I’m giving love: I’m feeling love regardless of what anyone else is doing back.

Harville Hendrix’s book Receiving Love is absolutely fantastic for having a look at yourself and learning how to drop your resistance to receiving love. I think we all need to learn how to do that, because we’ve been wounded in our childhood and we’ve put protections in place. But it’s those very things that stop us from growing into high levels of loving potential. Hendrix’s book is great for learning how to let go of that sort of stuff.

Amy: One of the most important things you can let go of is your resistance to experiencing pain. Men are going to hurt you. In every relationship you have, you are going to hurt them. I think we often forget that we hurt men as well, even when we don’t see it.

A lot of women think they want every single relationship to be the one. They want this to be the relationship that stops the cycle of pain and that it’s the relationship for forever, but it’s not like that. Every single relationship you have, as Sue said, opens your heart even more. Every relationship teaches you new skills. Every relationship, no matter how it ended, is actually teaching you more about how to become a loving person.

Stop thinking, “I have to protect myself against getting hurt,” and instead start realizing that getting hurt isn’t a bad thing. It’s part and parcel of love. Learn to love the experience of getting hurt.



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It’s not just me “saying” that, because I’ve gone through quite a few difficult breakups, but every time I get hurt I get more compassionate.

Sue: Absolutely. That is where compassion comes from. If we look at the journey of human beings, we don’t grow unless we have to, and we often grow through suffering. We do grow through suffering, and it’s amazing how we come out the other side.

The fundamental force that we all want is love. If you’re shutting that off, that’s a choice. You can do that; it’s up to you. But personally, why?

Letting Go of Baggage

Andrew: It’s like how, in the midst of a messy divorce, you can examine the idea that you don’t have to just focus on how a man hurt you and those feelings you felt at the time; you can also celebrate what you learned about yourself. You can celebrate that, and the strength that perhaps you never believed you had.

That ability to take control of your own destiny and take control of your own reaction to that pain is crucial. On some level, yes, you got hurt and men hurt you, but, on another level, you need to examine how much you let that pain affect your life.

Sue: The truth is you’re actually only going to attract someone who’s going to plug into your wounds anyway. That’s the power of attraction. You’re actually not attracted to someone who’s not going to be able to get in there.

What’s the purpose of that? So that they can come to the surface, so you can see them and try to heal them.

They’re in there, guys, and they’re in there for all of us. It’s just a matter of seeing yourself and deciding. The Mastery of Love book by don Miguel Ruiz is a brilliant guide about learning how to love as well.

Andrew: It’s all about attitude, isn’t it? Someone has hurt you, but, at the same time, the only reason they hurt you is because you loved them. You loved that person.

Amy: Just think about a child. Children hurt their mothers all the time. Teenagers hurt their mothers. Do their mothers stop loving them? No. if you can get to the point where you can love unconditionally even if the man hurts you, you know you’re growing to be greater and greater in love.



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Why Men Need Love, Too

Just to move to our final topic on why men need love, too, all too often we focus on the hurt they are giving us, and we don’t realize that they need our love.

Because what happens when a man hurts us? We don’t give him love back. We give him hate, and we hold onto our anger, and we say, “You did bad things to me. I’m resentful. I’m bitter. You have to make it up to me.” We don’t forgive. We don’t love him unconditionally.

What does that do to men? They don’t find us as attractive, because though they think, “I love her. Yes, I hurt her, but I didn’t mean it,” the woman just gives him hate.

Sue: That’s the test. It’s, when you feel hurt, to say that this is your hurt, to own it first and foremost, and to try and go into that space before you react to it … so that then you can come back with another response that’s not of anger or of hate. Because often it’s a communication thing.

Amy: Harville Hendrix talks about that. He says that, when we were children, we thought we could get our parents love by screaming or crying or making a fuss, because a baby can’t say, “Excuse me, Mom, I would like more milk.” What does a baby do instead? It cries. Harville Hendrix says that’s actually programmed into us.

When we’re not getting the love we want, we don’t know how to ask for it. Instead, all we know to do is to think, “You’re hurting me. I’m going to hurt you, so that you’ll wake up and realize you’re hurting me, and then you’ll stop.” It doesn’t work that way.

Sue: I have this incredible example. The other day, a man sent me a text saying, “I’m hurt and confused.” He was joking, but I took it seriously. When he got up the next day and saw that I had taken it the wrong way, he said, “You’re going to kill me.”

The thing was, though, I didn’t do anything with it. I sat on it. I said to him, “I don’t know what to do.” It changed everything. I know this subject, and I didn’t know what to do! That was just one of the most beautiful moments.

Amy: I think what we’ve learned in this session is that, to live and love, you’ve really got to look at your past hurts, how you allow people to hurt you, and your vision that love doesn’t include getting hurt. Once you examine your expectations, you might learn that, “Yes, I can open for love. I don’t have to protect or defend myself, because I can get hurt, and I can handle it. I’ll be okay. I can be hurt, and I don’t have to hurt him back. I can love him through it, and I can let it go.”



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LIVING IN THE NOW



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Part VII Living in the Now

Amy: In this session, we’re going to be talking a little bit more about that elusive concept of living in the now.

We’re going to be discussing how your expectations and goals – like you may have a goal to be married in a couple of years – actually may be sabotaging your experiences and preventing you from enjoying your relationships and the interactions with men that you do have.

We’re going to be talking a little bit about how judgments and worries can affect how men perceive you.

And we’re going to be finishing by talking a little bit about the importance of letting go, accepting that relationships end, and letting go of what we think has to happen in a relationship and enjoying it for the present.

Understanding Expectations

Sue: First of all, how do expectations work? We all have expectations of how we want something to turn out for us, for our girlfriends, for life. These expectations are our way of wanting something.

Now, the problem with this is that if somebody else doesn’t want to give that to us, then we’re going to be upset.

So who’s got the problem?

We have to identify what our expectations are. Then we have to choose our response to them if we’re not getting what we want.

Because, ultimately, if we’re having a tantrum about not getting our expectations met, then we’re being a child. I know we can all be children and it’s really fun sometimes, but in relationships, especially for women – and I know men have expectations as well – women have been taught to place an expectation on a man, and, if he meets that expectation, he’s a trustworthy man. That’s how we find out if this man is trustworthy or if we can control him. I think, personally, we need to take a look at that.

If we look at the corporate world, how it well works is built on expectations, because the expectation is from your boss. You know to please him, and everyone’s happy. Clear expectations get the job done, but in relationships it’s unconditional love.


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Amy: You love them whether or not they do anything for you. I know a lot of women say, “I just give and give and give in this relationship, but he gives nothing back!”

But maybe you don’t know how to love.

The other thing with that, I think, you said the problem isn’t with the person not meeting our expectations, it’s with us.

Women often say, “What is wrong with all these men who won’t commit? What’s their problem?”

Well, maybe I’m the one with problem, because I’m not living in the present. I’m not enjoying the fact I am with him right now. I’m saying that my relationship is only going to be valuable if we eventually get married.

I see a lot of women who have a fantastic relationship with a guy – they love him and think, “This is going to be fantastic,” because they think they’re going to get married – and then he says, “Sorry, I don’t want to marry you. I’m moving on.”

Suddenly, all she can say is that the relationship was terrible, she never had any fun, and he was a horrible person. Why the shift? She loved it when she was in the moment.

Andrew: When we’re placing expectations on relationships, we’ve got to look at whether or not those expectations are realistic, and whether or not they’re reasonable as well.

I get a lot of feedback from people wanting to move the relationship to the next level and have “The Talk” and ask those questions, “Where are we now? Where will we be three months from now? Where will we be six months from now? How do you fit in with my life plan?” And the problem with that is that they’ve only been dating the guy for three weeks! That’s a little bit frightening.

What I say to people is, “You need to enjoy the moment. You need to enjoy the courtship, dating, going out for dinner, going to movies, doing things that couples do at that time.” You never get that time back.

So many couples find themselves married two or three years down the track and think,” Oh gosh, we never did that, we never did this, because we rushed from Step 1 to Step 3. We missed out on Step 2 because our expectations were focused on marriage. ‘Is he marriage material. Is he going to make a good husband? Is he going to make a good father for my children?’”



At that stage, we’re just jumping ahead too far. We need to enjoy our time with them: dating, getting to know that person as Jack or as John, rather than getting to know them as the father of my children.

Amy: What does that do to men when a woman is with him and thinking, ”What if he’s going to ask me out again? What if we’re going to be a couple?” She’s just thinking it; she’s not saying it. But that’s scaring that man away.

A great thing about men is that men, I believe, have a much better ability to live in the moment than we do.

Sue: Especially in a relationship.

Making the Shift from Expectation to Intention

I think that we need to clarify something. What I like to work with, rather than expectation, is intention. So I intend to have this kind of relationship. I might intend to attract the sort of man who is going to treat me in this way, and I’m going to treat him this way, so I have respect for him.

So I work with intention. My intention is to create this, rather than expectation, because I personally still have a certain sort of man obviously I’m going to be attracted to. I want to get clear about that, so I can align myself up with the forces that are going to bring him to me, because if I’m not clear …

I work with intention for that and try to drop expectation. Expectation kills love. Love is only in the moment. That’s why romantic love is so fantastic, because there’s no expectation at that stage and no attachment. It’s a lot of promise, but it’s very, very in the moment, and that’s why it’s such a beautiful experience.

Then the moment we start to attach to it, we start to have expectations of it. The love starts to break down. “I’ll meet your needs if you meet mine.” We start trading. “I’ll do this if you do that.”

So have a look at your attachments and expectations, and try and personally work with intention … your intent to create. Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention will help you work with intention.

Andrew: That’s a great word. “Intention” is saying, for example, “I intend on having children one day.” What that’s saying is, “I intend to do that, and it may not necessarily be with you, but, at some stage in my life, children are going to be somewhere down the track.” It’s not saying, “I’m going to breed with you,” because, in placing that expectation, what that tells a man is, “Well, gosh. Am I there because she is attracted to me as a person? Or do I just come from a good bloodline? Am I just a breeder?”


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Replace Judgment with Acceptance

Sue: The fundamental thing with love is that what we’re all looking for is to be seen at the deepest level of being, not to be seen as utility or a transport system. We want to be seen deeply for our being, not for our money or our looks. We all yearn for that ... all of us! So just go straight to it, I say.

Amy: Another time when we’re not living in the moment is when we always try to figure out what a guy is thinking. We cannot accept a man’s actions on face value. Instead we say, “What was he thinking? What did that mean?”

Then we judge his action as to whether it was “good.” In other words whether it fit into our expectations, or whether it was “bad,” e.g., he might not be able to meet our expectations.

One of the great things about living the moment is not just letting go of expectations; it’s allowing him to be him. It’s also about letting go of that need to know what every single thing he did meant for your relationship.

Sue: Absolutely. That’s real freedom. That’s lovely.

Amy: You’d be the first woman in the world that he’s ever met that allowed him to be him and didn’t have to know what everything he did meant, such as whether, because he went out last night, it means you’re not together anymore. He’s going to love it!

I hope in this session you’ve learned quite a lot about the power of living in the now, a little bit about how your expectations could be limiting you, and how living with intention and allowing a man to be himself, not be who you think he is, can actually give you amazing freedom and open you up to real love.

In the next session we’re going to talk about how to invite a man into your life by creating a place for him.



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CREATING A PLACE FOR MEN IN OUR LIVES



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Part VIII Creating a Place for Men in Our Lives

Amy: In this section, we’re going to talk about creating a place for men in our lives.

You may be thinking, “Why in the world would they talk to me about this? I clearly want a relationship. I clearly want to be irresistible to men.”

Amazingly enough, a lot of us think we want a man in our lives, but we actually have no space at all for a man to be there.

I was just chatting with a friend of mine recently, and she said, “I’ve been single for 20 years.” Now, she’s beautiful; she’s a fantastic bodybuilder. And she said, “I’ve suddenly realized that the reason I’ve been single for 20 years is not that I’m not attractive. It’s not that men aren’t attracted to me. The problem is that my life has been so busy. I’ve been so busy pursuing my goals that I actually never looked up and smiled at a man and had any time to chat with one.”

So do women have places for men in their lives? And, if not, how do they create it?

How Being “Busy” Can Work Against Dating

Andrew: That’s a very interesting point to bring up, because I see a lot of women who have come out of long-term relationships, and the moment they’re out of them they’re in this mad rush to fill in that gap of time in the relationship. They’ll fill it with their friends, hobbies, nesting, and that type of thing.

What happens in doing this is, first of all, it loses the sense of urgency … not necessarily “urgency,” but that place for wanting a man in your life, because you’re less likely to want it if you’re around other people to replace that need.

As well as that, when you do get a man in your life, how prepared are you to give up those things you’ve actually quite enjoyed doing? You’ve developed these habits; you use that amount of time doing these certain things. So you have to ask yourself, “How much of that free time (that I filled up so desperately after my last relationship) am I prepared to give up for my new one?”

So, perhaps, in preparation, if you’re looking for a relationship, first start by creating a gap in your life where there is some “down time,” so that you can not only allow yourself to meet men, but develop a relationship.



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Sue: It’s like anything. If you meet a man that has no time for you in his life, then it’s not really going to go anywhere. The same goes for you. You’ve just got to take a look at that. If you’re not making the space, you can’t create. That’s all there is to it.

Amy: It’s especially a problem for those of us who have been taught that, to be attractive to men, we have to be really active. We have to always be going to social event, we have to have lots of female friends that we go out with, and we have to have these amazing hobbies. We have to be quite busy, so that when a man approaches us, we have to say, “I can’t go out with you on Friday night, because I already have plans.”

We are taught that to be attractive to men, we’re supposed to give the indication that our lives are so full that we have no room for him, except for these little bits of time we’re going to give him.

Do Men Really Like a Challenge?

Sue: Or what about the trick that my girlfriends told me? That when you meet a man, you never call him, and when he texts you or calls you, you wait three days. I was like, “What?!” When I found out, I broke that rule a million times. Why do you wait three days? They said, “Well, you know. That’s what you do. You don’t want to look like you’re too keen.” I couldn’t work that out.

Andrew: The problem in doing that is that it’s a loss of authenticity.

Sue: Exactly.

Andrew: In doing that, you’re playing the game.

Amy: You’re going to attract game players.

Andrew: Some people say to me, “Oh, but I can’t make myself too available for a man.” That’s fine, but, equally, you do need to make yourself available on some level. I think that’s where some people take the message just a little bit too far.

Amy: What happens when you play those games – when you say, “I’m not available” – is that you attract men who want the conquest. You attract those men who love pursuing unavailable women and breaking them down so that he gets to sleep with them … and then he says, “That challenge was fun. I’m off to the next woman!”

If you’re playing those games and you say, “Poor me, I seem to be meeting these horrible players and these men who don’t respect me,” maybe it’s because you’re playing a bit of the “I’m unavailable” game.



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Is What You See in Others Mirroring Yourself?

Sue: We have to look at that, because it’s easy to project onto the situation what we don’t want to own. And what we do there is we meet the people and we say they are commitment-phobics or they are this or they are that, but in actual fact what we’re doing is projecting.

How this works is: we have a story about how men are. We have to play that story out, so we’re actually only attracted to people who are going to validate our story so that we can be victims again. It’s called “projection.”

It’s very, very important to look at the patterns if you’re meeting the same kinds of people or men. You want to ask yourself, “What am I projecting onto them that I need to actually take a look at here?” Because maybe it’s not them who are unavailable. Maybe it’s you that’s unavailable.

So the moment you “own” that and go, “Okay, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s me who’s unavailable, and I just keep meeting men to live my story out so that I can be a victim over and over.” Why do you want to be a victim? You don’t want to be consciously, but hey, it’s you. It’s what you need.

Amy: It gets your attention.

Sue: We’re addicted to being these things sometimes. Just have a look at that. Just have a look. If there’s a pattern showing up, if you’re projecting that onto somebody, then you need to own it for yourself.

Amy: One really revealing thing that happened to me is that I wrote a post on my blog about how we need men in our lives, and I finished up with a challenge to women to say, “I need men.” I wrote, “You’re not saying, ‘I need a man.’ You’re just saying, ‘I need men.’ Can you say it?”

I got back fascinating responses. There are quite a few women who were very resistant. They said, “I don’t need a man. I’m independent. Neediness is something my grandmother and great-grandmothers felt. I’m a modern woman. I don’t need men.”

What actually that displays is the fact that they have a fear of being needy. They haven’t owned their neediness.

Sue: That’s correct. You react to something because there’s something to look at. If you’re reacting, look at it. You’re onto something. If you’re not reacting, you’ve made your peace. So there’s a clue for where your stuff is.


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Practical Ways to Create a Place for Men

Amy: So how do we do this practically? Say that I am a strong career woman and maybe I’ve got children from a previous relationship. I’m quite busy all the time. How do I go about creating time for men in my life? Should I just say I’m going to schedule two hours a week that I will be doing dating stuff, whether it’s online dating or going out to bars?

Andrew: Ultimately, it’s a judgment call. You have to examine your particular situation and think, “How much time do I want to devote to doing that?” In other words, new relationships, new love, and devoting your time to that.

I know a number of women that devote free time on Friday nights going out drinking with their single friends and with their girlfriends. What if every other Friday night they went actively looking for dates or spending time with their new partner?

What we’re doing here is creating a balance between “we” time versus “me” time. You are going to devote yourself on some level with your interpersonal relationships with your girlfriends and that sort of thing, and that’s fine, but let’s focus back on what you want, which is ultimately why we’re here: because we want to attract a man.

Amy: There’s nothing more attractive then being with somebody who has a warm, welcome place for you in their hearts.

Could you imagine if you go home and your mother says, “I’m sorry, I’m very busy, but I have an hour later tonight, and we can talk then.” You’d feel horrified. You’d feel shut down!

But so many women do that to men, and they expect the men to think that’s all right.

Sue: It’s being available. Being present.

Amy: So maybe the next time, try just a different tactic. See what happens when a man comes over to you. Give him a big smile. Forget about what you were thinking about, and give him a couple of minutes of being present of your time, just to chat and to hear what he has to say. You’ll be amazed.

I found out that technique doesn’t work with game players, because guys who are playing games – who are cheaters and who just want to mess with you – say, “I can’t play games with this girl, because she’s just listening to me and smiling.” You’ll actually push away the sort of guy you don’t want to be with, the guy who isn’t actually serious about you.



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And the genuine guys, the guys who really might care about you, think, “Man, this is the most fantastic woman I’ve ever come across, because she’s got a great smile, I’m welcome to her any time, and when I talk to her, she really listens.”

Now that you’ve opened a place in your life for men, in the next lesson we’re going to find out what are some of the most common mistakes women make that drive men away.




THE BIGGEST MISTAKES WOMEN MAKE WITH LOVE


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Part IX The Biggest Mistakes Women Make with Love

Amy: In this section, we’re going to be talking about the biggest mistakes women make with love. There are two major ones that we’re going to focus.

1. Grabbing at love … and by grabbing at it, pushing it away.2. Wanting the perfect relationship rather than the company of the

man we’re with. So many of us, because we have this expectation of married, will see a man as a potential mate only insofar as he’ll potentially propose. As a result, we stop thinking about whether or not we actually enjoy his company right now. If he never ever changed, would we be happy with him forever?

So we’re going to be asking ourselves these questions right now.

The Push/Pull Theory of Attraction

Sue, in our December seminar, you talked about grabbing at love and how that pushes it away. What’s this push/pull theory of attraction?

Sue: If you grab at something, you’ve got some laws of energy there. Often, what we try and grab at has this response to want to move away from us, especially men and love.

It’s like, if someone tried to grab at you, would you want to go towards them or would you want to pull away? The instinct is to pull away.

So what is grabbing and why do we do it? It’s a scarcity mentality. It’s, “I better hold onto this one, because there’s not too many out there,” or, “This is as good as it gets.”

While you’re coming from a perspective of scarcity, then you’re not creating. If you’re not creating, you’re not abundant, you’re not open, you’re not flowing, you’re not in your personal power, and you’re not authentic.

Grabbing at something is very “Me, me, me, me.” Children do it when they’re having a tantrum. There’s nothing wrong with that, but just be conscious that it’s really not going to serve you in the abundant ways that you’re really looking for.

Wanting Him Back and Letting Go

Amy: There are so many women who write to us and say, “I want to get my ex back. I want to get my ex-boyfriend back.” What they believe is that, to



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express their love, they have to possess him. In other words, they feel love for this man and believe, “The best way to express how much I love him is to show how shattered I am without him, how much I need him in my life, and to get him back.”

When we grow as human beings, we find out that when you love someone, you let them go. How many women actually apply that in relationships?

When you truly love a man and he says, “I need to back away. This isn’t right for me,” if you really love him, you will say, “You need to do what’s best for you, because I love you; I want you to flourish and grow. If it’s not with me, that’s fine, because you need to reach your potential.”

Instead, what do we do? We’re the children with the tantrum. We say, “No, I only love you insofar as I get something from you. And what I get from you is your companionship and your affection. Therefore, if you’re not going to be with me, I don’t love you any more, because you’re horrible.”

Is that real love? Are we just talking about a love affair or something else?

Sue: It’s not unconditional love; it’s conditional love, and I don’t think we’re particularly good at unconditionally loving each other.

The wanting has to go. Work with intention. Less about grabbing, less about wanting, more about intending – “I intend for this to happen” – and move into a space where you can just flow with it.

Ultimately, things are going to work out the way things are going work out. How much choice have we really got? You can’t control somebody.

Amy: I’ve heard that time and time again, asking people how they met their partner. It was never when they were wanting to meet somebody. Most people end up meeting their partners unexpectedly when they weren’t expecting anything to happen. They were not in a place where they needed a relationship, and, once they finally got into that place where they weren’t expecting anything, magic happened.

Sue: Openness.

Fear of Failure and Loss

Andrew: I think we’re all equally guilty of trying to harden some of our relationships, because we’re reluctant to let them go. I looked at one of my relationships back in the past, and I examined my reasons at why I was so upset that it had finished. Part of it was because I had felt an enormous sense of failure. That’s something a lot of people can relate to. You feel a sense of failure either on a personal level or because, “They don’t love me,” or, “Everyone else is managing to make it work, so what’s wrong with me?”



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More than feeling that sense of failure was the fact that I’d lost control of it. That wasn’t something I could make happen. I wanted that person to love me as much as I loved them, and I was going to hang on! I was going to fight them all the way. It wasn’t the fact that I loved them and they rejected me that I was upset about. I was upset because I grabbed at it and I couldn’t control it.

Sue: This brings us back to why we grab because we have a fear: the fear of losing love. It’s a primal fear. We all have that. We have a fear of being humiliated. This fear of being humiliated absolutely controls us.

Amy: It goes back to humility, doesn’t it?

Sue: It does. It goes back to being humble and learning how to let go of that. Be humiliated. Get it over with. It’s not that bad.

Andrew: When you look back through some of your old past relationships, you realize it wasn’t the man necessarily you were in love with. It was the idea of love.

You were in love with the relationship. Being with someone. Having someone to show off. Having someone there to talk to at night.

It was the relationship you were in love, with not the person.

Sue: That comes back to that feeling that you’re on track with who you are, and that person is not the journey.

Seeking the “Perfect Man” and “Perfect Relationship”

Amy: It comes back to our second point, which is that so many people want the ideal relationship rather than the company of the particular man they’re with.

So many women drive away men because they have that fixer-upper mentality. They say, “He will be the perfect husband as soon as I teach him how to do this and this. He needs to learn to open up. He needs to learn to pick up his socks. He needs to learn to do this, and then he’ll be the perfect husband, and we’ll be fine! But if he doesn’t do those things, then it’s his fault if the relationship doesn’t work out.”

Sue: What if you invest ten years and he becomes this perfect man … and then he leaves you?

Amy: You’ve done a good work for some other woman, haven’t you?

Andrew: That’s exactly it. Someone else steps in and reaps the benefits. Equally, when they get to that perfect person ten years later, is that where you are ten years later as well?



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Sue: Exactly. It takes a lot of energy.

Amy: So it seems that, in a sense, what many of us want isn’t actually a relationship with this particular guy. What we want is to actually control someone else to make them into what we think the “perfect man” would be, in order to have the “perfect relationship” as we think it should be.

Sue: Absolutely. Look at the illusion of marketing. The whole thing is there to corrupt our thinking into this way. It’s what you look like, and what you look like with who you’re with. Does it give you more status or less status?

It’s all about the fear of humiliation again. This is not love, but it is the world we live in. You have to come to know someone at a different place beyond their assets and credentials.

Summing Up the Lesson

Amy: So the two biggest mistakes women make is, first of all, when they see possibility – a potential somebody – and say, “I have to have that. I have to own it. I have to own him, because the act of possessing is the act of showing love.”

The second thing is not actually looking at men and saying, “Do I like him as he is right now? Or is what I really want just a relationship with anybody, and he is just somebody that is going to say yes?”

Sue: Absolutely. I’ve found in my own life that the times where I’ve become disillusioned with a relationship were because I had expectations for it to be different than it was. They’re my expectations, and I have to learn how to let that go and enjoy the person the way they are. If I can’t do that, I should probably move on.

Amy: There’s a fantastic book on the subject. The Real Rules by Barbara De Angelis. It’s one of my favorites, and it’s a great antidote for anybody that’s read The Rules. It talks about learning to love somebody as they are, and wanting to be in a relationship because he’s so fantastic, not because of the concept of being in a relationship is so fantastic.



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THE RELATIONSHIP LIFE CYCLE



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Part X The Relationship Life Cycle

Amy: In this section of the course we’d like to talk about the life cycle of a relationship. Why is it important that you know how a relationship goes? Well, one of the reasons is that often, when we get into a relationship, we fall madly in love. We think this must be the real thing: “I want to be with this person all the time. I feel fantastic when we’re together. This is going to last forever. I know it’s real love.”

Then, what happens is, we’re together for a while. We start arguing a little bit. Suddenly, we start thinking, “He’s got all these flaws. Why didn’t I see this before?”

There often comes a point in a relationship where you think, “I’ve fallen out of love. The relationship must be over. I don’t feel anything for him anymore.”

If you understood the relationship life cycle, you’d realize that’s actually a fantastic thing that you should celebrate! What you’re doing is making the transition from the stage of infatuation or romantic love, into the stage where real love is possible.

The Inevitability of Hurt

Sue, what happens when you fall out of love and suddenly you’re arguing all the time? Why should we celebrate that? That sounds like a pretty bad thing to happen in a relationship.

Sue: Essentially, you’re going to meet someone that’s going to tap into your wounding. Those are the things that you’re here to heal in this lifetime. You’re only attracted to somebody that is going to tap into these things. It’s inevitable that this person is going to.

Imagine you’ve got wounds underneath your skin. You can’t see these wounds. This person comes along and just taps into them like this. You flare up, or hurt.

Well, this is what happens in relationships. The Mastery of Love (by Miguel Ruiz) is a fantastic book for explaining how that works. We can’t avoid it, so, if we can’t avoid it, we should celebrate it! It helps us become stronger, because we now start to get in touch with who we are and what we’re here to learn and transcend in this lifetime.

You won’t get this level of understanding with yourself unless you’re in an intimate relationship. All this stuff gets workshopped out in intimacy, not


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with friends. To a point, your friends will tap into it, but nothing like the intimate partner does.

Amy: So what you’re saying is that, when conflict happens, that’s actually the chance where we get to further understand ourselves. It’s only through conflict that we can actually get through to the other side and to actual healing, true love, and true intimacy. If we don’t navigate that conflict, if we pretend it didn’t happen, then we’re not going to get through to real love. That’s our barrier.

Sue: Unconditional love. That’s right. Because these woundings prevent us from loving unconditionally. That’s how we know we’re growing and we’re getting past our wounding.

Navigating Conflict in a Relationship

Amy: This also begs a question: how do you get through that conflict?

In Working On Yourself Doesn’t Work, this fantastic book that I talked about earlier in the section about the power of living in the now, Ariel and Shya Kane talk about this concept. You can live in two houses, they say. You can live in the Right House, where “you get to be ‘right,’ righteously right. Not necessarily correct, but always right” (38). You can either live in this house or you can live in the House of Being Alive, where “you get to experience love, health, happiness, full self-expression, satisfaction, relationship, etc” (39).

But, to live in each house, you have to pay rent. To live in the house where you’re right, the rent that you have to pay is giving up the experience of love, health, and happiness. In other words, if you’re committed to always being right in any conflict, you’re giving up love right then and there. You’ll get to be right, very righteously right, as the Kanes put it! You’ll win the conflict. But you’ll give up love.

If you really want love – if you want to work through that and come out the other side into fuller self-awareness, health and healing – what you have to pay as your rent to live in the Alive House is giving up being right.

Could you imagine if you were in a relationship where you gave up your ability to say, “But I was right about that and you were wrong!”

What would a relationship look like where you couldn’t say, “I’m right and you’re wrong,” anymore?

Sue: My first thought is to make sure your partner is coming from the same place! I’ll be tempted to take over the power. If you want to use this, you agree on it. Both of you give up being right.



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I think, too, that there is no “right” or “wrong” anyway. Just your belief systems.

Amy: If you do give up your ability to say, “I’m right,” what you do is stop blaming the other person.

If you were able to stop blaming your partner, your partner would suddenly realize, “This must be the woman of my dreams, because she’s the first woman who hasn’t blamed every single little thing that goes wrong on me! She accepts responsibility.”

Somebody I was reading talked about how you always accept 100% responsibility for the relationship. Even though it takes two people to make a relationship, you must accept 100% responsibility for everything that happens. There’s no pinning it on your partner.

Amazingly enough, if both partners says, “I accept 100% responsibility for what goes on in this relationship,” magical things happen.

Sue: Absolutely. The key is that both of you agree. Because if one’s doing it, we have the imbalance.

Amy: If your partner’s not willing to do that, if they want to live in the House of Being Right, that’s a chance for you to exit the situation, because somebody who always has to be right is not going to be a good partner for you anyway.

The Inevitability of Conflict and Chaos

Andrew: This is where the idea of the inevitability of chaos is so interesting, because at that stage we’re saying, “I’m less than perfect. I make mistakes,” and also, “You’re less than perfect, and you make mistakes. We’re both responsible for this chaos.”

It’s lowering our defenses instead of saying, “No, no. I’m only responsible for the good bits. The bad bits are your fault,” or, “The bad bits just happened.” They don’t just happen. We create that reality.

We’re embracing the idea of chaos and getting through that, as well as recognizing the fact that we’re both responsible for that chaos, and we have some control over whether we make that work for us or whether that splits us up.

Amy: That’s actually what makes relationships successful: when both people say, “Conflict doesn’t mean we weren’t meant to be together. I may be falling out of love, but that’s okay. I may be arguing with my partner, but that’s okay. What commits us to being together – what makes us potentially a



couple who experiences real love – is the fact we see conflict and chaos as a chance for growth together. We’re going to work through this together.”

That’s going to create love. It’s going to create real love based on who your partner is, with all of his flaws!

If you have this illusion that your partner’s perfect, you’re actually not in love with the real person. You’re in love with your illusion.

I think what Andrew describes is exactly the way you will get to true love with somebody who you’re probably meant to be with forever.

Andrew: Perhaps that’s the idea: that in the face of adversity, it brings the two of you closer together.

I know within my own relationship we’ve had some outside influences lately that have been quite hard for us both to bear. Rather than having that chaos tears us apart, it has brought us closer together. We both discover a side of ourselves that we weren’t aware of previously.

Also, we’re aware of the fact that it’s up to us whether or not we choose to let that chaos overwhelm us or whether we can rise through it and see that we have something deeper and stronger beyond that. It’s kind of looking at the calmer water beyond the rapids.

Working Through Conflict as a Team

Amy: Yes. One important thing that you’re doing in your relationship is that you’re facing conflict squarely as a team, whereas for so many couples, when conflict arises, one of the two will often try to pretend it doesn’t exist so that they can maintain the illusion that everything’s perfect. As a result, they’re crippling their relationship. They’re keeping it at a shallower level.

What you need to do to achieve lasting love is to see that conflict squarely and don’t be scared. Realize your partner is not your enemy. He isn’t against you.

Too often, when we see conflict, we say, “My partner’s now the enemy. I have to fight against him.” No. The conflict is the enemy to your relationship. You both have to work as a team to get through that conflict to save your relationship.

Your goal is a healthy relationship. Your goal is not being right.


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I hope that’s given you a little bit of an idea of how understanding the relationship life cycle can actually move you through areas that would threaten shallower couples, and learning that if you do face those conflicts squarely and move on, you’ll actually achieve a deeper level of intimacy than you may have never experienced before in your life.

In the next section we’ll talk about what it takes to make a relationship work, even if you’ve experienced only failed relationships in the past.



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MAKING A RELATIONSHIP WORK THIS TIME AROUND



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Part XI Making a Relationship Work This Time Around

Amy: In this section that we’re going to talk about how you can make your relationships work this time around.

I’m sure a lot of you have had relationships that have failed in the past. We all have. It’s not something to be ashamed about. If you’re like most women, you think, “This time I want to do it right,” or, at least, “I want to do it better.” That’s what this section is about.

Balancing “We” and “Me”

There are a lot of different strategies you can use to improve your relationships. One is starting to think a little bit more about your partner’s needs. Andrew, do you want to talk about that a bit?

Andrew: When you come into a relationship, you start off as two individuals. It’s often very tempting to amalgamate those needs within your relationship to become “we.” In other words, “We do this. We feel this. We feel that.”

What’s important to remember is that, before we became “we,” there were two “me”s.

When we’re looking at fulfilling needs within relationships, we tend to look at what’s good for us within the relationship in terms of what’s good for us. We also need to look at what’s good for me, individually, which is realizing personal goals and that type of thing.

When we’re talking about identifying and fulfilling needs within our relationship individually, we need to allow men to fulfill their individual needs. We need to allow their masculinity to develop, and we need to allow their masculinity to flow. We need to let them be men in our relationships.

Amy: Does this mean I have to stop shouting to him to pick up his socks and to turn down that football?

Andrew: It’s not a case of shouting or stopping him. It’s a case of accepting sometimes that that’s just the way he’s programmed. It’s not a case of fighting his faults but a case of accepting his faults and still loving him anyway and finding a way to work around that.

Relationship Killer #1: Blame

Amy: That’s beautiful. One of the things that I have found in my research over and over again, is that one of the things that kills relationships is blame. In other words, partners who constantly say, “It’s my partner’s fault that our



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relationship isn’t perfect. It’s my partner’s fault that we’re late to dinner. It’s my partner’s fault that our house isn’t clean. “

The great thing about having a partner is you’ve got a scapegoat for everything! It’s no longer my fault for anything, because he’s the reason my life isn’t absolutely perfect.

As you’ll notice, this is an absolute reverse from how we are when we’re single, because when we’re single we think, “I’m incomplete. My life would be perfect if I have him.”

Then we have him, and our life isn’t perfect! We think, “Well, it must be because I didn’t pick the right man.”

Sue: That’s exactly how it happens. We take responsibility when we’re not in relationships. We’ve got no one to project our stuff onto. We own it a lot sooner.

Then we get into relationships and then it all starts over again.

I had an example of a good friend of mine who was looking to have a child. She was thirty-nine and coming to the age where she thought that maybe it wasn’t going to happen. She met a man, and instantly there was a match. They got together, and for two weeks it was all romantic love, great and wonderful and sincere.

Then, two weeks into it, she’s telling us that it is all just normal now. She has settled into the relationship, and all that magnetism, magic, and illusion have worn off. Now she’s in the relationship, and the reality of the relationship is coming through.

That’s how it is. Once it gets to that level, the challenges are different. She is not looking for a man or looking for a man to have a child with. She’s found that. Now she’s got different challenges, which are, “How do I live with this man I’ve found? How do I procreate with this man?”

We always have this idea that the grass is greener, or we get into something and we just want it to be different. We just think in these ways, really; we’re not very good at being in the moment and looking at what we have and appreciating it.

How Self-Work Can Make Your Relationship Work

Amy: One of the great resources for couples is Harville Hendrix’s Getting the Love You Want. It has piles and piles of exercises for couples. He has another book called Keeping the Love You Find, specifically for singles. It is absolutely mind-blowing, because it really will teach you why you’re attracted to certain sorts of people.



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It’s essential to realize that when you get into a relationship, you’re going to have to work on some personal issues. Most of us think when we get into a relationship, it’s all about developing relationship skills such as conflict negotiation and communication.

What we don’t realize is that we often get into a relationship where our partner starts mirroring ourselves. Instead of confronting who he is, we’re suddenly confronting all the characteristics in ourselves we don’t like. We’re starting to project that on him.

But there’s a fantastic solution to all this. The key to making your relationships work this time around – or, at least, to give them the best chance of working – is to start taking a hard look at yourself and at the characteristics that you despise in others … because that probably means you haven’t accepted them in yourself.

Start doing some pretty serious self-work. Amazingly enough, as you grow and become a better person, you’ll find out your partner seems like a better person. How is that happening?

Sue: Because you bring your wounding. You bring your dislikes. It’s all you being projected onto him.

The book that is great to work with on this topic is The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford. It is a fantastic book about having a look at the “shadow side” of who you are and seeing what you project on others, because we are everything; we’re dark and light.

Amy: What we’re learning, too, is that it means when our relationship goes bad it’s not his fault. We can’t change him. We have to take a look at ourselves.

Andrew: Perhaps it’s an idea of learning to respond with love. I get a lot of emails and submissions from people who aren’t happy with the state of things in their relationship, because their husband or partner or boyfriend at the time is not responding in the way they’d like them to.

An interesting idea to explore is that you respond to it with love. The first thing you need to do is actually live your love. “Love” in itself is a doing word. Let’s examine the ways that we demonstrate to our partner how we show our love to them. It’s pretty hard for someone to be angry with you when you respond to their anger with your love. Perhaps a way of overcoming some of the problems is to break the cycle of negative patterns. Start showing your partner love. That can be through physical demonstrations of love such as hugging, kissing, touching, that type of thing. It can be through small things like making an extra slice of toast in the morning, leaving the coffee pot on, or putting a note in his lunchbox.

Amy: There’s an absolutely fabulous book about ways to demonstrate love with your partner. It’s called The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. I highly recommend this book if you’re in a relationship or starting one, because it


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helps you identify the ways in which your partner understands how love is demonstrated, so that you can target your expressions of love to the way he understands it.

I hope you’ve learned a lot in this lesson. Making a relationship work is always going to be difficult. If you take the perspective that you’re not going to change him, it’s not his fault, and what you’re going to do is look into yourself, find out how the ways in which you’re responding could be perpetuating the negative patterns, and start learning how to let down your defenses and express your wholehearted love for him, then I think you have a much better shot at making your relationship work this time around.




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LETTING GO

Part XII Letting Go

Amy: In this concluding lesson, I’d like to talk about a topic that’s a bit difficult for a lot of us to think about. It’s the topic of letting go.

Most of us have been through relationships that have ended. A lot of them have probably ended when we didn’t want them to. How do we respond to that? Do we respond to the end of a breakup by letting him go with grace? Or by kicking and screaming and yelling at him and saying, “This is all your fault. You’ve lost the best thing that’s ever happened to you?”

It sounds funny but it’s actually quite a serious, difficult topic. What do you guys do when you’re facing a breakup? Or what have you done in the past?

Sue: The truth?

Andrew: Is this a case of, “Do as I say and not as I do?”

Sue: Well, the truth is that it’s through my previous behavior that I’ve gotten to know my wounds. Obviously, the ultimate is to let go with grace, but I still find that increasingly difficult, because who wants to lose love? It threatens our security, our survival, and our image. It threatens everything about us.

Essentially, what happens is: when the letting-go phase starts to sink into the body, it starts to click through all the different chakras, if you like. Then it goes not so bad. It’s like when a snake bites you; it takes a while for the poison to start to sink in. Eventually you’re in full swing. It’s like a washing machine on its final cycle. At that stage, you’re having to go through what you have to go through.

Then you work through all the stages after that: anger, grief, and finally letting go. You actually make the shift from past reality into a present moment or future reality.

That is a process. There are plenty of great books on grief that would explain the process of letting go. I think what you’re asking is how we could do that in a way that was less dramatic.

For me, it would be acceptance, not only that but trusting that there was something very important about this that I needed to learn, and that it was going to be better the next time around. If I had that kind of faith, I think I would let things go a lot easier; I would move on a lot easier.

So, the remedy for me is faith that this has happened for a reason I don’t understand. I trust that the reason will be revealed to me, and that the next one will be even better.


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Amy: That’s absolutely the key. I’ve gone through quite a few difficult breakups, and the one thing that keeps me going is the fact that every single guy I fall in love with seems to be better than the last one. I don’t understand how that could happen, because I thought the first man I fell in love with was perfect! Then it was so hard to let him go, but I met someone else. He was even better. He took me to a different level.

From my experience, there’s adequate evidence to demonstrate we just have to have faith that something better will come along. But it’s only true if we let go with grace and we accept the fact that it’s over. We will not move on to something better if we hold onto that person forever, or if we hate that person forever for what they’ve done to us.

Sue: Holding on to the hurt, too, which is probably more damaging than anything for you. Holding onto the hurt that’s associated with not getting what you want.

Amy: It’s okay to feel hurt. One thing I notice a lot of women do with breakups nowadays is they say, “I have to be strong about this. I didn’t need him anyway. He wasn’t good enough for me. I shouldn’t feel hurt about this, because I’m better than this.”

By rejecting their hurt, they don’t accept the fact that they’re hurting, so that’s not the solution.

Andrew: It’s okay to eat chocolate, drink wine, and eat ice cream for a while and feel bummed out.

Emotions are funny things. We’re taught to suppress so many of them, like anger and grief. We’re supposed to be stoic and present a strong face to the world. It’s unusual, because the only emotion we’re really allowed to gush with is love.

It’s okay feel grief, and it’s okay to feel sad. It’s okay to feel anger. It’s just appropriate times for those. When you’re feeling a little bit down go with it. Eat ice cream, drink wine, eat chocolate. That sort of thing.

Sue: Just don’t get stuck there. Don’t get stuck in narcissism and victimhood, because there’s just too much in our culture. So you’re saying to acknowledge it.

Andrew: Acknowledge it, yes, as part of a process. Hindsight’s a wonderful thing. I look back at the first time I fell in love. At the time, he seemed like the most wonderful thing in my life. Years later, I look back and think, “Wow, on some level, he did the right thing,” but at the time I felt like I was having my heart ripped out.

What we go back to is faith. It might not seem logical at the time, but we have to have faith that that the breakup is going to teach us something. Maybe not right now, because we’re not ready to hear it, but in six months’



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time or twelve months’ time or whatever the case may be, we have to have faith that there is a lesson there to be learned.

Amy: That’s fantastic. The other thing that I always recommend – and it’s something that I do practice, even though it’s painful – and that is, when you’re facing a breakup or you’re facing a divorce or the end of a relationship, it’s not the time to tell him all the ways in which he hurt you. Instead, it’s the time to take a step back, take a deep breath, and thank him for all the ways in which he was important and made a contribution to your life.

You may hate him at that point. It’s very natural when you’re ending a breakup that you absolutely hate the person. It’s okay. But instead of expressing hate, express your thankfulness for the time you spent together or the memories you made together. Let him go with a, “Thank you.”

Recently I went back to tell a person that. We had ended a relationship a while back by being grateful to one another, but I realized I hadn’t gone back and told this person that I love them. The relationship was long over, and he was with another woman, and I was with another guy. But I told myself, "This is something that needs to be said," because I knew that in his past women had ended relationships with him by saying, "I can’t believe I just wasted years of my life with you," and that had hurt him quite a lot.

So I went back and I told him, "Hey, just wanted to say something that doesn’t mean anything. I just wanted to say I loved you."

That was it. It’s amazing how it allowed me to move on, even though I'd thought I’d moved on ... just by saying, "Thank you, I did love you."

Sue: Maybe this is the key. Love is letting go, so that you’re able to push into your wounds, push into the hurt ,and do the opposite of what you feel like doing. Maybe this is the secret. Giving love is the secret to letting go.

Andrew: The greatest benefit can be derived from doing the thing that is least expected.

Sue: Absolutely. Ultimately, the journey is the journey of life. Evolution is to be able to open our hearts, push into our resistance, and love more and more. So an ending is the perfect way to practice that, if you’re committed to it.

I think the reward is great for learning how to open your heart, because the more you can open your heart, the more you’re going to attract someone equal who can as well.



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Summing Up the Lesson and the Course

Amy: So the more you learn to live with love and let go with love, the greater your chances of encountering your great love.

That’s a great note on which to end this course. I hope you’ve learned as much as we have. I know it’s a fantastic journey. There’s always so much to learn.

We’ve just given you a very basic outline of some of these concepts. Probably, right now, your mind is swirling with ideas! We have more material in the How to Be Irresistible to Men Members Area for you to look at to explore these ideas further.

Right now, just think back to all you’ve learned in this course and ask yourself, "What’s the one thing that I’ve learned that I can practice right now?" I hope that you’ll notice an immense change in your life.

As we’ve been talking throughout this course, you should have realized that the key to becoming irresistible to men is not by effecting some change in men. It’s not dressing sexy so that they’ll look at you. It’s not throwing your hair back and speaking a certain way.

It’s simply becoming truer and more loving to yourself.

The more you are yourself, the more you allow your natural radiance to shine through, and the more men will respond to this wonderful, genuine, smiling woman and think, "That’s the sort of woman I wish I could spend the rest of my life with."


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