Be PATIENT with Your Partner. They're Not You.

Ladies and gentlemen, and people who decided to spray some air freshener to make the place smell a bit nicer, but you went crazy. You went a little overboard, kind of lost the plot for a little bit there. You were just holding down the trigger like you were in a video game, and like with a machine gun or something. You sprayed the [ __ ] out of the room to the point where now two people are sitting down to record a podcast in that room already with a headache, feeling like they can't breathe. Relatable, am I right? Ladies and gentlemen, Andy here, and Imogen there. I went from depressed and suicidal to living a life of abundance. Enjoy. If I can do it, you can do it too.

We need an intro for you. Like, what cool stuff are you gonna say? And she used to be [ __ ] bulimic and just generally just a sad little munchkin, sad little sack of stuff. Very flattering. Yeah, we're going to talk about being patient with your partner because they're not you. And in particular, and this applies to casual relationships, serious relationships, marriage. That's all the [ __ ] types, isn't it? Friendship. Oh, friendship, that's a good one. But so many times, or so often, especially when it comes to self-improvement, we have a certain concept in our head or a certain timeline of what we expect other people to do. I mean, [ __ ], this even applies to strangers, doesn't it? Like somebody you're waiting in line at the grocery store and somebody is taking extra long to package your groceries, and your brain starts going, "They should be faster with this [ __ ]!"

And I think sometimes it's not just a timeline expectation, it's also just like competence. Like, you should be better at this. This was something that I went through a lot, and I would often, like you're saying, I'd get frustrated when other people weren't competent, or what I perceived to be competent. And I had very little patience, definitely very little empathy. And one of my friends, you probably know who, was similar. He just was very frustrated whenever things weren't competent. He would just complain a lot, and I would indulge in his complaining, and I would meet him and meet him right there, and I would complain as well. And we both got to a point where we're like, "Okay, like, we, we're putting our value judgments on other people. We're not giving any space for people to suck, essentially."

And I went and bought this book. It's called "The Psychology of Stupidity." Camera's not going to focus because you're in the way of it. "The Psychology of Stupidity." And I haven't even actually read this book, but just buying this book made me feel a tiny bit better because it was the start of, and it's going to sound very patronizing to call other people stupid, but it was the start of me going, "Okay, I just want to understand. I just want to understand why people don't necessarily operate on my timeline, or why they're not perfect at the things that I just think they should be perfect at."

Well, I think sometimes it's just that you're your own, you're your own person with different expectations and ideas of what is good and bad. And other people can't mind-read. They don't necessarily know what you want. And sometimes it's not even necessarily knowing what's good or bad, it's like they just have a different preference to you. So they think what they're doing is good, and they can't mind-read. So they don't actually know what you want if you haven't said it.

Yeah, and I have thought, and through this book, the purchasing of this book, but not the reading of it, because I actually, funnily enough, didn't feel like I needed to read it. Once I just bought that book and knew it existed, I then started to empathize a lot more. And, in other words, humble myself. Or it was a process of humbling myself. And like you're saying, like, other people can't [ __ ] read your mind. Also, you're not [ __ ] perfect. So why the [ __ ] are you expecting other people to be? And we often do that, don't we? When we get frustrated by someone not being quick enough at something, not being good enough at something, not operating on our timescale, not caring about the things that we think they should care about. You know, like if they just don't have an opinion on a topic and you go, "Well, how can you not care about that?" Like, you know, I can think of a thousand causes. People have probably the biggest one is like recycling. And I'm just like, "I don't give a [ __ ]!" Like, "But how can you not give a [ __ ]? It's the Earth, it's all of this stuff." And I'm like, "I just, I just don't care." Like, I just, I'm not like pissing on penguins and like smashing turtles in the face, but I just don't care about recycling. And we often get like really [ __ ] uptight with that. Or I was really, really, really. And no more was more apparent than our relationship.

Yeah, having expectations of one another, sometimes not voicing them. Yep. And definitely. And I guess this is what we're gonna go into a little bit more, expecting the other person to achieve things within a certain timeline, and also not letting them know that you have that expected timeline. And although not actually taking a step back and asking whether that's reasonable that they get it done.

Yeah, and I used to do this a lot with my coaching clients too. I used to do this with guys on my forums. I used to do this with YouTube commenters. And I wasn't meaning to, but I would get impatient. I think what we're really talking about here is impatience, which is why patient is in the title. And it's not that I thought that people were incompetent or [ __ ] or not good enough or any of that. But in my brain, I just had some made-up number of made-up amount of time of when they should get this thing done by. And I would then get frustrated if they didn't achieve it in that time, or if they weren't making significant progress towards it. And again, this is not where I'm at right now. Like, especially anyone in the coaching program said, like, "What the [ __ ]? Andy, but like, you're so patient." Yeah, but I had to train that. I wasn't. And I would get very frustrated with people. And I, I would be still kind to them, but there were quite a lot of moments of frustration where that would come up. It would bubble up and I'd be like, "Come on, man, just like [ __ ] get out there and talk to those women!" And like, you know, "Come on, just start that business! What are you doing? Like, come on, just do it!" And I would like lack the patience and especially the humility to realize, like, "Look, the world doesn't operate on your schedule. You're not [ __ ] God. You don't have the perfect idea of when everything should happen and all the molecules should be in all the right places and at exactly the right time. And everybody should have exactly the thoughts in their head that I want them to. They should have the knowledge in their head that I want them to at the time I say that they should." Yeah, things will get done when they get done.

And maybe a good example is, you're somebody that lacks to be extreme in goals. Often you will do things quite like intensely, and you go all in and want to get all done. I think one of the examples you've talked about is your weight loss when you lost weight quite a long time ago, and you were losing about a kilo a week or something along those lines, and you were cutting really, really aggressively. Yeah. And I think over time, I have learned that that's not something that works for me. And I think often you would encourage me to go to really extreme measures because that's what you did, and it worked for you. And I found that every time I did that and would do like extreme dieting and cut really hard, I would just end up getting it all back plus some because I would binge and I'll get hungry. And it's like a very classic like dieter cycle because that just didn't work for me. And sometimes your everyone's individual timeline is going to be best suited to them, not necessarily your expectations.

Yeah, I, I used to be very rigid with what I thought you should do to lose weight, and what I would tell my clients to do and stuff like that. I was, I mean, generally speaking, this applies to pretty much everything in my life. I was a lot more rigid about my opinions. I was a lot more rigid about the advice that I would give to you, to my coaching clients, to the audience. You can go back and look through my content, especially on killyourenaluser.com, my blog, and you will see a lot of articles where I use the word "should." Like, "You should do this." I'm like, directly telling people what to do, which you'll notice is just not even remotely the style of my content and my life philosophy anymore. It's like, "No, do whatever you want to do. If you're not sure what to do, I can give you some suggestions, but I'm not going to tell you what you should do. There's no right or wrong."

But I think in the past, I mean, I'll ask the question, did it feel more like I had a like a one-track mind about certain things? Like, it has to be this way, it's my way or the highway? Definitely. And I think that as someone who maybe wanted a bit of guidance and direction at the start, that was helpful. But then I think as I became more confident and was starting to understand more what was what I wanted, that took a bit of navigating for both of us. Yeah.

And this applies to relationships, friendships. Definitely. Any of you that want to start like your own coaching program, or you want to even just like help some friends or something. Telling people what to do as if there is like a correct way of doing things is really [ __ ] helpful. When someone's like at the start of their self-improvement journey, or the start of a new goal. I guess on top of that is also asking for that help. Yeah. Sure. Yeah, of course. But the point I'm getting to is, at the start, it can be really [ __ ] helpful. It's not, I wouldn't say it's the best way of doing it. I think like the mindset that I'm in right now is, in my opinion, the best way of doing it. But to get to the point, telling someone what to do and being quite direct and and not forceful, but like rigid with your opinion and your advice, that can really help the person at the start. That can be helpful at the start. But at a certain point, you're just training that person to need you. You're training that person to need your advice.

And this is where, you know, some content creators and some advice givers, they're coming from the best possible place. But I've seen so many of them that get to a point where they're like, "Man, my clients just keep needing me. Like, how do I get them to a point where they don't need me?" And it's like, "Well, you almost got to stop telling them what to do and just teach them how to think. Don't tell them what to think. Tell them, or teach them how to think." And that was definitely a big learning lesson in our relationship. It's probably something that I only learned over what, the last year or two. It hasn't been that long. That I've become a lot more peaceful, a lot more calm, a lot more like, "I don't have to, I don't have to argue with reality. I don't have to get frustrated if someone's taking a little bit longer than I think they should." I've let go of even that notion of like, when I think something should be done. I've tried to, as best as I can, you know, these days have like no expectations of like when somebody should get their life together, or when they should start this business, or when they should be making money, or when they should be talking to women, or talking to guys. It's like, you'll, you as long as you're showing up every day and doing a little bit, not even every day, most days, and doing something, you'll [ __ ] get there.

And I think you've even said this before as well, sometimes having those [ __ ] ups, or having not even necessarily [ __ ] ups, but having a long time where you don't achieve the goal or go backwards, further away from your goal, and feeling hopeless and getting to a really low place, sometimes that is a real, in an individual's journey, can be a really helpful thing because that then fires them up to get the goal or be more consistent. Like that often can be essential in somebody's journey in self-improvement.

Yeah, I used to have this notion that if you're seemingly making no progress, let's say you're going a couple of months and you haven't lost any weight. Let's say weight loss is your main goal. You've gone two months and you haven't lost a single pound or kilogram in in that two months. In the past, the past Andy would have said, "You're failing! Like, what are you doing? Like, you're wasting time! Come on!" Whereas current me would have a more sort of zoomed-out or holistic view of the whole situation and I go, "Yeah, maybe for two months you need to just sit there and not lose weight because maybe that will be the thing that lights the fire under your ass to then kick ass with your weight loss two months from now. Or maybe during that those two months, you were learning other skills, maybe you were evolving in different ways, maybe like I'm saying, you literally need to build up frustration from not having made much progress to go, '[ __ ] I can't do this again.'"

I think of the best example, or the best example of this, is in my own life. After I got over my approach anxiety with women. And for any of you, don't know what the [ __ ] that is, when you're basically scared to go out and talk to women and say, "Hey, I think you could like." And I think that's the vast majority of guys, by the way, are like, "I can't go out and talk to random women in cafes and on the street and in bars that I don't know." And so, you know, I did this program to work through that and get to a point where I could genuinely talk to women. Except that I didn't. I spent five months where I sort of had a breakdown at the end of that program where I was like, "I don't deserve to do this. Like, I finished this approach anxiety program. I can hit on women. I can tell them that they're attractive, but I don't deserve to. I'm not good enough." And I basically had this massive like breakdown where for five months I essentially didn't leave the house. I might have gone out to get groceries and maybe see a friend here and there, but I pretty much avoided going outside because there's obviously women outside. And every time I would see a woman, I would be like, "Holy [ __ ]! This is a reminder that I can't do this, that I don't deserve them, that they're better than me, that women will never be nice to me." All of those kind of insecurities and thoughts in my head. So I avoided going outside for five months. And you could look at that and say, "Man, like, what a waste of [ __ ] time." But no, that was like the most beautiful thing that I could have done because it built up all of this frustration until I had this breakthrough moment where I was like, "What the, what the [ __ ] am I doing? I've just sat here for five months." And I went outside and I talked to this adorable little Asian girl and I shook her hand and I was like, "I'm Andy, and I, you know, who are you?" And I held her hand for a little bit, for like 30 seconds, we just held hands at the end of the handshake. And she was like, "Super happy." And I was like, "Do you want to go out with me?" And she was like, "I have a boyfriend." And I was like, "I hope you enjoy your day." And I was like, "Holy [ __ ]! I did it!" And I was like, "The best [ __ ] moment for me because of those five months of just misery, depression, not leaving the house, jerking off to porn for like [ __ ] five hours a day, drinking alcohol, binge eating, just like, I can't leave the house and I'm just miserable." And yet, that was the most beautiful part of my journey.

I say the same stuff about my time in prison. Best six months of my [ __ ] life. Highly recommend prison. I really don't, by the way. No, don't do that. But it was the best, most transformative, most healing, most, um, what's the word? Where you're paying, like, not not recompense, like, like repent, making up for what I had done. Repenting. And not that you sit there and flagellate yourself and beat yourself up, but it was a really nice way to sit there and say, "Okay, I've done something that has meant I deserve to be here. Let's make up for that. Let's spend the rest of my life making the world a better place to balance this out." Best [ __ ] experience of my life. Best time of my life. And so, yeah, when I sit there and you've done it too, we're going to talk in a little bit about times where you've gotten impatient or frustrated. You think something should be done quicker, or better, or faster, or stronger, as the Daft Punk song goes. Um, but yeah, I have so many of, I've had so many of those moments of frustration with you, with other people, with clients, with friends, with random strangers, where I go, "Like, what the [ __ ] am I talking about? Like, me flailing around in prison, or when I was depressed and didn't leave the house, was the best [ __ ] thing for me. So maybe this person not achieving their goals right now is the best [ __ ] thing for them."

Yeah, to some extent, it's in pot letting go of your own ego and thinking like, "I'm right and I know best." And being like, "Maybe they can just have their own journey and do their own thing." And I'll leave them be and support them if they want support, or give them advice if they ask me for advice. But for the most part, people are going to do their own thing whether you have expectations of them or not. And it's gonna lead to a whole lot less suffering on your end if you don't have those expectations of other people.

Yeah, you're basically trying to micromanage the other person. You're trying to micromanage when you're not even them. And I've said this a million times, like, when we impose our will or impose our opinion on other people, and you know, we think, "You should have done this by now. You should have lost this way, or you should be this, or you should be stronger, you should be blah, blah." You don't have to deal. You're not having to live their life. All you're sort of doing is like what's called backseat driving. You're just saying, "Hey, you should do this." And it's like, "Yeah, but like, that terrifies me. That thing that you're just telling me to [ __ ] go and do is like the scariest thing I've ever thought about." Or maybe it's going to require a lot of, you know, reorganizing my life. Like, maybe there is some sort of price that I need to pay to start making this thing happen. And you're just casually throwing it out like, "Yo, hey, you should have lost weight by now." And it's like, "It might take me a [ __ ] year to sort out my life and get it in the right order so that I can do this weight loss thing, or so that I can make more money like you're telling me to." And if you're not living that person's life, which obviously you're not, we all live only our own life, it's very easy to give advice. You don't have to follow through on it. You're not the one that has to [ __ ] do it.

Yeah, and a lot of the time the advice requires discipline and consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's so much easier to just say, "Hey, like, you should be earning more money right now." And it's like, "Yeah, thanks, but you're not the one that has to show up every day and do this. You're not the one that has the fears or the doubts or the insecurities and the self, you know, flagellation and beating myself up and all of those demons that I might need to process and work through. On all the stuff under the surface that an outsider can't see. There's reasons." And so, yeah, it, it, it's been really nice over the last, it's probably been two years, I think, maybe a year and a half, maybe two years, since I've gotten to this point where I'm just like, "You'll do it when you do it."

And part of that, if we're talking about relationships, I feel like we should just throw in the caveat here, there might be certain things that for some of you are a dealbreaker in a relationship, of course. And so, you know, we're not saying ignore all of that. But I think for certain things, like things that I want for you, like where you have a goal. Yeah. What were you gonna say?

And I was gonna even say, like, I think that that in itself has changed. I think now you seem to more want things for me. But I think earlier on, you wanted things for you from me, for you. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. There was a lot more attachment at the start of our relationship, for sure. Um, definitely. And I think, to, to, to be fair to myself, I think at the start of the relationship, I mean, we literally talked about this in couples counseling the other day. Um, you definitely want a complete person at the start. You didn't know what your boundaries were. You hadn't been in a relationship. You didn't know what goals you wanted. You'd never really done self-improvement. You'd improved [ __ ], but you'd never gone, "All right, let's tackle this self-improvement thing." You had like no stoicism, not a lot of resilience. Like, you didn't have most of the concepts that we have today. And so there was for a lot of it, and definitely our dynamic was, you were like the mentee and I was the mentor. And for a lot of [ __ ], you were like, "Can you just make me do this?" And there was definitely a very like dominant submissive aspect to our relationship at the start. Whereas as we've talked about a lot, we're still like that in the bedroom, but outside of the bedroom now, you and I are a lot more like, it's a partnership. It's 100% like a, like we're peers. But at the start, I was acutely aware of like the age difference between us, which, you know, you can tell me how you feel, I already kind of know how you feel. But like, I don't see an age difference between us these days. Like, it doesn't really come up in my head. If I think about it, it's like, "Yeah, of course, I'm 12 years older than you." But I don't feel that as strongly as I did when we first started dating, where it was [ __ ] acutely aware. This is an 18, 19-year-old girl, and I am, you know, a 31-year-old who has done a lot more living than she has.

Oh, yeah. Like, at this point in time, it's like, not really apparent to me. It doesn't come up. Like, ever. It's, it's not at all. If you just asked me and I wasn't thinking, "Like, how old are you guys?" "Oh, at the same age." "Oh, no, wait, no, we're not." Like, that would just fall out of my mouth.

Yeah, and I think for me, the only time it comes up is when I'm talking about you to somebody new. Yeah. And then they'll be like, "Oh, I like how like often because I said we run our own business, I'm like, 'Oh, he's a life coach.' And then because people know I'm on the younger side, they're like, confused by that because like, what? You've got like, there's like a 20-year-old life coach?" Like, "I'm like, 'Oh, no, he's, he's like a bit older.'" And it kind of clarifies things. But then I'm like, "Oh, yeah, on on paper, it actually does sound like you're a fair bit older than me." But no, it's not something that I think about. Yeah. Yeah.

But so about, so back to the point, in those old days, I think there was a lot more, I put pressure on myself, and you were quite receptive to it, where I was like, almost like I had to micromanage your life. I told myself a story, they're like, "All right, I got to micromanage. Um, she won't do her goals unless I'm constantly pushing her. She has big dreams. She's told me all these things she wants. She has told me in no uncertain terms, she's told me in no uncertain terms that she wants a lot of pushing with a lot of these goals." And so I did sort of quite willingly take up that mantle of like, "All right, I'm gonna push you and make you do this." And if you then say to me, "Oh, I don't know, I can do it." "No, come on, you can. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it." And I think because you were so submissive, you were very receptive to that. And that's been something that has evolved in our relationship because that is not the [ __ ] case right now. I didn't push you with anything. I'm just like, "I will support you, sweetheart, whatever you want to do." I love that. And it certainly works when it works, until it doesn't. Yeah. And it wasn't gonna. And I will put a pin in what I was just about to say because I think that'll be a fascinating discussion. So continue what you were going to say.

Yeah, China thought is slipping away from me. That's all right. And maybe I'll speak for you a little bit here, but you feeling the need to micromanage wasn't a peaceful experience, even when it was worse. It was [ __ ] awful for me. I mean, no, no, I wanted to do it, so it wasn't awful. But yeah, yeah, even when I'm being receptive to that, it's not nice and chill for you. Whereas I guess, correct, the philosophy or the idea that we're advocating is to let people do their own thing. And to some extent, make their own mistakes. There's a lot more ease and peace to that because we're not trying to be responsible for somebody else's life. We're not having expectations of other people. Yeah.

It's why we move towards this. I think what we were doing was not sustainable. And that was going to be the, the question that I was going to come around to. Do you think that, and we can't speak for other people, but let's just play, and we're literally [ __ ] making it up at this point, but let's just play a game of like hypothetical. What do you think our relationship would be like if you had stayed super submissive and I had continued to micromanage?

I honestly just don't, I can't even see how we would have done that because it's hard to respect someone that you micromanage. I think I would have just broken up with you and we would have left it there. Yeah, at some point. Or I would have broken up with you because I wouldn't have respected you. We've had this conversation so many times. My mission with you from the very start, and your mission too, you wanted this, but I maybe even spearheaded this. I wanted you to get to two things. I wanted you to get to a point where you didn't need me. Like, like, and you never needed me, but you knew that you didn't need me, that you were quite comfortable with like, "Yeah, I don't need you. I'm cool." And then the second thing, I think I really wanted you to be more assertive and to have more boundaries. Basically, I wanted you to form yourself as a human being. And I wanted to be there for that and support that and facilitate that. But try my best, and we weren't perfect with it, because it's a tricky thing to do, try my best not to influence your developing of yourself. Like, in other words, you were trying to figure out, I wanted you to, we both wanted you to figure out who you are as a human being. And it's a weird thing where I'm trying to help with that, but also I'm like, "I can't help too much because then she might just do things that she knows I want her to do." I'm trying to kind of push you away a little bit and be like, "Look, go over there and figure out who you want to be." But I'm still here. Not that I'm a parent, but I think a lot of the time that's what I imagine parenting is like. That. Yeah, my mother has told me that's what parenting is like. You kind of just have to, at some point, just let them go out there and do their own thing and make their own decisions and make mistakes because that's gonna then build their independence. Not even mistakes, they're learning experiences. You can't teach them everything, you know what I mean?

Do you want to circle back to how we've had expectations and not being patient of one another in the past?

Yeah, I mean, we can give examples if we want to. Um, one thing at the very start that I was definitely impatient with for the first couple of years was your weight loss. You wanted to lose weight. I think you've always wanted to lose weight since you were in like high school and you've had bulimia, you know, challenges and things you've overcome. And you know, bulimia is like, you know, making yourself throw up to to lose weight. And you also with that had a binge. So it was like bulimia slash binge eating. Like those two things kind of go hand in hand. Well, they did for you. And you said, "Look, I want to lose weight." And so I was like, "Okay, I'll help you with that." And I think that was something where, like, like you said, well, we said this in a previous podcast, because I've often with my goals just gone all in. And not every goal, lots of my goals, I haven't, but certain goals, weight loss was one that for me, I don't know why, actually, I do know why, I'll explain in a second, was pretty [ __ ] easy. I lost 77 pounds and that [ __ ] felt pretty [ __ ] easy. That really genuinely felt very easy because I had nothing else going on in my entire life. It was just like 100% focused on that. I had zero friends. I was in that, you know, sort of unhappy relationship, but that was it. The, the money, the job that I had was just paying the bills and it was [ __ ] easy. I didn't have any friends, so I didn't even think about friends. I was just basically like, "I'm just gonna focus 12 hours a day on losing weight or 10 hours a day." Whatever it was. More than that, it would have been like 16 hours a day because while I was working, I got a standing desk and I would just work standing up. So I was basically, and I would pace back and forth while thinking and stuff. So I was just exercising 24/7. So of course it was [ __ ] easy for me. And then when I saw you, after about, I think I started getting really impatient after about a year, but definitely after like two or three years, and I was just like, "What the [ __ ]? I did this in nine months. Why is it taking you three years?" And then, you know, we said this at the start, was that reasonable? Not for me. No. And I was like, seeing a lot of counselors and people at the time to help with because my, to be clear, like when I first started trying to lose weight, my disorder didn't got a lot worse. It didn't get better. I got more and more intense. And now I'm kind of undoing some of those habits that I built, um, because of the extreme behavior. And I think the best solution for me would have been to take it slow. Um, but like we learned that lesson. And I think we also discussed this, that sometimes you're pushing me meant that pressure. I ended up pushing back, whether consciously or subconsciously, because I felt all of this pressure. It's like when you obsess about anything, you can kind of make the bad thing happen. And that, I think, definitely played a partner as well. And obviously, everything's easier in hindsight. But, um, I think it would have just been a, whether I reached my weight loss goals or not, would have been a lot more of a peaceful process for both of us. Yeah. To just let the other person be.

Yeah, and this I think beautifully underlines what we talk about all the [ __ ] time when we say, "Give yourself permission to suck." You don't have to be perfect. That especially applies in relationships. Like, you're just probably not going to be perfect at relationships. I don't think anyone is, especially because you're both constantly evolving human beings. Especially those of you if you're watching this channel, you are likely going to change and evolve at a rate that is 10 to 100 times faster than most people are. And if you're in a relationship where you're doing what we encourage, which is finding a partner who's also into self-improvement, now you have to double that speed because now you have two people evolving at 10 to 100 times the rate of the average pro. Like, you know, most people. And so there is an evolution there. So no matter how perfect or experienced or wonderful you think you might be, there is a big part of this that's like rolling with the punches and figuring things out as you go. And part of that process means embracing imperfection, embracing the fact that you might suck. You might, I don't even call them mistakes, but you might go through some learning lessons and some challenges and [ __ ] like that. One such one that we had.

So to give, you know, a Corolla, I can never say that word, Corolla, corollary, opposite example is, you were very impatient with me and my mindset around money. So for the longest time with money, I was just like, "I don't want to think about it. Money is icky. I have all of my own emotional baggage when it comes to money. I just don't even want to talk about it or think about it." And you basically couldn't really even have conversations with me about money. It was just this like, "Yeah, I was a brick wall. I wasn't letting anyone in."

Yeah. And to clarify, it wasn't a conversation about making money. The conversation was around managing money, around tax debts that we have and had and stuff we still have and stuff like that. And, you know, you might say, like, "Just let the man do whatever the [ __ ] he wants with money." But we were basically in business together, so it's like, yeah, we share our finances. So any decision that you make about money is a decision affecting you. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And we've actually had this conversation as well, is that if we had like separate finances, I wouldn't give a [ __ ] what you did with money. Yeah. So there were reasons why. But I think that's the same exact example of like, you know, flipping it. It's your example for me where you're like, "Look, you're not operating on my time scale. You need to get your [ __ ] together with money. You need to at least be able to talk to me about money." And you were really impatient. Actually, I think you were pretty patient at the start. And to be fair, I think I was patient with your weight loss at the start. But we both got to eventually to a point of impatience because it's like, "You're not doing this on my time. Excuse me, my timeline. You should be ready to talk about money by now. You should have your [ __ ] sorted with money by now." You know, the same way that I said to you, "Look, it's been a year. You should have [ __ ] started losing weight by now." Like, and it's, you know, you can answer this, how was that? Like, did that feel good?

Oh, is that peaceful? Not at all. And I didn't really like you most of the time when I was feeling all those things and had those expectations. You had those stories in your head. Yeah. Not a peaceful time. I think, which is ultimately why we're really advocating not needing something from your partner. Like not needing them to operate on this time scale. Yeah. Yeah. Not needing them to do what you want them to do. You can have boundaries, you can have expectations, and you also need to be okay with if they get broken. Either accepting that or moving on. Accepting it or improving it and talking, or moving on.

You just had a coughing fit. We paused him for half a second because of the air, all the [ __ ] aerosol that I sprayed in the shrimp. But yeah, and we've got plenty of other examples. And maybe we don't need to go through all of them because we're both about to die from the fumes that I sprayed in this room. I admit it was me. It was certainly not me. I don't. It was me. I sprayed too much air freshener in here and the room is not fresh now. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's one of those. We had this discussion. We're getting wildly off topic. We had one of those discussions about things that the more you do it, like the less you have. I think air freshener falls into that category. So the other example we had was decaf coffee. Decaffeinated coffee still has a tiny bit of caffeine in it. And so the more decaf you drink, technically you're getting less decaf, you're technically getting caffeine. Air freshener is in that category. The more I spray air freshener, the less [ __ ] fresh they say it feels. I'm telling you from personal experience right now. You're watching this live. Two beautiful human beings dying.

So examples, we've got plenty more examples. And it's just about patience. And you know, we talked about humility. And you don't have to be patient and humble. You will eventually [ __ ] learn, as we did. It's like, you can sit there and argue with this [ __ ] forever because you're gonna have to. Like, you'll smack your head against a brick wall between two and a thousand times. And eventually you'll be like, "I can't do this anymore." Like, "I'll be like, wait, my head wasn't getting hurt when I do this. Wait, why if I just stop smacking my head against the wall, will everything be okay?" You try that. I remember we had that moment. It was that one moment. I used the phrase, "I give up." It was about, you know, your goals and your weight loss. It wasn't that long ago. I think it was like a year ago. And I was just like, "I give up." And you're like, "Wait, are you giving up on me?" I was like, "No, I'm, I [ __ ] give up on trying to control you. I [ __ ] give up. I quit. I give up. I'm not gonna do it. I will support you. I will love you. I will help you with this. I give up. I, I'm done." Like, "I just, I [ __ ] give up." Like, you basically did the same with the money stuff. You were just like, "Right, you're gonna [ __ ] do whatever you're gonna do with money. I'm gonna go get some other [ __ ] job. Like, I'm gonna go do my own [ __ ]. I'm gonna figure out my own money. I'm gonna handle my own needs." In other words, "You can do whatever the [ __ ] you want with money." And that brought us a lot of peace. Like, both of us hitting that point of like, "Well, that realization of going, '[ __ ] why am I even trying to control the other person like this?'" Has gone beyond. And I think at the start, both of us started from a good place of like, "We want to help the other person. We want to support them. We want to push them with their goals. They tell us this goal is important. We're here pushing them with that." Like, and then it kind of morphed into a point of like, "Well, look, it was almost, at least for me, it was this bitterness or this frustration of like, 'You asked for my help and then you're not using it the way that you should be using it.'" It was like I was helping you with a hidden agenda. I was helping you going, "Look, I'll help you, but you got to do it on my time scale." And I was doing the same with my coaching in the first couple of years. I was like, "I'll give you advice, but you need to make sure you really go and use this. And I shouldn't have to say this advice twice. Like, you should just go and use it the first time." There were a lot of attachments there. There were a lot of like agendas there. That I, conditions that I didn't realize. I didn't know I was doing that. Otherwise, I wouldn't have [ __ ] wanted to do that. So yeah, you were probably doing the same thing.

Yeah, I loved what you said before when you said, "It's about not needing anything from your partner." Because I think the needing leads to desperation. Yep. And then you have to start controlling to get it, or forcing. And we were, yeah, I was very controlling with your weight loss. Quite a lot. You were very, I think you were quite patient with the money stuff, I'll be honest. But there were a lot of times where you were very passive aggressive and very frustrating. Like, clearly frustrated. And we would talk about those. And I think we handled all that pretty well. But there was clear frustration there. And it's not even frustration with the other person. I mean, it looks like it's that, but it's usually frustration with yourself. Like, for me, with the weight loss stuff, I was frustrated that I had put so much effort in and things weren't happening on the time scale that I believed they should happen on. That was the frustration. It was frustration of myself. I was like, "Why have I wasted all this time if it didn't work?" I was frustrated at the fact that maybe my advice wasn't very good. I was very insecure about that. And I was like, very frustrated with like, [ __ ] maybe I'm [ __ ] at giving advice to help someone lose weight.

Yeah, and I think similarly, I was probably frustrated that I'd attached myself to a man who might make us both go bankrupt and accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt. And like, I quit my job. My frustration. Yeah. I quit my job for this man. And I took out a loan for like, to help him with his business. Like, and there was all of that like frustration, anger, expectation, which we then project onto other people. I mean, most, maybe you can say all, I don't know, but most emotions that we like, frustration, anger, sadness, disappointment, jealousy, all of the [ __ ] that we say is like, "This person made me feel like that." It's like, "No, they [ __ ] didn't. They were the trigger, but that was like latent inside of you. That was sitting there waiting." Or it was like the stories that you had, the expect that you said before, expectations. You know, "If I help you, I expect that you will follow my advice and do everything I say." Or, "If I help you, I expect that you would do it at the rate that I say, all the time that I say." Or, "Put this much energy into it each day because I would." Or maybe I wouldn't even, but I think you should. There's that too sometimes. So there's all these like conditions that we put on our advice. And we don't know that we're doing it. Like, we, I mean, you can become aware of it. We now know when we do it. We've become quite aware with this stuff. Authors like Byron Katie, David Hawkins, you know, authors that I talk about all the time. It's just general stoicism. They've really.

helped with that. Probably the Byron Katie book, "I Need Your Love, Is That True?" It's probably the best book on this topic. It's about like not requiring [ __ ] from your partner. Like, obviously, you still have boundaries and [ __ ], but you're not sitting there going like, "I need you to keep the kitchen cleaner. I need you to do this." Like, for the little things where we attach so much. We attach our happy, we tether our happiness to those things. Like, "I won't be happy if you don't achieve this goal of weight loss." "I won't be happy if you don't get your [ __ ] together with money." And again, there's a balance there with boundaries. Like, there are some things that will be deal breakers, and that's beautiful. That's reasonable. You know, you can move on, or you can fix it, you can talk about it, whatever you want to do. But the stuff that's a bit smaller, it's about just not needing that [ __ ], being okay if it takes a little bit of time.

I think maybe we can finish up by adding a little bit of subtlety. I think it's also worth talking about some of these things might be deal breakers. And so I can give an example here. If you gained 30 kilograms of weight and said, and we've talked about this a billion times, if you were 100 kilograms and you said, "I'm happy being 100 kilograms and I will be this for the rest of my life." I genuinely do not believe that I would be okay with that. And I would not control you. I would not be like, "That's not good enough." But I'd be like, "Look, just, what I'm looking for is someone that I'm attracted to. I don't feel some attraction here. I'm just going to peace out and go find like, you know, go be with someone else."

In your case, and you can answer this, would you feel the same with me if, if I just like continued to build up, or let's say I got to a point of just like, "I don't know, $500,000 of tax debt," and I was just like, "No, I don't give a [ __ ]. Whatever." Like, and I just, and the tax department, we're going to come knocking, you know, there were going to be consequences. In the same way that being 100 kilograms at your height would have health consequences. Like, what would you be cool with though? Is there, is there like some limit where you'd be like, "No, I think that, I don't know, that's like, that's not the person that I thought I was with. Like, that's, that's a deal breaker to some extent."

I would probably just get my own job and then I feel like I'd be a whole lot of pace around it. Like, because at the end of the day, it's, you're, you're going to do whatever you're gonna do. So maybe that would be my solution in that case is just like, I just get a job or I, I make my own money and then I'm, I can deal with it. But yeah, okay, let's use my example. And there will be other examples that you'd have. Like, if I said, "Hey, listen, I'm gonna go and have sex with a whole bunch of women without you right now. Probably like seven women a week." Deal breaker. So we both have deal breakers, and that's the point.

But let's use the weight loss one because I think that's good, right? It's still a little bit messy with this example, but whatever. Let's, let's say you have something like a, let's say you were right now 100 kilograms, right? And I said, "Look, I'm not super attracted to you, but I love you, and we've been together for a long time, we've built a lot. And if you go down this path of weight loss, will you get to like, your current weight?" Let's say your goal was to go from 100 kilograms to your current weight. If you go down that path, I'll stick around. And I'll stick around for a couple of years. If it takes that, that's fine. That might be a situation that some of you might be in. Like, you might have, you know, like it's not a, like a boundary, and the person is on the path of healing that or on the path of improving that. And it might take a little bit of time. And the person basically says, "Look, are you willing to stick around while I work on this thing?" And you go, "Yes, I am." Like, there are situations where that [ __ ] happens, right? Well, I heal from this, while I improve this, while I get my [ __ ] together in this aspect. And you might say, "I'm going to stick around with that." Understand that you probably have some expectation of how long that quote should take. And I would be very [ __ ] clear with each other about that [ __ ]. And if it takes a little bit longer, then maybe this podcast is relevant where it's like, "Okay, look, I said I would stick around for two years. It's been two years and they're like 50% of the way there. Do I want to be patient and, you know, wait another two years? Or is this like enough?" Like, there's kind of a discussion to have with yourself. And then maybe with the other person as well. But I thought I'd throw that in there. Maybe I've just complicated this podcast by this example. But I, I wanted to throw in that there's a little bit of nuance with this. Or it can be. And we're not just saying, like, I guess the point of this podcast isn't just to say, "Be a hundred percent patient with your partner. And if there are deal breakers that they keep promising that they're working on and they're not showing progress, like, just put up with that because you've got to be patient." Like, that's, that's not really what this is. That's more like an extreme version of that.

Yeah, I guess maybe what we're saying is that a little bit of patience can go a long way. I'll phrase it like this: a little bit of patience has helped us. Yeah, I'm not saying you have to be patient. Most of our podcasts and our content aren't necessarily prescriptive. Like, we're not telling you what to do. We're sort of more saying, "This is what's worked for us. This has been a nice little learning lesson for us." Patience has been quite healing for both of us. It's been quite freeing. It's been nice to not. I still care about your goals. I still want you to achieve them. But it's been nice to sort of just say, "She'll get there when she gets there." And again, with almost those boundaries in place, because I do still have those boundaries. Like, if you went the opposite direction as I'm saying, if you're like, "Hey, I'm going to gain 30 kilograms now and [ __ ] you, Andy," then I'd be like, "Okay, like, sorry, that's the deal breaker for me." And maybe the same with you. If I said, "Hey, do you know what? With that money [ __ ] [ __ ], honey, I'm thinking we just keep racking up a hundred thousand dollars worth of debt every single year, and we just keep raising that. Let's, let's just keep going forever and getting more and more and more and more debt." And you see the psychological impact that has on me. Like, [ __ ] it. Maybe at that point, you'd be like, "No, like, you're just getting more and more unhappy. I'm not okay with that." So I hope this part. Anything else you want to add? You, you [ __ ], you did the thing where you're like, "gonna say the thing." You were going to say something.

No. Oh, damn. Nothing. What if I tickle you and get it out of you? No. I've never tickled you on camera, have I? You probably have. So go out there and crush your goals. No, listen. Hey, when she gets tickled, she. No, I'm actually okay. I promise you, I will not tickle you. Look, I promise you, I will not tickle you. I love you enough that I will not tickle you. This is boundaries, okay, ladies and gentlemen. You're seeing boundaries. When I tickle her. Also, the girl that we're dating right now likes to tickle you as well. For this, and that's my fault. I did encourage you to tickle you. Yeah. But when people tickle you, you make a sound. She makes a sound like a little baby. Actually, how the [ __ ] would I even know what they sound like? You don't. You're just like, [ __ ]. You've seen movies. Yeah. But she makes a sound like a baby dinosaur. I'm not gonna do it because you asked me not to. Boundaries are really. But as soon as the camera's off, I'm going to do it. No. Well, I don't want these people to know. Go out there and crush your goals. I love you so much. She makes it sound like a goddamn baby dinosaur. Literally sounds like a [ __ ] boot. She actually left the room. Holy [ __ ]. I'm coming to tickle you, lady.