I have the honor of connecting with Robert Mack today! He is an Ivy-League-educated Positive Psychology Expert, Celebrity Happiness Coach, Executive Coach, and Published Author. He recently released the book Love from the Inside Out: Lessons and Inspiration for Loving Yourself, Your Life, and Each Other.
We dive into Robert’s background in applied positive psychology and the influences of experts like Byron Katie and Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology. We discuss happiness, the potentiality of partners, adversity, resiliency, and love. Robert also gets into daily habits that can help us become healthier and happier humans.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
Robert dives into his motivation for getting into applied positive psychology.
Most people believe that happiness comes from external circumstances. However, research shows it does not.
How simplicity contributes to a happy life.
Robert shares the formula for happiness.
How inner work makes a meaningful, lasting, and sustainable change to our happiness score.
How happiness tends to lead to and facilitate success.
What contributes to the general perception that happiness comes from external forces?
What love is, and how it relates to happiness.
How to make college a happier experience.
How to become more focused and present.
How to remain present when triggered.
Robert talks about surrender.
Bio:
Robert is an Ivy-League-educated Positive Psychology Expert, Celebrity Happiness Coach, Executive Coach, and Published Author.
Robert studied under the direction of Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). UPenn is the only institution in the world to offer a Master’s Degree in Applied Positive Psychology.
Robert's work has been endorsed by Oprah, Vanessa Williams, and many others, and he has been seen on Good Morning America, The Today Show, Access Hollywood, E!, OWN, GQ, Self, Health, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour.
Robert's first book, Happiness from the Inside Out: The Art and Science of Fulfillment, is celebrity-endorsed and critically acclaimed. His most recent release, Love from the Inside Out: Lessons and Inspiration for Loving Yourself, Your Life, and Each Other, is a best-seller.
The challenge with being triggered or feeling anything that's undesirable or uncomfortable is that most of us go to the brain for explanations instead of the body for the experience.
- Robert Mack
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
Check out Cynthia’s website
Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com
Connect with Robert Mack
On his website
On social media: @robmackofficial
Find Robert’s books
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent, is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
Today, I had the honor of connecting with Robert Mack. He's an Ivy League-Educated Positive Psychology Expert, Celebrity Happiness Coach, Executive Coach, and Published Author, and recently released the book Love from the Inside Out: Lessons and Inspiration for Loving Yourself, Your Life, and Each Other. We dove deep into his background on Applied Positive Psychology, the influences of experts like Byron Katie, as well as Martin Seligman, who is the founder of Positive Psychology. We spoke at length about happiness, potentiality of partners, the impact of adversity and resiliency, love, and daily habits that can contribute to becoming a healthier, happier human being. This is a really special episode of Everyday Wellness. I hope you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it.
Rob, I'm so excited to reconnect with you. It is hard to believe. It has been a little over three years since I was out in LA recording with you, and now we get to connect today.
Robert Mack: It's unreal. I'm so excited to be here. I'm so grateful for you having me, and I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Cynthia Thurlow: Absolutely. I'm curious, when I was diving deep into your background, what was it about Applied Positive Psychology that really resonated with you and started an additional trajectory in your career and in your mindset and your process?
Robert Mack: It was happiness, and it was a scientific, empirically, valid approach to happiness that really moved me. I was unhappy most of my life. I was a depressed, anxious, self-loathing child, and I always thought I would grow out of it, and that didn't happen, at least not right away. I just became more anxious, stressed, and self-loathing as the years went on, and despite achieving and accomplishing and acquiring things both personally and professionally, financially, relationally, socially, had lots of friends, beautiful girlfriend, but I just felt worse and worse. And so, I eventually got to a place where I was suicidal. I was experiencing suicidal ideation dozens of times a day and then did a little research, said I was going to kill myself, said I was going to use a knife to slash my wrist. Yeah, I had a suicidal sort of experience there.
In the midst of that, quite unexpectedly, I felt this peace and this love and this joy. At the moment, I was digging a knife into my wrist that I just couldn't explain. It was ineffable and inexplicable and it was unexpected. And so, I postponed suicide at that time for a little while. In that period of time, at first, it was just 10 minutes. It wasn't a very long period of time that I had committed to postponing suicide. But at that time, I started doing a different kind of research that kept that up for several years and I eventually discovered Applied Positive Psychology, which was very helpful for someone like me who tends to be very analytical.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, well, and what an incredible story. I think for so many people, I fervently believe there are no such thing as coincidences. And so, whether it was the universe, the spirit whomever stepped in to have you pause and to then reflect on looking at your life differently, I think from my perspective, happiness can be defined in so many different ways. But really it sounds like both of us, during the course of the last two and a half years made some significant changes. And so, when you're working or you're working with people and talking about happiness, one of the things that I find surprising is that I would imagine most adults think that happiness actually is derived from external forces.
Robert Mack: Yes, those of us who have read X number of books know intellectually that's not true, that happiness is independent of your external conditions and circumstances, but viscerally, and sort of experientially, existentially, we don't feel it that way, we won't experience it that way. Just seems like, of course, when you hit the lottery or you meet the love of your life or you have that first child, or that second child acts up or whatever it is, that your happiness waxes and wanes and ebbs and flows accordingly. And so, it just seems like, "Well, no, happiness is clearly derived from external conditions, circumstances, people, activities, and so on."
But when we look at the research, we see that's clearly not true. And we look at our personal experiences and the experience of others we can see that's not true, that there have been times when you've been surrounded by happy conditions and yet you felt extraordinarily unhappy or you've been surrounded by seemingly undesirable or unhappy conditions and yet you're still happy or still at peace or you still feel love. So, yes, happiness is independent of the conditions and circumstances of our lives. And that's not an argument against creating the richest, healthiest, wealthiest life you can.
Cynthia Thurlow: Well, and I think for so many people, having come from a part of the country where a lot of people would articulate that what they derived happiness from wasn't family, wasn't intellectual fortitude, it was from things. There's a certain degree of toxicity that goes along with that, in my humble opinion and so it's wonderful to know that the research on happiness certainly supports the fact that can be an intrinsically derived process, that you can be in less-than-ideal circumstances and you can be in a happy state. I will be the first person to say spending 13 days in the hospital, most of which I would not describe as a pleasant experience. However, when I started to have this mindset shift about what am I going to focus on instead of feeling sorry for myself because it's easy to do that, I'm going to do this mindset shift, and now I'm going to reflect on what am I going to focus on so that when I get out of here, I can make the most of the rest of my life.
For many people, I don't want to be judgmental, but I think for many people that per se they would have stayed stuck in pessimism and negativity. Whereas I know for myself the only way I was going to be able to reframe the experience was to kind of flip the dial a bit. And so, when I left, I was so grateful that they figured out what was wrong with me and that I was going home. I remember thinking, I've never been so happy to leave [laughs] to go home and spend time with my family as I am right now. And I would argue that the profound appreciation and gratitude that I felt just fueled that happiness. Like every day I was like, "Okay if I wasn't as happy yesterday, I'm going to be even happier today." And it's interesting that we're having this discussion talking about happiness because as defined people think of happiness in many different ways. But I would say that when I've been my happiest has been when life is the most simplistic.
Robert Mack: For sure. Gosh, there's so much there to celebrate and to speak to. Certainly, simplicity is precious and I think it certainly does contribute to a happy life. There's no question about it. And it's not just simplicity and our surroundings and our lifestyle and our choices. It's also, and mostly to a large extent, simplicity of mind. Often you find that when you're the happiest, you're thinking either no thoughts or very simple thoughts. There's that. Something else you spoke to when you began the conversation around external circumstances, conditions, and the ways in which happiness, the kind of happiness that I talk about, that we're talking about here true happiness is unconditional, meaning it's not contingent or conditioned or conditional upon what's happening or not happening in your life.
Researchers have come up with their happiness formula and the happiness formula is H, Happiness = S, that's genetic set point +C, which is conditions and circumstances +V. So, that S genetic set point is responsible for about 50% of how happy or unhappy you are. That S, by the way, is perfectly malleable, which means that we can turn on and off those genes in ways that are conducive or detrimental to our happiness score rating. So, it's plastic, unlike eye color and unlike height. The C is conditions and circumstances and that's most of what we think about when we think about happiness. We think about successful life outcomes. Am I healthy? What age am I? Am I young? Am I old? Am I educated or not? How much money do I make or not? Am I married or unmarried? Am I single? Do I have kids? So, we think about that, and we would assume that most of our happiness is derived from that. But clearly, it's not. Only about 10% of our happiness comes--
Cynthia Thurlow: Wow.
Robert Mack: And that's at the best end. So, in other words, if you imagine the most ideal life, you could possibly have, unlimited money, perfect spouse, unlimited spouses or whatever it is that you're after, kids, no kids, perfect health, perfect youth, perfect beauty all those things combined only account for about 10% of your happiness at best, 10%. The other 40% are what we call volitional, that's the V, the volitional activities. And those are things like gratitude and optimism and self-care and exercise and social support, things like that and we have control and influence around, a lot more control and influence around. And so what that means is that 50% genetic set point perfectly malleable and it's malleable based on the 40%, the volitional activities. That means 90% of your happiness is totally up to you and maybe 10% at worse is attributable to conditions and circumstances that feel are less controllable like your health in this red-hot moment, the amount of money you make in this red hot moment, how many kids you do or don't have, all of that.
So, science says a lot about that. The other thing I'll say real quickly is something else you spoke to, which is just really powerful and profound, which is hedonic adaptation, hedonic treadmill. Which means that everything that happens to you can slightly increase or slightly decrease your baseline happiness score. But your happiness returns to its baseline level almost no matter what you do or what happens to you, except for the more volitional, like, lasting meaningful and sustainable changes that you make to your mindset to the way in which you approach social support or relationships. So, the things that you do inside the inner work actually makes a very lasting and meaningful and sustaining change to your happiness score. But practically everything else, like money, kids, relationships, and health have very little to no effect. In some cases, they have the opposite effect that you might expect. So, lots to unpack there, but the idea there is that true happiness is what I would call unconditional.
Cynthia Thurlow: It's really interesting because I think when I was a younger woman and girlfriends were getting married and seemingly blissfully happy, and I was definitely one of those women, I got married a little later, met my husband in my 30s, which is totally fine, I say all the time. I had to wait to be patient to meet the right person. And we've been married for 19 years. But when I think about how many people were in a rush to get married, they were in a rush to have kids, how a lot of my close friends or a few of them, I should say most of them made really good decisions. It was interesting to see over the last two and a half years how suddenly they had the courage to make changes that they perhaps didn't have at any other time during their relationships. And so, that makes sense and it's very consistent with what you're saying.
But I think for many people, they think it's the next thing they have to attain that's going to make them happy. Like when I get married, when I have kids, when I get that raise, when I have the big house, when I insert whatever thing it is that people are thinking, that golden ring that they're really aiming for.
Robert Mack: You nailed it. Success doesn't lead to happiness. Success doesn't lead to happiness. And that's especially true in relationships. Sure, when you first get married, you get a small increase or bump in your happiness score, but that bump and your happiness returns to its baseline level pretty much after the honeymoon phase. For a lot of people, it dips way below that. That's why you see so much divorces, that's why you see so many unhappy marriages. And so, a relationship is no panicky or remedy for unhappiness. We also know the same thing is true for kids. So many folks for a good reason look forward to having these little bundles of joy. But the little bundles of joy tend not to be that joyful often. It's not because you don't love them, it's just because there's a lot of stress and there's a lot of anxiety involved. You love and care about them so much that you worry about them and they're expensive.
And it's a lifetime kind of thing, right. What that means is that with the first kid, you get a small dip or decrease in your happiness level. With the second kid, a significant dip or decrease in happiness level. And your happiness levels don't return to those kids leave the house at 18 maybe or [audio cut] these days, right. That's not, again an argument against having kids. And for lots of people, it's not true at all, they experience the opposite of that, which is fantastic. But kids can again be very stressful and they can be very expensive. And so again, if you're looking for happiness, investing your happiness in having kids or getting the right relationship, or finding the right partner is not the best way to go about doing it.
That being said, on the other end, if you can find a way to get happy first, which is-- it's like if you can get happy without the partner and without the kids, you find that you end up getting married earlier, stay married longer and happier in all your relationships, whether you're married or not and you're also happy with your kids because you're sourcing the happiness from within yourself, right. And so, success doesn't lead to happiness but happiness does lead to success. And this is true not only in relationships but also with money. And happy people make about $600 to $700,000 more on average over the course of their lifetime than their unhappy counterparts. They experience better health. They live six to seven years longer than their unhappy peers. They experience less job burnout. They enjoy more flow state than their unhappy friends and colleagues and family members. So, in any case, happiness tends to lead to and facilitate success in increasingly effortless and enjoyable ways. And success doesn't lead to lasting, meaningful, and abiding happiness.
Cynthia Thurlow: There's so much to unpack there. But the first thing I wanted to kind of mention and it was part of my notes when I was pulling this together, is what contributes to people's perception that happiness is derived from external forces. Like, is that part of the movie industry? Is that part of media, creating that kind of environment, you know this false sense of environment? I mean, I feel like perhaps our generations are definitely more attuned to paying attention to these things, whereas I feel like my parents, my grandparents' generations, you got married, you stayed married, it didn't matter you're happy or sad you stayed married forever.
And even if you weren't happy, decoupled, or uncoupled, do you still look for that next relationship? But I feel like in many ways or at least it's my perception, young women grow up watching Cinderella and watching all these movies that give us this false sense of, "Oh, I'm not necessarily complete until I've met that other person." And what you're really saying is that true happiness comes from within. The best way to attract a healthy partner is to be happy with yourself. And yet women in many ways are conditioned to believe that we are not whole until we are coupled.
Robert Mack: Absolutely. The equivalent often for many men is that they're not whole unless they can provide or make a lot of money or are successful. And so, you're right. So, there's both nature and nurture, right so we can blame both nature and nurture. It's the hardware and the software, which means that we're born with some of these, might call them biases. They were extraordinarily adaptive tendencies, proclivities, inclinations. In the beginning, sure. I mean, it's going to get a dopamine hit. It's going to get a dopamine hit when you meet a partner and you have kids and then the kids survive to pass on your genetic code and then we continue to keep the human race moving forward or at least the numbers up high enough kind of thing. So, it's sort of nature reasons. But there's also the nurture, which is that as a result of that, sometimes we overvalue or overestimate that dopamine hit one hand, and we tend to continue to do what seems like we're rewarded for.
So, it's like if you get a dopamine hit every time you make a little more money or you can build a better house or you can get a better partner, you're going to probably continue to do those things. And so, the challenge with that, of course, is that underneath and in between and prior to and after the dopamine hit, you're feeling mostly anxiety and stress and worry and concern, particularly with the introduction of the prefrontal cortex. When that came to be in the human brain, then the ability for discursive thinking and abstract thought began to ruin and poison even the most blissful moment.
I mean, the very moment you achieve, accomplish or acquire something is also the moment you worry about keeping it. As Buddha said, "Unhappiness comes in multiple flavors," and really there's only two, which is not getting what you want, okay, but also getting what you want. You get what you want, you start to worry about it right away. And so, leave at that. And then on top of that so when you've got-- then folks that understand all this and maybe they're not that self-aware or not that evolved, then they begin to sell you a bad bill of goods in order for you to encourage you to buy their products or services. There's something really magical and wonderful about a Disney movie. There's something really magical and wonderful about a new beauty product or whatever. That's easier to sell those products if you inherently or intrinsically believe that you need it in order to be lovable or loved or happy, right.
So, you've got availability entrepreneurs. That's what we may call those folks that sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously [unintelligible [00:17:51] work at that. You've got nature, you've got nurture, but it's all quite easily solvable by just going within. Although I know that sounds like a cliche to so many of us, but it's by rediscovering the source of infinite internal happiness that you can then find yourself still enjoying life and enjoying life in greater, richer, more stress freeways and accomplishing what you want much more easily and effectively and quickly. You do have to rediscover that source of happiness within.
Cynthia Thurlow: Do you think there's different types of love? Like, I'm not just talking about platonic versus romantic, but you talk about false love or pseudo love. And what exactly is that? I think it's interesting. You talk about oxytocin and you talk about dopamine and how these influences behavior, influences brain chemistry. Sometimes we're feeling like, "Oh, we're very coupled." But sometimes when we think we're in love with someone, it's just mirroring what we think we perceive we want or need.
Robert Mack: So, wow, beautifully stated. Yeah. We often make a mistake. And when I say we, I mean me, it just as much as anyone else out there in a poster board for all this stuff. So, we often think we've fallen in love with a person, but we've actually fallen in love with our own thoughts or ideas of that person. So, there's that. We often fall in love with our own stories about people and things and activities and then we call that love. But that's not really love. We also sometimes call-- in love goes by lots of wrong names, right, love gets a bad name kind of like the song. So, sometimes it's like lust we mistake for love and entertainment, and distraction and ego gratification, we mistake for love.
Love is happy and if it's not happy, it's not love. First, love is free. If it's not free, it's not love. Love is mostly an experience of giving and that doesn't mean you don't get and it's not giving to get. It's giving that happens authentically without an expectation of reciprocity. If that happens organically and seamlessly when you simply are love. And so, in another way that I put it, a cleaner way, I think is that love is really happiness. When you're all alone and you're happy, we call it happiness.
When you're happy but you're together out there in the world mixing it up with other people, I call it love. So, when you're introverted and happy, we call it happiness. When you're extroverted in that moment, we call it love. But love is just your happiness shared. It's just your bliss shared. It's just your joy shared. So, the metaphor I like to use is of a rain cloud. I want to be a rain cloud. I want everyone to be a rain cloud. A rain cloud fills itself up with so much peace, love, and joy or self-love that it gets to a place where it can't contain that peace, love, self-love, and joy any longer. It's just ready to burst.
And at some point, because it can't help it, it just bursts. In the bursting, it's not doing something moral, ethical, something it should do. It's not trying to love the earth and everyone and everything on the earth. It's just unburdening itself. It's relieving itself of all this peace, love, happiness, bliss, and pleasure that's found within itself. It does it organically and seamlessly and effortlessly enjoyably. And it does it without an expectation of reward or reciprocity. And it showers all of that peace, love, joy down upon the earth and all sentient beings. And that's love. That's love, right.
The key and the challenge and the opportunity with love is to be so full of happiness that you get it on everybody and everything, no matter what you do. It's not like you get it on them or give it to them because you're trying to even help them. That's just a side effect that they're benefited from it. It's just that you're contagious with happiness. You're just positively infectious with happiness. I think the more I've thought along those lines and the more I've thought along that and use that metaphor, the clear it is for me. Yeah, most of what we mistake for love is just pleasure or ego gratification. And love can include those things, but it doesn't equate to those things.
Cynthia Thurlow: When I think a lot of people and a lot in the mirroring about love and relationships we get from our parents and so, I'm always the first person to say that "God didn't give me the parents I wanted. I got the parents I needed," because it demonstrated for me how I needed to show up differently with my children. And so, I view my parents with compassion and love, but I acknowledge that things would be very different with my kids. In fact, I went through a period of time thinking I may not ever get married or have children, and so that makes me laugh when I think about that now.
But what I think is of interest is that our first formation of relationships and communication is with our families. And families can take many different varieties. And it's up to us to do the work so that we fine tune what we've been, I don't want to use the word embedded, ingrained with, imprinted with, maybe that's a better term as we go about and navigate being out in the world and figuring out what works and what serves us and what does not. I always say I take a couple of things, really good things my parents gave me, and I keep those, and then I fine tune the rest.
But nowadays, because of the onslaught of social media and access to information, what are some of the challenges that you perceive about people navigating the world, trying to identify what love represents for them? Because I'm sure there's some degree of bio individuality, meaning each one of us might need something tweaked a little differently to make sure that we're in a position where we are loving and we can also take in love.
Robert Mack: Yeah. Well, good question. First, I'll just say in order to reflect back the wisdom that we shared earlier there, Byron Katie says, "Parents are responsible for all the problems, kids are responsible for all the solutions." I've always loved that because it doesn't matter who I meet or connect with in my private practice or real life, everyone seems to have a real complaint about their parents, no matter how perfect their parents were. That's a good thing because it means that your parents have done a perfectly phenomenal job, no matter who your parents are or what they did or not do. In serving as teachers for unconditional self-love and unconditional happiness and unconditional peace. In other words, they're like personal trainers for all those things.
If they met every one of your needs and desires and they showed you perfect love, which is impossible as a human being, you would be led away from and trained away from the very source of peace, love, self-love, and happiness that exists within you. And so, they do you a much greater disservice and much greater injustice if they would have been the way you wanted them to be. It's much better that they're not the way that you want them to be so that you can be what you want to be and you can find this infinite eternal source that exists within you. So, that's the first thing I'll say and the other point you're making, the question you asked is fantastic which is I think all relationship problems can ultimately be reduced to a question of when you say love, when you say I love you, what do you mean by it? We make all these assumptions. We're unaware, we're unconscious of all these assumptions we make about love. And we have thousands, at least a dozens or hundreds of assumptions and flawed premises built into what we mean when we say or tell someone we love them, and everyone's a little different that way. That's where we're really different, it's like when I say I love you, I mean I give you freedom to be and do and have anything you want.
I've realized that is not the way that other people think about love. [Cynthia laughs] They think of sometimes just the opposite that no, you are not free any longer. You belong to me and now these are the conditions under which we will enjoy this loving or lovable or love experience. So, I think answering that question can be extraordinarily helpful. But really get down to the nitty gritty like when do I not feel loved or lovable? So that's one way to think about it. Ultimately, at the end of the day though, I think that the challenge and opportunity is to kind of clear the lens entirely.
When you see with and through a really clear lens, blemishless lens you see that you're surrounded by love everywhere. That everything is just love with a different name and a face on it. And sometimes love looks like a poorly wrapped gift and sometimes love looks like a perfectly wrapped gift. But even the experiences that are not what you want them to be, remind you of what you want to be.
When people are terribly and they are and the world is a terribly unreliable place to find peace, love, and happiness, you're reminded that the only reliable place to find peace, love, and happiness is within yourself. So, that's the beautiful thing about it at the end of the day, the work ultimately remains the same for all of us. It may come in 32 flavors like Baskin Robbins but at the end of the day, it's really only our thoughts about love and our stories about love that get in the way of our experience of love here now.
Cynthia Thurlow: That makes so much sense. And yet, I think it's like the age-old question of how do I find a partner? How do I select a partner? Sometimes we make it about the other person and not ourselves. And I think it's something that perhaps with a lot of good therapy and probably in my 20s, I had figured out. I'm a huge proponent of therapy, reiki work, energy work. I think it's all very important because I fervently believe that a self-evolved human, someone that's done the work and you can tell.
I almost feel like the people I am closest to right now in my life and in my business are the people that have done the work and are exactly manifesting the types of relationships and friendships that they want to have. And so, being in alignment in that regard is pretty powerful. But back to the direction my question was going in is the potentiality of partners, when people are asking is this the right person for me?
Really it should be really reflecting and making it more about you are in the best position possible and are they at the same level and mindset that you are at so that you can have this powerful, maybe powerful is not the right word, mutually beneficial, enjoyable, loving, exchange of time together. But I agree with you that a lot of times the definition of love and definition of partnership is more about possession. It's more about having someone that goes along with whatever you want to do. It's much more selfish and self-serving.
Robert Mack: Nailed it. It's one of the other flawed false premises or assumptions we make around love, which is that love is two minds or two people with minds who are always in agreement. It's not the case at all. The person agrees with you all the time about everything. How fun is that? And what are you going to learn? How can you possibly broaden your perspective or your perception and experience and enjoy more of life and more of yourself and more of the other if you are always just activating this confirmation bias over and over again? It's good to bump up against people that don't agree with you. Now, the challenge of course, is can I learn to disagree without being disagreeable. I can simply say, "Oh that's interesting, I see it a different way, tell me more." "Oh, and you see it that way, that's interesting, ha."
At the end of the day say, because you're committed to love, above all else, meaning feeling. I mean that selfishly feeling love like, I'm so selfish I want to feel love as consistently as humanly possible and I don't want to outsource it or delegate to anyone else because it's not their job, neither is it their pleasure or privilege. If I don't feel loved, I need to address that within me. It then doesn't mean I can't also have a conversation and say, "No, I'd prefer you not punch me every time I see you," [laughs] like that kind of thing. So, I would say you're absolutely right that love isn't two minds that are always in agreement. It's two hearts that intend or set an intention to always be in alignment with each other, right? That really is about just being in alignment with yourself.
And so, yeah, I think that it's easy to get distracted by lots of ways of looking for or seeking love. And one of those ways is looking or seeking for a partner that's going to make your life right or make you feel loved or make you feel lovable. And that's always a trap. Even asking the question sometimes, although it's a valid and understandable perfectly human question, which is like, is this person right for you? I mean, the truth is on one hand nobody's right for you. The only person is right for you is you. Okay? Second of all, everybody's right for you. In this red-hot moment right here now, whatever it is that is happening and showing up for you is precisely what you need at this point in time to dive deeper into yourself or into what you want in a party.
Even if you just look at it as a data-gathering experience. Everybody is right in that sense because they're helping you clarify what you most want and/or need. And then the greater question I'd say is "Are you in alignment with you?" And the more in alignment you are with you, the more at peace you are with yourself, the less lonely you feel when you're alone, the more you can enjoy your own company, and the happier you can be when you're left alone with nothing to entertain you but your own thoughts and your own company, the more easily and effortlessly you'll find yourself attracting with and connecting with people who increasingly seem like the right person for you. The happier you are without a partner, the happier partners you tend to attract and you tend to keep around.
I'd say if there was a master key of cheat code to healthy, happy relationships, it's being healthy and happy yourself and sort of making everybody else a little less relevant in that equation and letting whoever shows up, show up. And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't step outside your house and go meet people or get on dating apps, it's fine, but make sure you're enjoying it as much as you possibly can and make sure you're trying to stay as healthy and happy on the inside as you can and not blame or give credit to other people for making you feel happy or unhappy.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways when I reflect back, I think college was like this great social experiment where you could date different people and you could decide whether or not that you were in alignment or you were in agreement with what type of relationship you wanted to have. But that great social experiment at that time in our lives, we never really get that degree of exposure all at once with people that are-- Everyone leaves their homes and goes to a university or a college and they're exposed to so many different people all at once. I like this, I don't like that, this is aligned with what I want to be like, this is not. But it's interesting. I feel like once you leave the nest of college or university if that's where your life takes you, it gets much more complicated.
You're not on that level playing field where everyone's coming together with kind of this new shared experience and how do people navigate that successfully? Because when I reflect back on my 20s, I remember thinking college was kind of this blissful experience and you're in this warm cocoon and then reality hits when you have to go to work for a paycheck to pay your rent and your car payment and whatever else you're paying for. Very different than when you're in this warm cocoon of parents supporting you and being in a very kind of like-minded environment with your peers.
Robert Mack: You nailed it. "Youth is wasted on the young." [laughs] I remember hearing that quote and expression before and as stressful and as anxiety producing and provoking as my college experience was, I do look back on it very fondly because it was a little utopian bubble in lots of ways and it was a great day to gather experience socially. We talked about this even before getting on the air here and people do struggle a lot with that and so many of us miss and reflect back on and are kind of nostalgic about all experiences for precisely the reasons you just described.
I'd say that one of the best things you can do is find your little community, your little tribe. It's not always easy, but if you can find things that you discover things, rediscover things that you intrinsically enjoy, and spend more time doing those things for their own sake, you'll find that you're in the company of people that you can more easily and effortlessly and enjoyably, connect with and that kind of sometimes develops into other things.
The second is letting go of your expectations around everything. It's easy because we can all be so stressed out or so busy that we find ourselves slipping into using these mental heuristics. These shortcuts where we put people in boxes very quickly and it's understandabl