How To Stop Being Fearful I Will Mess My Relationship Up

How to stop being fearful that you will mess your relationship up when things are going really well.

In this video coaching newsletter, I discuss a mindset question from a viewer who is new to my work. He has been dating his new girlfriend for about 4 months. Things are going really well between them. However, he is only 20 years old and is really fearful that he will do something to mess his relationship up. He obsesses about the future and what may or may not happen.

Learning to manage your fears, insecurities and doubts is essential to having long-term, sustainable success in all areas of life that are important to you. I discuss how to do this and what to focus on, so you can succeed like never before. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

He’s living in the future instead of the present, because the present is the only moment that exists. And so, if you’re living in the future, or living in the past for that matter, as a lot of people tend to do, you can’t be present in the moment. In other words, you want reality to be other than it is. And so, he’s focused on what may or may not happen in the future and not taking care of what he needs to take care of in the moment.

There are a lot of us, if we grew up in an environment where it wasn’t very healthy, maybe it was toxic, you watched your parents argue and have a loveless, sexless marriage, you’re going to be emotionally conditioned to expect that that is normal. Therefore, when you get into a good relationship with somebody that’s easygoing, easy to get along with, you communicate well, it’s not going to feel normal to you. And oftentimes, people don’t know any better, sabotage it and do things to mess the relationship up.

So, this particular guy, it’s a real short email, but he’s just afraid that he’s going to lose her. Now, keep in mind, he’s only gone through 3% Man once, and that’s another reason why I say read it 10 to 15 times. All men, really men and women both, we all start out as novices at everything. Nobody comes out of the womb an absolute expert. You’re not able to master the guitar, or electric guitar, or play the piano right out of the womb. It takes time and repetition to master anything and become competent.

And so, a guy like this that’s new to my work, everything is going well with his new relationship, what he doesn’t have is experience. And especially if you’ve never had things really good, where you feel like you’re dating or in a relationship with the kind of woman, or women for that matter, that you’ve always wanted, you’re not used to it, and you don’t have a track record of experience with it. And so, the only way to undo that is time and repetition of successful repetitions with the kind of woman or women that you want to spend your time and your life with. And that’s just something that comes with age.

Like Dale Carnegie said, and I love this quote, I use it all the time, “Inaction breeds fear and doubt. Taking action breeds confidence and courage.” And so, if you’re new to my work, and if you’ve been through the book at least once, there are a lot of things in the book that jump out at you that you recognize that you may have done or done in the past or things that women have said to you. And a lot of the things that I teach are the opposite of what you feel you should do and what society tells us that we should be doing in relationship. It’s only through observing the behaviors that I talk about in the book, and then experiencing them yourself over and over and over again, that you build that muscle, you build that discipline, you build that confidence, which ultimately leads to competence.

Viewer’s Email:

Hi Corey,

I’m a big fan. I’ve been dating this girl for 4 months now, everything is great. We’re boyfriend and girlfriend now. I try not to show my negative thoughts to her as much as possible. But man, it’s hard.

Well, the important thing is, dude, you cannot turn your girlfriend into your mommy or your therapist. She’s your lover, she is your cheerleader, and she is turned on by your confidence, your competence and your strength. And if you feel the need to be a whinge bag, and whine to her, and cry about your problems or how hard life is, these are not things that are going to cause her to feel more attracted to you. If you’re unsure of yourself, you’re going to make her feel unsure of you in your masculine core. If you want somebody to cry the blues to, talk to your therapist, your psychologist, your best friend, your dad. But don’t be having these conversations with the woman in your life, because it’s just not going to help you.

Guys get upset that they can’t turn their wives or girlfriends into their mommies or their therapists when they’re going through a difficult time. I had a phone session recently with the guy that had been with his wife for over three decades. His kids are grown and they’re doing great, but he had some health challenges in the last few years, and this is a guy that’s fit and in shape. And he admitted about halfway through our phone session that in the last few years, when he went through the challenges, he thought, “Hey, we’ve been together all these years, our kids are amazing.” He’s like, “My wife’s very successful in her career, I’m very successful in my career.” And he thought, “Hey, I should be able to lean on her.”

And what admitted that he did was he basically turned his wife into his mommy and his therapist. And women will put up with that for a period of time, but when it goes on six months, a year, two years, and every day – where your whole relationship for multiple decades, over three decades in this particular case, the guy’s been the rock and the mountain in his family and always been the masculine alpha type, and now he’s displaying all of these beta male tendencies and turning his wife into his mommy and his therapist – she predictably lost attraction for him, to the point where she moved out, she was so unattractive to him.

And he had a hard time accepting the fact that he couldn’t make her his mommy. Keep in mind, three decades the guy’s with somebody. And guys get upset at that, but women are with you because of your confidence and your competence. And if you’re going through a difficult time, you’ve got to understand this does not make you look attractive when you share your feelings. Even though these idiots have consumed the feminist virus and the cultural Marxist virus that says all men and women are the same.

When you study communism, they wear similar uniforms. When you look at the cultural revolution in China, everything is about trying to make the sexes equal, but we’re not equal. The reality is we’re attracted to our differences in each other. It’s the sexual polarity, the strong feminine energy and the strong masculine energy and being highly polarized. And this is true for heterosexual relationships, gay relationships and lesbian relationships. Without the sexual polarity, you become like unattracted roommates. And if you have feelings of platonic friendship towards your wife or your significant other, you’re simply not going to be turned on and want to have sex with them. That’s just the way it is. I didn’t make the rules. I didn’t make men and women this way. If you don’t like it, you can cry to the big man upstairs. At the end of the day, I’m just here to tell you the way things are.

And so, back to the guy who sent his email, you’re four months into it. It’s like, you cannot turn your girlfriend into your mom or your therapist, no matter who tells you that, “Oh, tell her your feelings and tell her how you’re struggling.” That’s not what she wants to hear. She wants to hear that, yeah, you can be going through a difficult time, but you’ve got to have a plan. It’s just like in business when you’ve got employees that work for you and they come to you with complaints. It’s like, don’t come to me with a complaint, come to me with the issue, but also offer solutions. And that’s how you need to be. You need to be solution oriented.

And again, if you want to cry the blues, go cry the blues in your beer with your best friends. Don’t do it with your girlfriend or your wife, because it’s going to turn them off. And the longer you do it, the more damage it does to her attraction and her level of respect for you. That’s just the way it is. Anybody that tells you differently is an idiot. They don’t know what they’re talking about. So, you just can’t do that. It’s not attractive. Especially when you’ve only been together a matter of months.

Like I said, I’ve got clients that had always been the man in their relationship and they go through a difficult time, and it goes on for several years, and they make the mistake of turning their wife into their mommy or their therapist, and eventually they tire of your lack of leadership, and confidence, and competence, and they leave because they no longer can count on you. What they leaned on you for and always was attracted to in you, you’re no longer exhibiting those behaviors anymore. And so the attraction goes away.

Women care about how they feel about you. And when they no longer feel attracted to you and no longer want to have sex with you, eventually, at some point, they’re going to leave. And that’s just the harsh reality. It’s not nice, but life is dangerous. Wear a helmet, life is savage. Just watch lions eating other animals, or alligators, nature is savage. And at the end of the day, nobody cares about your problems or my problems, and they’re glad that we all have them.

The only thing you can do is put your head down and get busy taking action, doing things that are productive – going to the gym, hanging out with your buddies, keeping your hobbies and your interests. The biggest two issues that guys have in long term relationships is, number one, they stop dating and courting their wife or girlfriend properly, because the courtship never ends. There’s even a chapter in my book about that. Or, number two, she doesn’t feel heard and understood. You can only do that for so long before they get turned off. If you don’t date or court your wife or your girlfriend, eventually some other guy will come along and do that for you. That’s just the harsh reality of life.

You can go through difficult times, but it should only last for a few weeks or a few months. And again, you can’t turn your wife or your girlfriend into your mommy or your therapist, or she’s going to get turned off. If you’re always going to her with all of your fears and your worries and your doubts, you’re going to make her feel full of fear and worry and doubt. And women don’t like that. They don’t deal well with it. They would rather not have to experience those things.

You want her to feel safe, feel comfortable, so she can be in her feminine energy, she can relax, and she can be full of joy and sexuality and do all the naughty things to you that you like her to do. But she’s got to feel safe and comfortable in the environment. And that means, as a man, like Jocko Willink says, “discipline equals freedom.” You must be disciplined. It doesn’t matter whether you’re having a good day, or a bad day, or a bad six months, or a bad two years, it does not matter. Every day you get up, before you go to bed each night, you’ve got to focus on, what do I have to get done today before I go to bed?

And then when you go to bed at night, if you’ve been productive, focusing on things – not things that keep you busy, but things that are productive, that move you incrementally closer to the things you want in life and the life and lifestyle that you want – you’re going to feel good. You’re going to feel content, you’re going to feel peaceful, you’re going to feel relaxed, and it’ll be very easy to go to sleep. If you wasted the day sitting around worrying, drinking and smoking, and goofing off, playing video games, not making the phone calls you need to make, hiding from life, in essence, you’re going to try to go to sleep and you’re going to be full of fear and anxiety and worry in doubt, because you weren’t productive.

Being productive gives you a peace of mind. And so even when you don’t feel like it as a man, you got to get your ass out of bed and do the things you need to do during the course of your day. That is the best way to have peace at night when you’re trying to sleep.

You see, I’m still young, 20, yet I can’t stop the obsessive thoughts of where this is going in the future.

That tells me you’ve got too much time on your hands. You should be focused on your mission and your purpose in life. Also, you’ve got to fill in your knowledge gap with the book. You’ve got to learn the material, because there’s a lot of things in here that are against what you’ve been taught and what you think, and you don’t know them well enough. And so, what often happens is you get into trouble in your relationship because you didn’t learn the material. You start trying to cherry pick from the book or from videos, and you don’t come off as being natural. It’s still early.

But the other thing to consider, he’s only been with this girl four months. People can hide who they are for about the first 90 days. So, you’re only about a month in at really trying to get a good idea of what kind of woman you’re with. So, she’s still on probation. You don’t know if she’s going to be the right girl to spend your life with, or co-parent with if you’re going to have children, or to live with, if you’re going to have a live-in girlfriend, or whatever it happens to be. It’s too soon to make those determinations. You’re just not far enough down the road yet.

She’s told me that she’s serious about me and all.

Well, when she says that, it only applies in that moment. Guys will hear something like that and six months later, when things are really bad, they’ll look back to, “Oh, well, she told me six months ago that she was in love with me.” Well, is she saying it now, or was she only saying it back then? If she was only saying it back then, but she’s not saying it lately, that’s indicative of how she feels today. That’s the only thing that matters.

A woman’s emotions and feelings change like the weather. And just like the weather report from yesterday has no bearing on what the weather is today, it’s the same thing; what a woman felt yesterday towards you, it only matters how she feels about you today. That’s just the way it is. Because every day, as a man, you’ve got to show up and you’ve got to handle your business. And I believe that’s why women were designed to be this way, to constantly test a man’s strength and call him to be at his absolute best. And if he’s at his absolute best, she can relax, feel safe, trust his masculine core, trust his leadership. Because, no matter what, even if he’s having a bad day, he’s still handling things. And that’s what men do.

But I’m still anxious about the future, as I have created this scarcity and the fear of losing her, and I’m sometimes haunted by the idea of other guys getting with her if we break up and how much that would hurt.

Well, the reality, dude, is everybody is somebody else’s leftovers. So, if you guys don’t stay together, you’re going to eventually be with other women, and she’s going to be with other men. She’s probably been with other men before you, I would assume. Most girls are having sex a lot earlier than the average guy is. So, it just is what it is. Get over it, nobody cares. We’re all living in bodies that are going to die, so it doesn’t matter. Years from now, when all of us are long gone, nobody’s going to give a damn about your fears, or who your girl dated, or what you were afraid of, or what people thought, because none of us are going to be around then. So, it doesn’t matter.

I would love it if you can give me practical advice on how to stop worrying about our future and stop our obsession thoughts with her.

I’ve read the book, and I’m planning to read it again.

Bob

Well, reading it twice is not going to give you sustainable success. Reading it twice is not going to cause you to lose all the fear. Reading it 10 to 15 times and getting to know the book so well, you could give a lecture or a class on it and then applying it, that’s what you need to do. Discipline equals freedom. Just like you work, work out day in and day out, week after week, month after month, year after year, and you focus on eating the right foods, it requires discipline, long-term. Nobody goes to the gym one time, and then they have the perfect body for life. It just doesn’t work that way.

It’s the same thing when you want to create a business that’s successful or a great career. You don’t go to work on your first day of work and you become the CEO of the company. Everything is a process. Success is a process, and part of feeling good about your life and confident and competent is you’ve got to see progress. Success is making progress. In other words, you see incremental changes in your life that it’s slowly moving towards the things that you want. That gives you confidence. But it all is a result of taking action.

As Tony Robbins would say, what is your MAP, your massive action plan? In other words, you have your outcomes, you have your goals, you have the things that you want, and your massive action plan should keep you busy. And you want to be a well rounded person. What a lot of guys do in long term relationships is they give up their hobbies, their interests, their friends. They stop going to the gym, they gained a bunch of weight. They stop being the interesting, confident, competent guys that their women fell in love with.

That’s why when they get dumped and she’s like, “You’ve changed,” guys are surprised. “Well, I gave up all of my hobbies and my interests and my friends, because you didn’t like that friend. You didn’t like the other friend. You didn’t like my stamp collection. You complained about me always working on my car in the garage, so I gave that up, thinking that’ll stop you from complaining.” And what ends up happening is guys turn themselves into pleasers, and they stop being the guy that she fell and love with. That’s just simply what happens.

So, if you’re worried about these things happening, that just tells me you’re not busy enough. That tells me you’re not being as productive as you could be. You also should be reading “Mastering Yourself,” as well. This is about how to align your life with your true calling and reach your full potential. The book is full of stories, and life experiences, negotiation techniques, business techniques, marketing techniques, all things that are going to be essential to you as a man, if you want to compress the time that it takes to go from where you are to where you want to be in life.

Where you end up 10 years, 20 years from now, 15 years from now, 5 years from now is a result of what you choose today, tomorrow, the day after that, the week after that, the month after that. You’ve got to do the little things day in and day out, even when you don’t feel like it. When you feel afraid and you feel fearful, you’ve got to remember, that should tell you that you’re not being very productive.

So, if you’re having a bad day, or you’re scared or you’re fearful, go do something that’s productive. It’s just like what I talk about in “3% Man,” the illusion of action when it comes to women. If you’re worried, if you’re fearful, if you’re sitting around with not much to do and you’re worried about your girlfriend – maybe she hasn’t texted you back as quickly as she normally would or called you back, or she didn’t seem to be as excited to plan a date a few days in advance as she normally is – if you’re sitting around doing nothing, you’re going to worry about that and you’re like, “I’ve got to fix this.” But if you just go hang out with your buddies, go see your mom, go do something productive, go to the gym, go hang out with the boys, clean your garage out, whatever it happens to be, get busy doing things that are productive, that you love, that you enjoy.

You’ll lose yourself in the process of your hobbies, your interests, your mission, your purpose, and you’ll feel good about that. And the next thing you know, the phone will ring, it’ll go off. There will be a text from your girl or a phone call and sweet message from her telling you how much she misses you and can’t wait to see you again. As Jocko says, “discipline equals freedom.” So get busy. Lose yourself in the process of achieving your grandest goals and dreams.

And if you’ve got challenges or questions, things you want to get my help with, maybe you need help figuring out your purpose, how to optimize your life, or maybe you’ve got a problem with a girl, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen and book a coaching session with yours truly.