How to STOP Thinking About Your Ex

Your ex is their own person with their own life. Wish them well and let them go because their story is not relevant to you anymore. I like to think about this like a car rental. Worrying about what an ex is doing or how well an ex is doing is like wanting to know how well a car is doing that we already gave back. A relationship that ends is a rental. It was a rental, it wasn't ours. But when we act like it still is ours in some way, like it's still a part of our life, we get upset to learn that it's doing great without us. I made a decision a few years ago that I was not going to make those kinds of comparisons or have those kinds of resentments about how other people were doing. Not just because it's low frequency behavior, but we're not here to talk about what righteously what's high frequency versus low frequency thinking. Because the truth is we all sometimes fall into low frequency thinking. It's hard not to, right? We're humans. But one of the things that helped me was realizing that even when I've been in a relationship before, my value never came from that person. My value only ever comes from me. And when I'm no longer with a person, I think their life is their life. It has nothing to do with mine. If I was somehow deriving my worth from the life that they had or from who they were, then I was placing my value in something outside of me. And that is a losing game. I heard Tony Robbins recently talking about Warren Buffett and how Warren Buffett said that the greatest investment you can make is in yourself. Because it is the one that will pay dividends forever. And I think about that in our love lives, in our work lives too. You know, I have a company and I'm really proud of that company. But make no mistake, I do not see that company as my value. I see it as something that I have built, that I'm proud of. It's valuable. It has value. But it's not my value. My value is, at least in that context, the things that helped build that business, the leadership, the hard work, the creativity, the resourcefulness, the resilience, the persistence. Those things all belong to me. Those are values that I have, traits that I have that helped to generate that value. But the organization isn't my value. If I were to lose it tomorrow or if I were to walk away from it, I would still have my value. And the same is true in a relationship. We may build something of value with someone. I mean, that's what a relationship is, isn't it? It's two people who are building value together. But that value, your value, is not the relationship. Your value is your value. When you leave the relationship, your value remains intact. You didn't lose any of your value when someone walked away. And if we're sitting here saying to ourselves, but the relationship was my value, I liked how much value I had in other people's eyes when they saw me with that person. I felt important by being with that person. I felt special by being with that person. That's honest. If you can be that honest with yourself, that's great. But that then should be a signal. A signal that something is going wrong in the way I'm building my life, in the way I'm building my confidence. If I am putting, if I'm investing in creating the value that is me outside of myself. And a lot of us do that. We, you know, we were raised by parents who took care of us. Maybe they did a good job, maybe they didn't. Or caregivers, if we didn't have direct parents. And at some point, it was our job to go away and build our own value. We were old enough to be responsible for building our own value. And most of us were never taught that it was our job at that point to build our own value. So what we do then is we go looking for value outside of ourselves. We go looking for things that can make us valuable if we get them. Whether it's status, or a partner, or money. Whatever can give me a sense that this thing I have gives me value. And we spend our whole lives putting, placing that value outside of ourselves. And that's why we get so terrified of losing things. It's because we think if I lose my money, if I lose my job, if I lose my status, if I lose this impressive partner that I'm with right now, then I lose my value because that was my value. But we have to start making that key distinction. That we can build things of value in our life, like a relationship, a career, a business. But the things that we create value in aren't our value. In a way, those things outside of us, they're only ever rented. Like the car. We are the only thing that we are guaranteed to own from now till the day we die. We're the only asset that is always going to be there with us every single day. Relationships can end. Businesses can go under. Money can be lost. Even friends and family, we know we can lose them. We are the only asset, the only thing that we will absolutely have for our entire lives. Most people, instead of building that asset, are always looking for some shortcut to value on the outside. And that's part of why we do it, isn't it? Part of why we do it is because we think that if we get with this person that's super charismatic or hot or, you know, powerful, they have something about them, we think that that's like a quick route to feeling valuable, to having value. But shortcuts like that don't work, because all it does is make us a prisoner to that relationship. We can't lose the relationship because we don't want to lose our value. That's one of the reasons why people stay in toxic relationships for so long. Is because even if they're being treated terribly, and let's be clear, if you're being treated terribly by someone, that doesn't have value, right? That has a negative value, if anything. There's no value to being around someone who constantly treats us terribly. So why would we stay in a situation where there's no value to it whatsoever? It's because we think that our value is tied to that relationship. Because if we were basing whether to stay or leave on the value of the relationship, we would have left a long time ago. But if we think that the relationship is our value, and it's not something that has to have value outside of us, then we'll hold on to it even if it's torture, even if it's hell on earth. Because we think losing the relationship would mean losing our value. We have to start building our own value. And then when we go out into the world, what happens is we don't cling to things that aren't serving us or making us happy. We invest in things where we feel like we're actually getting something back. Where we feel like if it's a relationship, that person is investing too. And together we are building something of value. Together. You still have your value on your own and I still have my value on my own. But together we are building something of value outside of ourselves. That's what a healthy relationship looks like. But you can only go into that in an impartial way when you already have a value of your own. And like I said, a lot of people, they would rather the shortcut. They would rather get a helicopter to some status or some value by attaching themselves to something on the outside of themselves than to build it themselves. I don't know about you, but for me in my life, maybe it partly is because there's a little bit of a control freak in me, but I always preferred owning to renting. I didn't want to get my value from something on the outside. I wanted to get it from me. I knew people in my life, I still know people in my life, whose value comes from who they're hanging out with. Their value comes, I'm not talking in relationships now, I'm talking about in friendships and in social networking. I know people that spend their lives just trying to hang out with the right people. If you're trying to figure out what they do, you don't even really know. Do you know anyone like that? You don't even really know what they do. All you know is that they're always at the party with the important people. They're always in the room. And I always saw that as like a really literal representation of instead of building your own value, your value is coming from attaching yourself to other people with value. And for me, I always wanted to create that value in myself, even if it was slower, even if it took more time, even if it was harder work, even if the ultimate value that I would achieve would be half of what I would have if I had tried to rub shoulders with people and get my value that way, or tried to date the right person and get value that way, or whatever. I would rather have half of all of it to feel like the value that I have, I own instead of rent. I hope this isn't too abstract. You can send me an email, podcast at MatthewHussey.com to let me know. I find this to be a tremendously important concept and I see it happen all the time with people. I see people who go through their lives trying to rent value or going to places where you can only rent value and then feeling insecure because they don't have that feeling of ownership over it. Trying to own it, trying to hold on to the person, trying to stay in with the right crowds, trying to stay at a certain level of status or power, trying to own things that can only be rented. I'd rather have less and own my house. I'm not talking literally, of course, this is an investment advice. But in your own life, you're a house that you get to own. And with the house that is me, I'd rather own it and build that house and work on the rooms in that house and make it beautiful, make it special. Because that's where I live every day and that's where my app value comes from. That's my asset. I don't care about taking a picture in some fancy hotel that I stay in for one night because I saved up and then putting that on Instagram and that being my value because it's not mine. So the next time you find yourself, I told you I started this process or this podcast by telling you that this was going to be about how to move on from an ex and not feel jealous when you see them doing their own thing. But I want you to, this is what I want you to remind yourself of. Your ex is their own person with their own life. Wish them well and let them go. Because their story is not relevant to you anymore. Because it's not your story. The moment the two of you parted ways, their story was no longer your story. It was irrelevant to you. And if you're going, but I feel bad because they're doing well or whatever. That's because in some way you're still trying to borrow value from that person and it irks you that they're doing well and that you don't have them anymore. If you say that person was never anything to do with my value. Their success was never my success. That has nothing to do with me whatsoever. I'm on my own path. My success is my success and that's it period. Their success has nothing to do with me. What they're doing in their life has nothing to do with me because my value doesn't come from that. They were only ever rented. In my relationship with them, it was only ever a rental. Now what we built together could have been real. We could have owned that together. But if you break up, then they go back to being a rental. And it doesn't matter to you what happens after that because it was never yours. I want you to ask yourself if instead of trying to borrow value from elsewhere, you doubled down, tripled down on the investment that is you. What would you do for yourself this year, this week, this month? If you dropped your ego because sometimes when we're starting again or when we feel like oh my god I haven't focused on myself and my own value and my own investment in myself in a long time. For way too long I've been deriving my worth from being in this marriage. For way too long I've been deriving this worth from this company that I have or from these friends that I have or from my status in society or whatever it is. From the people I'm dating. If you've been doing that for a long time, it can feel like starting from zero when you start to invest in yourself again. But let me tell you, the value you build up in yourself, even if it's from nothing, is real. You own it. It's yours. No one can take it away from you. And when that is the case, all of a sudden it empowers you in your life. You start going into decision making a little more boldly. You go into the room, that date, that job interview much more boldly because you're actually connected to your value. You're not going on a date secretly going, you're going to be my value if you choose me, so please choose me because I need to have value. You're going on a date going, I already have value. I've already built my value. I've already invested in the asset that is me. If you and I choose to build something together, that's awesome. I'm excited to see what we build. If we don't, I walk away and I have all of my value to take with me. What would you do to invest in yourself if you took this approach? Because this investing in yourself is the antidote to caring what your ex is doing, to being obsessed with them and their life still, even though they're not around anymore. And for anything else in life, you know, the comparison that we make with friends who we think are doing better than us, or people in life that we think are further ahead than us, or the fears we have about losing something in our life when we're afraid of what might happen to us in our job or our business. When we invest in ourselves, we safeguard ourselves against any loss in our life. And if we're too afraid right now, it's because we haven't been investing in ourselves. That can be reversed in a heartbeat if you make a decision to invest in yourself today. Now, for anyone who wants to do that with me, in June, from the 2nd to the 4th, I have my virtual retreat that I'm running for three days. And every single person who's coming to that event is going to be investing in themselves for three days. The people that are already signed up have made a commitment to build the asset that is them. And they're going to come out of that program with a different level of confidence, with a different level of invincibility, because they'll be building the asset they own, instead of deriving value from an asset that they can only ever rent. And if you want to do that for yourself, this is your moment to do that with me. I'm going to give you a link right now. I don't want you to leave the site of this podcast without going to this link. And do me this favor, at least check it out. The link for that is mhvirtualretreat.com. Go there, check it out. Book your appointment. And I look forward to seeing you on that program.