Struggling to Communicate Your Needs With Them?

We’ve been told from a very young age to “play it cool” . . . But as we grow up, we realize that when we feel we need to “play it cool” to keep someone interested, that often means we’re feeling anything but cool . . . and it usually comes from a place of insecurity or a fear of being rejected.

In today’s new video, you’ll learn the best way to increase attraction and investment in a way that doesn’t diminish your value or make you feel like a nuisance simply for stating your needs.



Finally Start Believing in Your Own Worth.
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Matthew:

One of the most common mistakes that people make when they want more with someone is playing it too cool. Have you ever played it too cool? Not asking for things, not wanting to be demanding, not wanting to pester someone because you’re worried that if you do, you will lose your value in their eyes. That your value comes from being chill, indifferent, easy, convenient, and that if you were suddenly to start asking for what you actually want, that person would leave.

Now, before we go any further, because I have a lot of good stuff to say in this video, we want subscribers badly, so we’ll put a subscriber thing, a button, hit that button and hit it now. Be cool, Matty. Be cool. Seriously though, hit the subscribe button or I will not continue.

There’s the famous monologue in the movie, Gone Girl, where she is talking about what it is to be a cool girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the cool girl means I’m a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang, while somehow maintaining a size two. Because cool girls are above all hot, hot, and understanding. Cool girls never get angry. They only smile in a chagrined loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead. Shit on me. I don’t mind. I’m the cool girl.

Now, that monologue struck a chord for good reason because it really explained the feeling of so many women about the impossibility of what they needed to be and represent, which is everything. I need to be everything all of the time. Not only do I need to be everything all of the time, but I need to ask for nothing in return because what that monologue does very, very well is it shows the utter imbalance at the extreme of giving everything, being everything, providing everything, and getting nothing for it. Just being this sort of vessel to be used for the juice to be wrung out of with the guy not having to do anything to earn that. And it’s that part of it that I want to pick up on because I actually believe that real life, real relationships are much more hopeful because there is this hidden secret to attraction psychology that is not revealed in that monologue.

Now, I think that there is this perceived safety in being, I don’t want to just say the cool girl, it could be the cool guy, for anyone who is going into dating with an insecurity that they are not enough or that they have to try to hold onto someone. They have to try to prove their value. Anyone in that situation is susceptible to slipping into the cool girl or the cool guy mask. Because it is a mask, because we don’t feel that cool really. We do care more than we let on. We do want more than we’re telling someone we want and things are pissing us off and upsetting us more than we’re actually saying. But it’s a mask that we put on because we think that that’s what someone wants. It feels safe to do it because it means, A, you’re less likely to reject me if I don’t ask for anything, if I don’t make life difficult for you, if I just please you, which is that typical people-pleaser mindset. As long as I ask for nothing and give you everything, you’ll still want me in your life.

But there’s also this knowledge that if someone does reject us, we can just go, “I wasn’t even really asking for anything anyway, so I wasn’t rejected, I wasn’t asking for anything.” So there’s a lot of protection, or at least what we see as protection and safety in being that. The problem is it’s actually the opposite. It makes us more likely to be taken advantage of either by someone who is oblivious to the fact that we’re giving everything and they’re giving very little in return and just takes us for granted or taken advantage of by someone much more malevolent who sees this as a golden opportunity to manipulate and take advantage of someone who will never ask for anything in return and will just go along with it.

But there is another reason why being the cool, indifferent person, who gives a lot but doesn’t ask for anything is really destructive for attraction. One of the things we have to understand about attraction is that for someone to continue to be attracted, they need to feel like they care. And the psychology of attraction that a lot of people miss is that what makes us care about something is investing in something. That’s actually what makes us care. That’s what makes us want to give more. Investing in something or someone actually makes us invest more. It gives us this momentum.

Me and Jameson found a dog one day in LA. It was by the side of the street and we were very careful not to name this dog because some part of us knew that we took this dog home, we gave it a little . . . That was a mistake when we cut his hair because once we’d give him a little haircut and a wash, we started going . . . We’ve just invested a little bit in this dog. I remember that day thinking, we are not naming this dog. We’re taking it to the vet. We’re going to find out whose it is, and that’s where it will stay or be killed. No, I just want to say it did have a happy ending. It did not get killed because we put out the word on social media and said, “Does anyone want this dog?” And one of our lovely previous Retreat attendees said, “I will take that dog.” So it found a lovely home, but at the time we didn’t want to name it because it was a little bit of investment.

We have to start making this psychology work for us when it comes to our dating lives. We think by never getting someone to invest and by not asking for anything that we’re somehow making ourselves indispensable in their lives. Oh, I’m just showing my value to you, but I’m also not being a nuisance to you. Because if I ask for something, if I tell you what I want, if I make you come to my part of town, if I text you first, I could be perceived as difficult, a nuisance, over the top, too much work, but as long as I hang back, you’ll still want me. But what’s actually happening is this person isn’t getting the experience of investing in you. And that’s what makes us care.

Look at the people who obsess over their cars the most. They’re the ones who actually wash their cars, the ones who tinker with them, the ones who upgrade them. Look at how much that person cares about their car. Compare having your own house that you own to a hotel room you stay in. When you leave a hotel room, do you think, I must leave this in such great condition because I really care about what happens next to this hotel room? Or do you just kind of go, I’m done with it now. I’m going to leave. Whereas the house that you buy, even, if where you live, is a 10th as nice as the hotel room that you rent for a night, you love that house because you invest in it because it’s yours, because you do the upgrades, because you give it love and care and that’s what makes you care about your house.

Why would we think it’s any different with us in dating? The shocking, unexpected truth is that people will care about us more, they will want more with us if we actually get them investing in us. And while that doesn’t mean that someone we just met, we should make huge demands of. It does mean we should pay attention to ourselves and our behavior when the pendulum swings all the way to the other direction because we are afraid, we are insecure. And that is what the cool girl and cool guy mask really is.

So what’s my message in this video? I want us to start becoming a little more brave, a little less cool, a bit more courageous, a little more honest, and a little less reverent, dare I say, in making demands of someone, whether that is something small, and this may not seem like a demand, but being okay with texting someone first because screw it, that’s what you felt like doing. And if they don’t text back or they don’t respond in good time, then fine, you can direct your attention elsewhere, but you’re not going to pretend you’re not interested in texting them just because they haven’t texted you yet. Or demanding that on the next date, it be on your side of town if the last couple of dates were closer to them, or saying what you want in order to invest more.

I want us to become more courageous in these things. And when we’ve spent a lot of our life playing nice, being cool, because those are really two versions of the same thing, right? If I’m really nice to you all the time and I never ask for anything, that’s the sort of fawning version of the same insecurity. Being cool is just I’m insecure, I don’t want to get rejected, but I’m going to wear that as indifference. But I want us to recognize that the only real great relationships are going to come out of us being brave enough to ask for what we want and learning how to communicate that, learning how to calibrate that.

And I want to invite you, if you’d like to, to come and learn that with me because in June I’m going to be running the Virtual Retreat. And for people that feel like, you know what? I don’t uphold my standards. This is where they learn how to do that from two perspectives, both competence and confidence. Competence is knowing how to communicate a standard, is knowing what to do when someone pushes back on that standard. It’s knowing how to hold yourself with confidence and with composure in those moments where you feel the tension of your standard meeting their desire for convenience or to have it exactly the way they want, that doesn’t line up with the way that you want things to be.

Navigating those situations is one of the most amazing skills we can ever learn in life. And once we have it, it’s like a superpower. You know that because you know there are people you admire that are so good at asking for what they want. They’re so good at communicating their standards and they don’t do it in a way that’s aggressive or offensive or difficult. They do it in a way that just feels bold and sexy and like they’re in control and it makes them attractive. That’s the really interesting thing is that when we start being confident in what we want and confident enough to ask for it, it becomes an indicator of our value. So the very fact that we’re confident enough to have a standard and ask for our demands to be met is a thing that makes someone see our value, that makes them see us as attractive. Wow. If they’re confident enough to have that standard, they must have something about them. There must be something to this person. So you can even change the way someone feels about you simply by having a standard that you stick to.

But the other part of what we do on the Virtual Retreat is we help people find their confidence. Competence is knowing how to communicate a standard. Confidence is believing that you are worthy of that standard, is believing that you are going to meet someone who’s going to see that standard and is going to be willing to meet it. Instead of thinking all the time, I’m going to scare them off. They’re not going to want me if I want more or if I ask for more, if I’m difficult. We have these, and a lot of them just come from trauma, come from times in our life where asking too much got us punished or where we learned to placate people in our lives. We learned to do whatever we could to be significant, where we learned to have to vie for someone’s attention, where we didn’t have healthy relationships growing up or in our early dating lives. And so we just never learned what it was to connect to our value in this area.

And what we do on the Virtual Retreat is I actually get you connected to your value because when you’re connected to your value, you can actually do what I’m talking about in this video. You won’t break at the first sign of tension from someone else or at the first sign that someone is starting to back off because that is the worst thing we can possibly do, is the moment someone starts to back away, we break our standard. And I’ve been doing this for 15 years now, and that is something I see many times a day in the people I work with.

So if you want to come and do this with me in June for three days on the Virtual Retreat, this is your chance. And by the way, it’s one of the last chances you’ll get because it’s right around the corner now. And once this is over, there isn’t another Virtual Retreat this year. And if you miss this, then you could be missing out on another year of progress. And I promise you, you can learn all of my dating advice in the world through these YouTube videos, but until you connect to your value and you learn how to stay strong in your standards, in your demands, and learn how to communicate them, nothing will change. And that’s what we do together on the Virtual Retreat. The link is MHVirtualRetreat.com. Come join us over there. I look forward to seeing you. I can’t wait to spend these three days together and let me know what you thought of this video. I’ll see you soon.