 A lot of that is revealing what the truth of your connection is and not trying to force it to be something in particular because you know if you care about someone or you like someone you're attracted to them you usually want a particular outcome but that can steer something in a wrong direction that it's not supposed to become just because you know you have that motivation there. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. When I had piqued my curiosity and why we wanted to bring you on is you put out a video and if I get the title wrong please correct me but it was 10 ways neuroticism shows up in men and in AJ and I's work in the last 15 years of running live programs we had given all of our clients a personality test which is ocean which is used in psychology at least for the best of everyone's ability to establish personality types and neuroticism usually from us sending it out and come up very high in our clients but that's also the amount of folks who are willing to admit that they have some neuroticism and one of the things that I enjoyed about your video was we have to first admit that we all display signs of neuroticism and it's on a scale and if we can perhaps destigmatize the word itself and discuss it that more people will be able to come the terms but some of these these the way they exhibit it and then go ahead and start to work on getting better at. Yes and it's not all bad right there are adaptive elements to having these traits and you can be both neurotic and also very confident and sort of wield it in a way that it's quite I don't I don't know like quirky and acute way you know what I mean there's a lot of high powered people that are fully embracing their neuroticism and it's what's made them successful so it's definitely not like an exclusive quality to being insecure and timid and unsuccessful. I think for a lot of our clients in their professional career it pays off to be neurotic to be highly motivated to be self analytical to show up in a lot of the ways that we're going to talk about here when it comes to interpersonal relationships and really having the trust in your actions and the way people are responding to you it creates a real barrier to creating successful relationships both romantically and socially. I just want to point this out as well we are we're now living in a post Seinfeld world and when I say that I mean that these these cute little traits that we find interesting or curious or attractive about somebody at the beginning of dating tend to get more and more how we say they go from cute to frustrating and then to unattractive there is a cycle there and so the the other thing is about once we can identify these these troubled areas that stop us from connecting we're able to start working on them and getting them under control so that they remain cute they remain quirks as as you were saying. Yes I think you know when it comes to getting to know somebody they can just really be the clutter in the way of connection so it's really important to be able to clarify you know your communication and the way that you are interacting with someone so that you can get to the truth of what that is right like I see vetting and you know people call it dating but vetting is really the getting to know you stage a lot of that is revealing what the truth of your connection is and not trying to force it to be something in particular because you know if you care about someone or you like someone you're attracted to them you usually want a particular outcome but that can steer something in a wrong direction that it's not supposed to become just because you know you have that motivation there so I think overthinking will just make that job even more difficult because you've got all this clutter in the way. Now Johnny and I are very familiar with the work that you do but I'd love for you to explain a little bit about yourself and your background for our audience as we kick things off. Sure I'm a retired mental health counselor and a retired marriage and family therapist so my PhDs in marriage and family counseling and when I retired my licenses I just wanted to work online independently and so it's it's very different work and it allows me to work location independently globally with anybody and I've really augmented what I learned formally with a lot of my own sort of autodidactic knowledge that I've acquired in my own life experience and personality and just being more directive and more like a mentor to my clients so they seek me out because they align with my values and we can really get straight to the work rather than spending a lot of time building trust they already trust me so it's great I really like this this type of work that I've been doing so I focus on mostly I would say singles although I do work with couples as well because the vetting system is really a whole life paradigm shift it's applicable in all facets of life so my book the vetting system is is not geared towards married or or coupled people but it definitely applies and so people who want to prevent a disastrous type of relationship that they have to either totally fix and transform or extricate themselves from really want to learn how to spot the things that matter in a partner so that you know who to invest in and how to escalate you know a relationship as it grows so I really reframe people or the process of dating as reserved for after you have more clarity around what your intentions are and vetting is more so the very beginning stages as you're getting to know someone we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends yeah and we all know in dating especially in the online dating world that many of us will present a great first impression a very curated social media feed and then as we start to get to know someone the more time spent with them we let our hair down the honeymoon phase is over and a lot of these neurotic tendencies that we're going to talk about start to showcase themselves and unfortunately what a lot of our clients struggle with is when these signs are present the other person loses interest but the other person isn't often going to be able to articulate exactly why they're losing interest and a highly neurotic person is going to seek out those answers because they want to know exactly what it was that pushed the other person away and what it maybe could be that they can improve and in actuality that just creates a vicious cycle that hurts them even more and turns the other person off and we see this in a lot of our clients who come to us saying well i did everything you guys talk about i followed everything to a t and she's not responding to my messages she doesn't want to go on a third date with me i can't figure it out and this is a repeat pattern now with multiple potential partners and what can be very frustrating is there isn't that close feedback loop it's just the other person loses interest can articulate it and they're gone from your life and you're kind of left wondering well how do i pick up the pieces how do i improve and it could be a very frustrating process yeah i hear that a lot so that's definitely common from my my camp as well and i think too you know when people are overthinking things it's like they don't recognize that the other person can probably be a little bit neurotic themselves and so instead of having empathy for the other person and maybe thinking the best they always go to the worst case scenario but you know i i think it's it's obviously it's something that affects your in your entire life so it's you want to get a grip on these if it's anxieties and securities self-doubt self-consciousness just ruminative thinking you know where you're like what if thing scenarios constantly that's going to slow you down across the board so it behooves you to attend to this and try to clarify and create more effective self-talk and thinking patterns so we've kind of danced around it and johnny and i know it quite well but i'd love to start with just defining neuroticism as we said at the beginning it gets a bad rap many people would not want to self-identify as neurotic for exactly that seinfeld example but what is neuroticism how does it show up in her personality a lot of times i mean it's just easy to think about it as over thinking so you're over analyzing things your i guess it's like very exhaustive analysis like analysis paralysis insecurities self-consciousness that puts you at the the center of every bad scenario basically taking the blame internalized blame for things always making things about you thinking other people are thinking bad things about you and yeah i think it's trying too hard as well a lot of people just really want to project an image that they think will make a good impression rather than just being present and being their best self in the moment so it's it's basically a way that you take yourself out of your body and you're just really residing in your brain and and that's not effective so you really need to have that integrated sense of self where you're connecting your body your mind your spirit and you're able to flow more naturally between them and not sort of hyper focus or obsess about your thinking interesting and i think that's where it plays the role anytime that there is clutter in the middle of that integration between all of those is where the the hiccups are and that's where it shows up and for those who are listening to this who are still not convinced that they show any of these trades we should go through them because even for myself and watching your video i was like oh i i do that from time to time or oh i i recognize when i do this so i think we should go through them and talk about how these things manifest themselves okay well i don't know if you have the notes in front of you i don't have any notes in front of me i i i do so okay so the first one was restlessness and impatience yeah i think people are very um fast paced they expect results right away and then they assume that things are reflecting something negative about them when it could just be totally irrelevant like some kind of external thing is happening and if you just uh if you're able to see the bigger picture step back slow down right like i think it's it's a lot easier to come to some kind of constructive conclusion about whatever event you're analyzing but when it comes to restless behaviors like twitches and stuff you know you'll notice people might be hyperactive hypervigilant they're fidgety and so they're constantly moving and it's a lot of these the things that i'm talking about are connected like i did a recent video on the four stress languages too and i talked about the the flight response and so when you're feeling emotionally overwhelmed right the stress is really high the flight response is about being overactive and restless so you're going to be running away from those scenarios where you have to be intimate with someone because it kind of puts you on the spot and makes you confront something and you're not you're not prepared for it or you're not ready for it so then you start maybe talking fast you you want to leave you feel suffocated or trapped and so they're very related that person who's feeling restless is might throw themselves into work you know just occupy their time in an obsessive way kind of procrastinating doing something else you know like if you're procrastinating dealing with one thing by doing something else so it can be rewarded which is part of the adaptive part element of it right like when you're restless sometimes you can end up doing something something positive but not necessarily what you're supposed to be doing by having the conversation with the person absolutely and we see it in our clients and much like yourself working with high achievers this restlessness this impatience will often lead to breakthroughs in your career will lead to you tossing and turning until you find the solution but that impatience with others when we're talking about interpersonal relationships will lead to you searching out youtube videos searching out the art of charm following whatever model is available to you and then getting quickly frustrated when you don't get that result as fast as you would like you don't get that date you don't get that girlfriend you don't get that boyfriend as fast as you would like and of course that impatience i'd love to talk about how it feels on the other side so for someone who's experiencing you being impatient it does show a sign of lack of confidence a lack of actual need for connection with the other person making it about yourself and that's very off-putting that's very unattractive when we're talking about a romantic relationship