Hello, hello, hello, welcome to another episode of the Mark Grove's podcast.

You know, we don't often think of dating and relating as a skill set, right?

Like we don't think about it as being something that we can learn and develop.

We sort of often, until we don't, till we realize, we assume that people are just born with

these skills or they got lucky, but no, they're learned and we can all learn them. And they, you know,

one thing that I find with dating that I see so regularly is people don't actually learn the skill set to date from a really mindful place, an intentional place. You know, they're just sort of like when I say, what are you looking for? Well, I'm looking for this, this, and, you know, I'm looking for, you know, find someone to have a family with. But, you know, like, that's only if I found the right person.

It's like, why are you planning on not finding the right person?

Like, we already qualify and set the bar lower so that we try, what we're trying to do is

save ourselves from disappointment.

But what we're doing is actually not standing in the truth of what we want.

We're not, you know, we're kind of saying it but not fully committing to it and then what happens is we make choices that dance in the gray we align what we want to what other people want oh you don't want a relationship neither do i because we'll take any connection rather than the connection we're actually looking for. So we'll, like, take the scraps. We take the breadcrumbs and we set low standards because we don't believe we're worthy of more. And I'm here to tell you that's bullshit. You are worthy of all of it. But you got to make choices that align with what you say you want. You've got to show up for yourself. You've got to be courageous. You've got to you've got to wait as I was

listening to a podcast episode from my friend Jen Pasteloff just launched a new podcast and she was

interviewing Elizabeth Gilbert and on it Elizabeth Gilbert said, you know, my sponsor would always

say to me, keep making

different decisions till better comes along. And that's what dating is really about is it's this

opportunity to heal. It's this opportunity to have your stuff come forward. You know, because I've said

this before. We like have her poop in a group. We got her shit together.

When we're single and we're, like, reading the books and doing the thing.

And we start dating.

We're like, shit, what the fuck happened here?

I don't know what's going. Oh, man, all my shits. I thought I healed that shit. It's not right. And so I think this is when we can start to see that relationships are a learning opportunity and dating in and of itself is an opportunity to practice setting boundaries, to practice communicating in different ways,

to look where you take things personally, look where you have exaggerated responses to things,

...