By having a clear vision about what you want in the future,

you can be present today in a way that allows you

to not get overexcited about something that isn't real yet.

I ask people recently on Instagram, what is a mistake or a pattern

that you keep making in your love life that you want to work on?

One person said that she wanted to work on taking things more slowly,

so that she doesn't invest in people before they've shown they actually deserve it.

I thought I'd spend a bit of time here because this is an incredibly common thing.

I know I've done it, I'm sure you've done it, you get excited about someone,

and you rush forward thinking, I don't even think we are thinking when we do it

necessarily. There's just this instinctive, I'm excited about this person,

I'm excited about what it could be. We start projecting, of course,

onto that person, all of the value that they could have in our lives,

how amazing they are, how great the relationship could be or would be,

and then we start giving a ton of energy to it.

Firstly, is that helpful to do?

And if we agree that it's not helpful, how do we get ourselves to actually slow down?

I would argue that it's absolutely not helpful to do that because

it shows someone that they don't actually have to provide any value or invest in us in order

to get all of our value. It is a false representation of how great that person is,

because we probably don't even know them that well yet, and it assumes that by speeding up

and by investing more, someone will like us more. And that's just not true.

...