Life With Soul

I read a book recently called Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath, about “how to change when change is hard.”

The book covers a lot of different areas of life, but it centres around how and why people can change things in their life, whether it’s their dating, love and sex life, their business or work, or other aspects of their lifestyle.

I took a lot of great things from it and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in growing any facet of their life.

One of my biggest takeaways from it, however, was something they wrote about called a “U-shaped mood curve.” I liked this concept so much that I actually started teaching it on my Daytime Dating workshops.

The premise of it is that any endeavour in life will typically take you on a mood curve that is U-shaped. At the start of that endeavour, you will feed good; that period is OPTIMISM.

In the middle, as you get deeper into whatever it is you’re doing, you realise that it’s a lot harder than you thought it would be. There are all these unforeseen things that come up and factors you didn’t factor in for. That period is tough. You start to feel shitty because you’re not making all the rapid progress your optimism stage led you to expect. You question yourself. You wonder if you made the right decision to start this. You wonder if you can make it through.

But then you rally. You gather up every ounce of your resources; you pull your shit together and you tell your inner doubts (or what my colleague and friend Daniel Vercetti calls his “inner demons”) to go back to the hole they came from. You get through the dip and you make it through. This period, the bottom of the dip, is called INSIGHT.

Once you get through the dip and get to the end of your endeavour, your goals reached for that project, you reach the final period: CONFIDENCE. At this stage, you know you made it through, and you know you can do it again if needs be. That’s what ultimate confidence is about.

Incidentally, that’s one of the reasons why I can’t stand it when people advise men to “just be confident” with women: it takes a lot of experience to gain that confidence in the first place (and if you don’t even have guidance or the right advice on how to start a conversation, how can you begin to even think about being confident in the rest of your interaction with her).

But back to the topic at hand. That dip, the insight period, is critical because it is where all your real learning takes place. I often say to my clients on workshops, “Relish your failures and the situations with women where you mess things up or things go wrong; it’s in these that you get all your learnings. It’s these situations that enable you to have great successes later on.”

So, whether you’re trying to become the world’s most awesome daytime dater (and hey, I hear that Jeremy Soul guy is pretty damn good, so you’ve got quite a challenge on your hands!), building your career or business, or trying to get through some other tough time in your life, remember that it’s in the middle of it, in the dip, where your mettle is tested.

Be prepared to fight your demons and hopefully, emerge victorious.

Jeremy Soul