Feminine Intelligence in Breaking Up

Autumn is a time for aging of the leaves and flowers of summer and eventual death - then a long, cold winter that prepares the land for renewal again. It's not surprising that sometimes our dating and relationships follow that same pattern.

While there's much that we provide that's specific to women dealing with challenges and how to tackle them - The Seventh Sense Program for example - or for preparing all the skills of femininity to be able to face anything life throws you - the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program for the skills of being a woman, and MindOS for the skills of being a growing, evolving, mature, high-character person in general - we haven't done a program specifically and solely on one of the most painful things a woman could suffer - breakup and divorce.

I was especially touched recently when someone wrote me with last minute interest in our quickly approaching training programs in dating and relationships. 

Their story really got me thinking about what women need for this specific, potentially crippling problem, and about my own experiences with it.

In fact, they inspired me to offer you a special opportunity for total recovery from this situation.

A man was divorced by a woman and hadn't been in a single social life in a long, long time. He was out of practice, feeling a bit depressed, thinks himself overweight and "too old" - being barely over 35. Meanwhile, his wife had gotten so into the routine of being married, both busy with jobs, that she had forgotten what she even saw in him so long ago. It was true that the sex life had died, and neither of them made that happen on purpose - it just did on its own. What's more, long enough in that dynamic and their friendship also faltered to the point that all that was left was a passionless relationship.

The man wanted to do something about this sudden, surprising new status being single and unprepared, and with the London training coming up, he thought he'd ask about it and how it works. The problem is that she wanted to come too. We do separate trainings for men and women, but I had to let him know that they would need to decide jointly who's going to come. I probably could not see them both in the same event. It's a time for introspection and healing for both.

Normally, I tend to think of our dating and relationship trainings as being about helping people who were never very good at high level skills with the opposite sex and dating. Or even for people who had never dated very much or very successfully in the first place.

Since in my youth, I too, was not very good, I like to think of our programs as both so simple, and so complete, that it's for "starting from scratch" - the kind of thing I would have paid any price for when I was eighteen, twenty, or twenty-four...

But I've never stopped to think about its use in "starting over" instead of starting from scratch.

We got on the phone together, and the description of infidelity, the suddenness of the revelation, and the harsh struggle for months now to deal with the effects - it reminded me of my own early twenties, when I had been cheated on and left by a fiancee...

...that I felt extra-protective of both people. I had once, long ago, swore that if I could help it, I would never let a person I know personally go through the same lengthy pain, suffering, and self-doubt that I once had so long ago. We ended up talking an hour about the live trainings.

I told him all about the specific skills, strategies and tactics we teach, based in the latest research findings on human courtship - but how practical and easy they are to apply in your own life.

I talked about the results that so many people have gotten in the past few years from it, and how these principles are something you can come back to again and again as you gain new experience with new dates.

But the big thing that struck me square in the face was the "extras" of these trips - the travel adventure, the bonding with other like minded people on the same educational mission - to learn that lifelong friendships always come out of these events.

And every time we put these on, I always remember how incredibly healing it was for me to leave the entire city that my own breakup had taken place in - the new identity and new opportunity and new hope that I got from going away and never looking back - over a 1000 miles away from the person, from it - the pain, the event, the betrayal and rejection.

It was 1024 miles to be exact. I actually had measured it.

Here are some principles I learned about the connection between travel, relocation, building new understanding of the opposite sex, and recovery from breakups:

• When you move, or travel, it "forces" you to always be attentive to all the new things you have to handle - which strengthens a skill called Observing Ego.

We talk about Observing Ego in the MindOS Mastery Course. It is essentially a "social common sense" and much more - it is the literal, scientific explanation of "cool" or "being cool" - it is your composure, you acting as your own advisor and coach in life, and even provides you this - the one, single skill in life that guarantees that you never have REGRETS. Why? Because you are awake and aware of your strengths, weaknesses, situations around you, and equipped to really give life your best effort. When you give your best effort, it's impossible to have regrets. The outcomes are then not your fault.

• When you meet new people or form new friendships, meet new dates (even if you are clumsy with interacting), they offer you a new "view" of yourself, a new discovery of what you are capable of.

The reason for this is that we grow character and social abilities only through interaction with others. If we can call them friends, then they are on our side. They want us to grow, to heal, and to expand what we are capable of.

• When you go into environments you are unfamiliar with - whether places or social groups - you must take action, rapidly solve problems, and get the experience of "initiation" - where a more childlike aspect of you becomes more adult-like through being "tested by the elements."

This is perhaps the most revitalizing thing of all - to go and do what you weren't sure you could, and find that YES, you really were and are good enough to survive, and thrive in the new situation.

Travel has always done this for me. New people have always done this for me, especially when working on a team. And meeting new people (even bad dates with them) has always expanded my understanding of them, and of myself. Which leads to new skills, and new hopes for a life even more the way I always envisioned it.

Since that time so many years ago, I've never stopped to wonder why it is that I am compelled to travel, to transition, to explore new lands and new cultures. And a literal hunger for meeting new people whenever i can. I was running away from the pain of loss, but I know even more so that I was running TO something as well - to a sort of "promised land" - the place where I could have a new life, a new love, and grow into the man I wanted to be.

We hung up the call, and I just remembered all the places I've been to train people at romance - many thousands of miles away from everywhere else I've lived. And of anything a person could suffer (including never having had a very good dating life in the first place), these experiences learning about the opposite sex are most certainly the closest thing I can think of to a "cure" for being broken up WITH or divorced BY a very important person in your life.

It's not therapy, it's not medicine.

It's living the way we are meant to live - discovering, exploring, adventuring, learning and growing by DOING. Especially by immersing into a culture he has never been and doesn't yet understand. That very challenge refreshes the spirit and I can personally attest, evaporates any memory of drudgery in the same old place, with the same old painful memories, and the possibility of a chance encounter with that very same person who broke your heart - only on the arm of a new love.

There's nothing in the world quite like traveling the world, and discovering what you are really capable of. You never would have known had you not picked up your suitcase and slammed the door behind you as you boarded the plane, found your way to somewhere else...

...only to find that "home" really is wherever you - and friends - are.